.. -*- encoding: utf-8 -*-

.. meta::
   :PG.Id: 44195
   :PG.Title: Flower o' the Peach
   :PG.Released: 2013-11-16
   :PG.Rights: Public Domain
   :PG.Producer: Al Haines
   :DC.Creator: Perceval Gibbon
   :DC.Title: Flower o' the Peach
   :DC.Language: en
   :DC.Created: 1911
   :coverpage: images/img-cover.jpg

===================
FLOWER O' THE PEACH
===================

.. clearpage::

.. pgheader::

.. container:: titlepage white-space-pre-line

   .. class:: x-large center 

      FLOWER O' THE PEACH

   .. vspace:: 2

   .. class:: medium center 

      BY

   .. class:: large center

      PERCEVAL GIBBON

   .. vspace:: 3

   ..

      |  "Flower o' the peach,
      |  Death for us all and his own life for each."
      |                                  *Fra Lippo Lippi*.

   .. vspace:: 3

   .. class:: medium center 

      NEW YORK
      THE CENTURY CO.
      1911

   .. vspace:: 4

.. container:: verso center white-space-pre-line

   .. class:: small

      Copyright, 1911, by
      THE CENTURY CO.

   .. class:: small

      *Published, October, 1911*

   .. vspace:: 4

.. container:: dedication center white-space-pre-line

   .. class:: medium

      TO
      JESSIE AND JOSEPH CONRAD

   .. vspace:: 4

.. _`CHAPTER I`:

.. class:: center x-large bold

   FLOWER O' THE PEACH

.. vspace:: 3

.. class:: center large bold

   CHAPTER I

.. vspace:: 2

It was late in the afternoon when the sheep moved
off, and the west was full of the sunset.  They
flowed out from the cactus-ringed fold like a
broadening trickle of milk, with their mild idiot faces set
southwards towards the sparse pastures beyond the
horizon, and the dust from their feet hung over them
in a haze of soft bronze.  Half-way along the path
between the house and the dam, Paul turned to watch
their departure, dwelling with parted lips on the picture
they made as they drifted forth to join themselves with
earth and sky in a single mellowness of hue.

The little farmhouse with its outbuildings, and the one
other house that reared its steep roof within eyeshot of
the farm, were behind him as he stood; nothing interrupted
the suave level of the miles stretching forth, like
a sluggish sea, to the sky-line.  In its sunset mood, its
barren brown, the universal tint into which its poor
scrub faded and was lost to the eye, was touched to
warmth and softened; it was a wilderness with a soul.
The tall boy, who knew it in all its aspects for a
neighbor, stood gazing absorbed as the sheep came to a pause,
with the lean, smooth-coated dog at their heels, and
waited for the shepherd who was to drive them through
the night.  He was nearing seventeen years of age, and
the whole of those years had been spent on the Karoo,
in the native land of dreams.  The glamour of it was
on his face, where the soft childish curves were not yet
broken into angles, and in his gaze, as his steady
unconscious eyes pored on the distance, deep with
foreknowledge of the coming of the night.

"Baas!"

Paul closed his lips and turned absently.  The old
black shepherd was eager to linger out a minute or two
in talk before he went forth to his night-long solitude.
He stood, a bundle of shabby clothes, with his strong old
face seamed with gray lines and the corners of the eyes
bunched into puckers, waiting in the hope that the
young baas might be tempted into conversation.  He
carried a little armory of smooth, wire-bound sticks, his
equipment against all the perils of the unknown, and
smiled wistfully, ingratiatingly, up into Paul's face.

"Well?" said the boy.

It all depended on the beginning, for if he should
merely nod and turn away there would be nothing left
but to follow the sheep out to the silence.  The old man
eyed him warily.

"Has the baas heard," he asked, "that there is a mad
Kafir in the veld?"

"No," said Paul.  "A mad Kafir?"

The old man nodded half a dozen times.  "There is
such a one," he affirmed.  The thing was done; the
boy would listen, and he let his sticks fall at his feet
that he might have two hands to talk with.  They were
speaking "Kitchen Kafir," the *lingua franca* of the
Cape, and since that is a sterile and colorless
tongue—the embalmed corpse of the sonorous native
speech—the tale would need pantomime to do it justice.

"There is such a one," repeated the shepherd.  "He
goes about alone, in the day and in the night, talking
as he goes to companions who are not there, and
laughing sometimes as though they had answered him.  And
that is very strange."

"Yes," said the boy slowly.  His eyes traveled
involuntarily to the veld brooding under the sky.  "Who
has seen him?" he asked.

"I have," said the shepherd, putting a big black
forefinger to his own breast.  "I have seen him."  He held
out his great hand before him, with the fingers splayed,
and counted on them.  "Four nights ago I saw him
when the moon was rising."

"And he was mad?"

"Mad as a sheep."

Paul waited for the tale.  The old man had touched
his interest with the skill of a clever servant
practising upon a master.  A hint of mystery, of things
living under the inscrutable mask of the veld, could not
fail to hold him.  He watched the shepherd with a
kind of grave intensity as he gathered himself to tell
the matter.

"The moon was rising," he said, "and it lay low
above the earth, making long shadows of the stones and
little bushes.  The sheep were here and there, and in
the middle of them was I, with a handful of fire and
my blanket.  It was very still, baas, for the wind was
gone down, and I heard nothing at all but the ash
sliding in the fire and the slow noise of the sheep
eating.  There was not even a jackal to stand out of
sight and cry in the dark.

"Perhaps I was on the brink of sleep—perhaps I was
only cloudy with thoughts—I do not know.  But very
suddenly I heard singing.—a voice coming nearer that
sang a curious music."

"Curious!" The boy was hanging on the words.
"Curious!" he repeated.

"It was a song," explained the old Kafir, "but the
words of it were meaningless, just noises such as a baby
makes—a babble.  I listened, for I was not afraid.
And soon I could hear footfalls among the stones and
the singer came between me and the young moon, very
great and black against the sky.  It was only when he
stood by my fire that I saw he was not a white man,
but a Kafir.  He was young, a strong young man,
wearing clothes and boots."  He paused.  "Boots," he said
again and thrust out his own bare foot, scarred and
worn with much traveling.  "Boots!"

In a town, it is conceivable that a Kafir may wear
boots for purposes of splendor; but not on the Karoo.
Paul saw the old man's point; here was an attribute
of the unnatural.

"Yes," he said; "go on."

"I was sitting, with my pipe.  He stood by the fire
and looked down at me, and I could see by the shine
of his teeth that he was smiling.  But when he spoke,
it was like his song—just noises, no speech at all.  It
was then that I began to doubt him.  But I gave him
greeting, and moved that he might sit down and smoke
with me.  He listened and shook his head gently, and
spoke again with his slow soft voice in his language of
the mad."

"What did it sound like?" demanded Paul.

"Baas, it sounded like English," replied the shepherd.
"Yes, there are many Kafirs who speak English;
the dorps are noisy with them; but there are none who
do not speak Kafir.  And this man had come through
the night, singing in his strange tongue, going straight
forward like one that has a purpose.  I and my fire
stayed him only for a minute; he was not one of us;
he stood, with his head on one side, smiling down, while
I began to feel fear and ill-ease.  I had it in my mind
that this was a ghost, but of a sudden he stooped to
where my bread lay—I had newly eaten my supper,
and the things still lay about—and took a piece as
large as this fist.  He seemed to ask for it, but I could
not understand him.  Then he laughed and tossed
something into my lap, and turned again to the night and
the long shadows and the things that belong there.  His
feet moved among the stones and he was gone; and
later I heard him singing again in the distance, till his
voice dwindled and was lost."

"He threw you something," said the boy.  "What was it?"

The old shepherd nodded.  "I will show the baas,"
he said, and made search among precarious pockets.
"This is it; I have not spent it."

It was a shilling, looking no larger than sixpence on
the flat of his great horny palm.  Paul looked at it and
turned it over, sensible that something was lacking in
it, since it differed in no respect from any other shilling.
The magic of madness and the stolid massiveness of
Queen Victoria's effigy were not easy to reconcile.

"It looks like a good one," he commented.

"It is good," said the shepherd.  "But—" he
paused ere he put it in its true light—"the bread was
not more than a pennyworth."

A hundred yards away the waiting sheep discharged
a small volley of bleats.  Paul raised his head.

"Yes," he said, "the veld is full of wonderful
things.  But I would like to hear that language of the
mad."

He nodded in token of dismissal and walked slowly
on towards the dam, where the scarlet of the sky had
changed the water to blood.  The old shepherd picked
up his sticks and went heavily after the sheep, a
grotesque and laborious figure in that wonder of evening
light.  The smooth dog slunk towards him, snuffling
in welcome; the Kafir dog is not a demonstrative
animal, and his snuffle meant much.  The shepherd hit
him with the longest of the wire-bound sticks.

"Hup!" he grunted.  "Get on!"

At the top of the dam wall, the sloping bank of
earth and stones that held the water, Paul paused to
watch them pass into the shifting distance, ere he went
to his concerns at the foot of it.  He could not have put
a name to the quality in them which stirred him and
held him gazing, for beauty is older than speech; but
words were not needful to flavor the far prospect of
even land, with the sheep moving across it, the squat,
swart shape of the shepherd pacing at their heels, and the
strange, soft light making the whole unreal and mysterious.

Below the dam wall, the moisture oozing through
had made a space of rank grass and trailing
weed-vines, and the ground underfoot was cool and damp
through the longest day of sun.  Here one might sit
in the odor of water and watch the wind lift tall spirals
of dust and chase them over the monotonous miles where
the very bushes rustled like dead boughs at their
passage.  It had the quality of a heritage, a place
where one may be aloof and yet keep an eye on the
world, and since there were no others who needed
elbow-room for their dreams, Paul had it to himself.  Here
and there about the sloping bank, as on the walls of
a gallery, his handiwork cracked and crumbled in the
sun—little masks and figures of red clay which he
fashioned to hold some shape that had caught his eye
and stayed in it.  He had an instinct for the momentary
attitude, the quick, unconscious pose which is life, the
bunched compact shape of a sheep grazing, the poise
of a Kafir girl with a load on her head, a figure
revealed in wind-blown clothes and lost in a flash.  The
sweet, pliant clay was his confidant; it was not the
fault of the clay that he could tell it so much less than
he knew.

He groped, kneeling, below a vine, and brought out
the thing he had hidden there the evening before when
the light failed him.  A flattened stone at the foot of
the wall was his table; he set the clay down tenderly and
squatted beside it, with his back to the veld and all the
world.  It was to be the head of a negro, the negro as
Paul knew him, and already the clay had shape.  The
shallow round of the skull was achieved; he had been
feeling, darkly, gropingly, for the brutal angle of the
brows that should brood like a cloud over the whole
countenance.  It had evaded him and baffled him; he knew
how it should be, but when the time had come for him
to leave it for the night, the brows still cocked
themselves in a suggestion of imbecility which was
heart-breaking.  He turned it round, frowning a little as his
habit was when he centered his faculties upon a matter;
the chaos of the featureless face below the smooth head
fronted him.

"*Allemachtag!*" he cried aloud, as he set eyes on it.

There was no possibility that he could be mistaken;
he remembered, in their smallest exasperating detail,
those brows as he had left them, taunting him as bad
work will.  Even now, he had but to close his eyes
and he could see them, absurd and clamorous for
correction.  But—he stared dumbly at the clay as he
realized it—since then another creator had played with
it, or else the thing, left to itself, had frowned.  The
rampart of the brows had deepened above the empty
face; Paul knew in it the darkness for which he had
sought, the age-old patience quenching the spark of the
soul.  It was as different from what he had left as
living flesh is from red clay, an inconsequent miracle.

"Somebody," said Paul, pondering over it—"somebody *knows*!"

The thing troubled him a little while, but he passed
his hand over the clay, to make yet more sure of it,
and the cool invitation of its softness was medicine for
his wonder.  He smudged the clay to a ridge in the
place where the nose should be, and then, forgetting
forthwith that he was the victim of a practical joke,
as it seemed, played upon him by the powers of the air,
he fell to work.

The colors in the west were burning low when he
raised his head, disturbed by a far sound that forced
itself on his ear.  It was like a pulse in the air, a dull
rhythmical throb faintly resonant like the beating of
some great heart.  He came to consciousness of it
slowly, withdrawing himself unwillingly from the work
under his hands, and noting with surprise that the
evening light was all but gone.  But the face of the
negro was a step nearer completion, and even the
outline of the gross mouth was there to aid the clay to
return his look.  The far sound insisted; he lifted his
head with mild impatience to listen to it, sighed, and
tucked the unfinished head away in its hidingplace.
Perhaps another night would draw out the mouth to its
destined shape of empty, pitiful mirth.

The beat of the gourd-drum that hung at the farmhouse
door still called, and he hastened his steps along
the homeward path.  It was the common manner of
summons on the farm.  For the European ear, the
gourd sawed across, with a skin stretched over it, is
empty of music, but it has the quality of sowing its
flat voice over many miles, threading through the voices
of nature as a snake goes through grass.  Simple
variants in the rhythm of the strokes adapt it to
messages, and now it was calling Paul.  "Paul, Paul,
P-P-Paul!" it thrilled, and its summons was as plain
as words.  To silence it, he put fingers to his mouth
and answered with a shrill, rending whistle.  The
gourd was silent.

His mother was in the doorway as he came through
the kraals; she heard his steps and called to him.

"Paul!  That you?  Where you bin all this time?"

"By the dam," he answered.

"I been callin' you this half hour," she said.  "Mrs. Jakes
is here—she wants you."

The light from within the house showed her as a
thin woman, with the shape of youth yet upon her.
But the years had taken tribute of her freshness, and
her small, rather vacant face was worn and faded.
She wore her hair coiled upon her head in a way to
frame the thin oval of the face, and there remained
to her yet the slight prettiness of sharp weak gestures
and little conscious attitudes.  In her voice there
survived the clipped accent of London; Paul had come to
know it as the thing that distinguished his mother from
other women.  Before her marriage she had been an
actress of the obscure sort to be found in the lesser
touring companies, and it was when the enterprise of
which she was a member had broken down at the town
of Fereira that she met and married the Boer,
Christian du Preez, Paul's father.  She preserved from
the old days a stock of photographs inscribed in
dashing hands—"yours to the dregs"—"your old pal"—"yours
ever most sincerely"—and so on a few cuttings
from newspapers—"Miss Vivie Sinclair as Gertie
Gottem was most unique," said the *Dopfontein
Courant*—a touch of raucousness in her voice, and a
ceaseless weary longing for the easy sham life, the foolish
cheerful companions, the stimulus of the daily publicity.

She drew the boy in, sliding her arm through his,
to where Mrs. Jakes sat waiting.

"Here he is at last," she said, looking up at him
prettily.  She often said she was glad her boy was tall
enough to go into a picture, but a mother must admire
her son for one thing or another.

Mrs. Jakes acknowledged Paul's arrival with a
lady-like little smile.  "Better late than never," she
pronounced.

She was the wife of the doctor at the Sanatorium,
the old Dutch house that showed its steep roofs within
a couple of miles of the farm, where came in twos and
threes the consumptives from England, to mend their
broken lungs in the clean air of the Karoo.  They
came not quite so frequently nowadays, for a few that
returned healed, or believing themselves to be healed,
had added to their travel-sketches of the wonderful old
house and its surroundings an account of Dr. Jakes
and his growing habit of withdrawing from his duties
to devote himself to drink.  Their tales commonly
omitted to describe justly the anxious, lonely woman
who labored at such times to supply his place,
driving herself to contrive and arrange to keep the life
of the house moving in its course, to maintain an
assured countenance, and all the while to screen him
from public shame and ruin.  She was a wan little
woman, clinging almost with desperation to those trivial
mannerisms and fashions of speech which in certain
worlds distinguished the lady from the mere person.
She had lain of nights beside a drunken husband, she
had fought with him when he would have gone out to
make a show of his staggering gait and blurred
speech—horrible silent battles in a candle-lit room, ending
in a gasping fall and sickness—she had lied and cheated
to hide the sorry truth, she had bared her soul in
gratitude to her kind God that her child had died.  These
things as a matter of course, as women accept and
belittle their martyrdom; but never in her life had she
left the spoon standing in her tea-cup or mislaid her
handkerchief.  The true standards of her life were
still inviolate.

She liked Paul because he was shy and gentle, but
not well enough to talk to him without mentioning the
weather first.

"The evenings are drawing out nicely," she remarked,
leaning to one side in her chair to see through
the door the darkness growing dense upon the veld.
"It reminds me a little of a June evening in
England—if only the rain holds off."

"Yes," said Paul.  There would be rain in the ordinary
course in three months or so, if all went well, but
it was not worth while to go into the matter with Mrs. Jakes.

"We are to have another guest," the lady went on.
The doctor's patients were always "guests" when she
spoke of them.  "A young lady this time.  And that
is what I came about, really."

"Mrs. Jakes wants you to go in to the station with
the Cape-cart and fetch her out, Paul," explained his
mother.  "You 'll 'ave the first look at her.  Mrs. Jakes
takes her oath she is young."

Mrs. Jakes shuddered faintly, and looked at the floor.

"About twenty-six, I understand," she said.  "About
that."  Her tone reproached Mrs. du Preez for a lapse
of good manners.  Mrs. Jakes did not understand the
sprightliness of mild misstatement.  She turned to Paul.

"If you could manage it," she suggested.  "If it
wouldn't be too much trouble!  The doctor, I 'm sorry
to say, has a touch of the sun; he is subject, you
know."  Her hands clasped nervously in her lap, and her face
seemed blind as she beat bravely on.  "The climate
really does n't suit him at all; he can't stand the heat.
I 've begged and prayed him to give it up and go back
to private practice at home.  But he considers it his
duty to keep on."

"The morning train?" asked Paul.

"It is early," lamented Mrs. Jakes.  "But we should
be so much obliged."

Paul nodded.  "All right," he said.  "I will bring
her, Mrs. Jakes."

There are transactions consecrated to the humorous
point of view, landmarks in the history of laughter.
Mrs. du Preez honestly believed that a youth and a
girl alone in the dawn were a spectacle essentially mirthful.

"Catch him missing the chance," she said, with her
slightly jarring laugh.  "None of your larks, now,
Paul!  Promise you 'll behave!"

"Yes, mother," Paul promised gravely, and her face
went blank before the clear eyes he turned upon her.
Mrs. Jakes in her chair rustled her stiff dress in a
wriggle of approval.

"Miss Harding is the name," she told Paul.  "You 'll
manage to find her?  I don't know at all what she 's
like, but she comes of a very good family, I believe.
You can't mistake her."

"Paul knows the look of the lungy ones by now,"
Mrs. du Preez assured her.  "Don't you, Paul?  It 's
lungs, of course, Mrs. Jakes?"

"Chest trouble," corrected Mrs. Jakes, nervously.
She preferred the less exact phrase, for there is
indelicacy in localising diseases, and from the lungs to the
bowels it is but a step.  "Chest trouble, a slight
attack.  Fortunately, Miss Harding is taking it in time.
The doctor lays stress on the necessity for taking it in
time."

"Well," said Mrs. du Preez, "whatever it is, she 'll
'ave the fashions.  Lungs or liver, they 've got to
dress, and it 'll be something to see a frock again.
She 's from London, you said?"

Mrs. Jakes rearranged her black skirts which had
suffered by implication, and suppressed an impulse to
reply that she had not said London.

"The address is Kensington," she answered.  "Very
good people live in Kensington."

"There 's shops there, at any rate," said Mrs. du
Preez.  "Lord, don't I remember 'em!  I had
lodgings at Hammersmith once myself, and an aunt in the
High Street.  There 's not much you can tell me about
that part."

She nodded a challenge to Mrs. Jakes, who shrank
from it.

"Then I can tell the doctor that you 'll meet Miss
Harding?" Mrs. Jakes asked Paul.  "He will be so
obliged.  You see, he 'd go himself, only—you quite
see?  Then I 'll expect Miss Harding for breakfast."

She rose and shook herself, the gentle expert shake
that settles a woman's clothes into their place, and
tendered him a vague, black-gloved hand.  Gloves were
among her defenses against the crudities of the Karoo.
She was prim in the lamp-light, and extraordinarily
detached from the little uncomfortable room, with its
pale old photographs of forgotten actors staring down
from wall and mantel.

"She may as well see you first," she said, and smiled
at him as though there were an understanding between
them.





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`CHAPTER II`:

.. class:: center large bold

   CHAPTER II

.. vspace:: 2

At three o'clock in the morning it was still dark,
though in the east, low down and gradual, there
paled an apprehension of the dawn.  From the
driving-seat of the high two-wheeled cart, Paul looked
forward over the heads of his horses to where the station
lights were blurred like a luminous bead on the
thread of railway that sliced without a curve from
sky to sky.  It was the humblest of halting places, with
no town at its back to feed the big trains; it owed
its existence frankly to a gaunt water-tank for the
refreshment of engines.  But for Paul it had the
significance of a threshold.  He could lose himself in the
crowding impressions of a train's arrival, as it
broadened and grew out of the distance and bore down
between the narrow platforms, immense and portentous,
and thudded to a standstill as though impatient of the
trivial delay.  The smell of it, the dull shine of glass
and varnish, were linked in his mind with the names
of strange, distant cities; it was freighted with the
romance of far travel.  There were glimpses of
cushioned interiors, and tired faces that looked from the
windows, giving a perfunctory glance to the Karoo
which Paul knew as the world.  And once he had
watched four men, with a little folding table cramped
between their knees, playing cards, low-voiced, alert,
each dark predatory face marked with an impassivity
that was like the sheath that hides a blade.  He stared
at them fascinated; not once did they raise their eyes
to glance through the window, nor for an instant did
one of them slacken his profound attention.  Ahead, at
the platform's end, the great engine whined like a
child that gropes for the breast, till the feed-hose
contented it and its gurgle-gurgle succeeded to the thin
wail of the steam.  The Kafir orange woman made
melodious offers of *naartjes* and a hammer clinked
critically along the wheels.  It was the live season of
the day, the poignant moment, its amends for the slow
empty hours.  But the men about the table had graver
concerns.  The feed-hose splashed back out of the way,
the guard shouted, the brakes whanged loose.  The
long train jolted and slid, and still they had not looked
up.  Paul could not leave them; he even ran along the
platform till their window distanced him, and then
stopped, panting, to watch the tail of the train sink to
the horizon.  He had seen the Jew in earnest and it
left him daunted.

"They wouldn't even look," he was saying, as he
went back to his cart.  "They wouldn't even look."  It
served as a revelation to one who looked so much and
so fervently.

The other train, which came and went before the
daylight, had its equal quality of a swift, brief visitor,
and the further mystery of windows lighted dimly
through drawn curtains, whereon surprising shadow
heads would dawn and vanish in abrupt motion.  It was
strange to stand beside one and hear from within the
crying of an infant and the soothing of a mother,
both invisible, arriving from the void on one hand
and bound for the void on the other, with the Karoo
not even an incident in their passage.  Paul
wondered whether one day that infant might not pass
through again, with trousers and a mustache and a
cigar, and another trouble to perturb him and cards
and partners to do the soothing.

He arrived well in advance of the time of the train,
and tied his docile horses to the hitching rail beside
the road.  Within the station there was the usual
expectant group under the dim lamps, the two or three
men who attended to the tank, a Cape Mounted Policeman,
spurred and trim, and a few others, besides the
half-dozen or so mute and timid Kafirs who lounged
at the end of the platform.  The white men talked
together and shivered at the cold of the night; only the
Cape Policeman, secure in his uniform great-coat, stood
with legs astraddle and his whip held behind his back,
a model of correct military demeanor in the small
hours.  Paul noted the aggressive beauty of his
attitude and his fine young virility, and stared somewhat
till the armed man noticed it.

"Well, young feller," he drawled.  "You haven't
fallen in love with me, have you?"

"No," answered Paul, astonished.

Two or three of the bystanders laughed, and made
him uncomfortable.  He did not fully understand why
he had been spoken to, and stared at his questioner a
little helplessly.  The policeman smacked his boot with
his whip.

"Nor yet me with you," he said.  "So if you want
to stare, go and stare at something else.  See?"

Paul backed away, angry and shy, and moved down
the platform to be out of the sound of their voices.
The things that people laughed at were seldom clear
to him; it seemed that he had been left out of some
understanding to take certain things as funny and
laugh at them.  His mother's mirth, breaking startlingly
out of unexpected incidents, out of words spoken
without afterthought, out of little accidents and
breakages, always puzzled him.  It was as little to be
understood as her tears, when she would sit silent through
a long afternoon of stagnant heat, and burst suddenly
into weeping when some one spoke to her.

He came to a standstill at the point where the
station roof ended and left the platform bare to the calm
skies.  The metals gleamed before his feet, ranging
out to the veld whence the train would come.  He
listened for the sound of it, the low drum-note so like
the call of the gourd-drum at the farmhouse door,
which would herald it even before its funnel dragged
its glare into view.  There was nothing to be heard,
and he turned to the Kafirs behind him, and spoke
to one who squatted against the wall apart from the rest.

"Is the train late?" he asked, in the "Kitchen
Kafir" of his everyday commerce with natives.

The black man raised his head at the question, but
did not answer.  Paul repeated it a little louder.

The native held his head as if he listened closely or
were deaf.  Then he smiled, his white teeth gleaming
in the black circle of his shadowed face.

"I 'm sorry," he answered, distinctly; "I can't
understand what you say.  You 'll have to speak English."

It was the voice of a negro, always vaguely musical,
and running to soft full tones, but there was a note
in it which made it remarkable and unfamiliar, some
turn which suggested (to Paul, at any rate) that this
was a man with properties even stranger than his speaking
English.  He thrilled with a sense of adventure, for
this, of course, was the mad creature of the shepherd's
tale, who sang to himself of nights when the moon
rose on the veld.  If a dog had answered him in set
phrases, it would not have been more amazing than
to hear that precise, aptly modulated voice reply in
easy English from the mouth of a Kafir.

"I—I 've heard of you," he said, stammering.

"Have you?"  He remembered how the old shepherd
had spoken of the man's smile.  He was smiling now,
looking up at Paul.

"You 've heard of me—I wonder what you 've
heard.  And I 've seen you, too."

"Where did you see me?  Who are you?" asked
Paul quickly.  The man was mad, according to the
shepherd, but Paul was not very clear as to what it
meant to be mad, beyond that it enabled one to see
things unseen by the sane.

The Kafir turned over, and rose stiffly to his feet,
like a man spent with fatigue.

"They 'll wonder if they see me sitting down while
I talk to you," he said, with a motion to the group
about the Cape Mounted Policeman.  His gesture
made a confidant of Paul and enlisted him, as it were,
in a conspiracy to keep up appearances.  It was
possible to see him when he stood on his feet, a young man,
as tall as the boy, with a skin of warm Kafir black.
But the face, the foolish, tragic mask of the negro,
shaped for gross, easy emotions, blunted on the
grindstone of the races of mankind, was almost unexpected.
Paul stared dumbly, trying to link it on some plane of
reason with the quiet, schooled voice.

"What was it you were asking me?" the Kafir inquired.

But Paul had forgotten.  "Don't you speak anything
but English?" he demanded now.

The Kafir smiled again.  "A little French," he
replied.  "Nothing to speak of."  He saw that the lad
was bewildered, and turned grave at once.  "Don't
be frightened," he said quickly.  "There 's nothing to
be frightened of."

Paul shook his head.  "I 'm not frightened," he
answered slowly.  "It 's not that.  But—you said you
had seen me before?"

"Yes," the Kafir nodded.  "One evening about a
fortnight ago; you didn't notice me.  I was walking
on the veld, and I came by a dam, with somebody sitting
under the wall and trying to model in clay."

"Oh!"  Paul was suddenly illuminated.

"Yes.  I 'd have spoken to you then, only you
seemed so busy," said the Kafir.  "Besides, I didn't
know how you 'd take it.  But I went there later on
and had a look at the things you 'd made.  That 's how
I saw you."

"Then," said Paul, "it was *you*—"

"Hush!" The Kafir touched him warningly on the
arm, for the Cape Policeman had turned at his raised
voice to look towards them.  "Not so loud.  You mean
the head?  Yes, I went on with it a bit.  I hope you
didn't mind."

"No," replied Paul.  "I did n't mind.  No!"

His mind beat helplessly among these incongruities;
only one thing was clear; here was a man who could
shape things in clay.  Upon the brink of that world
of which the station was a door, he had encountered
a kindred spirit.  The thought made him tremble; it
was so vital a matter that he could not stay to consider
that the spirit was caged in a black skin.  The single
fact engrossed him to the exclusion of all the other
factors in the situation, just as some sight about the
farm would strike him while at work, and hold him,
absorbed and forgetful of all else, till either its
interest was exhausted or he was recalled to his task by
a shout across the kraals.

"I did n't mind at all," he replied.  "How did you do
it?  I tried, but it wouldn't come."

"You were n't quite sure what you were trying for,"
said the Kafir.  "Was n't that it?"

"Was it?" wondered Paul.

"I think so."  The Kafir's smile shone out again.
"Once you 're sure what you mean to do, it 's easy.
If I had a piece of clay, I 'd show you.  There 's a way
of thumbing it up, just a trick, you know—"

"I 'm there every evening," said Paul eagerly.  "But
tell me: *do* other people make things out of clay,
too—over there?"

His arm pointed along the railway; the gesture
comprehended sweepingly the cities and habitations of men.
The idea that there was a science of fingering clay, that
it was practised and studied, excited him wildly.

"Gently!" warned the Kafir.  He looked at the boy
curiously.  "Yes," he said.  "Lots of people do it,
and lots more go to look at the things they make and
talk about them.  People pay money to learn to do it,
and there are great schools where they are taught to
model—to make things, you know, in clay, and stone,
and bronze.  Did you think it was all done behind dam
walls?"

Paul breathed deep.  "I did n't know," he murmured.

"Do you know Capetown?" asked the other.  "No?
It doesn't matter.  You 've heard of Jan van Riebeck,
though?"

As it happened, Paul had heard of the Surgeon of the
Fleet who first carried dominion to the shadow of
Table Mountain.

"Well," said the Kafir, "you can imagine Jan van
Riebeek, shaped in bronze, standing on a high pedestal
at the foot of a great street, with the water of the bay
behind him, where his ships used to float, and his
strong Dutch face lifted to look up to Table Mountain,
as it was when he landed?  Don't think of the bronze
shape; think of the man.  That's what clay is
for—to make things like that!"

"Yes, yes.  That's what it's for," cried Paul.
"But—I never saw anything like that."

"Plenty of time," said the other.  "And that's only
one of the things to see.  In London—"

"You 've been in London?" asked Paul quickly.

"Yes," said the Kafir, nodding.  "Why?"

Paul was silent for a space of seconds.  When he
answered it was in a low voice.

"I 've seen nothing," he said.  "I can't find out
those ways to work the clay.  But—but if somebody
would just show me, just teach me those—those tricks
you spoke about—"

"All right."  The Kafir patted his arm.  "Under
the dam wall, eh?  In the evenings?  I 'll come, and
then—"

"What?" said Paul eagerly, for he had broken off
abruptly.

"The train," said the Kafir, pointing, and sighed.

Paul had been too intent in talk to hear it, but he
could see now, floating against the distance, the bead
of light which grew while he watched.  The group
further down the platform dissolved, and the tank-men
went past at a run to their work.  A voice at his elbow
made Paul turn quickly.  It was the Cape Mounted
Policeman.

"You 're not having any trouble with this nigger,
hey?" he demanded.

"No," said Paul, flushing.  The Kafir bit off a smile
and stood submissive, with an eye on the boy's troubled
face.

"You don't want to let them get fresh with you,"
said the policeman.  "I 've been keepin' my eye on
him and he talks too much.  Have you finished with
him now?"

His silver-headed whip came out from behind his
back ready to dismiss the negro in the accepted
manner.  Paul trembled and took a step which brought him
near enough to seize the whip if it should flick back
for the cut.

"Let him alone," he said wrathfully.  "Mind your
own business."

"Eh?" the policeman was astonished.

"You let him alone," repeated Paul, bracing himself
nervously for combat, and ready to cry because he
could not keep from trembling.  He had never come
to blows in his life, but he meant to now.  The
policeman stared at him, and laughed harshly.

"He 's a friend of yours, I suppose," he suggested,
striving for a monstrous affront.

"Yes," retorted Paul hotly, "he is."

For a moment it looked as though the policeman,
outraged in the deepest recesses of his nature, would burst
a blood vessel or cry for help.  A man whose prayer
that he may be damned is granted on the nail could
scarcely have looked less shocked.  He recovered
himself with a gulp.

"Oh, he is, is he?  A friend of yours?  A
nigger!"  Then, with a swelling of rage he dodged Paul's
grasping hand and swung the whip.  "I 'll teach him to—"

He came to a stop, open-mouthed.  The Kafir was
gone.  He had slipped away unheard while they
quarreled, and the effect of it was like a conjuring trick.
Even Paul gaped at the place where he had been and
now was not.

"Blimy!" said the policeman, reduced to an expression
of his civilian days, and vented a short bark
of laughter.  "And *so*, young feller, he 's a friend o'
yours, is he?  Now, lemme give you just a word of
advice."

His young, sun-roughened face was almost paternal
for a moment, and Paul shook with a yearning to
murder him, to do anything that would wipe the
self-satisfaction from it.  He sought furiously for a form
of anathema that would shatter the man.

"Go to hell," he cried.

"Oh, well," said the policeman, tolerantly, and then
the train's magnificent uproar of arrival gave Paul
an opportunity to be rid of him.

In the complication of events Paul had all but
forgotten his duty of discovering the young lady with
"chest trouble," and now he wondered rather
dolefully how to set about it.  He stood back to watch
the carriage windows flow past.  Would it be at all
possible just to stand where he was and shout "Miss
Harding" till she answered?  To do that needed some
one more like the policeman and less like Paul; the
mere thought of it was embarrassing.  The alternative
was, to wait until such passengers as alighted—they
would not be many—had taken themselves away, and
then to go up to the one that remained and say, "Is
your name Miss Harding, if you please?"  But
supposing she answered, "Mind your own business!"

The train settled and stood, and Paul became aware
that from the carriage nearest him a woman was
looking forth, with her face in the full light of a lamp.
The inveterate picture-seeker in him suddenly found
her engrossing, as she leaned a little forward, lifting
her face to the soft meager light, and framed in the
varnished wood of the window.  It was a pale face, with
that delicacy and luster of pallor which make rose
tints seem over-robust.  It was grave and composed;
there was something there which the boy, in his
innocence, found at once inscrutable and pitiful, like the
bravery of a little child.  Distinctly, this was a day
of surprises; it came to him that he had not known
that the world had women like this.  His eyes, always
the stronghold of dreams, devoured her, unconscious
that she was returning his gaze.  Perhaps to her, he
also was a source of surprise, with his face rapt and
vague, his slender boyishness, his general quality of
standing always a little aloof from his surroundings.
On the Karoo, people said of him that he was
"old-fashioned"; one word is as good as another when
folk understand each other.  The point was that it was
necessary to find some term to set Paul apart from
themselves.

He saw the girl was making preparations to leave
the carriage, and was suddenly inspired.  He found
the handle of the door and jerked it open, and there
she was above him, and looking down.  She wore some
kind of scent, very faint and elusive; he was conscious
of her as a near and gentle and fragrant personality.

"I hope," he said, letting the words come, "I
hope you are Miss Harding?"

The girl smiled.  It had been prettily spoken, with
the accent of sincerity.

"Yes," she answered.  "You have come to meet me?"

The thing about her to which Paul could put no
name was that she was finished, a complete and
perfect product of a special life, which, whatever its
defects and shortcomings, is yet able to put a polish of
considerable wearing qualities on its practitioners.
She knew her effect; her education had revealed it to
her early; she was aware of the pale, intent figure she
cut, and her appearance of enlightened virginity.  The
reverence in the boy's eyes touched her and warmed
her at once; it was a charming welcome at the end of
that night's journey.  Paul's guilelessness had served
the specious ends of tact, for to corroborate a woman's
opinion of herself is the sublime compliment.

He received the lesser luggage which she handed
down to him and then she came down herself, and one
train, at least, had shed its marvel upon the Karoo.
She was not less wonderful and foreign on the
platform than she had been at the window; the Cape
Policeman, coming past again, lost his military-man air
of a connoisseur in women and stiffened to a strutting
perfection of demeanor at sight of her.  South Africa
is still so short of women that it makes the most of
those it can get, both as goddesses and as beasts of
burden.  Paul was free of the evil civilized habit of
thinking while he could feel, and the girl had to
despatch the single lanky porter for her baggage
herself and attend to having it stacked at the back of
the cart.  Then she was beside him, with the poignant
air from the open south fresh on their faces, and the
empty veld before them.  The slow dawn was suddenly
magical and the stillness was the hush that
attends miracles.

He had to give his mind to steering the big cart
through the gateway to the road, and it was here
that he saw, against the white fence, a waiting figure
that looked up and was silent.  He bent forward and
waved his hand, but the Kafir did not respond.  The
girl at his side broke silence in her low rich voice.

"That was a native, was n't it?" she asked.

Paul looked at her.  "It was a—a friend of mine,"
he answered seriously.  "A Kafir, you know."

The light in the eastern sky had grown and its lower
edge, against the rim of the earth, was tinged with a
rose-and-bronze presentiment of the sunrise.  The
Karoo lay under a twilight, with the night stripping
from its face like a veil drawn westwards and away.
In that half-light, its spacious level, its stillness, its
quality of a desert, were enhanced; its few and little
inequalities were smoothed out and merged in one
empty flatness, and the sky stood over in a single
arch, sprinkled with stars that were already burning
pale.  In all the vast expanse before them, there rose no
roof, no tree, no token of human habitation; the eye
that wandered forward, returned, like the dove to the
Ark, for lack of a resting-place.  It was a world at
gaze, brooding grimly.  The little morning wind, which
would die when the sun rose clear of the horizon and
leave the veld to its day-long torpor of heat, leaned
upon their faces; the girl raised her brows against it
and breathed deeply of its buoyancy.

"Oh," she said; "this is what I came for."

"The air?"  Paul glanced sideways at her clear
profile set against the shadowy morning.  "They say it
is good for—for—"

He hesitated; Mrs. Jakes had managed to make the
word difficult.  But Miss Harding took it in her stride.

"For the lungs?" she suggested without compunction.
"Yes, I 'm sure it is.  And you live here all the
time, do you?"

"I was born here," Paul answered.

"How you must love it," she said, and met his eyes
with a look in which there was a certain curiosity.  "All
this, I mean," she explained.  Then: "But do you?"

"Yes," he answered.  "It 's—it's fine to look at—if
you like looking at things."

It was not all that he desired to say, for he was
newly eager to make himself clear to this wonderful
person at his side, and he felt that he was not doing
himself justice.  But Miss Harding had seen inarticulate
souls before, aching to be confidential and to make
revelations and unable to run their trouble into a mould
of speech.  They were not uncommon in the neighborhood
of her address in Kensington.  She smiled her
recognition of the phenomenon.  "There are not many
kinds of men, and only two kinds of boy," she said to
herself.  She was twenty-six, and she knew.

"Oh, I," she answered.  "Yes, I like looking at things."

Paul nodded, watching his horses.  "I was sure you
did when I saw you at the window," he said.  He
turned to her, and she smiled at him, interested in the
strong simplicity with which he spoke.

"I was sure," he repeated, "and yet nobody like you
ever came here before, ever.  They always went on in
the train.  I used to wonder if one of them would never
get out, but they never did.  They just sat still by the
window, with their faces tired and sleepy, and went
on again."

He loosed the lash of his whip, and it made lightning
circles over the off horse, and the tail of the lash
slapped that animal reproachfully on the neck.  Miss
Harding contented herself with a little incoherent noise
of general sympathy.  "If I say anything," she
thought, "I 'll be knocked off my seat with a compliment."

But Paul had only wanted to tell her; it seemed
necessary that she should know something of her value.
That done, he was content to drive on in dreaming
silence, while the pair of them watched the veld grow
momentarily lighter, its bare earth, the very hue and
texture of barrenness, spreading and widening before
them like water spilt on a floor.  The stronger light
that showed it to them revealed only a larger vacancy,
a void extending where the darkness had stood like a
presence.  Beside the cart, and no more than a dozen
yards away, a heavy bird suddenly uttered a cry and
spouted up into the air, with laborious wings, flapping
noisily.  It rose perhaps thirty feet, with an appearance
of great effort, whistled and sank again forthwith,
girl laughed; it was such a futile performance.

"What was that?" she asked.

"A lark," was the answer, and Paul turned his eyes
to the east.  "Look!" he bade her, pointing.

Over the horizon which was like a black bar, set rigid
against the heavens, stood the upper edge of the sun,
naked and red,—a fiery eye, cocked arrogantly over
the sky-line.  About it, the very air seemed flooded
with color, and the veld reflected it in dull gleams of
red.

"And there!" said Paul again, pointing ahead.

They were at the top of a gentle slope, so gradual that
it had made no break in the flat prospect of ten
minutes ago, and before them, and still so far off that it
had the appearance of a delicate and elaborate toy,
stood the Sanatorium.  In that diamond clearness of
air, every detail of it was apparent.  Its beautiful
serene front, crowned by old Dutch gables mounting in
steps to the height of the rooftree, faced them, frank
and fair, over the shadowy reticence of the stone-pillared
stoep.  Beyond and behind it, the roof of the
farm, Paul's home, stood in a dim perspective.

"Is that it?" asked Miss Harding.  "Where I am
going, I mean."

"Yes," said Paul.

"It's very beautiful," she said.

He smiled contentedly.  "I was sure you would say
that," he replied.  "I am so glad you have come here."

Miss Harding regarded him doubtfully, but decided
that no rebuke was necessary.

"Yes," she said, soberly.  "It ought to give my
lungs a chance."

Paul flicked the long lash towards the off horse again,
and spoke no more till he brought the cart to a stand-still
at the foot of the fan-shaped flight of steps that
led up to the door on the stoep.  The big house was
voiceless and its windows blank; he was preparing to
call out when the front door opened, uncovering a vista
of a stone corridor within, simple and splendid, and
there emerged Mrs. Jakes to the glory of the new day.
She crossed the stoep, challenging the dignity of smooth
cold stone with her little black figure of ceremony and
her amiable, empty face of formal welcome.

"Miss Harding?" she enquired.  "I scarcely
expected you so early.  Isn't it charming weather?"

Paul helped the girl to alight, and watched the two
women as they stood, before entering the house, and
exchanged perfunctory civilities.

"And now, to see your room," said Mrs. Jakes at
last, and let her pass.  "Isn't it fortunate that the
rain has held off so nicely?"

Her small voice tinkled indefatigably, and she worked
through all the motions of hospitable politeness.  But
behind her smile her eyes were haggard and stale, and
Paul thought that she looked at the girl, as they went
in, with the very hate of envy.





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`CHAPTER III`:

.. class:: center large bold

   CHAPTER III

.. vspace:: 2

In the years of his innocence, when the art and
practice of medicine were rich with enticements
like a bride, Dr. Jakes had taken his dreams in hand to
mold them to the shape of his desire.  A vision had
beckoned to him across the roofs and telegraph wires
of South London, where he scuffled for a livelihood as
the assistant of a general practitioner; and when he
fixed his eyes upon it, it spread and took shape as a
great quiet house, noble and gray, harboring within its
sober walls the atmosphere of distinguished repose
which goes with a practice of the very highest class.
Nothing of all its sumptuous appointment was quite so
clear to him as that flavor of footfalls muffled and voices
subdued; to summon it was to establish a refuge in
which he might have brief ease between a tooth-drawing
and a confinement.  Kindly people who excused a
certain want of alacrity in the little doctor by the
reflection that he was called out every night might have
saved their charity; his droop, his vacancy were only
a screen for the splendid hush and shadow of that great
visionary mansion.  It was peopled, too, with many dim
folk, resident patients in attitudes of relaxation; and
among them, delicate and urbane, went Dr. Jakes, the
sweet and polished vehicle of healing for the
pulmonary complaints of the well-bred.  Nor was there
lacking a lady, rather ghostlike and faint in conformity with
the dreamer's ideal of the highest expression of a
lady-like quality, but touched, none the less, with warm
femininity, an angel and a houri in one, and answering, in
the voice of refinement, to the title of Mrs. Jakes.

She had no Christian name then; she was a haunting
mellowness, a presence delicate and uplifting.  In the
murk of the early morning, after a night spent behind
drawn blinds in a narrow, tragic room, where another
human being entered the world between his hands, he
would go home along empty furtive streets, conscious
of the comfort of her and glad as with wine, and in such
hours he would make it clear to himself that she, at any
rate, should never bear a child.

"No," he would say, half aloud and very seriously.
"No; it's not in the part.  No!"

That gracious and mild presence—he did not entirely
lose it even when its place was assailed by the advent
of the timid and amiable lady whom he married.  She
was a daughter of the landed interest; her father owned
"weekly property" about Clapham Junction, two streets
of forlorn little houses, which rang day and night with
the passing of trains, and furnished to the population a
constant supply of unwelcome babies.  Dr. Jakes knew
the value of property of that kind, and perhaps his
knowledge did something to quicken his interest in a
sallow, meager girl whom he encountered in the house
of his employer.  She brought him a thousand pounds
in money, means ready to his hand to anchor the old
vision to earth and run it on commercial lines; it
puzzled him a little that the vision no longer responded
to his summons so readily as of old.  It had
degenerated from an inspiration to a mere scheme, best
expressed in the language of the prospectus; the fine zest
of it was gone beyond recovery.  There was no
recapturing its gentle languors, the brooding silence of it;
still less was it possible when, by the mere momentum
of his plans, he had moved to South Africa and found
him a house, to reproduce that reposefulness as the main
character of the establishment.  Such effects as he
gained, during the brief strenuousness that he
manifested on taking possession, were the merest caricatures
of the splendid original, mocking his impotence.  The
thousand pounds, too, which at first had some of the
fine, vague, inexhaustible quality of a dream, proved
inelastic, and by the time the baby came, Dr. Jakes was
already buying whisky by the case.  The baby was a
brief incident, a caller rather than a visitor, so
ephemeral that it was scarcely a nuisance before it departed
again in search of a peace less dependent on the arrangement
of furniture than that which Dr. Jakes had sought
to bring into being.

All life is a compromise; between the dream and the
exigencies of Dr. Jakes' position the Sanatorium had
emerged.  The fine, simple, old house had an air of its
own, which no base use could entirely destroy.  Its flat
front, pedestaled upon a wide, flagged stoep, faced to
the southeast and made a stronghold of shade in the
noonday vehemence of the sun.  Its rooms were great
and low, with wide solemn windows regarding the
monotony of the level veld; they stood between straight
corridors where one's footsteps rang as one walked.
The art of its builders had so fashioned it that it stood
on the naked ground like a thing native to it, not
interrupting nor affronting that sweep of vacant miles,
but enhancing it.  The stolid Dutch builders knew how
to make their profit out of wide horizons.  They had
conceived a frame for lives which should ripen in face
of the Karoo, gleaming on its barrenness a measure of
its tranquillity.  They built a home; and of it Dr. Jakes
had made a Home.

There remained yet, of all the decorous and ceremonial
processes which were to maintain and give color to the
life of the Sanatorium as he had conceived it of old,
only one function.  The two men patients who were
left to him did as they pleased in most respects, but if
they took tea in the afternoon they took it from
Mrs. Jakes in the drawing-room after an established usage,
with formal handing to and fro of plates and cups in
the manner of civilized society.  Jakes was seldom too
unwell to be present at this function, and it was here,
with his household at his back, that Margaret saw him
first.

Weariness had come upon her with the rush of an
overtaking pursuer as Mrs. Jakes brought her into the
house and away from the spreading dawn, and that
lady had cut short the forms of politeness to bid her
go to bed.  She woke to the warmth of afternoon and
the glow of its sun slanting upon the floor of her room
and was aware at once of a genial presence.  At the
window a tall, stout Kafir woman, her head bound in a
red and yellow handkerchief in a fashion which
reminded Margaret of pictures of pirates, was tweaking
the tails of the spring-blinds and taking delight in
watching them run up with a whir and click.  She
turned at the sound of Margaret's movement, and
flashed a brilliant smile upon her.

"Missis sleeping too long," she observed.  "Tea now."

The mere good humor of her was infectious and
Margaret smiled in return.

"Who are you?" she asked.

"Me?  Fat Mary," was the answer.  She laughed
easily, willing to make or be a joke according to
Margaret's humor.  "Fat Mary, because—" she sought for
a word in the unfamiliar English and then gave it up.
"Because," she repeated, and traced her ample
circumference with a black finger.  "You see?"

"I see," said Margaret, and prepared to get up.

Her long sleep had restored her and there was
comfort, too, in waking to the willing humanity of Fat
Mary's smiles, instead of to the starched cuffs and
starched countenance of some formal trained and
mechanical nurse.  Fat Mary was not a deft maid; she was
too easily amused at niceties of the toilet, and Margaret
could not help feeling that she regarded the process of
dressing as a performance which she could discuss later
with her friends; but at least she was interested.  She
revolved helpfully about the girl, to the noise of bumped
furniture and of large bare feet scraping on the mats,
like a bulky planet about a wan and diminutive sun,
and made mistakes and laughed and was buoyant and
alight with smiles—all with a suggestion of gentle and
reverent playfulness such as a more than usually grown
person might use with a child.

"Too much clothes," was her final comment, when
Margaret at last was ready and stood, slim and sober,
under her inspection.  "Like bundles," she added,
thoughtfully.  "But Missis is skinny."

"Where do we go now?" asked Margaret.

"Tea," replied Fat Mary, and led the way downstairs
by a wide and noble staircase to the gray shadows
of the stone hall.  There was a simple splendor about
the house which roused the connoisseur in Margaret, a
grandeur which was all of proportion and mass, and
the few articles of furniture which stood about were dim
and shabby in contrast to it.  She had only time to
note so much when Fat Mary opened a door for her, and
she was facing across a wide room to broad windows
flooded with sunlight and aware of Mrs. Jakes rising
from behind a little tea-table and coming forward to
meet her.  Two men, a young one and an old one, rose
from their chairs near the window as she entered, and a
third was standing on the hearth-rug, with his back to
the empty hearth.

"Quite rested now?" Mrs. Jakes was asking.
"You 've had a nice long sleep.  Let me introduce the
doctor.  Eustace—this is Miss Harding."

Dr. Jakes advanced from the hearth-rug; Margaret
thought he started forward rather abruptly as his name
was spoken.  He gave her a loose, hot hand.

"Charmed," he said in a voice that was not quite
free from hoarseness.  "We were just out of ladies,
Miss Harding.  This is a great pleasure; a great pleasure."

"Thank you," murmured Margaret vaguely.

He was a short plump man, with a big head and
round spectacles that gave him the aspect of a large,
deliberate bird.  He was dressed for the afternoon in
formal black, the uniform of his calling, though the
window framed shimmering vistas of heat.  He peered
up at her with a sort of appeal on his plump, amiable
face, as though he were conscious of that quality in him
which made the girl shrink involuntarily while he held
her hand, which no decent austerity of broadcloth
could veil from her scrutiny.  There was something
about him at once sleepy and tormented, the state in
which a man lies all day full-dressed upon a bed and
goes habitually unbuttoned.  It was the salient
character in him, and he seemed to search her face in a faint
hope that she would not recognize it.  He dropped her
hand with a momentary knitting of his brows like the
ghost of despair, and talked on.

"It 's the air we depend on," he told her.  "Wonderful
air here, Miss Harding—the breath of healing,
you know.  It doesn't suit me, but then I 'm not here
for my health."

He laughed uncertainly, and ceased abruptly when
he saw that no one laughed with him.  He was like a
child in disgrace trying to win and conciliate a circle
of remorseless elders.

Mrs. Jakes interrupted with a further introduction.
While the doctor spoke, she had been standing by like
an umpire.  "Mr. Ford," she said now, and the younger
of the two men by the window bowed to her without
speaking across the tea-table.  His back was to the
window and he stood silhouetted against the golden haze
which filled it, and Margaret saw only that he was tall
and slender and moved with easy deliberation.

"Mr. Samson," said Mrs. Jakes next.

This was the elder man.  He came forward to her,
showing a thin, sophisticated old face with cloudy white
eyebrows, and shook hands in a pronounced manner.

"Ah, you come like a gleam of sunshine," he
announced, in a thin voice that was like a piece of
bravado.  "A gleam of sunshine, by gad!  We 're not much
to look at, Miss Harding; a set of crocks, you know—bellows
to mend, and all that sort of thing, but, by gad,
we 're English, and we 're glad to see a countrywoman."

He cocked his white head at her gallantly and straddled
his legs in their neat gray trousers with a stiff
swagger.

"My mother was Irish," observed Mrs. Jakes brightly.
"But Miss Harding must have some tea."

Mr. Samson skipped before to draw out a chair for
her, and Margaret was established at Mrs. Jakes' elbow.
The doctor came across the room to hand her bread and
butter; that done, he retired again to his place on the
hearth-rug and to his cup, lodged upon the mantel-shelf.
It seemed that this was his place, outside the
circle by the window.

"Charming weather we 're having," announced Mrs. Jakes,
conscientiously assailing an interval of silence.
"If it only lasts!"

Mr. Samson, with his back to the wall and his teacup
wavering in his thin hand, snorted.

"Weather!" he said.  "Ya-as, we do get weather.
'Bout all we do get here,—eh, Jakes?"

Behind Margaret's back the doctor's teaspoon clinked
in his saucer, and he said something indistinct, in which
the words "wonderful air" alone reached her.  She
hitched her chair a pace sideways, so as to see him.

Mrs. Jakes was looking over her with the acute eyes
of a shopper which took in and estimated each detail
of her raiment.

"I suppose, now," she remarked thoughtfully, "in
England, the spring fashions were just coming out."

"I don't know, really," Margaret answered.  "When
I left, the principal wear seemed to be umbrellas.  It 's
been an awful winter—rain every day."

"Aha!"  Mr. Samson returned to the charge.
"Rain, eh?  Cab-wheels squirting mud at you all along
the street, eh?  Trees blubbering over the railings like
bally babies, eh?  Women bunchin' up their skirts and
hoppin' over the puddles like dicky-birds, eh?  I know,
I know; don't I just know!  How 'd you like a mouthful
of that air, eh, Ford?  Bad for the lungs—yes!
But good, deuced good for the heart."

The young man in the window raised his head when
he was addressed and nodded.  From the hearth-rug
Dr. Jakes murmured audibly: "Influenza."

"That of course," said Mrs. Jakes indulgently.
"Were there many people in town, Miss Harding?"

"People!"  Margaret was mystified for the moment.
"Oh, yes, I think so."

She was puzzled by the general attitude of the others
towards the little doctor; it was a matter into which she
had yet to be initiated.  It was as though there existed a
tacit understanding to suffer his presence and keep
an eye upon him.  It conveyed to her a sense that these
people knew things about him which would not bear
telling, and held the key to his manner of one dully
afflicted.  When he moved or managed to make some
small clatter in setting his cup on the mantel-shelf,
Mrs. Jakes turned a swift eye upon him, inspected him
suspiciously and turned away again.  If he spoke, the
person addressed seemed to turn his remark over and
examine it for contraband meanings before making a
perfunctory answer.  He was like a prisoner handicapped
by previous convictions or a dog conscious of a
bad name.  When he managed to catch the girl's eye,
he gave her weak, hopeful, little smiles, and subsided
quickly if any one else saw him, as though he had
been caught doing some forbidden thing.  The thing
troubled her a little.  Her malady had made a sharp
interruption in her life and she had come to the Karoo
in the sure hope that there she would be restored and
given a warrant to return finally to her own world
and deal with it unhampered.  The doctors who had
bidden her go had spoken confidently of an early cure;
they were smooth men who made a good show of their
expert knowledge.  She had looked to find such a man
at her journey's end, a doctor with the marks of a
doctor, his social adroitness, his personal strength and
style, his confidence and superiority to the weaknesses
of diseased flesh.  This little man, dazed and dumb,
standing apart like a child who has been put in the
corner, did not realize her expectations.  If medical
skill, the art and dexterity of a physician, dwelt in him,
they had, she reflected, fallen among thieves.

"You have only three patients here now?" she asked
Mrs. Jakes.

"At present," answered Mrs. Jakes.  "It's a
convenient number.  The doctor, you see, can give them
so much more attention than if there were a houseful.
Yes, it's really better for everybody."

As she finished, Margaret looked up and caught the
eye of the young man, Ford, fixed upon her, as though
he watched to see how she would take it.  He was a tall
youth with a dark impassive face and level brows, and
his malady announced itself in a certain delicacy of
coloring and general texture and in attitudes which
slacked naturally to invalid languors.  While the others
talked, he sat on the ledge of the window, looking out
to the veld prostrate under the thresh of the sun.  In
any talkative assembly, the silent man is at an advantage,
and this tall youth seemed to sit without the little
circle of desultory tongues and dwarf it by his mere
aloofness.  His glance now seemed to convey a hint to
her to accept, to pass over, things that needed
explanation and to promise revelations at a more fitting
time.

"You see," Mrs. Jakes continued, when Margaret had
murmured noises of acquiescence; "you see, each
patient requires his individual attention.  And—" she
sank her voice to a confidential undertone—"he 's not
*strong*."

She nodded past Margaret's shoulder at Jakes, who
was drinking from his cup with precautions against
noise.  He caught her look over the rim of it and
choked.  Ford smiled faintly and turned to the window
again.

"The Karoo does n't suit him a bit," Mrs. Jakes went
on.  "Too bracing, you know.  He 's often quite ill.
But he won't leave."

"Why?" asked Margaret.  The doctor was busy with
his handkerchief, removing the traces of the accident
from his waistcoat.

Mrs. Jakes looked serious.  "Duty," she replied, and
pursed her pale lips.  "He considers it his duty to
remain here.  It 's his life-work, you know."

Ford's eye caught Margaret's again, warning and
inviting.  "It 's—it's very unselfish of him," she said.

"Yes!" said Mrs. Jakes.  "It is."  And she nodded
at Margaret as much as to ask, "And now, what have
you got to say?"

The doctor managed the tea stains to his satisfaction
and came across the room, replacing the cup and saucer
on the table with a hand that was not quite steady.  In
the broad light of the window, he had a strained look;
one familiar with such matters would have known that
the man was raw and tense with the after effects of
heavy drinking.  He looked down at Margaret with an
uncertain smile.

"I must have a little talk with Miss Harding," he
said.  "We must find out how matters stand.  Will you
bring her to my study presently, my dear?"

"In a quarter of an hour?" suggested Mrs. Jakes.
He nodded.  Ford did not turn from his idle gazing
through the window and old Samson did not cease from
looking at him with an arrogant fixity that seemed on
the point of breaking into spoken denunciations.  He
looked from one to the other with a hardy little smile,
then sighed and went out.

His going was the signal for the breaking up of the
gathering.  Old Samson coughed and walked off and
Ford disappeared with him.

"And what would you care to do now?" asked
Mrs. Jakes of Margaret.  "I have some very good views of
Windsor, if you like.  You know Windsor?"

Margaret shook her head.  Windsor had no attractions
for her.  What interested her much more was
the fact that this small, bleak woman was on the
defensive, patently standing guard over privacies of her
life, and acutely ready to repel boarders who might
endeavor to force an intimacy upon her.  It was plain
in the rigor of her countenance, set into a mask, and in
each tone of her voice.  Margaret had yet to undergo
her interview with Dr. Jakes in his study, and till that
was over, and she definitely enlisted for or against him,
Mrs. Jakes would preserve an armed neutrality.

"I think," said Margaret, "I 'd like to go out to the
veranda."

"We call it the stoep," corrected Mrs. Jakes.  "A
Dutch word, I believe.  By all means; you 'll probably
find Mr. Ford there and I will call you when the doctor
is ready."

The stone hall held its cathedral shadows inviolate,
and from it Margaret went forth to a westering sun that
filled the earth with light, and painted the shadow of the
house in startling black upon the ground.  She stood
between the square pillars with their dead and ruined
vines and looked forth at a land upon which the light
stood stagnant.  It was as though the Karoo challenged
her conception of it.  She had seen it last vague with
the illusions of the dawn, hemmed in by mists and
shadows that seemed to veil the distances and what they
held.  Now these were stripped from it to reveal only
a vast nakedness, of red and red-brown and gray, all
ardent in the afternoon sun.  The shadows had
promised a mystery, the light discovered a void.  It ran
from before her yet in a single sweep to a horizon
upon which the blue of remote hills was a faint blur,
and in all the far prospect of it there was not one
roof, no single interruption to its still level.  Margaret,
quickly sensitive to the quality of her environment,
gazed at it almost with a sense of awe, baffled by the fact
that no words at her command were pliant enough to fit
it.  It was not "wild" nor "desolate" nor even "beautiful";
none of the words allotted to landscapes, with
which folk are used to label the land they live upon,
could be stretched to the compass of this great staring
vacancy.  It was outside of language; it struck a note
not included in the gamut of speech.  "Inhuman" came
nearest to it, for the salient quality of it was something
that bore no relation to the lives—and deaths—of men.

A sound of coughing recalled her from her contemplation
of it, and she walked along the stoep towards
it.  Behind a pillar near the corner of the house, Ford
sat on a camp-stool, with a little easel before him, and
smudged with his thumb at the paint on a small canvas.

He looked up at her with no token of welcome, but
rather as though he withdrew himself unwillingly from
his picture.

"Well?" he said, motioning with his head at the wide
prospect before them.  "What d'you think of it?"

"Oh, a lot," replied Margaret, refusing to commit
herself with adjectives.  "Can I see?"

He sat back to give her room to look.  She had in her
time spent sincere days at one of the art schools which
help Kensington to its character and was prepared to
appreciate expertly.  It was a sketch in oils, done
mostly with the thumb and palette-knife, a *croûte* of the
most obvious—paint piled in ridges as though the artist
would have built his subject in relief upon the
canvas, perspective improvised by the light of nature,
crudities, brutalities of color, obtruded in the effort for
breadth.  They were all there.  She stared into this
mist of blemishes in an effort to see what the painter
saw and could not set down, and had to give it up.

In the art school it had been the custom to tell one's
fellows the curt, unwelcome truth.

"You can't paint," said Margaret.

"Oh, I know that," answered Ford.  "You weren't
looking for that, were you?"

"For what, then?" asked Margaret.

He hitched himself up to the canvas again, and began
to smudge with his thumb at a mess of yellow ocre.

"There 's something in it that I can see," he said.
"I 've been watching this—this desert for more than a
year, you know, and I try to get in what I see in it.
You can't see anything?"

"No," said Margaret.  "But I did try."  She
watched his unskilful handling of the ocre.  "I could
show you a thing or two," she suggested.

She had all a woman's love for technique, and might
have been satisfied with more skill and less purpose.
But Ford shook his head.

"No, thank you," he said.  "It's not worth while.
I 'm only painting for myself.  I know what I mean
by these messes I make; if I could paint more, I
mightn't be so pleased with it."

"As you like, of course," said Margaret, a little
disappointed.

He worked in silence for about a minute.

"You didn't like the looks of Dr. Jakes?" he
suggested suddenly.  "I saw you wondering at him in
there."

"Well," Margaret hesitated.  "He seemed rather out
of it," she answered.  "Is there anything—wrong—with
him?"

Ford was making an irreparable mess of his picture
and did not look up.

"Wrong?" he repeated.  "Well, depends what you
call wrong.  He drinks."

"Drinks!" Margaret did not like the matter-of-fact
way in which he said it.  "Do you mean—"

"He 's a drunkard—he goes to bed drunk.  His
nerves were like banjo strings this afternoon; he
couldn't keep his hands still.  You noticed it?  That
was last night's drinking; he didn't get to bed till
daylight.  I heard him struggling up the stairs, with
Mrs. Jakes whispering to him not to make a noise and
helping him.  That was just before you came."

"Poor thing!"

"Yes—poor thing!"  Ford looked up at the girl
sharply.  "You 've got it, Miss Harding.  It 's
Mrs. Jakes that suffers.  Jakes has got his liquor, and that
makes up to him for a lot.  You and I, we 've got—whatever
we have got, little or much.  Old Samson 's
got his memories and his pose; he gets along all right
with them.  But she 's got nothing at all—only the
feeling that she 's managed to screen him and prop him
and fooled people into thinking she 's the wife of a
decent man.  That 's all."

"But," said Margaret, "is he safe?"

"Safe?  Oh, I forgot that he was to see you in his
study.  He won't reel about and fall down, if that 's
what you mean.  *That* part of it is all done in private;
Mrs. Jakes gets the benefit of *that*.  And as to his
patients, he really does know a little about lungs when
he 's sober, and there 's always the air.  Oh, he 's safe
enough."

"It's dreadful," said Margaret.  She was at a loss;
the men she knew did not get drunk.  When they went
to the bad, they chose different roads; this one seemed
ankle-deep with defilement.  She recalled Mrs. Jakes
when she had come forth from the silent house to meet
her in the chill dawn, and a vision flashed upon her of
the vigil that must have been hers through the slow
night, listening to the chink of bottle on glass and
waiting, waiting in misery and fear to do that final office of
helping the drunken man to his bed.  Her primness, her
wan gentility, her little affectations of fashion, seemed
monstrously heroic in the light of that vision—she had
carried them with her to the pit of her humiliation and
brought them forth again unsullied, the spotless armor
of a woman of no account.

"You understand now?" asked Ford, watching her.

"Yes," answered Margaret, slowly.  "But it frightens
me.  I wish I hadn't got to see him in his study.
What will he do?"

"Hush!" said Ford.  "Here comes Mrs. Jakes.
Don't let her hear you.  He won't do anything."

He fell to his work again, and Margaret turned to
receive the doctor's wife.

"The doctor will see you now, Miss Harding," said
Mrs. Jakes.  "Will you come with me?"

She eyed the pair of them with a suspicion she could
not altogether hide, and Ford was careful to hold an
impassive face.

"I am quite ready," returned Margaret, nerving herself
for what had assumed the proportions of an ordeal,
and went with her obediently.

Jakes' study was a small, rather dark room opening
off the hall, in which the apparatus of his profession
was set forth to make as much show as possible.  His
desk, his carpet, his leather chairs and bookcases did
their best to counterfeit a due studiousness in his behalf,
and a high shelf of blue and green bottles, with a
microscope among them, counteracted their effect by
suggesting to the irreverent that here science was "skied"
while practice was hung on the line.  This first
interview was a convention in the case of every new patient.
Dr. Jakes always saw them alone as a matter of
professional honor.  Mrs. Jakes would make a preliminary
inspection of him to assure herself and him that he was
fit for it; old Mr. Samson, passing by the half-open
door once, had seen her bending over him, smelling his
breath critically; and then she would trust him to his
patient's good will and to the arbitrary Providence
which ruled her world.

"Miss Harding, Eustace," she announced at the door
of the study and motioned the girl to enter.

The little doctor rose with bustling haste, and looked
at her with melancholy eyes.  There was a smell of eau
de Cologne in the room, which seemed natural at the
time to its rather comfortable shabbiness.

"Sit down, sit down, Miss Harding," he said, and
made a business of thrusting forward one of the leather
chairs to the side of his desk.  Seated, she faced him
across a corner of it.  In the interval that had elapsed
since she had seen him at tea, he seemed to have
recovered himself somewhat.  Some of the strain was gone
from him, and he was grave with a less effect of effort
and discomfort.

He put his open hand upon a paper that lay before him.

"It was Dr. Mackintosh who ordered you south?" he
asked.  "A clever man, Miss Harding.  I have his
letter here about your case.  Now, I want you to answer
a question or two before we listen to that lung of
yours."

"Certainly," said Margaret.

She was conscious of some surprise that he should
move so directly to the matter in hand.  It relieved her
of vague fears with which Ford's warning had filled
her, and as he went on to question her searchingly, her
nervousness departed.  The little man who fell so far
short of her ideal of a doctor knew his business; even
a patient like herself, with all a patient's prejudice
and ignorance, could tell by the line his questions took
that he had her case by heart.  He was clearly on
familiar ground, a fact which had power to reassure
her, and she told herself that, after all, his resigned,
plump face was not entirely repulsive.

"A queer little man," she said to herself.  "Queer
enough to be a genius, perhaps."

"And, now, please, we 'll just hear how things really
are.  No, I don't think you need undo anything.  Yes,
like that."

As he explored her chest and side with the stethoscope,
his head was just under her face, the back of it
rumpled like the head of some huge and clumsy baby.
It was fluffy and innocent and comical, and Margaret
smiled above him.  Every one has his best aspect, or
photographers would crowd the workhouses and the
manufacturers of pink lampshades would starve.  Dr. Jakes
should have made more of the back of his head and
less of his poor, uncertain face.

But he was done with the stethoscope at last, and as he
raised his head his face came close to hers and the taint
of his breath reached her nostrils.  Suddenly she
understood the eau de Cologne.

"Well," he said, sitting down again; "now we know
where we are."

He had seen her little start of disgust and annoyance
at the smell of him, and kept his eyes on the paper
before him, playing with a corner of it between his
fingers as he spoke.

"Will I get well?" asked Margaret, directly.

"Yes," he answered, without hesitating.

"I 'm glad," she said.  "I 'm awfully glad.  Thank you."

"I 'll see about your treatment," he said, without
raising his eyes.  "But I needn't keep you now.  Only—"

"Yes?"

"You mustn't be afraid," he continued.  "Not of
anything.  Do you understand?  You mustn't be afraid."

Margaret wished he would look up.  "I 'm not
afraid," she answered.  "Really I 'm not."

Dr. Jakes sighed and rose slowly.  The trouble had
descended on him again, and he looked sorry and dull.

"That 's right," he said without heartiness, and
moved to open the door for her.  His appealing eyes
dwelt on her for a moment.  "This isn't England," he
added, with a heavy deliberation.  "We 're none of us
here because we like it.  But—but don't be afraid,
Miss Harding."

"I 'm sure there 's nothing to be afraid of,"
answered Margaret, moved—he was so mournful in his
shame.  He bowed to her, a slow peck of his big head,
and she went.

In the hall, Mrs. Jakes met her and challenged her.

"Well," she said; "and what does the doctor say
about you?"

Margaret smiled at her.  "He says I shall get well,
and I believe he knows," she answered.

It was as though some stiffening in Mrs. Jakes had
suddenly resigned its functions.  She softened before
the girl's eyes.

"Of course he knows," she said contentedly.  "Of
course he knows.  My dear, he really does know."

"I 'm sure he does," agreed Margaret.

Mrs. Jakes put a hand on her arm.  "I feel certain
we 're going to be friends," she said.  "You 're so
pretty and—and distinguished.  And—and what a
pretty frock you 've got!"

She hesitated an instant, and was very timid and
humble.

"I should love to see you unpack," she said earnestly.





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`CHAPTER IV`:

.. class:: center large bold

   CHAPTER IV

.. vspace:: 2

The strength of a community, of almost any
community, is its momentum; it is easier to go on
than to pull up, even though its progress be erratic
and the tear exceed the wear.  Dr. Jakes' Sanatorium
was a house divided against itself and poised for a
downfall; but the course of its daily life had yet
current enough to pick up a newcomer and float him from
his independent foothold.  The long languors of its
days, its deep whispering nights, were opiates for the
critical and exacting, so that before they had made it
clear to themselves that this was no place for them,
they were absorbed, merged in, the eventless quiet
of the house and its people.  For some—for most of
them, indeed—there came at last a poignant day when
Paul and his tall horses halted at the door to carry
them to the station, and it was strange with what a
reluctance they rode finally across the horizon that rose
up to shut the big gray house from view, and how they
hesitated and frowned and talked curtly when the
station opened out before them and offered them the
freedom of the world.  And for the others, those who
traveled the longer journey and alone, there stood upon
the veld, a mile from the house, an enclosure of barbed
wire—barbed against—what?  For them came stout
packing cases, which made the Kafirs sweat by their
weight, and being opened, yielded some small cross of
marble, black-lettered with name and dates and
sorrowful texts; the lizards sunned themselves all day upon
these monuments, for none disturbed them.

At the Sanatorium, day began in the cool of morning
with a padding of bare feet in the long corridors and
the fresh wakeful smell of coffee.  Africa begins its
day with coffee; it is the stirrup-cup of the country.
Margaret opened her eyes to the brightness of morning
and the brisk presence of Fat Mary, radiant across
her adventurously held tray of coffee cups and
reflecting the joy of the new light in her exulting smile.
She had caught from Mrs. Jakes the first rule of polite
conversation, though none of the subsequent ones, and
she always began with a tribute of words to the weather.

"Sun burning plenty; how 's Missis?" was her usual
opening gambit.

The wide-open windows flushed the room with air,
sweet from the night's refreshment; and Margaret
came to value that hour between the administration of
coffee and the time for rising; it was the *bonne bouche*
of the day.  From her pillows she could lie and see
the far mists making a last stand against the shock
of the sun, breaking and diffusing before his attack
and yielding up wider views of the rusty plain at each
minute, till at last the dim blue of infinitely remote
hills thickened the horizon.  At the farm, a mile away,
figures moved about and among the kraals, wonderfully
and delicately clear in that diamond air which stirred
her blood like wine.  She could even make out Paul;
the distance robbed him of nothing of his deliberate,
dreamy character as he went to and fro with his air
of one concerned with greater things than the mere
immediacies of every day.  There was always a
suggestion about him of one who stoops from cloudy
altitudes of preoccupation to the little concerns of men,
and towards Margaret he wore the manner of having
a secret to divulge which was difficult to name.  She
met him sometimes on the veld paths between the two
houses, and each time he seemed to draw near the
critical moment of confession and fall back from it baffled.
And though Margaret in her time had heard many
confidences from many men and had made much progress in
the subtle arts of the confidante, this was a case beyond
her powers.  The deftly sympathetic corkscrew failed to
unbottle whatever moved in his mind; he evidently
meant to bide his time.  Meanwhile, seen from afar, he
was a feature of the before-breakfast hour, part of
the upholstery of the morning.

It was when she heard Mr. Samson pass her door
on his way to the bath that she knew the house was
definitely awake.  He wore Turkish slippers that
announced him as he went with the slap-slap of their
heels upon the floor.  Once, putting her head forth
from the door incautiously to scout for Fat Mary she
had beheld him, with his bath-robe girt about him by
its tasseled cord and bath towels round his neck, going
faithfully to the ritual initiation of his daily round,
a figure consistent with the most correct gentlemanly
tradition.  The loose robe and the towels gave him
girth and substance, and on the wary, intolerant old
face, with its gay white mustache, was fixed a look of
serious purpose.  Mr. Samson never trifled with his
toilet, by gad—what?  Later, on his return, she would
hear his debonair knock on Ford's door.  "Out with
you!" he would pipe—he never varied it.  "Out with
you!  Bright and early, my boy—bright and
early—what?"  An answer growled from within contented
him, and he would turn in at his room, there to build
up the completed personality which he offered daily
to the world.  It took time, too, and a meek Kafir
valet, for a man is not made and perfected in a minute
or two, and the result never failed to justify the labor.
When next he appeared it would be as a member of the
upper classes, armored and equipped, treading the stoep
in a five-minutes' constitutional in a manner that at
once dignified and lightened it.  When one looked at
him, one thought instinctively of exclusive clubs, of
fine afternoons in Piccadilly, of the landed interest and
the Church of England.  One judged that his tailor
loved him.  He had a cock of the head, with a
Homburg hat upon it, and a way of swelling his neck over
the edge of his conservative collar, that were the very
ensign of gallantry and spirit.  It was only when he
coughed that the power abandoned him, and it was
shocking and pitiful to see the fine flower of gentility
rattled like a dice-box in the throes of his malady and
dropped at last against a wall, wheezing and gasping
for breath in the image of a weak and stricken old man.

"Against the ropes," he would stammer shakily as
he gathered himself together again, sniffling into his
beautiful handkerchief.  "Got me against the ropes, it
did.  Damn it—what?"

He suffered somewhat in his aggressive effect from
the lack of victims.  He had exhausted his black valet's
capacity for being blasted by a glance, and had fallen
back on Dr. Jakes.  The wretched little doctor had to
bear the brunt of his high severity when he came among
his patients racked and quivering from his restless
bed, and his bleared and tragic eyes appealed in vain
for mercy from that high priest of correct demeanor.
Mr. Samson looked at him as a justice of the peace,
detained upon the bench when he should be at lunch
and conscious that his services to the State are
gratuitous, might look upon a malefactor who has gone to
the length of being without visible means of subsistence.
The doctor might wriggle and smile painfully and seek
the obscurity of corners, but it could not serve him;
there was no getting out of range of that righteous and
manly battery while he stayed in the same room with
it.  Once, however, he spiked its guns.  The glare across
the tea-table, the unspoken sheer weight of rebuke and
condemnation, seemed to suddenly break up the
poisoned fog that clouded his faculties, and he lifted
his face, shining a little as with sweat, in a quick look
at Mr. Samson.  Margaret, who saw it, recognized it;
just so he had looked in his study when he questioned
her on her case and bent his mind to the consideration
of it.  It was direct, expert, impersonal, the dehumanized
scrutiny of the man whose trade is with flesh and
blood.  Something had stirred the physician in the
marrow of the man, and from a judge and an executioner
of justice, a drawing-room hangman, Mr. Samson
had become a case.  At the beginning of it, Mrs. Jakes,
unfailingly watchful, had opened her mouth to
speak and save the situation, but she too saw in time
and closed her mouth again.  Mr. Samson glowered and
the hectic in his thin cheeks burned brighter.

"You 've seen me before, Jakes!" he said, crisply.

The little doctor nodded almost easily.  "Your hand,
please," he said.  "Thanks."

His forefinger found the pulse and dwelt on it; he
waited with lips pursed, frowning.

"As I thought," he said, dropping the stringy white
hand again.  "Yes!  I 'll see you in the study,
Mr. Samson, please—in half an hour."

Mr. Samson gulped but stood up manfully.  He was
at his best, standing, by reason of a certain legginess
which had been taken into account in the design of his
clothes, but now those clothes seemed big for him.

"What is it?" he demanded, throwing his courage
into his voice.

Dr. Jakes warned him with an uplifted finger.

"Sit down," he said.  "Keep quiet.  I 'll see you in
half an hour."

He looked round at Margaret and the rest of them
thoughtfully and went back to his place by the mantel-piece,
sighing.  It was his signal to them that his brief
display of efficiency was over, and as though to screen his
retreat, Mrs. Jakes coughed and hoped loudly that the
rain would hold off.

But Mr. Samson made his way to a chair and sat down
in it heavily, grasping its arms with his hands, and
Margaret noticed for the first time that he was an old man.

Apparently the thing that threatened Mr. Samson
was not very serious, or else the doctor had found
means to head it off in time, for though he went from
the study to his bed, he was at breakfast next morning,
with a fastidious appetite and thereafter the course
of his life remained unaltered.

Breakfast at the Sanatorium was in theory a meal
that might be taken at any hour from eight till half past
eleven.  In the days of his dream, Dr. Jakes had seen
dimly silver dishes with spirit lamps under them and
a house-party effect of folk dropping in as they came
down and helping themselves.  But Mrs. Jakes' thousand
pounds had stopped short of the silver dishes and
Mrs. Jakes herself could not be restrained from attending
in person to see that the coffee was hot.  Therefore,
since it was not possible in any conscience to bind
Mrs. Jakes to her post till noon, breakfast occurred between
half-past eight and half-past nine.

The freshness, the exuberance, of the morning were
not for her; already she wore the aspect of one who has
done a stage of the day's journey and shed the bloom
of her vigor upon it.  The sunlight, waxing like a tide
in flood, was powerless to lift her prim, black-dressed
personality from the level of its cares and functions.
She made to each as he entered the same mechanical
little bow across the crockery, smiled the same formal
smile from the lips outwards and uttered the same small
comment on the blaze of day that filled the earth
without the window.  She had her life trimmed down to
a routine for convenience of handling; she was one of
those people—they are the salt of the earth!—whose
passions are monosyllabic, whose woes are inarticulate.
The three who sat daily at meat with her knew and
told each other that her composure, her face keyed
up like an instrument to its pitch of vacant propriety,
were a mask.  Sometimes, even, there had been sounds
in the night to assure them of it; occasionally Jakes,
on his way to bed in the small hours, would slip on
the stairs and bump down a dozen or so of them, and
lie where he fell till he was picked up and set on his
way again; there would be the rasp of labored breath
as he was supported along the corridor, and the
mumble of his blurred speech hushed by prayerful
whispers.  A door slammed, a low cry bitten off short,
and then silence in the big house, and in the morning
Mrs. Jakes with her coffee pot and trivial tinkle of
speech and treble armor of practised bearing against
the pity of those who knew!  The sheer truculence of
it held them dumb; it was the courage of a swashbuckler,
of a bravo, and it imposed on them the decorum
of silence.

The doctor, she gave them to understand, suffered
from the climate.

"He never was strong," she would say, with her
eyes fixed on the person addressed as though she would
challenge him to dispute or question it.  "Never!  It 's
the sun, I think; he suffers from his head, you
know.  He used to take aspirin for it when we were
first married, but it doesn't seem to do him any good
now."

The three of them would nod sympathetically and
look hastily elsewhere, as though ashamed to be the
spectators of her humiliation.

Poor Mrs. Jakes!  Seven thousand miles from the
streets of Clapham Junction, an exile from the cheeriness
and security of its little decent houses, she held
yet with a frail hand to the skirts of its beatitude.  In
the drawer in her bedroom which also contained Jakes'
dress suit, she kept in tissue paper and sincere regard
a morocco-bound mausoleum of memory—an album.
Only two or three times in Mr. Samson's experience—and
he had been an inmate of the Sanatorium for four
years—had she brought it forth.  Once was on the night
before young Shaw died, and when no soothing would
hold him at peace in his bed, he had lain still to look
through those yellowing portraits and hear Mrs. Jakes
tell how this one was doing very well as a job-master
and that one had turned Papist.  But Margaret Harding
had seen it.  Mrs. Jakes had sat on her bed, quelling
Fat Mary with her eye, and seen her unpack her
clothes, the frocks new from dressmakers and tailors in
London, the hats of only a month ago.  Margaret had
been aided in buying them by a philosophic aunt who
had recently given up vegetarianism on the advice of
her hairdresser.  "My child, play light," had been the
counsel of this relative.  "Don't surprise the natives;
they never like it.  No frills; a vigorous vicarage style
is what you want."  And she had brought considerable
powers of personality and vocabulary to bear on
Margaret's choice, so that in the result there predominated
a certain austerity of raiment which Margaret found
unexciting.  But Mrs. Jakes received them as canons
of fashion, screwing up her mouth and nodding gravely
as she mastered saliencies.

"I can't quite imagine them in these styles," she said;
"the people in the Park, I mean.  I suppose it's this
golf that's done it."

In return for the exhibition, she had shown Margaret
her album.  It had many thick pages with beveled gilt
edges, each framing from one to six portraits or
groups, and she had led her hearer through the lot
of them, from the first to the last.  They sat side by
side on the bed in Mrs. Jakes' room, and the album lay
open on their laps, and Mrs. Jakes' finger traveled like
a pointer among the pictures while she elucidated them
in a voice of quiet pride.  These pale and fading faces,
fixed to the order of the photographer in more than
human smiles, with sleek and decorative hair and a
show of clothes so patently reserved for Sundays, were
neither pale nor faded for her.  She knew the life
behind them, their passions and their strength, and spoke
of them as she might have spoken had they been
waiting in the next room.

"That 's my sister," she said, her finger pausing.
"Two years older than me, but she never married.
And what she used to suffer from indigestion, words
can't tell.  And here 's my Aunt Martha—yes, she died
seven years ago.  My mother's sister, you know.  My
mother was a Penfold—one of the Penfolds of Putney.
You 've heard of them?  Ah, and here 's Bill Penfold,
my cousin Bill.  Poor Bill, he didn't do well, ever.
He had a fancy for me, once, or so they said, but my
father never could bear him.  No harm, you know, no
real harm, but larky—sort of.  This one?  Oh, that 's
nobody—a Mr. Wrench, who used to collect for my
father; he had a hair-lip.  I did n't like him."

The thick page turned, and showed on the other side
a single cabinet portrait of a thin woman, with her head
a little on one side.

"My mother," said Mrs. Jakes, and shifted the album
that Margaret might see better.

"She was a Penfold of Putney," she said, gently.
"I think she shows it, you know.  A bit quiet and
refined, especially about the eyes.  Don't you think so?"

It was the picture of the wife of a robust and hardy
man, Margaret thought, and as for the eyes and their
slight droop, the touch of listlessness which bespeaks an
acquired habit of patience and self-suppression, she had
only to look up and they returned her look from the face
of Mrs. Jakes.

"And this?" she asked.

Mrs. Jakes smiled quite brightly; the photograph was
one of a baby.

"That 's little Eustace," she answered, with no trace
of the softness of regret which had hushed her tone when
she spoke of her mother.  "My little baby; he 'd have
been a big boy now.  He was like his father—very like.
Everybody noticed it.  And that"—her finger passed
on—"is George Penfold, Sergeant-Major in the
Guards.  His widow married again, a gunner in the Navy."

No sorrow for little Eustace.  He, at any rate,
would never see his dreams dislimn and fail him; no
wife would watch the slow night through for his
unsteady step nor read the dishonor written in his eyes.
The first of the crosses in the barbed wire enclosure,
Mrs. Jakes' empty and aching heart and her quick smile
of triumph at his easy victory over all the snares of
life—these and the faint, whitening photograph remained
of little Eustace.  Many a man leaves less when his
time comes in South Africa.

"The weather is holding up nicely," she would say
at breakfast.  "Almost too fine, isn't it?  But I
suppose we oughtn't complain."

It was a meal over which one lingered, for with the
end of it there closed the eventful period of the day.
While it lasted, the Sanatorium was at its best; one
saw one's fellows in faint hues of glamour after the
night's separation and heard them speak with a sense
of receiving news.  But the hour exhausted them of
interest and one left the table, when all pretexts for
remaining there had been expended, to face the
emptiness of a morning already stale.  That, in truth, was
the price one paid for healing, the wearing, smothering
monotony of the idle days, when there was nothing
to do and one saw oneself a part of the stagnation
that ruled the place.  Mrs. Jakes withdrew herself to
become the motor of the domestic machinery, and till
lunch time was not available for countenance and
support.  Ford occupied himself gravely with his little
canvases, plastering upon them strange travesties of
landscape, and was busy and intent and impatient of
interruption for long periods at a time, while Mr. Samson,
keeping a sufficient offing from all human contact,
alternately strutted to and fro upon the stoep in a
short quarter-deck promenade of ten steps and a right
about turn, and lay in a deck chair with a writing case
upon his knee and wrote fitfully and with deep thought
long, important looking letters which never reached the
post.

"You 're feeling the need of something to do," Ford
told Margaret, when in desperation she came behind
him and watched him modeling—as it seemed—in
burnt sienna.  "Why don't you knit—or something?"

"Knit?" said Margaret with huge scorn.

"You 'll come to it," he warned her.  "There was
a chap here before you came who taught himself the
harp.  A nuisance he was, too, but he said he 'd have
been a gibbering idiot without it."

"That was n't saying much, perhaps," retorted Margaret.

"Oh, I don't know.  He was a barrister of sorts, I
believe.  Not many barristers who can play the harp,
you know."

"For goodness' sake, don't knead the stuff like that!"
cried Margaret, watching his thumb at work.  "You 're
painting, not—not civil engineering!  But what were you?"

"Eh?"  He looked up at her.

"Before you had to come here, I mean?  Oh, do talk
for a minute," she begged.

"Sorry," he said.  "I was in the army."

"And was it rather awful to have to give up and
nurse yourself?"

"Well!"  He glanced at her consideringly, as
though to measure her intelligence.  "It was rough,"
he admitted.  "You see, the army 's not like barristering,
for instance.  It 's not a thing you can drop for a
bit and then take up again; once you 're out, you 're out
for good."  He paused.  "And I meant it," he added.

"Meant it?"

"Yes, there 's a chance nowadays for a chap with
a turn for soldiering.  There 's a lot to know, you
see, and, well—I was by way of knowing it.  That 's all."

He turned to his canvas again, but did not fall to
work.  Margaret saw his back, thin under his silk coat
but flat and trim as a drilled man's should be.

"So for you, it meant the end of everything?" she
suggested.

"Looks like it, doesn't it!" he answered.  "Still—we 'll
see.  They trained me and there 's just a
chance, in the event of a row, that they might have a
use for me.  They 'd be short of officers who knew the
game.  You see—"

He hitched sideways on his camp-stool so that he
might make himself clear to her.

"You see, the business of charging at the head of
your men is a thing of the past, pretty nearly.  All
that gallery play is done away with.  But take a
hundred Tommies and walk 'em about for half a year,
dry-nurse 'em, keep them fed and healthy and
moderately happy and as clean as you can, be something
between an uncle and a schoolmaster to them, and have
'em ready at the end of it to march forty miles in a day
and then fight—that's an art in itself!  In fact, it's
a trade, and it can't be learned in a week."

"I 'm perfectly sure it can't," agreed Margaret.

"Well, that was my trade," said Ford.  "That's
where I 'll come in when the band begins to play.  See?"

He nodded at her expressively but with finality.  If
was plain that he considered the subject drained dry,
and only waited for her to go to return to the mysteries
of art.

"Oh, well," sighed Margaret, and left him to it.

Lunch lacked the character of breakfast.  For one
thing, it was impossible for three feeble people,
debarred from exercise, to arrive at a state of appetite
during a morning of semi-torpor, with a prospect before
them of an afternoon of the same quality.  For
another, tempers had endured the heat and burden of
four hours of enforced idleness and emerged from the
test frayed at the edges.

This meant more labor for poor Mrs. Jakes, who
could by no means allow the meal to be eaten in a
bitter silence, and was driven by a stern sense of duty to
keep up a dropping fire of small talk.  Their sour
faces, the grimness with which they passed the salt,
filled her with nervous tremors, and she talked as a
born hostess might talk to cover the confusion induced
by an earthquake under the table, trembling but fluent
to the last.  There were times when her small, hesitating
voice wrought Margaret up to the very point of
flat interventions.  At one such moment, it was Ford
who saved the situation.

"Miss Harding," he said, in a matter-of-fact way.
"You are a pig!"

Mrs. Jakes gasped and bounded in her chair, and old
Mr. Samson choked.

"And you," replied Margaret with intensity, "are
just a plain beast!"

"That 's the idea," said Ford.  "You feel better now?"

"Ever so much better, thank you," answered Margaret.
"It was just what I wanted."

Mrs. Jakes was staring at them as though convinced
that sudden mania had attacked them both at the same
moment.

"It 's all right," Ford assured her.  "It's a dodge
for blowing off temper.  If you 'd just call Mr. Samson
something really rude, he 'd be ever so grateful.
Call him a Socialist, Mrs. Jakes."

"Oh, I couldn't," said Mrs. Jakes, while Mr. Samson,
mastering his emotions, glared and reddened.
"You did alarm me," she said.  "I thought for a
moment—well, I don't know what I did think."

She was distinctly not at her ease for the remainder
of the meal, and even at tea that afternoon, she kept
an eye on the pair of them.  To her mind, they were
playing with edged tools.

It was at tea, as a rule, that Dr. Jakes was first
visible, very tremulous and thirsty, but always
submissive and content to be overlooked and forgotten.
At dinner, later on, he would be better and able to
talk with a jerky continuity to Margaret who sat at
his right hand.  He bore himself always with an air of
effort, like one who is not at home and whose
acquaintance with his fellows is slight, and drank at table
nothing but water.  His eyes kept the Kafir servants
under observation as they waited, and the black boys
were full of alacrity in the consciousness that he was
watching.  "It 's strange," Mrs. Jakes used to say;
"Eustace is so quiet, and yet the natives obey him
wonderfully."  Afterwards, in the drawing-room, he
would flicker to and fro restlessly, growing each
moment more irritable and incapable of hearing a
sentence to the end.  Half-way through the evening, he
would seize an occasion to escape to his own quarters,
and thereafter would be invisible till next day.  Every
one knew whither he went and for what purpose; eyes
met in significant glances as the door closed softly
behind him and Mrs. Jakes raised her voice in rapid
speech to hide the sound of his tiptoe crossing of the
hall; his secret was anybody's and even the Kafirs
shared it, and yet the man had the force of mystery.
He slid to and fro in the interstices of their lives and
came to the surface only to serve and heal them.  That
done, he dropped back again to the solace that was his
behind his locked door, while about him the house
slept.  He knew himself and yet could look his
patients and his wife in the face.  Mingled with their
contempt and disgust, there was an acknowledgment of the
quality of him, of a kind of wry and shabby greatness.

And thus the day came to its end.  One by one,
Margaret, Ford and Mr. Samson drew off and made their
way to the dignified invitation of the big staircase and
their rooms.  Mrs. Jakes was always at hand to bid
them good night, for her day was yet a long way from
its finish.

"Tired, my dear?" she would ask Margaret.  "It 's
been a tiring day; I feel it myself.  Good night to you."

In her room, Margaret would find Fat Mary waiting
for her, sleepy in her vast, ridiculous way, but still
prodigal of smiles, and ready to put her to bed with
two left hands equipped with ten thumbs.  She had a
yawn which would have reminded Jonah of old times,
but nothing could damp her helpful ardor, not even
being discovered stretched fast asleep on Margaret's
bed and being waked with the bath sponge.  She made
it clear that she would stop at few things to be of
service.

"Missis not sleepy?  Ah!"  She stood in thought
for five seconds.  "Me nurse Missis, all same baby?
Plenty strong—me!"

She dandled an imaginary child in her great arms,
smiling cheerfully but quite in earnest.  "Plenty
strong," she assured the young lady from Kensington.
"No?  No?  All a-right!"

Darkness at last, and the window wide to the small,
whispering winds which people the veld at night!  A
sky of blue-black powdered with misty white stars, and
from the distance, squeaks, small cries, the wary voice
of the wilderness!  Sometimes a jackal would range
within earshot and lift up his voice under the stars
to cry like a child, in the very accent of heartbroken,
helpless woe.  The nightly traffic of the veld was in
full swing ere her eyes closed and its subdued clamor
followed her into her dreams.

Silence in the big house and along the matted
corridors—and one voice, speaking guardedly, in the hall.
It never happened to Margaret to hear it and go to
the stair-head and look down.  Thence she might have
seen what would have made her less happy—Mrs. Jakes
on her knees at the locked door of the study,
with her candle set on the floor beside her, casting a
monstrous shadow-caricature of her upon the gray
stone wall.  In her sober black dress she knelt on the
mat and her small, kitchen-reddened hands tapped
gently, carefully on the panels.  She spoke through the
keyhole and her fruitless whisperings rustled in light
echoes about the high ceiling.

"Eustace, it's me.  Eustace!  I 'm so tired, Eustace.
Please open the door.  Please, Eustace!  It 's only me,
dear."





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`CHAPTER V`:

.. class:: center large bold

   CHAPTER V

.. vspace:: 2

"Hardly smart," pronounced Mrs. du Preez,
speaking low into Mrs. Jakes' ear.  "Smart 's
not the word I 'd use for her myself.  *Distangay*, now,
or *chic*, if you understand what that means!"

"Oh, quite!" replied Mrs. Jakes coldly.

They were seated side by side upon the sofa in the
little parlor of the farm; its dimensions made it impossible
for Mrs. Jakes to treat her hostess as distantly as
she could have wished.  There was nothing for it but
to leave her ear and her unresponsive profile, composed
to a steadfast woodenness, to the mercy of those critical
and authoritative whispers until deliverance should
offer itself.  She settled her small black-gowned figure
and coughed behind three gloved fingers.

Near the window looking forth across the kraals,
Margaret Harding, the subject of Mrs. du Preez's
comments, had the gaunt Boer for a companion.  This was
her visit of ceremony, her "return call"; two or three
earlier visits, mere incidents of morning walks, when
she had stopped to talk to Paul and been surprised and
captured by Paul's mother, were understood not to
count, and the Recording Angel would omit them from
his notes.  Mrs. du Preez had taken the initiative in
due order by appearing at the Sanatorium one afternoon
at tea-time; she had asked Dr. Jakes if he had "a
mouth on him" and Margaret if there were many people
in town.  The next step in the transaction was for
Margaret to put on a real frock and a real hat, and take
herself and her card-case through the white, scornful
sunshine to the farm; and behold! by virtue of this
solemnity, two women marooned at the heart of an
ocean of sun-swamped desert had license to distinguish
one another from common objects of the country side.

Even Mrs. Jakes, whose attitude towards Mrs. du
Preez was one of disapproval tempered by dread, could
see no alternative to this course.  She shook her head
at Margaret's amusement.

"This is not London, of course," she said reasonably.
"I know that.  But, my dear, we 're Christian
people—even here."

At Margaret's side, the tall Boer, Christian du
Preez, leaned against the wall and regarded her with
shy, intent eyes that were oddly like Paul's.  There
was lacking in him that aloof and almost reverent quality
of the boy which made him seem as though he regarded
all things with an equal wonder and an equal kinship;
he was altogether harder and more immediately
forceful, a figure at home in his narrow world; but the
relationship between him and his son was obvious.
Margaret had only to glance across the room to where
Paul sat by the door, following the trickle of conversation
around the room from face to face with his eyes,
to see the resemblance.  What was common to them
both was a certain shadowy reserve, a character of
relationship to the dumbness and significance of the
Karoo, and something else which had the gloom of
melancholy and the power of pride.  In each of them
the Boer, the world's disinherited son, was salient.

Mrs. du Preez had secured his presence to grace the
occasion after some resistance on his part, for he
entered the parlor seldom and was not at his ease there.
Its atmosphere of indoor formality daunted and
oppressed him, and he felt coarse and earth-stained under
the eyes of the serene young men who watched him
from their plush and fret-work frames.  He had
nothing to set against their sleek beauty and their calm
sophistication but his fathom and odd inches of lean,
slow-moving strength, his eyes of patient expectancy
and the wild beard that redeemed his countenance from
mildness.  He had come under protest and for the sake
of peace, and sat scowling in a chair, raw with shyness
and irritation, in the dreadful interval between the
completion of Mrs. du Preez's preparations and the
arrival of the guests, while in face of him "yours
blithely, Boy Bailey," set him a hopeless example of
iron-clad complacency.

Then came Margaret and Mrs. Jakes, and at the
first sign of them he was screened as in a cloud by the
welcome of Mrs. du Preez.  Their step upon the
threshold was her cue for a cordiality of greeting that
filled the room and overflowed into the passage in a
rapid crescendo of compliment, inquiries as to health,
laughter and mere bustle; it was like the entrance of
two star performers supported by a full chorus and
*corps de ballet*.

"So here you are, the two of you," was her style.
"On time to a tick, too!  Come right in, Miss Harding,
and look out for that step—it 's a terror.  A death-trap,
*I* call it!  And you, Mrs. Jakes.  I won't say
I 'm glad to see you, 'cause you 'll believe that without
me telling you.  You found it pretty hot walking, I
know; we 're all pretty warm members in this
community, aren't we?  Sit down, sit down; no extra
charge for sitting down, y'know.  And now, how are
you?  Sitting up and taking nourishment, eh?  That's
the style!"

Margaret was aware, across her shoulder, of a
gloomy male presence inhabiting the background.

"Let me introduce my husband," said Mrs. du
Preez, following her glance.  "Christian, this is Miss
Harding.  And now, Mrs. Jakes, let you an' me have
a sit-down over here.  You first—age before innocence,
y'know.  And how 's the poor old doctor?"

"Thank you," said Mrs. Jakes firmly, "he is quite
well."

She smiled graciously at Paul, who was watching her,
and took her seat, resigned to martyrdom.

Christian du Preez gave the girl a slack hand and
murmured incoherently some salutation, while his gaze
took in avidly each feature of her and summed up her
effect of easy modernity.  He recognized in her a
certain feminine quality for which he had no name.  Once
before he had glimpsed it as in a revelation, when, as
a youth newly returned from service on commando
against rebellious Kafirs, he had spent an evening in
a small town and there seen a performance by a
traveling theatrical company.  It was a crude and
ill-devised show, full of improbable murders that
affronted the common-sense of a man fresh from
various killings; but in an interval between slaughters,
there was a scene that brought upon the stage a slim
girl who walked erect and smiled and shrugged easily
at the audience.  Her part was brief; she was not visible
for more than a few minutes, and assuredly her shaft,
so soon sped, struck no one else.  It needed a Boer,
with his feet in the mud and his head among the stars,
to clothe her with dignity as with a robe and add to
her valuation of herself the riches of his woman-haunted
imagination.  She passed from sight again,
and for the time he scarcely regretted her, for she left
glamour behind her and a vision of womanhood
equipped, debonnaire, heart-breaking in its fragility and
its daring.

The outcome of that revelation was marriage within
the week; but it never revisited the bored and weary
woman whom Christian du Preez had brought home to
his farm and its solitudes.  It was as though he had
tried to pick an image from still water; the fruit of
that endeavor was memory and an empty hand.  Even
as he greeted Margaret he turned slowly and looked
from her to his wife in unconscious comparison, and
turned as unconsciously back again.  Only Mrs. du
Preez knew the meaning of that glance; she answered
it with an obstinate compression of the mouth and went
on talking to Mrs. Jakes about the hang of Margaret's
skirt.

"It 's all right for her," she was saying.  "These
leggy ones can wear anything.  But think how you 'd
look in it, for instance.  Why you 'd make a horse
laugh!"

"Indeed!" said Mrs. Jakes, unhappy but bristling.
She never grew reconciled to Mrs. du Preez's habit of
using her as a horrible example.

"You would that," Mrs. du Preez assured her.
"You see, my dear, yours is an elderly style."

At the window, Margaret was doing what she could
to thaw the tall Boer into talk, and meeting with
some success.  He liked, while possibly he did not quite
understand, her relish for the view from the window,
with the rude circles of the kraals near at hand, the
scattered huts of the farm Kafirs beyond them, and the
all-subduing brown of the Karoo slipping forth to the
edge of the sky.  He had once heard a young man from
the Sanatorium agree with Mrs. du Preez that the
Karoo resembled a brick-field established in a cemetery.
Margaret did better than that.

"I suppose you 've traveled all over it?" she asked him.

"When I was a young man, I rode transport," he
answered.  "Then I traveled; now I sit still in the
middle of it and try to grow wool."

"Is it all like this?" she asked.

"Sometimes there is grass—a little—not much, and
milk bushes and prickly pear," he told her.  "But it
is hard ground, all of it.  It is very peaceful, though."

She nodded comprehendingly, and he found a stimulant
in her quiet interest.  He had not Paul's tense
absorption in the harvest of the eye, but he would
have been no Boer had the vacant miles not exercised
a power over him.

"You 're never—discontented with it?" asked
Margaret.  "I mean, you find it enough for you, without
wanting towns and all that?"

He shook his head, hesitating.  "I do not know
towns," he answered.  "No, I don't want towns.
But—every day the same sights, and the sun and the
silence—"

"Yes?" she asked.

He was little used to confessing himself and his
shyness was an obstacle to clear speech.  Besides, the
matter in his mind was not clear to himself; he was aware
of it as a color to his thoughts rather than as a fact
to be stated.

"It makes you guess at things," he said at last.
"You guess, but you don't ever know."

"What things?" asked Margaret.

"A lot of things," he answered.  "God, and the
devil, and all that.  It's always there, you see, and you
must think."

A rattle in the passage and a start from Mrs. du
Preez heralded tea, borne in upon a reverberating iron
tray by a timid and clumsy Kafir maid, who set her
burden insecurely upon the table and fled in panic.
Christian du Preez ceased to speak as if upon a signal
and Mrs. du Preez entered the arena hospitably.

"You 're sure you wouldn't rather have something
else?" she asked Margaret, as she filled the cups.
"There 's afternoons when a whisky-and-soda is more
in my line than tea.  Sure you won't?  P'r'aps Mrs. Jakes
will, then?  We won't tell, will we, Paul?  Well,
'ave it your own way, only don't blame me!  Christian,
reach this cup to Miss Harding."

The tall man did as he was bidden, ignoring
Mrs. Jakes.  In his world, women helped themselves.  Paul
carried her cup to Mrs. Jakes and sat down beside her
in the place vacated by his mother.  From there, he
could see Margaret and look through the window as
well.

"If you 'll have one, I 'll keep you company,"
suggested Mrs. du Preez privately to Mrs. Jakes.

"One what?" inquired Mrs. Jakes across her cup.
The poor lady was feeling very grateful for the strong
tea to console her nerves.

"One what!" Mrs. du Preez was scornful.  "A
drink, of course—a drink out of a glass!"

"No, thank you," replied Mrs. Jakes hastily.  "I
never touch stimulants."

"Oh, well!" Mrs. du Preez resigned herself to
circumstances.  "I suppose," she enquired, nodding
towards Margaret, "*she* don't either?"

"I believe not," replied Mrs. Jakes.

Mrs. du Preez considered the matter.  "You 'd think
they 'd grow out of it," she observed enigmatically.
"She seems to be lively enough, too, in her way.  First
person I ever saw who could make Christian talk."

Christian was talking at last.  Margaret had paused
to watch a string of natives pass in single-file, after the
unsociable Kafir fashion, before the window, going
towards the huts, with the sun-gilt dust rising about them
in a faint haze.  They were going home after their
day's work, and she wondered suddenly to what secret
joy of freedom they re-entered when the hours of the
white man's dominion were over and the coming of
night made a black world for the habitation of black men.

"I suppose there is no knowing what they really feel
and think?" she suggested.

That is the South African view, the white man's
surrender to the impregnable reserve of the black races;
native opinion is only to be gathered when the native
breaks bounds.  Christian du Preez nodded.

"No," he agreed.  "I have always been among them,
and I have fought them, too; but what they think they
don't tell."

"You have fought them?  How was that?"

"When I was young.  On commando," he explained,
with his eyes on her.  It was luxury to see the
animation of her pale, clear-cut face as she looked up and
waited for him to go on.

"It was a real war," he answered her.  "A real war.
There was a chief—Kamis, they called him—down there
in the south, and his men murdered an officer.  So
the government called out the burghers and sent Cape
Mounted Rifles with us to go and punish him.  I was
twenty years old then, and I went too."

In the background Mrs. du Preez sniffed.  "He 's
telling her about that old Kafir war of his," she said.
"He always tells that to young women.  I know him!"

Christian went on, lapsing as he continued from the
careful English he had spoken hitherto to the cruder
vernacular of the Cape.  He told of the marching and
the quick, shattering attack against Kafirs at bay in the
low hills bordering the Karoo, of a fight at night in a
rain-squall, when the "pot-leg," the Kafir bullets
hammered out of cold iron, sang in the air like flutes and
made a wound when they struck that a man could put
his fist into.  His eyes shone with the fires of warm
remembrance as he told of that advance over
grass-grown slopes slippery with wet, when the gay
desperadoes of the Cape Mounted Rifles went up singing,
"Jinny, my own true loved one, Wait till the clouds
roll by," and on their flank the burghers found
cover and lit the night with the flashes of their
musketry.  It was an epic woven into the fiber of the
narrator's soul, a thing lived poignantly, each moment of
it flavored on the palate and the taste remembered.  He
had been in the final breathless rush that broke the
Kafirs and sent them scuttling like rock-rabbits—"dassies,"
he called them—through the rocks to the
kopje-ringed hollow where they would be held till morning.

And then that morning!

"Man, it was cold," he said.  "There was no fires.
We were lying in the bushes with our rifles under our
bellies till coffee-time, and that Lascelles, our general,
walked up and down behind us all the night.  He was
a little old soldier-officer from Capetown; his face was
red and his mustache was white.  The rain was falling
on my back all the time, but sometimes I slept a little.
And when it was sun-up, I could see down the krantz
to the veld below, and there was all the Kafirs together,
all in a bunch, in the middle of it.  They didn't look
much; I was surprised to see so few.  They were
standing and lying on the wet grass, and they seemed tired.
Some were sleeping, even, stretched out like dead men
below us, but what made me sorry for them was, they
were so few.

"I was sorry," he added, thoughtfully.

Margaret nodded.

"But it was a real war," he assured her quickly.
"When the sun was well up, we moved, and presently
all the burghers were lying close together with our rifles
ready.  It was Lascelles that ordered it.  I didn't
understand, then, for I knew a beaten Kafir when I saw
one, and those below were beaten to the ground.  By
and by the Cape Mounted Rifles went past behind us, and
dipped down into a hollow on our right; we had only
to wait, and it was very cold.  I was wondering when
they would let us make coffee and talking to the next
man about it, when from our right, so sudden that I
jumped up at the sound of it, the Cape Mounted Rifles
fired at the Kafirs down below.  Man, that was awful!
It was like a thunder on a clear day.  All of us were
surprised, and some called out and swore and said
Lascelles was a fool.  But it was queer, all the same, to
see the Kafirs.  Twenty of them was killed, and one
of them had a bullet in his stomach and rolled about
making screams like laughing.  The rest—they didn't
move; they didn't run; they didn't cry out.  A few
looked up at us; I tell you, it was near enough to see
their white eyes; but the others just stopped as they
were.  They was like cattle, like sick cattle, patient and
weak and finished; the Cape Mounted Rifles could have
killed them all and they wouldn't have lifted their hands.

"Our commandant—Van Zyl, he was called, a very
fat man—clicked with his tongue.  'Wasting them,' he
said.  'Wasting them!'

"Then we went down the hill and came all round
them, standing among the dead bodies, and Lascelles
with his interpreter and his two young officers in tight
belts went forward to look for Kamis, the chief.  The
interpreter—he was a yellow-faced Hollander—called
out once, and in the middle of the Kafirs there stood up
an old Kafir with a blanket on his shoulders and his wool
all gray.  He came walking through the others with a
little black boy, three or four years old, holding by his
hand and making big round eyes at us.  It was the son
that was left to him; the others, we found out, were all
killed.  He was an old man and walked bent and held
the blanket round him with one hand.  He looked to
me like a good old woman who ought to have been
sitting in a chair in a kitchen.

"'Are you Kamis?' they asked him.

"'I am Kamis,' he said, 'and this is my son who is
also Kamis.'

"He showed them the little plump piccanin, who hung
back and struggled.  One of the young officers with
tight belts put an eye-glass in his eye and laughed.
Lascelles did not laugh.  He was a little man, as neat
as a lady, with ugly, narrow eyes.

"'Tell him he 's to be hanged,' he ordered.

"Old Kamis heard it without a sign, only nodding
as the interpreter translated it to him.

"'And what will they do to my son?' he asked.

"Lascelles snuffled in his nose angrily.  'The Government
will take care of his son,' he said, and turned
away.  But when he had gone a few steps he turned
back again.  'Tell the old chap,' he ordered, 'and tell
him plainly, that his son will be taken care of.  He 'll
be all right, he 'll be well looked after.  Savvy?' he
shouted to Kamis.  'Piccanin all right; plenty *skoff*,
plenty *mahli*, plenty everything.'

"The Hollander told the old chief while Lascelles
waited, and the men of the Cape Mounted Rifles who
had the handcuffs for him stood on each side.  Kamis
heard it with his head on one side, as if he was a bit
deaf.  Then he nodded and put out his hands for the
irons.

"Lascelles held out his hands to the baby Kafir.

"'Come with me, kid!' he said.

"The baby hung back.  He was scared.  Old Kamis
said something to him and pushed him with his
knee, and at last the child went and took Lascelles'
hand.

"'That 's it,' said Lascelles, and lifted him up.  As
he carried him away, I heard him talking to the young
officer with the eye-glass.  'That 's a damned silly grin
you 've got, Whitburn,' he said, 'and you may as well
know I 'm sick of it.'

"I think he was a bit ashamed of carrying the baby.
He had n't any of his own.  I saw his wife later, when
we were disbanded—a skinny, yellow woman who played
cards every evening.

"And then, at Fereira, they hanged old Kamis, while
we all stood round with our rifles resting on the ground.
There was a man to hang him who wore a mask, and I
was sorry about the mask, because I thought I might
meet him sometime and not know him and be friends
with him.  He had red hair though; his mask couldn't
hide that, and there is something about red hair that
turns me cold.  There were about fifty of his tribe who
were brought there to see the end of Kamis and take
warning by him, and when he came out of the jail door,
between two men, with his hands tied behind him, they
all lifted a hand above their heads to salute him.  The
men on each side of him held him by the elbows and
hurried him along.  They took him so fast that he
tripped his foot and nearly fell.  'Slower, you swine!'
said Lascelles, who was there with a sword on.  He
walked across and spoke to Kamis.  'Piccanin all right!'
he said, 'All-a right!' said Kamis, and then they led
him up the steps.  They were all about him there, the
jail men and the man with the mask; for a minute I
couldn't see him at all.  Then they were away from
him, and there was a bag on his head and the rope was
round his neck.  The man with the mask seemed to be
waiting, and at last Lascelles lifted his hand in a tired
way and there was a crash of falling planks and a cry
from the Kafirs, and old Kamis, as straight and lean
as a young man, was hanging under the platform just
above the ground and swinging a little."

Christian du Preez frowned and looked at Margaret
absently.

"And then I was sick," he said reflectively.  "Quite
sick!"

"I don't wonder," said Margaret.  "But the baby!
What happened to the Kafir baby?"

"I didn't see the baby any more," replied the Boer.
"But I read in a newspaper that they sent it to
England.  Perhaps it died."

"But why send it to England?" asked Margaret.
"What could it do there?"

Christian du Preez shrugged one shoulder.  "The
Government sent it," he replied, conclusively.  No Boer
attempts to explain a government; it is his eternal
unaccountable.  "You see it was the Chief, that baby was,
so they wanted to send it a long way off, perhaps."

"And now, I suppose it 's a man," said Margaret; "a
poor negro all alone in London, who has forgotten his
own tongue.  He wears shabby clothes and makes
friends with servant girls, and never remembers how
he held his father's hand while you burghers and the
soldiers came down the hillside.  Don't you think that's
sad?"

"Yes," said the Boer thoughtfully, but without alacrity,
for after all a Kafir is a Kafir and his place in the
sympathies of his betters is a small one.  "Kafirs
look ugly in clothes," he added after a moment.

At the other side of the room, the others had ceased
their talk to listen.  Mrs. du Preez laughed a little
harshly.

"They 're worse in boots," she volunteered.  "Ever
seen a nigger with boots on, Miss Harding?  He walks
as if his feet weighed a ton.  Make a clatter like
clog-dancin'.  But round here, of course, there 's no boots
for them to get."

"There 's one now," said Margaret.  "Look—he 's
passing the kraals.  He 's got boots on."

They all looked with a quick curiosity that was a little
strange to see; one would have thought a passing Kafir
would scarcely have interested them by any eccentricity
of attire.  Even Mrs. Jakes rose from her place on the
sofa and stood on tip-toe to see over Mrs. du Preez's
shoulders.  There is an instinct in the South African
which makes him conscious, in his dim, short-sighted
way, that over against him there looms the passive,
irreconcilable power of the black races.  He is like a man
carrying a lantern, with the shifting circle of light about
him, and at its frontier the darkness pregnant with
presences.

The Boer, learned in Kafir varieties, stared under
puckered brows at the single figure passing below the
kraals.  He marked not so much any unusual feature
in it as the absence of things that were usual.

"Paul," he said, "go an' see what he 's after."

Paul was already at the door, going out silently.  He
paused to nod.

"I 'm going now," he said.

"Strange Kafirs want lookin' after," explained Mrs. du
Preez to Margaret as the boy passed the window
outside.  "You never know what they 're up to.  Hang
out your wash when they 're around and you 're short
of linen before you know where you are, and there 's a
nigger on the trek somewhere in a frilled petticoat or
a table-cloth.  They don't care what it is; anything 'll
do for them.  Why, last year one of 'em sneaked a skirt
off Mrs. Jakes here.  Didn't he, now?"

"It was a very good skirt," said Mrs. Jakes, flushing.
"A very good one—not even turned."

"Well, he was in luck, then," said Mrs. du Preez.
"And what he looks like in it—well, I give it up!  Miss
Harding, you ain't going yet, surely?"

"I 'm afraid *I* must," put in Mrs. Jakes, seizing her
opportunity.  "I have to see about dinner."

They shook hands all round.  "You must all come
up to tea with me some afternoon soon," suggested
Margaret.  "You will come, won't you?"

"Will a duck swim?" inquired Mrs. du Preez, genially.
"You just try us, Miss Harding.  And oh! if you
want to say good-by to Paul, I know where he 's gone.
He 'll be down under the dam, makin' mud pies."

"Not really?"

"You just step down and see; it won't take you a
moment.  He makes things, y'know; he made a sort of
statue of me once.  'If that 's like me,' I told him, 'it 's
lucky I 'm off the stage.'  And what d 'you think he
had the cheek to answer me?  'Mother,' he says, 'when
you forget what you look like, you look like this.'"

"I think I will just say good-by to Paul," said
Margaret, glancing at Mrs. Jakes.

"Come on after me, then," answered the doctor's
wife.  "I really must fly."

"Pigs might fly," suggested Mrs. du Preez, enigmatically.

The Boer did not go to the door with them; he waited
where he stood while Mrs. du Preez, her voice waxing
through the leave-takings to a shrill climax of farewell,
accompanied them to her borders.  When she returned
to the little room, he was still standing in his place,
returning "Boy Bailey's" glazed stare with gloomy intensity.

His wife looked curiously at him as she moved to the
table and began to put the scattered tea-cups together
on the tray.

"She 's a nice girl, Christian," she said, as she
gathered them up.

He did not answer, though he heard.  She went on
with her work till the tray was ready to be carried
forth, glancing at his brooding face under her eyebrows.

"Christian," she said suddenly.  "I remember when
you told me about the war and the Kafir baby."

He gave her an absent look.  "You said, 'Hang the
Kafir baby!'" he answered.

He turned from her, with a last resentful glare at the
plump perfection of Boy Bailey, and slouched heavily
from the room.  Mrs. du Preez, with a pursed mouth,
watched him go in silence.

Mrs. Jakes was resolute in her homeward intentions;
she had a presentiment of trouble in the kitchen which
turned out to be well grounded.  So Margaret went
alone along the narrow rut of a path which ran down
towards the shining water of the dam, which the
slanting sun transmuted to a bath of gold.  She was glad
of the open air again, after Mrs. du Preez's carefully
guarded breathing-mixture with its faint odor of
furniture polish and horsehair.  Paul, by the way, knew
that elusive fragrance as the breath of polite life; it
belonged to the parlor, where his father might not smoke,
and to nowhere else, and its usual effect was to rarefy
human intercourse to the point of inanity.  In the
parlor, one spoke in low tones and dared not clear one's
throat and felt like an abortion and a monstrosity.
Years afterwards, when the doors of the world had
been forced and it had turned out to be a smallish place,
only passably upholstered, it needed but a sniff of that
odor to make his hands suddenly vast and unwieldy
and reduce him to silence and discomfort.

The path skirted the dam, at the edge of which grew
rank grass, and dipped to turn the corner of the sloping
wall of earth and stones at its deeper end.  As she
went, she stooped to pick up a fragment of sun-dried
clay that caught her eye; it had been part of a face, and
on it the mouth still curved.  It was rudely done, but
it was there, and it had, even the broken fragment that
lacked the interpretation of its context, some touch of
free vigor that arrested her in the act of letting it drop.
She went on carrying it in her hand, and at the corner
of the wall stopped again at the sound of voices.  Some
one was talking only twenty paces away, hidden from
her by the bulk of the wall.

"You must shape it in the lump," she heard.  "You
must go for the mass.  That's everything—the mass!
Do you see what I mean?"

She knew the tones, the clear modulations of the
pundit-speech which belonged to her class, but there was
another quality in the voice that was only vaguely
familiar to her, which she could not identify.  It brought
to her mind, by some unconscious association, the
lumbering gaiety of Fat Mary.

"Ye-es," very slowly.  That was Paul's voice
answering.  "Yes.  Like you see it in the distance."

"That 's it," the baffling voice spoke again.  "That 's
it exactly.  And work the clay like this, without
breaking it, smoothly."

She still held the broken fragment in her hand as she
stepped round the corner of the wall to look.  Paul,
sitting cross-legged on the ground, had his back to her,
and facing him, with a lump of red clay between his
hands, which moved upon it deliberately, molding it
with care, sat a Kafir.  He was intent upon his work,
and the brim of his hat, overhanging his eyes, prevented
him from seeing her arrival.  She stood for a moment
watching; the two of them made a still group to which
all the western sky and the wide land were a
background.  And then the clay fragment dropped from her
hand, hit on a stone underfoot and cracked into pieces
that dissolved the dumb curve of the mouth in ruin.

At the little noise it made, Paul turned sharply and
the Kafir raised his head and looked at her.  There was
an instant of puzzled staring and then the Kafir lifted
his hat to her.

"I 'll be going," he said, and began to rise to his feet.

"Don't," said Paul.  "Don't go."  He was looking
at the girl expectantly, waiting for her to justify
herself.  Now was the time to confirm his faith in her.
"Don't go," he repeated.  "It's Miss Harding that I
told you about."  He hesitated a moment, and now
his eyes appealed to her.  "She 's from London," he
said; "she 'll understand."

The Kafir waited, standing up, a slender, upright
young man in worn discolored clothes.  To Margaret
then, as to Paul in his first encounter with him at the
station, there was a shock in the pitiful, gross negro face
that went with the pleasant, cultivated voice.  It
added something slavish to his travel-stained
appearance that touched the girl's quick pity.

She stepped forward impulsively.

"Please don't go," she begged, "I should be so sorry.
And Paul will introduce us."

He smiled.  "It shall be as you like, of course," he
answered.  "Will you sit down?  The grass is always
dry here."

He made an oddly conventional gesture, as though
the slope of the dam wall were a chair and he were
going to place it for her.

"Oh, thanks," said Margaret, and sat down.





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`CHAPTER VI`:

.. class:: center large bold

   CHAPTER VI

.. vspace:: 2

The Kafir seated himself again in his old place and
let his hand fall upon the mass of clay which he
had been fashioning for Paul's instruction.  He was
the least perturbed of the three of them.  He sank
his finger-tops in the soft plasticity of the stuff, and
smiled across it at the others, at the boy, embarrassed
and not sure of Margaret yet, and at her, still mastered
by her curiosity.  It was almost as if he were used to
being regarded with astonishment, and his self-possession
had a touch of that deliberate lime-lit quality which
distinguishes the private lives of preachers and actors
and hunchbacks.

For the rest, he seemed to be about Margaret's age,
clean run and of the middle stature.  Watching him,
Margaret was at a loss to discover what it was about
him that seemed so oddly commonplace and familiar till
she noted his clothes.  They were "tweeds."  Though
he had apparently slept on the bare ground in them
and made them a buffer between his skin and many
emergencies of travel, they were still tweeds, such as
any sprightly youth of Bayswater might affect for a
week-end in the country.

It needed only a complexion and an attitude to render
him inconspicuous on a golf-course, but in that place,
under the majestic sun, with the heat-dazzle of the
Karoo at his back, his very clothes made him the more
incomprehensible.

Margaret realized that he was waiting for her to
speak.

"You model, then?" she asked, striving to speak in an
altogether matter-of-fact tone, as though to come across
gifted, English-speaking negroes, giving art lessons in
odd corners, were nothing unusual.

"Just a little," he answered.  "Enough to help Paul
to make a beginning.  Eh, Paul?"

Paul nodded, turning to Margaret.  "He knows
lots," he said.  "*He 's* been in London, too.  It was
there he learned to—to model."

Paul had a way of uttering the word "London"
which conveyed to Margaret's ready sympathies some
little part of what it meant to him, the bright unattainable
home of wonderful activities, the land of heart's
desire.

"In London?"  She turned to the Kafir, "London
seems a long way from here, doesn't it?"

"Yes; a long way."  He was not smiling now.  "It
is seven months since I left London," he said; "and
already it seems dim and unreal.  It's as if I 'd
dreamed about it and only remembered parts of my
dream."

Paul was listening with that profound attention he
seemed to give to all things.

"I don't feel it 's as far as all that," said Margaret.
"But then, I was there two months ago.  Probably that
makes a difference."

She was only now beginning to realize the strangeness
of the encounter, and as she talked her faculties,
taken by ambush and startled from their functions,
regained their alertness.  She watched him composedly
as he replied.

"Yes," he said.  "And there are other differences,
too.  Since I left London I have not slept under a roof."

While he spoke he did not cease to finger the clay;
as he turned it here and there, Margaret was able to see
it was the head of a negro that he was shaping and the
work was already well forward.  It was, indeed, the
same head whose unexpected scowl had astonished Paul;
and as he moved it about, the still gloomy face of clay
seemed to glance backward and forward as though it
heard him and doubted.

"But why not?" demanded Margaret.

He seemed to hesitate before answering, and meanwhile
his hands were busy and deft.

"Why not?" she repeated.  "Seven months!  I
don't understand.  Why have n't you slept under a roof
all that time?"

"Well!" He smiled as he spoke at last.  "You see—I
don't speak Kafir.  That's where the trouble is.
When first I came up here, I went across to the southern
districts, where Kafirs are pretty numerous.  My idea
was to live among them, in order to—well, to carry out
an idea of mine."

He paused.  "They didn't know what to make of
you?" suggested Margaret.

"No—unless it was a corpse," he answered.  "I
don't really blame them; they must have been horribly
suspicious of me.  At the first kraal I came to—the first
village, that is—I tried to make myself known to a
splendid old chap, sitting over a little fire, who seemed
to be in charge.  That was awfully queer.  Every man,
woman and child in the place stood round and stared
and made noises of distrust—that's what they sounded
like; and the old chap just squatted in the middle and
blinked up at me without a word.  I 'd heard that most
of the Kafirs about here could understand a little
English, so I just talked away and tried to look innocent
and useful and I hoped I was making the right
impression.  The chap listened profoundly till I had quite
done, looking as though he were taking in every word
of it.  Then he lifted both arms, with exactly the
movement of a cock when it 's going to crow, and two young
fellows behind him leaned down and took hold of them
and helped him very slowly to his feet.  I made sure
I 'd done the trick and that he was getting up to shake
hands or something.  But instead of that he groped
about with his right hand in a blind, helpless kind of
way, till one of his private secretaries put a knobherry,
a bludgeon with a knob on the end, into it.  And then,
the poor old thing who had to be helped to his feet took
one quick step in my direction and landed me a bang
on the head with the club.  I just remember that all the
others burst into screams of laughter; I must have heard
them as I went down."

"What a horrible thing!" exclaimed Margaret.

He smiled again, his teeth flashing brilliantly in his
black face.

"It was awkward at the time," he admitted.  "I came
to later on the veld where they dragged me, with a
lump on my head the size of my fist.  And sore—by
Jove!  I was sore.  Still, it's just possible I might
have gone back for another try, if the first thing I
saw hadn't been a tall black gentleman sitting at
the entrance to the kraal with an assegai—a spear,
that is—ready for me.  I concluded it was n't good
enough!"

"No!" Margaret agreed with him.  "I should think
not.  But why should they receive you like that?"

"Perhaps," he suggested, "they learned it from the
white men!"

("He means to look ironical," Margaret thought.
"It isn't a leer; it 's irony handicapped by a negro
face.  Poor thing!")

"Then you had a bad time somewhere else?" she
asked aloud.  "Would you mind telling how?  If you
would, please don't tell me.  But I 'd like to hear."

"Then you shall.  Of course you shall."  The look
that tried to be ironical vanished.  "If you could only
know how grateful I am for—for this—for just your
politeness.  For you being what you are—"

"Please," interrupted Margaret.  "Please don't.  I
want to hear.  Just tell me."

There was something pathetic in his prompt obedience.
He shifted ground at once like a child that is snubbed.

"It was in Capetown," he said; "when I landed from
the boat.  There was trouble on the boat, too; it was full
of South Africans, and I had to have my meals alone
and only use the deck at certain hours.  I could n't even
put my name down for a sovereign in the subscription
they raised for the ship's band; the others wouldn't
have it.  I only got rid of that sovereign on the last
evening, when the leader of the band came to me as I
walked up and down on the boat deck.  He passed me
once or twice before he stopped to speak to me—making
sure that nobody was looking.  'Hurry up!' he said, in a
whisper.  'Where 's the quid you was going to
subscribe?'  'Say Sir!' I said—for the fun of the thing.
He couldn't manage it for fully a minute; his share
of it wasn't more than half-a-crown.  I went on walking
and left him where I stood, but as I came back again
he was ready for me.  'No offense, sir,' he said, quite
clearly.  I gave him the money and passed on.  But
he was still there when I turned again, and ever so
anxious to put himself right with his conscience.  'D'you
know what I 'd do with you niggers if I had my way?'
he began, still in a large hoarse whisper, like air
escaping from a pipe.  'I 'd 'ave you back into slavery, I
would.  I 'd sell the lot of you.'  I laughed.  'You
couldn't buy many of us with that sovereign!' I told
him.  Really, I rather liked that man."

"There are men like that," said Margaret thoughtfully.
"And women, too."

"Yes, aren't there?" he agreed quickly.  "But I 'd
rather—it 's a pity you should know it.  However, you
wanted to hear about Capetown."

The afternoon was waning; the Kafir, with his hat at
the back of his head and the rim of its brim framing his
patient face, was set against a skyful of melting color.
Even in face of those two attentive hearers, he sat as
though in an immense and significant isolation, imposing
himself upon them by virtue of his strong aloofness.
Margaret was conscious of a great gulf set between them,
an unbridgable hiatus of spirit and purpose.  The man
saw the life of the world not from above or below but
as through a barred window, from a room in which he
was prisoned and solitary.

He was entirely matter-of-fact as he told of his
troubles and difficulties when he landed in Capetown; he
spoke of them as things accepted, calling for no comment.
On the steamer from England he had been told of the
then recent experiences of a concert party of
American negroes who visited Africa and had been obliged
to sleep in the streets, but the tale had the sound of a
smoking-room ingenuity and had not daunted him.  But
it was true for all that and he ran full-tilt into the
application of it, when nightfall of the day of his arrival
found him still seeking vainly for a lodging.  He had
money in plenty, but neither money nor fair words
availed to bribe an innkeeper into granting him a bed.

"But I saw a lot of Capetown," he said.  "I walked
that afternoon and evening full twenty miles—once all
the way out to Sea Point and back again.  And I was
perhaps a little discouraged: there were so many
difficulties I hadn't expected.  I knew quite well before I
left England that I should have difficulties with the
whites, but I hadn't allowed for practically the same
difficulties with the blacks.  There was a place behind
the railway station, a tumble-down house in which about
a dozen Kafirs were living, and I tried that.  They
fetched a policeman who ordered me away, and I had
to go.  You see, they could n't make head or tail of me;
I was much too unusual for them to keep company with.
So about midnight I found myself walking down
towards the jetty at the foot of Adderly Street.  You
don't know Capetown, I suppose?  The jetty sticks out
into the bay; it 's no great use except for a few boats
to land and at night it serves the purpose of the Thames
Embankment for men who have nowhere else to go.  I
was very tired by then.  As I passed the Van Riebeck
statue, a woman spoke to me."

He hesitated, examining Margaret's listening face,
doubtfully.

"I understand," she said.  "Go on.  A white woman,
was it?"

"Yes, a white woman," he replied with the first touch
of bitterness she had seen in him.  "A poor devil who
had fallen so far that she had lost even the scruples of
her trade.  I heard her coughing in the shadow when
she was some distance from me, and saw her come out
into the lamplight still breathless, with the shadows
making a ruin of her poor painted face.  But she had
herself in hand; she was game.  At the moment I was near
enough, she smiled—I suppose the last thing they forget
is how to smile.  'Koos!' she called to me, softly.
'Koos!'  'Koos' is the Taal for cousin, you know; it 's a
sort of familiar address.  I couldn't pass her without
a word, so I stopped.  'You ought to see to that cough,'
I told her.  She was horribly surprised, of course, and
I rather think she started to bolt, but her cough stopped
her.  It was a bad case, that—a very bad case, and of
course she wasn't sufficiently clad or nourished.  I
advised her to get home to bed, and she leaned against the
wall wiping her eyes with the corner of her handkerchief
wrapped round her finger so as not to smudge the paint,
and stared at me with a sort of surrender.  I got her to
believe at last that I was what I said—a doctor—"

"*Are* you a doctor?" interrupted Margaret.

"Yes," he answered.  "I hold the London M.B.; oh,
I knew what I was talking about.  When she understood
it, she changed at once.  She was pretty near the
end of her tether, and now she had a chance, her first
chance, to claim some one's pity.  The lives they lead,
those poor smirched things!  She had a landlady; can
you imagine that landlady?  And unless she brought
money with her, she could not even go back to her
lodgings.  She told me all about it, coughing in between,
under the windows of a huge shopful of delicate
women's wear, with a big arc-light spluttering above
the empty street and Van Riebeck looking over our heads
to Table Mountain.  Wasn't it strange—us two homeless
people, cast out by our own folk and rejected by the
other color?"

"Yes," answered the girl; "very strange and sad."

"It was like a dream," said the Kafir.  "It was weird.
But I like the idea that she accosted a possible customer
and found a deliverer.  I gave her the money she needed,
of course, and listened to her lungs and wrote her a
prescription on the back of a card she produced.  No
real use, you know—just something to go on with.  She
was past any real help.  No use going into details,
but it was a bad case!"

He shook his head thoughtfully, in a mood of gloom.

"And then?" asked Margaret.

"Oh, then she went away," he said, "and I watched
her go.  She crossed the road, holding up her skirt clear
of the mud; she was a neat, appealing little figure in
spite of everything.  She passed with her head drooped
to the corner opposite and there she turned and waved
her hand to me, I waved back and she went into the
shadows.  She 's in the Valley of the Shadows now,
though; she hadn't far to go.

"But you can't conceive how still and wonderful it
was on the jetty, with the water all round and the moon
making a broad track of beams across it, and over the
bay the bulk of inland hills massive and inscrutable.  It
was like looking at Africa from a great distance; and
yet, you know, I was born here!"

His hands had fallen idle on the clay, but as he ceased
to speak he began to work again, with eyes cast down to
his task.  The light was already failing, and as the three
of them waited in the silence that followed on his words,
there reached them the dull pulse of the gourd-drum at
the farm, stealing upon their consciousness gradually.
Paul frowned as he recognized it, coming out of the
trance of his faculties unwillingly.  He had sat motionless
with parted lips through the Kafir's story, so still in
his absorption that the others had forgotten his presence.

"That 's for me," he said, slowly, but took his time
about getting up.  He was looking at the Kafir with the
solemn, sincere eyes of a child.

"I would like," he said, "to make a clay of that woman."

"Eh!"  The Kafir suppressed his smile.  "Time
enough, Paul.  Plenty of time and plenty of clay for
you to do that—and plenty of women, too."

Paul was on his feet by now, looking down at the
other two.

"But," he hesitated, "I *must* make it," he said.  "I
must."

The Kafir nodded.  "All right," he said.  "You
make it, Paul, and show it to me.  As you see her, you
know; that 's how you must do it."

"Yes," said Paul seriously.  "Brave and smiling and
dying.  I know!"

The gourd-drum throbbed insistently.  He moved
towards it reluctantly.  "Good night," he said.

"Goodnight, Paul!"

A moment later he was vague in the growing dusk,
and they heard his long whistle of answer to the drum.

Margaret, with her chin propped on her hand, sat on
the slope of the wall.  The Kafir began to put away
the clay on which he had been working.  Paul's store
was an abandoned ant-bear's hole across which there
trailed the broad dry leaves of a tenacious gourd.  He
put the unfinished head carefully in this receptacle, and
then drew from it another object, which he held out to
the girl.

"A bit of Paul's work," he explained.

She took it in her hand, but for the time being her interest
in the immaturities of art gave place to the strange
realities in whose presence she felt herself to be.  She
glanced at it perfunctorily, a little sketch of a woman
carrying a basket, well observed and sympathetic.

"Yes," she answered.  "He has a real gift.  But just
now I can't think about that.  I 'm thinking about you."

"I 've saddened you," he said.  "I didn't want to
do that.  I should have held my tongue.  But if you
could know what it means to talk to you at all, you 'd
forgive me.  I 'm not regretting, you know; I 'm going
through it of my own free will; but it 's a lonely
business.  I 'm always glad of a tramp making his way along
the railway line, and Paul was a godsend.  But you!
Oh, you 'll never understand how splendid it is to tell
you anything and have you listen to it."

He spoke almost humbly, but with a warmth of sincerity
that moved her.

"You 'll have to tell me more," she said.  "You 'll
be coming here again?"

"Indeed I will," he replied quickly.  "I 'll be here
often, if only in the hope that you 'll come down to the
dam sometimes.  But—there 's one thing."

"Yes?" asked Margaret.

"You know, it won't do for you to be seen with me,"
he said gently.  "It won't do at all."

Margaret laughed.  "I think I can bear up against
the ill-report of the neighborhood," she said.  "My
kingdom is not of this particular world.  We won't
bother about that, please."

The Kafir shook his head.  "There 's no help for it,"
he answered.  "I must bother about it.  It bothers me
so much that unless you will let me know best in this
(for I really do know) I 'll never come this way again.
Do you think I could bear it, if people talked about
you for suffering the company of a nigger?  You don't
know this country.  It 's a dangerous place for people
who go against its prejudices.  So if I am to see you,
for God's sake be careful.  I 'll look forward to it
like—like a sick man looking forward to health; but not if
you are to pay for it.  Not at that price."

"Oh, well!"  Margaret found the topic unpleasant.
"I don't see any risk.  But you 're rather putting me
into the position of the bandmaster on the ship, are n't
you?  I 'm to have the sovereign; that is, I 'm to hear
what I want to hear; but only when nobody 's looking.
However, it shall be as you say."

"Thank you."  He managed to sound genuinely
grateful.  "You 're awfully kind to me.  You shall
hear everything you want to hear.  Paul can always lay
hands on me for you."

Margaret rose to her feet.  The evening struck chill
upon her and she coughed.  In the growing dark, the
Kafir knit his brows at the sound of it.

"I must be going now," she said.  "Paul didn't
introduce me after all, did he?  But I don't think it's
necessary."

She stood a little above him on the slope of the wall,
a tall, slight figure seen against its dark bulk.

"I know your name," he answered.

"And I know yours," she put in quickly.  "Tell me
if I 'm not right.  You 're Kamis.  I 've heard about
you this afternoon."

He stared at her for a space of seconds.  "Yes," he
said slowly.  "I 'm Kamis.  But—who told you?"

She laughed quietly.  "You see," she said, "I 've
got something to tell, too.  Oh, I know lots about you;
you 'll have to come and hear that, at any rate."

She put out her hand to him.

"Good night, Mr. Kamis," she said.

The Kafir bared his head before he took her hand.
He seemed to have some difficulty in speaking.

"Good night," he said.  "Good night!  I'll never
forget your goodness."

He let her go and she turned back to the path that
should take her past the farmhouse and the kraals to
the Sanatorium and dinner.  At the turn of the wall,
its lights met her with their dazed, unwinking stare,
shining from the dining-room which had no part in the
spacious night of the Karoo and those whose place is in
the darkness.  She had gone a hundred yards before she
looked back.

Behind her the western sky treasured still the last
luminous dregs of day, that leaked from it like water
one holds in cupped hands.  In the middle of it, high
upon the dam wall, a single human figure, swart and
motionless, stood to watch her out of sight.





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`CHAPTER VII`:

.. class:: center large bold

   CHAPTER VII

.. vspace:: 2

"Looks pooty bad for the huntin'," remarked
Mr. Samson suddenly, glancing up from the crinkly
sheets of the letter he was reading.  "Here 's a feller
writin' to me that the ground 's like iron already.  You
hunt, Miss Harding?"

"Oh, dear, yes," replied Margaret cheerfully.
"Lions and elephants and—er—eagles.  Such sport,
you know!"

"Hah!"  Mr. Samson shook his head at her indulgently.
"Your grandmother wouldn't have said that,
young lady.  But you youngsters, you don't know
what 's good for you—by gad!  Eagles, eh?"

Once in a week, breakfast at the Sanatorium gained
a vivid and even a breathless quality from the fact that
one found the weekly letters piled between one's knife
and fork, as though Mrs. Jakes knew—no doubt she
did—that her guests would make the chief part of their
meal on the contents of the envelopes.  The Kafir
runner who brought them from the station arrived in the
early dawn and nobody saw him but Mrs. Jakes; she
was the human link between the abstractions of the
post-office and those who had the right to open the letters
and be changed for the day by their contents.  It was
not invariably that the mail included letters for her,
and these too would be put in order on the breakfast
table, under the tap of the urn, and not opened till
the others were down.  Then Mrs. Jakes also, like a
well-connected Jack Horner, could pull from the
eloquence of her correspondents an occasional plum of
information to pass round the table.

"Only think!" she would offer.  "The Duchess of
York has got another baby.  Let me see now!  How
many does that make?"

It was always Mr. Samson who was down first on
mail-mornings, and his was always the largest budget.
His seat was at the end of the table nearest the window,
and he would read sitting a little sideways in his chair,
with the letter held well up to the light and his right
eyebrow clenched on a monocle.  Fat letters of many
sheets, long letters on thin foreign paper, newspapers,
circulars—they made up enough to keep him reading the
whole morning, and thoughtful most of the afternoon.
From this feast he would scatter crumbs of fashionable
or sporting intelligence, and always he would have
something to say about the state of the weather in England
when the post left, three weeks before.

"Just think!" he continued.  "Frost already—and
fogs!  Frost, Miss Harding; instead of this sultry old
dust-heap.  How does that strike you?  Eh?"

"It leaves me cold," returned Margaret agreeably.

"Cold!" he retorted, snorting.  "Well, I 'd give
something to shiver again, something handsome.
What 's that you 're saying, Ford?"

Ford had passed a post-card to Mrs. Jakes to read
and now received it back from her.

"It 's Van Zyl," he replied.  "He writes that he 'll
be coming past this afternoon, about tea time, and he 'll
look in.  I was telling Mrs. Jakes."

"Good!" said Mr. Samson.

"It's a man I know," Ford explained to Margaret.
"He looks me up occasionally.  He 's in the Cape
Mounted Police and a Dutchman.  You 'll be in for tea?"

"When somebody 's coming?  Of course I will," said
Margaret.  "A policeman, is he?"

"Yes," answered Ford.  "He 's a sub-inspector, an
officer; but he was a trooper three years ago, and he 's
quite a chap to know.  You see what you think of him."

"I 'll look at him carefully," said Margaret.  "But
tell me some more, please!  Is he a mute, inglorious
Sherlock Holmes, or what?"

Ford laughed.  "No," he said.  "No, it 's not that
sort of thing, at all.  It 's just that he 's a noticeable
person, don't you know?  He 's the kind of chap who 's
simply born to put into a uniform and astride of a horse;
you 'll see what I mean when he comes."

Mrs. Jakes leaned to the right to catch Margaret's
eye round the urn.

"My dear," she said seriously.  "Mr. Van Zyl is the
image of a perfect gentleman."

"All right!" said Margaret.  "Between you, you 've
filled me with the darkest forebodings.  But so long as
it's a biped, and without feathers, I 'll do my best."

Her own letters were three in number.  One was from
an uncle who was also her solicitor and trustee, the
source of checks and worldly counsel.  His letter
opened playfully; the legal uncle, writing in the inner
chamber of his offices in Lincoln's Inn Fields, hoped
that she did not find the local fashions in dress
irksome, and made reference to three mosquitos and a
smile.  The break of a paragraph brought him to
business matters and the epistle concluded with an
allusion to the effect of a Liberal Government on markets.
It was, thought Margaret, a compact revelation of the
whole mind of the legal uncle, and wondered why she
should get vaguely impatient with his implied suggestion
that she was in an uncivilized country.  The next
was from the strong-minded aunt who had imposed
austerity upon her choice of clothes for her travels—a
Chinese cracker of a letter, detonating along three sheets in
crisp misstatements that had the outward form of
epigrams.  The aunt related, tersely, her endeavor to
cultivate a physique with Indian clubs and the consequent
accident to her maid.  "But arms like pipe-stems can
be trusted to break like pipe-stems," she concluded
hardily.  "I 've given her cash and a character, and
the new one is fat.  No pipe-stems about her, though
she bruises with the least touch!"

These two she read at the breakfast table, drinking
from her coffee-cup between the bottom of one sheet
and the top of the next, savoring them for a vintage
gone flat and perished.  It came to her that their writers
lived as in dim glass cases, seeing the world beyond
their own small scope as a distance of shadows,
indeterminate and void, while trivialities and toys that were
close to them bulked like impending doom.  She laid
down the legal uncle in the middle of a sentence to
hear of Van Zyl and did not look back to pick up the
context when she resumed her reading.  The legal
uncle, in her theory, had no context; he ranked as a
printer's error.  It was the third letter which she
carried forth when she left the table, to read again on the
stoep.

The jargon of the art schools saves its practitioners
much trouble in accounting for those matters and things
which come under their observation, since a phrase is
frequently indistinguishable from a fact and very filling
at the price.  But Margaret was not ready with a name
for that quality in the third letter which caused her
to read it through again and linger out its substance.
It was from a girl who had been her school-fellow and
later her friend, and later still a gracious and
rarely-seen acquaintance, smiling a welcome at chance
meetings and ever remoter and more abstracted from those
affairs which occupied Margaret's days.  The name of
a Kensington square stood at the head of her letter
as her address; Margaret knew it familiarly, from the
grime on the iron railings which held its melancholy
garden a prisoner, to the deep areas of its houses that
gave one in passing glimpses of spacious kitchens under
the roots of the dwellings.  Three floors up from the
pavement, Amy Hollyer, in her brown-papered room,
with the Rossetti prints on the wall and the Heleu
etching above the mantel, had set her mild and earnest
mind on paper for Margaret's reading, news, comment,
small jest and smaller dogma, a gentle trickle of gossip
about things and people who were already vague in the
past.  It was little, it was trivial, but through it there
ran, like the red thread in a ripping-cord, a vein of
zest, of sheer gusto in the movement and thrill of
things.  It suggested an ant lost in a two-inch high
forest of lawn-grass, but it rendered, too, some of the
ant's passionate sense of adventure.

"She 's alive," thought Margaret, laying the letter
at last in her lap.  "Dear old Amy, what a wonderful
world she lives in!  But then, she 'd furnish any world
with complications."

Twenty feet way, Ford had his little easel between
his outstretched legs and was frowning absorbedly from
it to the Karoo and back again.  Twenty feet away on
her other side, Mr. Samson was crackling a three-weeks-old
copy of *The Morning Post* into readable dimensions.
Before her, across the railing of the stoep, the
Karoo lifted its blind face to the gathering might of
the sun.

"Even this," continued Margaret.  "She 'd find this
inexhaustible.  She was born with an appetite for life.
I seem to have lost mine."

From the great front door emerged to the daylight
the solid rotundity of Fat Mary, billowing forth on
flat bare feet and carrying in her hand a bunch of the
long crimson plumes of the aloe, that spiky free-lance of
the veld which flaunts its red cockade above the
abomination of desolation.  Fat Mary spied Margaret and
came padding towards her, her smile lighting up her
vast black face with the effect of "some great
illumination surprising a festal night."

"For Missis," she remarked, offering the crimson bunch.

Margaret sat up in her chair with an exclamation.
"Flowers!" she said.  "Are they flowers?  They 're
more like great thick feathers.  Where did you get them,
Mary?"

Fat Mary giggled awkwardly.  "A Kafir bring
'um," she explained.  "He say—for Missis Harding,
an' give me a ticky (a threepenny piece).  Fool—that
Kafir!"

Margaret stared, holding the fat, fleshy crimson
things in her hands.

"Oh!" she said, understanding.  "Where is he,
Mary?  The Kafir, I mean?"

Fat Mary shook her head placidly.  "Gone," she
said; and waved a great hand to the utter distance of
the heat haze.  "That Kafir gone, Missis.  He come
before breakfus'; Missis in bed.  Say for Missis
Harding an' give me ticky.  Fool!  Talk English—an'
boots!"

She shrugged mightily to express the distrust and
contempt she could not put into words.

"Boots!" she repeated darkly.

"Well," said Margaret, "they 're very pretty, anyhow."

Fat Mary wrinkled her nose.  "Stink," she observed.
"Missis smell 'em.  Stink like a hell!  Missis throw
'um away."

Margaret looked at the stout woman and smiled.
Fat Mary's hostility to the Kafir and the aloe plumes
and the ticky was plainly the fruit of jealousy.

"I won't throw them away yet," she said.  "I want
to look at them first.  But did you know the Kafir,
Mary?"

"Me!"  Fat Mary drew herself up.  "No, Missis—not
know that *skellum*.  Never see him before.
What for that Kafir come here, an' bring stink-flowers
to my Missis?  An' boots?  Fool, that Kafir!  *Fool*!"

"All right, Mary," said Margaret, conciliatingly.
"Very likely he won't come again.  So never mind this
time."

Fat Mary smiled ruefully.  Most of her emotions
found expressions in smiles.

"That Kafir come again," she said thoughtfully,
"I punch 'im!"

And comforted by this resolve, she retired along
the stone stoep and betook herself once more to her
functions indoors.

At his post further along the stoep, Ford was
looking up with a smile, for the sounds of Fat Mary's
grievance had reached him.  Margaret did not notice
his attention; she was turning over the great bouquet
of cold flaunting flowers which had come to her out of
the wilderness, as though to remind her that at the
heart of it there was a voice crying.

Ford's friend was punctual to his promise to arrive
for tea.  Upon the stroke of half-past four he reined
in his big horse at the foot of the steps and swung
stiffly from the saddle.  He came, indeed, with
circumstances of pomp, armed men riding before him and
captives padding in the dust between them.  Old
Mr. Samson sighted him while he was yet afar off and
cried the news and the others came to look.

"Who 's he got with him?" demanded Mr. Samson,
fumbling his papers into the pockets of his writing
case.  "Looks like a bally army.  Can you see what
it is, Ford?"

Ford was staring with narrowed eyes through the
sunshine.

"Yes," he said slowly.  "He 's got prisoners.  But
what 's he bringing them here for?"

"Prisoners?  Oh, do let me look!"

Margaret came to his side and followed his pointing
finger with her eyes.  A blot of haze was moving very
slowly towards them over the surface of the ground,
and through it as she watched there broke here and
there the shapes of men and horses traveling in that
cloud of dust.

"Why, they 're miles away," she exclaimed.
"They'll be hours yet."

"Say half-an-hour," suggested Ford, his face still
puckered with the effort to see.  "They 're moving
briskly, you know.  He 's shoving them along."

"But why prisoners?" enquired Margaret.  "What
prisoners could he get on the Karoo?  There 's nobody
to arrest."

"Van Zyl seems to have found somebody, anyhow,"
answered Ford.  "I had a glimpse of people on foot.
But I can't imagine why he brings 'em here."

"Ask him," suggested Mr. Samson.  "What 's your
hurry?  Wait till he comes and then ask him."

First Mrs. Jakes and then the doctor joined the
spectators on the stoep as the party drew out of the
distance and defined itself as a string of Kafirs on
foot, herded upon their way by five Cape Mounted Police
with a tall young officer riding in the rear.  It was
a monstrous phenomenon to emerge thus from the
vagueness and mystery of the haze, and Margaret
uttered a sharp exclamation of distress as it came
close and showed itself in all its miserable detail.
There were perhaps twenty Kafirs, men and women
both, dusty, lean creatures with the eyes, at once
timorous and untameable, of wild animals.  They shuffled
along dejectedly, their feet lifting the dust in spurts
and wreaths, their backs bent to the labor of the
journey.  Three or four of the men were handcuffed
together, and these made the van of the unhappy body,
but save for these fetters, there was nothing to distinguish
one from another.  Their separate individualities
seemed merged in a single slavishness, and as they
turned their heads to look at the white people
elevated on the stoep, they showed only a row of white
hopeless eyes.  Beside them as they plodded, the tall
beautiful horses had a look of nonchalance and
superiority, and the mounted men, bored and thirsty, looked
over their heads as perfunctorily as drovers keeping
watch on docile cattle.

"How horrible!" said Margaret, in a low voice, for
the officer, followed by an orderly, was at the foot of
the steps.

The prisoners and their guards did not halt; they
continued their way past the house and on towards the
opposite horizon.  Their backs, as they departed,
showed gray with clinging dust.

Sub-Inspector Van Zyl, booted and spurred, trim in
his dust-smirched blue uniform, with his holster at
his hip and the sling across his tight chest, lifted his
hand in the abrupt motions of a salute as he received
Mrs. Jakes' greeting.

"Kind of you," he said, with a sort of curt cordiality
and the least touch in life of the thick Dutch accent.
"Most kind!  Tea 's the very thing I 'd like.  Thank you."

At sight of Margaret, grave and young, as different
from Mrs. Jakes as if she had been of another sex,
a slight spark lit in his eye for a moment and there was
an even stronger abruptness of formality in his salute.
His curiously direct gaze rested upon her several times
during the administration of tea in the drawing-room,
where he sat upright in his chair, with knees apart,
as though he were still astride of a horse.  He was a
man made as by design for the wearing of official
cloth.  His blunt, neatly-modeled Dutch face, blond as
straw where it was not tanned to the hue of the earth
of the Karoo, had the stolid, responsible cast that is the
ensign of military authority.  His uniform stood on
him like a skin; and his mere unconsciousness of the
spurs on his boots and the revolver on his hip
strengthened his effect of a man habituated to the
panoply and accoutrement of war.  Even his manners,
precise and ordered like a military exercise, never
slackened into humanity; the Dutch Sub-Inspector of Cape
Mounted Police might have been a Prussian Lieutenant
with the eyes of the world on him.

"Timed myself to get here for tea," he explained to
Ford.  "Just managed it, though.  Hot work
traveling, to-day."

Hotter, thought Margaret, for those of his traveling
companions who had no horses under them, and who
would not arrive anywhere in time for tea.

"You seem to have made a bag," replied Ford.
"What 's been the trouble?"

"Fighting and looting," answered Sub-Inspector
Van Zyl carelessly.  "A row between two kraals, you
know, and a man killed."

"Any resistance?" enquired Ford.

"A bit," said Van Zyl.  "My sergeant got his head
split open with an axe.  Those niggers in the south
are an ugly lot and they 'll always fight.  You see, it 's
only about twenty years ago they were at war with us;
it 'll need another twenty to knock the fighting
tradition out of 'em."

"They looked meek enough as they passed," remarked
Ford.  "There didn't seem to be a kick left
among them."

Van Zyl nodded over the brim of his tea-cup.
"There isn't," he said shortly.  "They 've had the
kick taken out of 'em."

He drank imperturbably, and Margaret had a momentary
blurred vision of defeated, captured Kafirs in
the process of having the kick extracted from them and
the serene, fair-haired sub-inspector superintending its
removal with unruffled, professional calm.

"Been here long, Miss Harding?"

Van Zyl addressed her suddenly across the room.

"Not quite long enough to understand," she replied.
"Did you say those poor creatures were fighting—among
themselves?"

"Yes."

"But why?" she persisted.  "What did they fight for?"

He shrugged his neat shoulders.  "Why does a
Kafir do anything?" he enquired.  "They told a
cock-and-bull story that seems to be getting fashionable
among them of late, about a son of one of their old
chiefs appearing among them dressed like a white man.
He went from kraal to kraal, talking English and
giving money, and at one kraal the headman, an old
chap who used to be a native constable of ours,
actually seems to have laid his stick across some wandering
nigger who couldn't explain what he wanted.  The
next kraal heard of this, and decided at once that a
chief had been insulted, and the next thing was a fight
and the old headman with an assegai through him.
But if you want my opinion, Miss Harding—it does n't
make such a good story, but I 've had to do with niggers
all my life—"

"Yes?" said Margaret.  "Tell me."

"Well," said Van Zyl, "my opinion is that if the old
headman had n't been the owner of twelve head of cattle,
all ready to be stolen, he might have gone on whacking
stray Kafirs all his life without hurting anybody's
feelings."

"Except theirs," suggested Mr. Samson.  "Hah,
ha!  Except the chaps that he whacked—what?"

"Quite so!" Sub-Inspector Van Zyl smiled politely.
"He was a vigorous old gentleman, and rather given
to laying about him with anything that came handy.
Probably picked up the habit in the police; the Kafir
constables are always pretty rough with people of their
own color.  Anyhow, he 's done for; they drove a
stabbing assegai clean through him and pinned him to a
post of his own hut.  I think I 've got the nigger that
did it."

Mrs. Jakes at the tea-table shook her skirts
applaudingly.  At any rate, the rustle of them as she
shook came in like applause at the tail of the
sub-inspector's narrative.

"He ought to be hanged," she said.

"He will be," said the sub-inspector.  "But we 're
not at the bottom of it yet.  There is a fellow, so far
as I can find out, coming and going on the Karoo,
dressed in clothes and talking a sort of English.  He 's
the man I want."

"What for?" demanded Margaret, and knew that
she had spoken too sharply.  Van Zyl seemed to remark
it, too, for his eye dwelt on her inquiringly for a couple
of seconds before he replied.

"It'll probably be sedition," he replied.  "The
whole lot of 'em are uneasy down in the south there
and we 're strengthening our posts.  No!" he said, to
Mrs. Jakes' exclamation; "there 's no danger.  Not
the slightest danger.  But if we could just lay hands
on that wandering nigger who talks English—"

He left the sentence unfinished, and his nod
signified that dire experiences awaited the elusive Kafir
when he should come into the strong hands of authority.
The Cape Mounted Police, he replied, would cure
him of his eccentricities.

He passed on to talk with Ford and Mrs. Jakes about
common acquaintances, officers in the police and the
Rifles and people who lived in Dopfontein, sixty miles
away, and belonged to a tennis club.  Then the sound
of the softly-closing door advertised them of the tiptoe
departure of Dr. Jakes, and soon afterwards Van Zyl
rose and announced that he must leave to overtake
his party.

"If you can come to Dopfontein, Miss Harding,"
he said, as he took his leave, "hope you 'll let me
know.  Decent little place; we 'll try to amuse you."

The orderly, refreshed but dusty still, came quickly
to attention as the sub-inspector appeared in the
doorway, and his pert cockney face took on the blankness
proper to discipline.  At a window above, Fat Mary
shed admiring glances upon him, and a certain rigor
of demeanor might have been taken to indicate that
the warrior was not unconscious of them.  He looked
back over his shoulder as he cantered off in the wake
of the sub-inspector.

"What 's the trouble?" asked Ford, discreetly, as
the sun-warmed dust fluffed up and enveloped the
riders in a soft cloud of bronze.

Margaret turned impatiently from looking after them.

"I hate cruelty," she said, irritably.

Ford looked at her shrewdly.  "Of course you do,"
he said.  "But Van Zyl's not cruel.  What he said
is true; he 's been among Kafirs all his life."

"And learned nothing," retorted Margaret.  "It 's
beastly; it's just beastly.  He can't even think they
ever mean well; they only fight to steal, according to
him.  And then he 'takes the kick out of them!'  Some
day he 'll work himself up to crucify one of them."

"Hold on," said Ford.  "You mustn't get excited;
you know, Jakes doesn't allow it.  And you 're
really not quite just to Van Zyl."

"Isn't he proud of it?" asked Margaret scornfully.

"I wonder," said Ford.  "But it 's just as likely
he 's proud of policing a smallpox district
single-handed and playing priest and nurse when he was
only paid to be jailer and executioner.  He got his
promotion for that."

"Mr. Van Zyl did that?" asked Margaret incredulously.
"Did he arrange to have the deaths over in
time for tea?"

Ford laughed shortly.  "You must ask him," he
replied.  "He 'll probably say he did.  He 's very
fond of tea.  But at any rate, he sees as much
downright hard fighting in a year as a man in the army
might see in a lifetime and—" he looked at Margaret
out of the corners of his eyes—"the Kafirs swear by
him."

"The Kafirs do?" asked Margaret incredulously.

"They swear by him," Ford assured her.  "You try
Fat Mary some time; she 'll tell you."

"Oh, well," said Margaret; "I don't know.  Things
are beastly, anyhow, and I don't know which is
worse—cruelty to Kafirs or the Kafirs' apparent
enjoyment of it.  That man has made me miserable."

Ford frowned.  "Don't be miserable," he said,
awkwardly.  "I hate to think you 're unhappy.  You
know," he went on, more fluently as an argument
opened out ahead of him, "you 've no business really
to concern yourself with such things.  You don't
belong among them.  You 're a bird of passage, just
perching for a moment on your way through, and you
mustn't eat the local worms.  It 's poaching."

"There 's nothing else to eat," replied Margaret
lugubriously.

"You should have brought your knitting," said
Ford.  "You really should!  Capital thing for
staying the pangs of hunger, knitting!"

"Thank you," said Margaret.  "You 're very good.
But I prefer worms.  Not so cloying, you know!"

She did not, however, act upon Ford's suggestion to
ask Fat Mary about the sub-inspector.  Even as rats
are said to afford the means of travel to the bacillus
of bubonic plague, it is probable that the worms of a
country furnish vehicles for native prejudices and
habits of mind.  At any rate, when Margaret
surveyed Fat Mary, ballooning about the room and creased
with gaiety, there came to her that sense of the
impropriety of discussing a white man with her handmaid
which is at the root of South African etiquette.

"Them flowers gone," announced Fat Mary
tranquilly, when Margaret was in bed and she was
preparing to depart.

"Gone!  Where?" asked Margaret.

"I throw 'um away," was the contented answer.
"Stink—pah!  So I throw 'um.  Goo' night, missis."





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`CHAPTER VIII`:

.. class:: center large bold

   CHAPTER VIII

.. vspace:: 2

"Don't you some times feel," asked Margaret,
"as though dullness had gone as far as it possibly
can go, and something surprising simply must
happen soon?"

Ford glanced cautiously about him before he answered.

"Lots of things might happen any minute to some
of us," he said.  "You haven't been ill enough to
know, but we are n't all keen for surprises."

It was evening, and the big lamp that hung from
the ceiling in the middle of the drawing-room breathed
a faint fragrance of paraffin upon the inhabitants of
the Sanatorium assembled beneath it.  From the piano
which stood against the wall, Mrs. Jakes had removed
its usual load of photographs and ornamental pottery,
and now, with her back to her fellow creatures, was
playing the intermezzo from "Cavalleria Rusticana."  Her
small hands moving upon the keys showed the red
knuckles and uneven nails which had come to her since
first she learned that composition within earshot of
the diapason of trains passing by Clapham Junction,
mightily challenging her laborious tinkle-tinkle, and
with as little avail as now the night of the Karoo
challenged it.  Like her gloves and her company
manners, it stood between her shrinking spirit and those
poignant realities which might otherwise have
overthrown her.  So when she came to the end of it she
turned back the pages of the score which was propped
before her, and without glancing at the notes, played
it through again.

"For instance," whispered Ford, under cover of the
music; "look at Jakes.  He carries a catastrophe about
with him, don't you think?"

The doctor was ranging uneasily to and fro on the
hearth-rug, where the years of his exile were recorded
in patches worn bare by his feet.  There was already
a change to be remarked in him since Margaret had first
made his acquaintance; some of his softness and
appealing guiltiness was gone and he was a little more
desperate and unresponsive.  She had mentioned this once to
Ford, who had frowned and replied, "Yes, he 's showing
the strain."  She looked at him now covertly.  He
was walking to and fro before the empty fireplace with
quick, unequal steps and the fingers of one hand
fidgeted about his mouth.  His eyes, flickering back
and forth, showed an almost frantic impatience; poor
Mrs. Jakes' melodious noises that smoothed balm upon
her soul were evidently making havoc with his nerves.
He seemed to have forgotten, in the stress of his misery,
that others were present to see him and enter his
disordered demeanor upon their lists of his shortcomings.
As he faced towards her, Margaret saw the sideward
sag of his mouth under his meager, fair mustache and
the panic of his white eyeball upturned.  His decent
black clothes only accentuated the strangeness of him.

"He looks dreadful," she said; "dreadful.
Oughtn't you to go to him—or something?"

"No use."  Ford shook his head.  "*I* know.  But
I wish he 'd go to his study, all the same.  If he stays
here he may break down."

"Why doesn't he go?" asked Margaret.

"He can't make up his mind.  He 's at that stage
when to decide to do anything is an effort.  And yet the
chap 's suffering for the only thing that will give his
nerves relief.  Can't help pitying him, in spite of
everything, when you see him like that."

"Pitying him—yes," agreed Margaret.  Mrs. Jakes
with her foot on the soft pedal, was beginning the
intermezzo again for the fifth time and slurring it
dreamily to accord with her brief mood of contentment
and peace.

"You know," Margaret went on, "it 's awfully queer,
really, that I should be in the same room with a man
in that condition.  Three months ago, I couldn't have
borne it.  Except sometimes on the streets, I don't
think I 'd ever seen a drunken man.  I must have
changed since then in some way."

"Learned something, perhaps," suggested Ford.
"But you were saying you found things dull.  Well,
it just struck me that you 'd only got to lift up your
eyes to see the makings of a drama, and while you 're
looking on, your lungs are getting better.  Aren't you
a bit hard to satisfy?"

"Am I?  I wonder."  They were seated at opposite
ends of a couch which faced them to the room, and
the books which they had abandoned—loose-backed,
much-handled novels from the doctor's inelastic stock
of literature—lay face down between them.  Margaret
looked across them at Ford with a smile; he had always
a reasonable answer to her complainings.

"You don't take enough stock in human nature," he
said seriously.  "Too fastidious—that's what you are,
and it makes you miss a lot."

"Perhaps you 're right," she answered.  "I 've been
thinking something of the kind myself.  A letter I
had—from a girl at home—put it in my mind.  She writes
me six sheets all about the most trivial and futile
things you can imagine, but she speaks of them with
bated breath, as it were.  If only she were here
instead of me, she 'd be simply thrilled.  I wish you knew
her."

"I wish I did," he said.  "I 've always had an idea
that the good Samaritan was a prying, inquisitive kind
of chap, and that 's really what made him cross the
road to the other fellow.  He wanted to know what
was up, in the first place, and the rest followed."

"Whereas—" prompted Margaret.  "Go on.
What 's the moral?"

Ford laughed.  "The moral is that there 's plenty
to see if you only look for it," he answered.

"I 've seen one thing, at any rate, without looking
for it, since I 've been here," retorted Margaret.
"Something you don't know anything about, Mr. Ford."

"What was that?" he demanded.  "Nothing about
Jakes, was it?"

"No; nothing about him."

She hesitated.  She had it in her mind to speak to
him about the Kafir, Kamis, and share with him that
mystery in return for the explanations which he could
doubtless give of its less comprehensible features.  But
at that moment Mrs. Jakes ceased playing and began
to put the score away.

"I 'll tell you another time," she promised, and
picked up her book again.

The cessation of the music seemed to release
Dr. Jakes from the spell which had been holding him.  He
stopped walking to and fro and strove to master
himself for the necessary moment before his departure.
He turned a writhen, twitching face on his wife.

"You played it again and again," he said, with a sort
of dull resentment.

Mrs. Jakes looked up at him swiftly, with fear in her
eyes.

"Don't you like it, Eustace?" she asked.

He only stared without answering, and she went on
speaking hurriedly to cover him.

"It always seems to me such a sweet piece," she said.
"So haunting.  Don't you think so, Miss Harding?
I 've always liked it.  I remember there was a
tea-room in Oxford Street where they used to have a
band in the afternoons—just fiddles and a piano—and
they used to play it there.  Many 's the time I 've
dropped in for a cup of tea when I was shopping—not
for the tea but just to sit and listen.  Their
tea wasn't good, for the matter of that, but lots of
people went, all the same.  Tyler's, was the name,
I remember now.  Do you know Tyler's, Miss Harding?"

She was making it easy for the doctor to get away,
after his custom, but either the enterprise of making a
move was too difficult for him or else an unusual
perversity possessed him.  At any rate, he did not go.
He stood listening with an owlish intentness to her
nervous babble.

"I know Tyler's very well," answered Margaret,
coming to her aid.  "Jolly useful place it is, too.  But
I don't remember the band."

"*I* used to go to the Queen's Hall," put in Dr. Jakes
hoarsely.  "Monday afternoons, when I could
get away.  And afterwards, have dinner in Soho."

From the window, where Mr. Samson lay in an armchair
in apparent torpor, came a wheeze, and the single
word, "Simpson's."

Margaret laughed.  "How sumptuous," she said.
"Now, Mr. Ford, you tell us where you used to go."

"Club," answered Ford, promptly.  "I had to have
something for my subscription, you know, so I went
there and read the papers."

Mrs. Jakes was watching her husband anxiously,
while Ford and Margaret took up the burden of inconsequent
talk and made a screen of trivialities for her.
But to-night Dr. Jakes needed expression as much as
whisky; there was the hopeless, ineffectual anger of a
baited animal in his stare as he faced them.

"Why aren't any of you looking at me?" he said
suddenly.

None answered; only Mr. Samson sat up on his
creaking armchair of basketwork with an amazed,
"Eh?  What 's that?"  Margaret stared helplessly
and Mrs. Jakes, white-faced and tense, murmured
imploringly, "Eustace."

"Dodging with your eyes and babbling about tea-shops,"
said the doctor hotly.  "You think, because
a man 's a bit—"

"Eustace," cried Mrs. Jakes, clasping her hands.
"Eustace *dear*."

It was wonderful to notice how her habit of tone held
good in that peril which whitened her face and made
her tremble from head to foot as she stood.  From her
voice alone, one would have implied no more than some
playful extravagance on the doctor's part; she still
hoped that it could be carried off on the plane of small
affairs.

"You would go out without a proper hat on, Jakes,"
said Ford suddenly.  "Feel stuffy in the head, don't
you?"

"What do you mean—stuffy?" demanded Jakes.

But already the vigor that had spurred him to a
demonstration was exhausted and the need for alcohol,
the burning physical famine for nerve-reinforcement,
had him in its grip.

"Stuffy?" repeated Ford, watching him closely.
"Oh, you know what I mean.  I 've seen chaps like it
heaps of times after a day in the sun; they get the
queerest fancies.  You really ought to get a proper hat,
though."

Mrs. Jakes took him by the arm persuasively.
"Don't you think you 'd better lie down for a bit,
Eustace—in the study?"

"In the study?"  He blinked twice or thrice painfully,
and made an endeavor to smile.  "Yes, perhaps.
This—er—stuffy feeling, you know—yes."

His wife's arm steered him to the door, and once out
of the room he dropped it and fairly bolted across the
echoing hall to his refuge.  In the drawing-room they
heard his eager feet and the slam of the door that
shut him in to his miserable deliverance from pain,
and the double snap of the key that locked out the world
and its censorious eyes.

"You—you just managed it," said Margaret to
Ford.  The queer inconsequent business had left her
rather breathless.  "But wasn't it horrible?"

"Some day we shan't be able to talk him down, and
then it 'll be worse," answered Ford soberly.  "That 'll
be the end for Mrs. Jakes' home.  But you played up
all right, you know.  You did the decent thing, and in
just the right way.  And I was glad, because, you
know, I 've never been quite sure how you 'd shape."

"You thought I 'd scream for help, I suppose,"
suggested Margaret.

"No," he replied slowly.  "But I often wondered
whether, when the time came, you 'd go to your room
or stay and lend a hand.  Not that you wouldn't be
quite right to stand out, for it 's a foul business, all
this, and there 's nothing pretty in it.  Still, taking
sides is a sign of life in one's body—and I 'm glad."

"That's all right, then," said Margaret.  "And
it 's enough about me for the present, too.  You said
that some day it won't be possible any more to talk him
down.  Did you mean—some day *soon*?"

"Goodness knows," said Ford.  He leaned back and
turned his head to look over the back of the couch at
Mr. Samson.  "Samson," he called.

"Yes; what?"

"That was bad, eh!  What's the meaning of it?"

Mr. Samson blew out his breath windily and uncrossed
his thin legs.  "Don't care to go into it before
Miss Harding," he said pointedly.

"Oh, bother," exclaimed Margaret.  "Don't you
think I want to know too?"

"Well, then," said Mr. Samson, with careful
deliberation, "since you ask me, I 'd say it was a touch
of the horrors casting its shadow before.  He doesn't
exactly see things, y' know, but that 's what 's
coming.  Next thing he knows, he 'll see snakes or cuttle-fish
or rats all round the room and he 'll—he 'll gibber.
Sorry, Miss Harding, but you wanted to know."

"But—but—"  Margaret stared aghast at the feeble,
urbane old man asprawl in the wicker chair, who spoke
with genial authority on these matters of shadowy
horror.  "But how can you possibly know all this?"

Mr. Samson smiled.  He considered it fitting and
rather endearing that a young woman should be
ignorant of such things and easily shocked when they
were revealed.

"Seen it all before, my dear young lady," he assured
her.  "It 's natural you should be surprised, but it's
not so uncommon as you think.  Why, I remember,
once, in '87, a feller gettin' out of a cab because he said
there was a bally great python there—a feller I knew; a
member of Parliament."

Margaret looked at Ford, who nodded.

"He knows all right," he said, quietly.  "But I
don't think you need be nervous.  When it comes to
that, we 'll have to do something."

"I 'm not nervous—not in that way, at least," said
Margaret.  "Only—must it come to that?  Isn't there
anything that can be done?"

"If we got a doctor here, the chances are he 'd report
the matter to the authorities," said Ford.  "This place
is licensed or certified or something, and that would be
the end of it.  And then, even if there wasn't that, it
isn't easy to put the matter to Mrs. Jakes."

"I—I suppose not," agreed Margaret thoughtfully.
"Still, if you decided it was necessary—you and
Mr. Samson—I 'd be willing to help as far as I could.  I
wouldn't like to see Mrs. Jakes suffer for lack of
anything I could do."

"That's good of you," answered Ford.  "I mean—good
of you, really.  We won't leave you out of it when
the time comes, because we shall need you."

"Always knew Miss Harding was a sportsman," came
unexpectedly from Mr. Samson in the rear.  And then
the handle of the door, which was loose and arbitrary
in its workings, rattled warningly and Mrs. Jakes
re-appeared.

She made a compunctious mouth, and expressed with
headshakes a sense that all was not well, though
perfectly natural and proper, with the doctor.  Her eyes
seemed rather to dwell on Margaret as she gave her
bulletin.

"Mr. Ford was perfectly right about the hat," she
said.  "Perfectly right.  He ought to have one of those
white ones with a pugaree.  He never was really strong,
you know, and the sun goes to his head at once.
But what can I do?  He simply won't listen to me
when I tell him we ought to go Home.  The number
of times I 've said to him, 'Eustace, give it up; it 's
killing you, Eustace,'—you wouldn't believe.  But
he 's lying down now, and I think he 'll be better presently."

Mr. Samson spoke again from the background.  He
didn't believe in hitting a man when he was down,
Mr. Samson didn't.

"Better have that pith helmet of mine," he suggested.
"That 's the thing for him, Mrs. Jakes.  No sense in
losin' time while you 're writin' to hatters—what?"

"You 're very good, Mr. Samson," answered Mrs. Jakes,
gratefully, pausing by the piano.  "I 'll mention
it to the doctor in the morning; I 'm sure he 'll be
most obliged.  He 's—he 's greatly troubled, in case any
of you should feel—well—annoyed, you know, at
anything he said."

"Poor Dr. Jakes," said Margaret.  "Of course not,"
chorused the others.  "Don't know what he means,"
added Mr. Samson.

Mrs. Jakes looked from one to another, collecting
their responses and reassuring herself.

"He 'll be so glad," she said.  "And now, I
wonder—would you mind if I just played the intermezzo a
little again?"

The easy gradual cadences of the music resumed its
government of the room as Mrs. Jakes called up images
of less poignant days to aid her in her extremity,
sitting under the lamplight very upright and little upon
the pedestal stool.  For the others also, those too
familiar strains induced a mood of reflection, and
Margaret fell back on a word of Ford's that had grappled
at her mind and fallen away again.  His mention of
the need of a doctor and the difficulty of obtaining one
who could be relied upon to keep a shut mouth concerning
Dr. Jakes' affairs returned to her, and brought
with it the figure of Kamis, mute, inglorious, with his
London diploma, wasting his skill and knowledge literally
on the desert air.  While Mrs. Jakes, quite involuntarily,
recalled the flavor of the music-master of years
ago, who played of nights a violin in the orchestra of
the Putney Hippodrome and carried a Bohemian
glamour about him on his daily rounds, Margaret's mind
was astray in the paths of the Karoo where wandered
under the stars, unaccountable and heartrending, a
healer clothed with the flesh and skin of tragedy.  She
remembered him as she had seen him, below the dam
wall, with Paul hanging on his words and the humble
clay gathering shape under his hands, lifting his blunt
negro face to her and speaking in deliberate, schooled
English of how it fared in Africa with a black man
who was not a savage.  He had thanked her then very
movingly for merely hearing him and being touched
by the pity and strangeness of his fate, and had
promised to come to her whenever she should signify a wish
to speak with him again.  The wish was not wanting, but
the opportunity had failed, and since then the only
token of him had been the scarlet aloe plumes, fruit of
the desert gathered in loneliness, which he had
conveyed to her by the hands of Fat Mary.  Like himself,
they came to her unexpected and unexplained, and
she had had them only long enough to know they existed.

Her promise to Kamis to keep her acquaintance with
him a secret had withheld her so far from sharing the
matter with Ford, though she told herself more than
once that in his particular case the promise could not
apply.  With him she was sure there could be no risk;
he would take his stand on the clear facts of the
situation and be free from the first from the silly violence
of thought which complicates the racial question in
South Africa.  She had even pictured to herself his
reception of the news, when he received it, say, across
the top of his little easel; he would pause, the palette
knife between his fingers, and frown consideringly at
the sticky mess before him on the canvas.  His lean,
sober, courageous face would give no index to the
direction of his mind; he would put it to the test of his
queer, sententious logic with all due deliberation, till at
last he would look up decidedly and commit himself
to the reasonable and human attitude of mind.  "As
I see it," he would probably begin; or "Well, the
position 's pretty clear, I think.  It 's like this."  And
then he would state the matter with all his harsh,
youthful wisdom, tempered a little by natural kindliness and
gentleness of heart.  And all would be well, with a
confidant gained into the bargain.  But, nevertheless,
he had not yet been told.

Mrs. Jakes was perfunctory, that evening with her
good nights; with all her efforts to appear at ease the
best she could do was to appear a little absent-minded.
She gave Margaret her breakfast smile instead of her
farewell one and stared at her curiously as she stood
aside to let the girl pass up-stairs.  She had the air of
passing her in review.

It seemed to Margaret that she had been asleep for
many hours when she was awakened and found the
night still dark about her.  Some blurred fragments
of a dream still clung to her and dulled her wits; she
had watched again the passing before the stoep of Van
Zyl's captives and seen their dragging feet lift the dust
and the hopelessness of their white eyes.  But with
them, the mounted men seemed to ride to the accompaniment
of hoofs clattering as they do not clatter on the
dry earth of the Karoo; they clicked insistently like a
cab horse trotting smartly on wood pavement, and then,
when that had barely headed off her thoughts and let
her glimpse a far vista of long evening streets,
populous with traffic, she was awake and sitting up in her
bed, and the noise was Mrs. Jakes standing in the
half-open door and tapping on the panels to wake her.
She carried a candle which showed her face in an
unsteady, upward illumination and filled it unfamiliarly
with shadows.

"What is it?" called Margaret.  "Come in, Mrs. Jakes.
Is there anything wrong?"

Mrs. Jakes entered and closed the door behind her.
She was fully dressed still, even to the garnet brooch
she wore of evenings, which she had once purchased
from a countess at a bazaar.  Stranger far, she wore an
embarrassed, confidential little smile as though some
one had turned a laugh against her.  She came to
Margaret's bedside and stood there with her candle.

"My dear," she said; "I know it's very awkward,
but I feel I can trust you.  We are friends, aren't we?"

"Yes," said Margaret, staring at her.  "But what is it?"

"Well," said Mrs. Jakes, very deliberately, and still
with the same little smile, "it 's an awkward thing, but
I want you to help me.  I don't care to ask Mr. Samson
or Mr. Ford, because they might not understand.  So,
as we 're friends—"

"Is anybody dead?" demanded Margaret.

Mrs. Jakes made a shocked face.  "Dead.  No.  My
dear, if that was it, you may be sure I should n't trouble
you.  No, nobody 's dead; it 's nothing of that kind at
all.  I only just want a little help, and I thought—"

"You 're making me nervous," said Margaret.  "I 'll
help if I can, but do say what it is."

Mrs. Jakes' smile wavered; she did not find it easy to
say what it was.  She put her candle down upon a
chair, to speak without the strain of light on her face.

"It's the doctor," she said.  "He's had a—a fit,
my dear.  He thought a little fresh air would do him
good and he went out.  And the fact is, I can't quite
manage to get him in by myself."

"Eh?" Margaret stared.  "Where is he?" she asked.

"He got as far as the road and then he fell," said
Mrs. Jakes.  "I wouldn't dream of troubling you, my
dear, but I 'm—I 'm rather tired to-night and I really
couldn't manage by myself.  And then I remembered
we were friends."

"Not till then?" asked Margaret.  "You don't care
to wake Mr. Ford?  He wouldn't misunderstand."

"Oh, no—please," begged Mrs. Jakes, terrified.
"No, *please*.  I 'd rather manage alone, somehow—I
would, really."

"You can't do that," said Margaret, decidedly.  She
sat a space of moments in thought.  The doctor's fit
did not deceive her at all; she knew that for one of the
euphemisms that made Mrs. Jakes' life livable to her.
He was drunk and incapable upon the road before the
house, and Mrs. Jakes, helpless and frightened, had
waked her in the middle of the night to help bring the
drunken man in and hide him.

"I 'll help you," she said suddenly.  "Don't you
worry any more, Mrs. Jakes; we 'll manage it
somehow.  Let me get some things on and we 'll go out."

"It 's very kind of you, my dear," said Mrs. Jakes
humbly.  "You 'll put some warm things on, won't
you?  The doctor would never forgive me if I let you
catch cold."

Margaret was fumbling for her stockings.

"I 'm not very strong, you know," she suggested.
"I 'll do all I can, but hadn't we better call Fat Mary?
She 's strong enough for anything."

"Fat Mary!  A Kafir!"  Mrs. Jakes forgot her caution
and for the moment was shrill with protest.
"Why—why, the doctor would never hold up his head
again.  It wouldn't do at *all*; I simply couldn't *think*
of it."

"Oh, well.  As you like; I did n't know.  Here 's me,
anyhow; and awfully willing to be useful."

But Mrs. Jakes had been startled in earnest.  While
Margaret completed a sketchy toilet she stood murmuring:
"A Kafir!  Why, the very idea—it would break
the doctor's heart."

With her dressing-gown held close about her,
Margaret went down-stairs by the side of Mrs. Jakes and
her candle, with the abrupt shadows prancing before
them on wall and ceiling like derisive spectators of
their enterprise.  But there was no sense of adventure
in it; somehow the matter had ranged itself prosaically
and Mrs. Jakes, prim and controlled, managed to throw
over it the commonplace hue of an undertaking which
is adequately chaperoned.  The big hall, solemn and
reserved, had no significant emptiness, and from the study
there was audible the ticking of some stolid little clock.

The front door of the house was open, and a faint
wind entered by it and made Margaret shiver; it showed
them a slice of night framed between its posts and two
misty still stars like vacant eyes.

"It 's not far," said Mrs. Jakes, on the stoep, and
then the faint wind rustled for a moment in the dead
vines and the candle-flame swooped and went out.

"You haven't matches, my dear?" enquired Mrs. Jakes,
patiently.  "No?  But we 'll want a light.  I
could fetch a lantern if you wouldn't mind waiting.
I think I know where it is."

"All right," agreed Margaret.  "I don't mind."

It was the first thrill of the business, to be left alone
while Mrs. Jakes tracked that lantern to its hiding-place.
Margaret slowly descended the steps from the stoep and
sat down on the lowest of them to look at the night.
There was a touch of chill in it, and she gathered
herself up closely, with her hands clasped around her knees.
The wide sleeves of the dressing-gown fell back and
left her arms bare to the elbow and the recurring wind,
like a cold breath, touched her on the chest where the
loose robe parted.  The immensity of the night, veiling
with emptiness unimaginable bare miles, awed her like
a great presence; there was no illumination, or none
but the faintest, making darkness only apparent, from
the heavenful of pale blurred stars that hung over her.
Behind her, the house with those it held was dumb; it
was the Karoo that was vocal.  As she sat, a score of
voices pressed upon her ears.  She heard chirpings and
little furtive cries, the far hoot of some bold bird and by
and by the heartbroken wailing of a jackal.  She
seemed to sit at the edge of a great arena of unguessed
and unsuspected destinies, fighting their way to their
fulfilment in the hours of darkness.  And then
suddenly, she was aware of a noise recurring regularly,
a civilized and familiar noise, the sound of footsteps, of
somebody walking on the earth near at hand.

She heard it before she recognized it for what it was,
and she was not alarmed.  The footsteps came close
before she spoke.

"Is anybody there, please?" she called.

The answer came at once.  "Yes," it said.

"Who is it?" she asked again, and in answer to her
question, the night-walker loomed into her view and
stood before her.

She rose to her feet with a little breathless laugh, for
she recognized him.

"Oh, it 's you," she exclaimed.  "Mr. Kamis, isn't
it?  But what are you doing here at this time of night?"

It was not light enough to see his face; she had
recognized him by the figure and attitude; and she was
glad.  She was aware then that she rather dreaded
the negro face of him.

"What are you doing, rather?" he asked.  "Does
anybody know you 're out here like this?  Is it part of
some silly treatment, or what?"

"I 'm waiting for Mrs. Jakes," said Margaret.
"She 's coming with a lantern in a minute or two and
you 'll have to go.  It's all right, though; I shan't take
any harm."

"I hope not."  He was plainly dissatisfied, and it
was very strange to catch the professional restraint in
his voice.  "Your being here—if I may ask—hasn't
got anything to do with a very drunk man lying in
the road over there?"

"You 've seen him, then?" asked Margaret.  "It is
just drunkenness, of course?"

He nodded.  "But why—?" he began again.

"That's Dr. Jakes," explained Margaret.  "And
I 'm going to help Mrs. Jakes to fetch him in, quietly,
so that nobody will know.  So you see why you must
keep very quiet and slip away before she sees you—don't you?"

There was a pause before he answered.

"But, good Lord," he burst out.  "This is—this is
damnable.  You can't have a hand in this kind of thing;
it 's impossible.  What on earth are these people
thinking of?  You mustn't let them drag you into
beastliness of this kind."

"Wait," said Margaret.  "Don't be so furious.
Nobody is dragging me into anything, and I don't think
I 'm a very draggable person, anyhow.  I 'd only to be
a little shocked once or twice and I should never have
heard of this.  I 'm doing it because—well, because I
want to be useful and Mrs. Jakes came to me and asked,
'Was I her friend?'  That isn't very clear to you,
perhaps, but there it is."

"Useful."  He repeated the word scornfully.  "Useful—yes.
But do you mean that this is the only use
they can find for you?"

"I 'm an invalid," said Margaret placidly.  "A
crock, you know.  I 've got to take what chances I can
find of doing things.  But it 's no use explaining such
a thing as this.  If you 're not going to understand
and be sympathetic, don't let 's talk about it at all."

He did not at once reply.  She stood on the last step
but one and looked down towards him where he stood
like a part of the night, and though she could see of him
only the shape, she showed to him as a tall slenderness,
with the faint luminosity of bare arms and face and
neck.  He seemed to be staring at her very intently.

"Anyhow," he said suddenly—"what is wanted principally
is to bring him in.  That is so, is n't it?  Well,
I 'll fetch him for you.  Will you be satisfied with that?"

"No, you mustn't," said Margaret.  "Mrs. Jakes
wouldn't allow it.  Never mind why.  She simply
wouldn't."

"I know why," he answered.  "I 've come across all
that before.  But this Kafir has seen the state of that
white man.  That does n't make any difference?  No?"

Margaret had shaken her head.  "I 'm awfully
sorry," she said.  "I feel like a brute—but if you had
seen her when I suggested getting help.  It was the one
thing that terrified her.  You see, it 's her I want to
help, much more than Dr. Jakes, and she must have her
way.  So please don't be hurt, will you?"

He laughed a little.  "Oh, *that* doesn't hurt me,"
he said.  "If it were you, it would be different, but
Mrs. Jakes can't help it.  However—do you know
where this man keeps his drugs?"

"In the study," answered Margaret.  "In there, on
the left.  But why?"

"I 'm a doctor too; you 'd forgotten that, had n't you?
If I had two or three things I could mix something that
would sober him in a couple of minutes."

"Really?"  Margaret considered it for a minute, but
even that would not do.  She could not bring herself
to brave Mrs. Jakes' horror and sense of betrayal when
she should see the deliverer who came out of the night.
And, after all, it was she who had claimed Margaret's
help.  "We're friends, aren't we?" she had asked,
and the girl had answered "Yes."  It was not the part
of a friend to press upon her a gift that tasted
pungently of ruin and shame.

"No," said Margaret.  "Don't offer any more help,
please.  It hurts to keep on refusing it.  But it isn't
what Mrs. Jakes woke me up to beg of me and it isn't
what I got up from bed to grant her.  Can't you see
what I mean?  I 've told you all about it, and I 'm
trusting you to understand."

"I understand," he answered.  "But I hate to let
you go down to that drunken beast.  And suppose the
pair of you can't manage him—what will you do then?
You 'll have to get help somewhere, won't you?"

"I suppose so," said Margaret.

"Well, get me," he urged, and came a pace nearer,
so that only the width of the two bottom steps
separated them and she could feel his breath upon the hands
that hung clasped before her.  "Let me help, if you
need it," he begged.  "I 'll wait, out of sight.
Mrs. Jakes shan't guess I 'm there.  But I won't be far, and
if you just call quietly, I 'll hear.  It—it would be kind
of you—merciful to let me bear just a hand.  And if
you don't call, I 'll not show myself.  There can't be
any harm in that."

"No," agreed Margaret, uncertainly.  "There can't
be any harm in that."

She saw that he moved abruptly, and had an
impression that he made some gesture almost of glee.
But he thanked her in quiet tones for her grace of
consent.

Mrs. Jakes, returning, found Margaret as she had left
her.  She had in her hand one of those stable lanterns
which consist of a glass funnel protected by a wire cage,
and she spilled its light about her feet as she went and
walked in a shifting ring of light through a darkness
made more opaque by the contrast.  There was visible
of her chiefly her worn elastic-sided boots as she came
down the steps with the lantern swinging in her hand;
and the little feet in those uncomely coverings were
somehow appealing and pathetic.

"I found it in Fat Mary's room," she explained.
"She nearly woke up when I was taking it."

Margaret wondered whether Kamis were near enough
to hear and acute enough to picture the tiptoe search
for the lantern by the bedside of snoring Kafirs, the
breathless halts when one stirred, the determination
that carried the quest through, and the prosaic
matter-of-factness of it all.

They stumbled their way arm in arm across the spit
of patched grass that stood between the house and the
road, and the lantern diffused about them a yellow haze.
Then their feet recognized soft loose dust and they were
on the road and moving along it.

"It is n't far," said Mrs. Jakes, in her flat quiet voice.
"Be careful, my dear; there are sometimes snakes on
the road at night."

Dr. Jakes was apparent first as an indeterminate bulk
against the dust that spread before them under the
lantern.  Mrs. Jakes saw him first.

"He has n't moved," she remarked.  "I was rather
afraid he might have.  These fits, you know—he 's had
them before."

She stood at his head, with the lantern held before
her, like a sentinel at a lying-in-state, and the whole
unloveliness of his slumbers was disclosed.  He sprawled
upon the road in his formal black clothes, with one arm
outstretched and his face upturned to the grave
innocence of the night.  It had not the cast of repose; he
seemed to have carried his torments with him to his
couch of dust and to brood upon them under his mask
of sleep.  What was ghastly was the eyelids which
were not fully shut down, but left bare a thin line of
white eyeball under each, and touched the broken
countenance with deathliness.  His coat, crumpled about
him and over him, gave an impression of a bloated and
corpulent body, and he was stained from head to foot
with dust.

Mrs. Jakes surveyed him without emotion.

"He 's undone his collar, anyhow," she remarked.

"Did n't you do it?" asked Margaret, seeing the
white ends that rose on each side of his chin.

"No; I forgot," was the answer.  "He can't be very
bad, since he did that."

Margaret detected the hand of Kamis in this precaution.
She said nothing, but stooped with Mrs. Jakes
to try to rouse the doctor.  The sickening reek of the
man's breath affronted her as she bent over him.

Mrs. Jakes shook him and called on him by name in
a loud half-whisper, lowering her face close to his ear.
She was persuasive, remonstrant; she had the manner
of reasoning briskly with him and rousing him to better
ways.

"Eustace, Eustace," she called, hushing her tones
as though the night and the desert were perilous with
ears.  "Come, Eustace; you can get up if you try.
Make just one effort, now, and you 'll be all right."

The gurgle of his breath was the only answer.

"We 'll have to lift him," she said, staring across his
body at Margaret.

"All right," agreed the girl.

"Get hold of his right arm and I 'll take his left,"
directed Mrs. Jakes.  "If we get him on his feet,
perhaps he 'll rouse.  Are you ready?"

Margaret closed her lips and put forth the strength
that she had, and between them they dragged him to a
sitting posture, with his head hanging back and his
heels furrowed deep in the dust.

"Now, if I can just get behind him," panted Mrs. Jakes.
"Don't let go.  That's it.  Now!  Could you
just help to lift him straight up?"

Margaret went quickly to her aid.  It had become
horrible.  The gross carcass in their hands was inert
like a flabby corpse, and its mere weight overtaxed them.
They wrestled with it sobbingly, to the noise of their
harsh breath and the shuffle of their straining feet on
the grit of the road.  Suddenly Margaret ceased her
laboring and the doctor collapsed once more upon the
ground.

"Why did you do that?" cried Mrs. Jakes.  "He was
nearly up."

"It was my chest," answered Margaret weakly.  "It—it hurt."

There was a warm feeling in her throat and a taste in
her mouth which she knew of old.  She found her
handkerchief and dabbed with it at her lips.  The feeble
light of the lantern showed her the result—the red
spots on the white cambric.

"It 's just a strain," said Mrs. Jakes, dully.
"That 's all.  The doctor will see to it to-morrow.  If
you rest a moment, you 'll be all right."  She hesitated,
but her husband and her life's credit lay upon the
ground at her feet, and she could not weigh Margaret's
danger against those.  "You wouldn't leave me now,
my dear?" she supplicated.

"No," said the girl, after a moment's pause.  "I
won't leave you."

"What 's that?" cried Mrs. Jakes and put a quick
frightened hand upon her arm.  "Listen!  Who is it?"

Steps, undisguised and clear, passed from the grass
to the stone steps of the house and ascended, crossed
the stoep and were lost to hearing in the doorway.

The two women waited, breathless.  It sprang to
Margaret's mind that the lantern must have shown her
clearly to Kamis, where he waited in the darkness, and
he must have seen the climax of her efforts and her
handkerchief at her lips, and gone forthwith to the
study for the drugs which would put an end to the matter.

"Look," whispered Mrs. Jakes.  "Some one is striking
matches—in the study."

The window brightened and darkened again and then
lit with a steady glow; the invader had found a candle.
Mrs. Jakes dropped Margaret's arm.

"I must see who it is," she said.  "Walking into people's
houses like this."

Margaret held her back; she was starting forthwith
to bring the majesty of her presence to bear on the
unknown and possibly dangerous intruder.  Mrs. Jakes
had a house as well as a husband and could die at need
for either.

"No, don't go," said Margaret.  "I know who it is.
It's all right, if only you won't be—well, silly about
it."

"Who is it, then?" demanded Mrs. Jakes.

Margaret felt feeble and unequal to the position.  Her
chest was painful, she was cold, and now there was about
to be a delicate affair with Mrs. Jakes.  She could have
laughed at the growing complexity of things, but had the
wit not to.

"It 's a doctor," she said; "a real London doctor.  He
was passing when you left me to get the lantern, and I
wouldn't let him stay because I thought you 'd be
annoyed.  He 's gone into the house to—"

"Does he know?" whispered Mrs. Jakes, feverishly,
thrusting close to her.  "Does he know—about this?"  Her
downward-pointing finger indicated the slumbers
of Dr. Jakes.  "Say, can't you—does he know?"

"He 'd seen him," said Margaret.  "I expect he
loosened the collar—you know.  He wanted to help but
I wouldn't let him."

"Is he a friend of yours?" asked Mrs. Jakes again,
still in the same agitated whisper.

"Yes," answered Margaret.  "He is.  It 's all right,
really, if only you 'll be sensible and not make a fuss.
He 'll help us and then he 'll go away and he 'll say
nothing.  You did n't think I 'd do anything to hurt
you, did you?  Are n't we friends?"

Mrs. Jakes stood silent; she asked no questions as to
how a London doctor, a friend of Margaret's, chanced
to be walking upon the Karoo at night.

"Well," she said at last, with a long sigh; "perhaps
we might have needed some help, in any case."

That was all she said, till the footsteps came again
across the stoep and down the steps, more deliberately
this time, as though something were being carried with
precaution.  Then they were noiseless for a minute or
more on the grass, and at last the figure of Kamis came
into the further edge of the lighted circle.

"I had to do it," he said, before either of them could
speak, and showed the graduated glass in his hand.  "I
saw you with your handkerchief."

Margaret, with an instinct of apprehension, looked at
Mrs. Jakes.  At the first dim view of him, she had roused
herself from her dejection, and put on her prim, social
face to meet the London doctor effectively.  Her little
meaningless smile was bent for him; she would make a
blameless and uneventful drawing-room of the August
night and guard it against unseemly dramatics.

He turned from Margaret towards her and came further
into the lamp-light, and she had a clear view of the
black face and sorrowful, foolish negro features.  She
uttered a gasp that was like a low cry and stood aghast,
staring.

"Madam," began Kamis.

She shivered.  "A Kafir," she said.  "The doctor
will never forgive us."  And then, wheeling upon
Margaret, "And I 'll never forgive you.  You said we were
friends—and this is what you do to me."

"Mrs. Jakes," implored Margaret.  "You must be
sensible.  It 's all right, really.  This gentleman—"

"This gentleman," Mrs. Jakes uttered a passionate
spurt of laughter.  "Do you mean this nigger?
Gentleman, you call it?  A London doctor?  A friend of
yours?  A friend.  Ha, ha!"  She spun round again
towards Kamis, waiting with the glass in his hand, the
liquid in which shone greenish to the lamp.  "*Voetzaak!*"
she ordered, shrilly.  "*Hamba wena—ch'che.
Skellum.  Injah.  Voetzaak!*"

Kamis stood his ground.  He cast a look at Margaret,
past Mrs. Jakes, and spoke to her.

"Will she let me give him this?" he asked.  "Tell
her I am a doctor and this will bring him to very
quickly.  And then I 'll go away at once and never say
a word about it."

"Don't you dare touch him," menaced Mrs. Jakes.
"A filthy Kafir—I should think so, indeed."

Kamis went on in the same steady tone.  "If she
won't you must go in at once and send for another
doctor to-morrow.  This man ought to be reported."

"You dare," cried Mrs. Jakes.  "You 'd report him—a
Kafir."  She edged closer to the prostrate body of
Dr. Jakes and stood beside it like a beast-mother at bay.
"I 'll have you locked up—walking into my husband's
study like that."

"Mrs. Jakes."  Margaret tried once more.  "Please
listen.  If you 'll only let the doctor have this drink,
he 'll be able to walk.  If you don't, he 'll have to stay
here.  I am your friend; I got up when you came to me
and I said I wouldn't leave you even when I hurt my
chest.  Doesn't that prove that I am?  I wouldn't do
you any harm or shame you before other people for
anything.  What will Dr. Jakes say if he finds out that you
let me stay here pleading when I ought to be in bed?
He 's a doctor himself and he 'll be awfully annoyed—after
telling me I should get well, too.  Aren't you going
to give him a chance—and me?"

Mrs. Jakes merely glared stonily.

"Come," said Margaret.  "Won't you?"

Kamis uttered a smothered exclamation.  "I won't
wait," he said.  "I 'll count ten, slowly.  Then Miss
Harding must go in and I go away."

"Oh, don't begin that sort of thing," cried Margaret.
"Mrs. Jakes is going to be sensible.  Aren't you?"

There was no reply, only the stony and hostile stare
of the little woman facing them and the gray image
of disgrace.

"One," counted Kamis clearly.  "Two.  Three."

He counted with the stolid regularity of a clock; he
made as though to overturn the glass and waste its
contents in the dust as soon as he should have reached ten.
"Ten," he uttered, but held it safely still.  "Well?"

Mrs. Jakes did not move for some moments.  Then
she sighed and, still without speaking, moved away from
the slumbering doctor.  She walked a dozen paces from
the road and stood with her back to them.

With quick skilful movements, Kamis lifted the
unconscious man's head to the crook of his arm and the
rim of the glass clicked on his teeth.  Margaret walked
after Mrs. Jakes.

"Come," she said gently.  "I don't misunderstand.
You trusted me or you would n't have waked me.  Everything
will be all right soon and then you 'll forgive me."

"I won't—never."

Mrs. Jakes would not face her.  She stood looking
into the blackness, tense with enmity.

"Well, I hope you will," said Margaret.

They heard grunts from the doctor and then quavering
speech and one rich oath, and a noise of spitting.
The Kafir approached them noiselessly from behind
and paused at Margaret's side.

"That's done the trick," he said; "and he doesn't
even know who gave him the draft.  You 'll go in now?"

"Yes," said Margaret.  "You *have* been good, though."

Mrs. Jakes had returned to her husband; they were
for the moment alone.

"I didn't mean to force your hand," he whispered.
"But I had to.  A doctor has duties."

She gave him her hand.  "There was something I
wanted to tell you, but there 's no time to explain now.
Did you know you were wanted by the police?"

"Bless you, yes."  He smiled with a white flash of
teeth.  "Were you going to warn me?  How kind!
And now, in you go, and good night."

Dr. Jakes was sitting up, spitting with vigor and
astonishment.  He had taken a heroic dose of hair-raising
restoratives on the head of a poisonous amount of
whisky, and his palate was a moldering ruin.  But the
clearness of his faculties left nothing to be desired.

"Who 's that?" he demanded at sight of Margaret.
"Miss Harding.  How do you come to be out here at
this time?"

"You should time your fits more decently, doctor,"
answered Margaret coolly.

Mrs. Jakes hastened to explain more acceptably.  "I
was frightened, Eustace.  You looked so bad—and these
fits are terrible.  So I asked Miss Harding if she
wouldn't come and help me."

"A patient," said the doctor.  He turned over and
rose stiffly to his feet, dust-stained all over.  He stood
before her awkwardly.

"I am unfortunate," he said.  "You are in my care
and this is what happens.  It is my misfortune—and
my fault.  You 'll go back to bed now, Miss Harding,
please."

"Sure there 's nothing more you want?" inquired
Margaret.

"At once, please," he repeated.  "In the morning—but
go at once now."

On the stoep she paused to listen to them following
after her and heard a portion of Mrs. Jakes' excuses to
her husband.

"You looked so dreadful, Eustace, and I was frightened.
And then, you 're so heavy, and I suppose I was
tired, and to-night I couldn't quite manage by myself,
dear."

Margaret passed in at the door in order to cough
unheard, that nothing might be added to the tale of
Mrs. Jakes' delinquencies.





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`CHAPTER IX`:

.. class:: center large bold

   CHAPTER IX

.. vspace:: 2

"And what have we here?" said the stranger loudly.
"What have we here, now?"

Paul, sitting cross-legged in his old place under the
wall of the dam, with a piece of clay between his fingers,
looked round with a start.  The stranger had come up
behind him, treading unheard in his burst and broken
shoes upon the soft dust, and now stood leaning upon
a stick and smiling down upon him with a kind of
desperate jauntiness.  His attitude and manner, with their
parody of urbane ease, had for the moment power to
hide the miserable shabbiness of his clothes, which were
not so much broken and worn as decayed; it was decay
rather than hardship which marked the whole figure of
the man.  Only the face, clean-shaven save for a new
crop of bristles, had some quality of mobility and
temper, and the eyes with which he looked at Paul were
wary and hard.

"Oh, nothing," said Paul, uneasily, covering his clay
with one hand.  "Who are you?"

The stranger eyed him for some moments longer with
the shrewdness of one accustomed to read his fortune
in other men's faces, and while he did so the smile
remained fixed on his own as though he had forgotten
to take it off.

"Who am I!" he exclaimed.  "My boy, it 'd take a
long time to tell you.  But there 's one thing that
perhaps you can see for yourself—I 'm a gentleman."

Paul considered this information deliberately.

"Are you?" he said.

"I 'm dusty," admitted the other; "dusty both
inside and out.  And I 'm travelin' on foot—without
luggage.  So much I admit; I 've met with misfortunes.
But there 's one thing the devil himself can't
take away from me, and that 's the grand old name of
gentleman.  An' now, my lad, to business; you live at
that farm there?"

"Yes," replied Paul.  This tramp had points at
which he differed from other tramps, and Paul stared at
him thoughtfully.

"So far, so good," said the stranger.  "Question
number two: does it run to a meal for a gentleman
on his travels, an' a bed of sorts?  Answer me that.
I don't mean a meal with a shilling to pay at the end
of it, because—to give it you straight—I 'm out of
shillings for the present.  Now, speak up."

"If you go up there, they 'll give you something to
eat, and you can sleep somewhere," said Paul, a little
puzzled by the unusual rhetoric.

The stranger nodded approvingly.  "It's all right,
then?" he said.  "Good—go up one.  But say!  Ain't
you going there yourself pretty soon?"

"Presently," said Paul.

"Then, if it 's all the same to you," said the stranger,
"I 'll wait and go up with you.  Nothing like being
introduced by a member," he added, as he lowered
himself stiffly to a seat among the rank grass under the
wall.  "Gives a feller standing, don't it?"

He took off his limp hat and let himself fall back
against the slope of the wall, grunting with appreciation
of the relief after a day's tramp in the sun.  His
rather full body and thin legs, ending in a pair of
ruinous shoes that let his toes be seen, lay along the
grass like an obscene corpse, and above them his feeble,
sophisticated face leered at Paul as though to invite
him to become its confidant.

"You go on with what you 're doing," urged the
stranger.  "Don't let me hinder you.  Makin' marbles,
were you—or what?"

"No," said Paul.  He hesitated, for an idea had
come to him while he watched the stranger.  "But—but
if you 'll do something for me, I 'll give you a
shilling."

"Eh?"  The other rolled a dull eye on him.  "It
isn't murder, is it?  I should want one-and-six for
that.  I never take less."

Paul flushed.  "I don't know what you mean," he
said.  "I only want you to keep still like that while
I—while I make a model of you.  You said you had n't
got any shillings just now."

"Did I say that?" inquired the stranger.  "Well,
well!  However, chuck us over your shilling and I 'll
see what I can do for you."

He made a show of biting the coin and subjecting
it to other tests of its goodness while the boy looked on
anxiously.  Paul was relieved when at last he pocketed
it and lay back again.

"I 'll get rid of it somehow," he said.  "It's very
well made.  And now, am I to look pleasant, or what?"

"Don't look at all," directed Paul.  "Just be
like—like you are.  You can go to sleep if you like."

"I never sleep on an empty stomach," replied the
stranger, arranging himself in an attitude of comfort.

"Is this all right for you?  Fire away, then, Mike
Angelo.  Can I talk while you 're at it?"

"If you want to," answered Paul.  The clay which
he had been shaping was another head, and now he
kneaded it out of shape between his hands and rounded
it rudely for a sketch of the face before him.  The
Kafir, Kamis, had bidden him refrain from his attempts
to do mass and detail at once, to form the features and
the expression together; but Paul knew he had little
time before him and meant to make the most of it.
The tramp had his hands joined behind his head and
his eyes half-closed; he offered to the boy the spectacle
of a man beaten to the very ground and content to take
his ease there.

"D'you do much of this kind of thing?" asked the
tramp, when some silent minutes had passed.

"Yes," said Paul, "a lot."

"Nothing like it, is there?" asked the other.  He
spoke lazily, absorbed in his comfort.  "We 've all got
our game, every bally one of us.  Mine was actin'."

"Acting?"  Paul paused in his busy fingering to
look up.  "Were you an actor?"

The actors he knew looked out of frames in his
mother's little parlor, intense, well-fed, with an
inhuman brilliance of attire.

"Even me," replied the tramp equably.  He did not
move from his posture nor uncover his drowsy eyes;
the swollen lids, in which the veins stood out in purple,
did not move, but his voice took a rounder and more
conscious tone as he went on: "And there was a time,
my boy, when actin' meant me and I meant actin'.
In '87, I was playing in 'The Demon Doctor,' and
drawing my seven quid a week—you believe me.  Talk
of art—why!  I 've had letters from Irving that 'd
make you open your eyes."

"I 've heard about Irving," said Paul, glancing back
and fore from his clay to the curiously pouched mouth
of his recumbent model.

"Fancy," exclaimed the tramp softly.  "But it was
a great game, a great game.  Sometimes, even now, I
sort of miss it.  And the funny thing is—it is n't the
grub and the girls and the cash in my breeches pocket
that I miss so much.  It 's the bally work.  It 's the
work, my boy."  He seemed to wonder torpidly at
himself, and for some seconds he continued to repeat,
as though in amazement: "It 's the work."  He went
on: "Seems as if once an actor, always an actor,
don't it?  A feller 's got talent in him and he 's got
to empty it out, or ache.  Some sing, some write, some
paint; you prod clay about; but I 'm an actor.  Time
was, I could act a gas meter, if it was the part, and
that 's my trouble to this day."

He ceased; he had delivered himself without once
looking up or reflecting the matter of his speech by
a change of expression.  For all the part his body or
his features had in his words, it might have been a dead
man speaking.  Paul worked on steadily, giving small
thought to anything but the shape that came into being
under his hands.  His standard of experience was
slight; he knew too little of men and their vicissitudes
to picture to himself the processes by which the face
he strove to reproduce sketchily could have been shaped
to its cast of sorrowful pretense; he only felt, cloudily
and without knowledge, that it signaled a strange and
unlovely fate.

His knack served him well on that evening, and
besides, there was not an elusive remembrance of form
to be courted, but the living original before him.  The
tramp seemed to sleep; and swiftly, with merciless
assurance, the salient thing about him came into existence
between Paul's hands.  Long before the light failed or
the gourd-drum at the farmhouse door commenced its
rhythmic call, the thing was done—a mere sketch, with
the thumb-prints not even smoothed away, but stamped
none the less with the pitiless print of life.

"Done it?" inquired the tramp, rousing as Paul
uncrossed his legs and prepared to put the clay away.
"Let 's have a look?"

"It wants to be made smooth," explained Paul, as he
passed it to him.  "And it's soft, of course, so don't
squeeze it."

"I won't squeeze it," the tramp assured him and
took it.  He gazed at it doubtfully, letting it lie on
his knee.  "Oho!" he said.

"It's only a quick thing," said Paul.  "There
was n't time to do it properly."

"Wasn't there?" said the tramp, without looking up.
"It 's like me, is it?  Damn you, why don't you say
it and have done with it?"

"Why," cried Paul bewildered, and coloring furiously.
"What's the matter?  It *is* like you.  I modeled
it from you just now as you were lying there."

"An' paid me a shilling for it."  The tramp thrust
an impetuous hand into his pocket; possibly he was
inspired to draw forth the coin and fling it in Paul's
face.  If so, he decided against it; he looked at the coin
wryly and returned it to its place.

"Well," he said finally; "you 've got me nicely.
The cue is to shy you and your bally model into the
dam together—an' what about my supper?  Eh?  Yes,
you 've got me sweetly.  Here, take the thing, or I
might make up my mind to go hungry for the pleasure
of squashing it flat on your ugly mug."

"You don't like it?" asked Paul, as he received the
clay again from the tramp's hands.  He did not
understand; for all he knew, there were men who surprised
their mothers by being born with that strange stamp
upon them.

The tramp gave him a slow wrathful look.  "The
joke 's on me," he answered.  "*I* know.  I look a
drunk who 's been out all night; I 'm not denying it.
I 've got a face that 'll get me blackballed for admission
to hell.  I know all that and you 've made a picture
of it.  But don't rub it in."

Paul looked at the clay again, and although the man's
offense was dawning on his understanding, he smiled at
the sight of a strong thing strongly done.

"I didn't mean any joke," he protested.

"Let 's call it a joke," said the tramp.  "Once when
I was nearly dying of thirst up beyond Kimberly, a
feller that I asked for water gave me a cup of paraffin.
That was another joke.  Tramps are fair game for you
jokers, aren't they?  Well, if that meal you spoke
about wasn't a joke, too, let 's be getting up to the
house."

"All right," said Paul.  He hesitated a minute, for
he hated to part with the thing he had made.  "Oh,
it can go," he exclaimed, and threw the clay up over
the wall.  It fell into the dam above their heads with
a splash.

"I didn't mean any joke, truly," he assured the tramp.

"Don't rub it in," begged the other.  "We don't
want to make a song about it.  And anyhow, I want to
try to forget it.  So come on—do."

They came together through the kraals and across the
deserted yard to the house-door, the tramp looking about
him at the apparatus of well-fed and well-roofed life
with an expression of genial approval.  Paul would have
taken him round to the back-door, but he halted.

"Not bad," he commented.  "Not bad at all,
considering.  An' this is the way in, I suppose."

"We 'd better go round," suggested Paul, but the
tramp turned on the doorstep and waved a nonchalant
hand.

"Oh, this 'll do," he said, and there was nothing for
Paul to do but to follow him into the little passage.

The door of the parlor stood open, and within was
Mrs. du Preez, flicking a duster at the furniture in a
desultory fashion.  The tramp paused and looked at her
appraisingly.

"The lady of the house, no doubt," he surmised, with
his terrible showy smile, before she could speak.  "It 's
the boy, madam; he wouldn't take no for an answer.
I *had* to come home to supper with him."

His greedy quick eyes were busy about the little room;
they seemed to read a price-ticket on each item of its
poor pretentious furniture and assess the littleness of
those signed and framed photographs which inhabited
it like a company of ghosts.

"Why," he cried suddenly, and turned from his inspection
of these last to stare again at Mrs. du Preez.

His plausible fluency had availed for the moment to
hide the quality of his clothes and person, but now
Mrs. du Preez had had time to perceive the defects of both.

"What d'you mean?" she demanded.  "How d 'you
get in here?  Who are you?"

The tramp was still staring at her.  "It 's on the tip
of my tongue," he said.  "Give me a moment.
Why"—with a joyous vociferation—"who 'd ha'
thought it?  It 's little Sinclair, as I 'm a sinnair—little
Vivie Sinclair of the old brigade, stap my vitals if
it ain't."

"What?"

The man filled the narrow door, and Paul had to
stoop under his elbow to see his mother.  She was leaning
with both hands on the table, searching his face with
eyes grown lively and apprehensive in a moment.  The
old name of her stage days had power to make this
change in her.

"Who is it?" she asked.

"Think," begged the tramp.  "Try!  No use?
Well—" he swept her a spacious bow, battered hat
to heart, foot thrown back—"look on this picture"—he
tapped his bosom—"and on that."  His big
creased forefinger flung out towards the photograph
which had the place of honor on the crowded
mantel-shelf and dragged her gaze with it.

"It 's not—"  Mrs. du Preez glanced rapidly back and
forth between the living original and the glazed,
immaculate counterfeit—"it isn't—it can't be—*Bailey*?"

"It is; it can," replied the tramp categorically, and
Boy Bailey, in the too, too solid flesh advanced into the
room.

Mrs. du Preez had a moment of motionless amaze, and
then with a flushed face came in a rush around the
table to meet him.  They clasped hands and both
laughed.

"Why," cried Mrs. du Preez; "if this don't—but
Bailey!  Where ever do you come from, an' like this?
Glad to see you?  Yes, I am glad; you 're the first
of the old crowd that I 've seen since I—I married."

"Married, eh?"  The tramp tempered an over-gallant
and enterprising attitude.  "Then I mustn't—eh?"

His face was bent towards hers and he still held her
hands.

"No; you mustn't," spoke Paul unexpectedly, from
the doorway, where he was an absorbed witness of the
scene.

They both turned sharply; they had forgotten the boy.

"Don't be silly, Paul," said his mother, rather
sharply.  "Mr. Bailey was only joking."  But she
freed her hands none the less, while Mr. Bailey bent his
wary gaze upon the boy.

The interruption served to bring the conversation
down to a less emotional plane, and Paul sat down on
a chair just within the door to watch the unawaited
results of promising a meal to a chance tramp.  The
effect on his mother was not the least remarkable
consequence.  The veld threw up a lamentable man at your
feet; in charity and some bewilderment you took him
home to feed him, and thereupon your mother, your
weary, petulant, uncertain mother, took him to her arms
and became, by that unsavory contact, pink and vivacious.

"There 's more of you," said Mrs. du Preez, making
a fresh examination of her visitor.  "You 're fatter
than what you were, Bailey, in those old days."

Boy Bailey nodded carelessly.  "Yes, my figure 's
gone too," he agreed; "gone with all the rest.
Friends, position, reputation—all but my spirits and my
talents.  I know.  Ah, but those were good times,
weren't they?"

"Too good to last," sighed Mrs. du Preez.

"They didn't last for me," said Boy Bailey.
"When we broke down at Fereira—lemme see!  That
must be nearly twenty years ago, ain't it?—I took my
leave of Fortune.  Never another glance did I get
from her; not one bally squint.  I did advance agent
for a fortune-teller for a bit; I even came down to
clerking in a store.  I 've been most things a man can
be in this country, except rich.  And why is it?
What 's stood in my way all along?  What 's been my
handicap that holds me back and nobbles me every time
I face the starter?"

"Ah!" exclaimed Mrs. du Preez sympathetically.

"I don't need to tell you," continued Boy Bailey,
"you not being one of the herd, that it 's temperament
that has me all the time.  I don't boast of it, but you
know how it is.  You remember me when I had scope;
you 've seen me at the game; you can judge for
yourself.  A man with temperament in this country has got
as much chance as a snowflake in hell.  Perhaps,
though, you 've found that out for yourself before now."

"Don't I know it," retorted Mrs. du Preez.  "Bailey,
if you 'll believe me, I have n't heard that word
'temperament,' since I saw you last.  Talk of scope—why you
can go to the winder there and see with your eyes all
the scope I 've had since I married.  It 's been tough,
Bailey; it 's been downright tough."

"Still—" began Mr. Bailey, but paused.  "We must
have another talk," he substituted.  "There 's a lot to
hear and to tell.  Do you think you could manage to
put me up for a day or two?  I suppose your husband
wouldn't mind?"

"Why should he?" demanded Mrs. du Preez.
"You 're the first in all these years.  Still, it wouldn't
be a bad idea if you was to have a change of clothes
before he sees you, Bailey.  It isn't me that minds,
you know; so far as that goes, you 'd be welcome in
anything; but—"

Boy Bailey waved her excuses away.  "I understand,"
he said.  "I understand.  It's these prejudices—have
your own way."

The resources of Christian du Preez's wardrobe were
narrow, and Christian's wife was further hampered in
the selection of clothes for her guest by a doubt
whether, if she selected too generously, Christian might
not insist on the guest stripping as soon as he set
eyes on him.  Her discretion revealed itself, when
Mr. Bailey was dressed, in a certain sketchiness of his total
effect, an indeterminate quality that was not lessened
by the fact that all of the garments were too narrow
and too long; and though no alteration of his original
appearance could fail to improve it, there was no
hiding his general character of slow decay.

"It 's hardly a disguise," commented Boy Bailey, as
he surveyed himself when the change was made.
"Disguise is n't the word that covers it, and I 'm hanged if
I know what word does.  But these pants are chronic."

"You can roll 'em up another couple of inches,"
suggested Mrs. du Preez.

"It isn't that," complained Mr. Bailey.  "If they
want to cover my feet, they can.  But I 'd need a
waist like a wasp before the three top buttons would
see reason.  Damme, I feel as if I was going to break
in halves.  What 's that dear boy of yours grinning at?"

"I wasn't grinning," protested Paul.  "I was only
going to say that father 's coming in now."

The tramp and his mother exchanged a glance of
which the meaning was hidden from him, the look of
allies preparing for a crucial moment.  Already they
were leagued to defeat the husband.

Christian du Preez came with heavy footsteps along
the passage from the outer door, saw that there was a
stranger in the parlor and paused.

"Christian," said Mrs. du Preez, with a false
sprightliness.  "Come in; here 's a—an old friend of
mine come to see us."

"An old friend?"

The Boer stared at the stranger standing with
straddled legs before the fireplace, and recognized him
forthwith.  Without speaking, he made a quick
comparison of the bold photograph, whose fleshy perfection
had so often invited him to take stock of his own
imperfections, and then met the living Boy Bailey's rigid
smile with a smile of his own that had the effect of
tempering the other's humor.

"I see," said the Boer.  "What's the name?"  He
came forward and read from the photograph where
the bold showy signature sprawled across a corner.
"'Yours blithely, Boy Bailey,'" he read.  "And you
are Boy Bailey?"

"You 've got it," replied the photograph's original.
"Older, my dear sir, and it may be meatier; but the
same man in the main, and happy to make the
acquaintance of an old friend's husband."

His impudence cost him an effort in face of the Boer's
stare of contemptuous amusement, a stare which
comprehended, item by item, each article of his grotesque
attire and came to rest, without diminishing its
intensity, upon the specious, unstable countenance.

"*Allemachtag,*" was the Boer's only reply, as he
completed his survey.

"I don't think you saw Bailey, that time we were
married, Christian," said Mrs. du Preez.  "But he
was a dear old friend of mine."

Christian nodded.  "You walked here?" he inquired
of the guest.  On the Karoo, the decent man
does not travel afoot, and none of the three others who
were present missed the implication of the inquiry.
Mrs. du Preez colored hotly; Boy Bailey introduced his
celebrated wave of the hand.

"I see you know what walking means," he replied.
"It ain't a human occupation—is it now?  What I say
is—if man had been meant for a *voetganger* (a
walker)"—he watched the effect of the Dutch word on
the Boer—"he 'd have been made with four feet.  Is n't
that right?  You bet your shirt it is."

"My shirt."  Christian seemed puzzled for the
moment, though the phrase was one which his wife used.
She watched him uneasily.  "Oh, I see.  Yes, you can
keep that shirt you 've got on.  I don't want it."

Boy Bailey made him a bow.  "Ah, thanks.  A shirt
more or less don't matter, does it?"

Christian turned to Paul.  "You brought him in?"

"Yes," answered Paul.

"Well, come and help me with the sacks.  Your
mother an' her friend wants to talk, an' we don't want
to listen to them talking."

Boy Bailey watched them depart.

"What 's he mean by that?" he asked of Mrs. du Preez.

"Never mind what he means," she answered.  "He
can't have his own way in everything.  Sit down an'
tell me about the others an' what happened to them
after I left.  There was Kitty Cassel—what did she
do?  Go home?"

Boy Bailey pursed his lips.  "No," he answered
slowly.  "She and I went down to Capetown together.
She did n't come to any good, Kitty did n't.  Ask me
about some one else; I don't want to offend your ears."

.. vspace:: 2

But Mrs. du Preez was in error in one particular:
Christian had seen Boy Bailey "that time we were
married," and remembered him very clearly.  Those were
days when he, too, lived vividly and the petty incidents
and personalities of the moment wrote themselves deep
on his boyish mind.  As he worked at the empty sacks,
telling them over by the stencils upon them, while Paul
waded among them to his knees and flung them towards
him, he returned in the spirit to those poignant years
when a thin girl walking across a little makeshift stage
could shake him to his foundations.

He remembered the little town to which the
commando had returned to be paid off and disbanded, a
single street straggling under a rampart of a
gray-green mountain, with the crude beginnings of other
streets budding from it on either side, and the big
brown, native location like a tuberous root at its lower
end.  Along its length, beetle-browed shops, with
shaded stoeps and hitching-rails for horses, showed
interior recesses of shade and gave an illusion of dignified
prosperous commerce, and at the edge of it all there was
a string of still pools, linked by a dribble of water,
which went by the name of a river and nurtured along
its banks gums and willows, the only trees of greater
stature than a mimosa-bush that Christian had ever seen.

It was a small, stagnant veld dorp, in fact, one of
hundreds that are littered over the face of the Colony,
and have for their districts a more than metropolitan
importance.  Christian knew it as a focus of life, the
center of incomprehensible issues and concerns and when
his corps returned to it, flavored in its single street
the pungencies of life about town.  The little war in
the neighborhood had drawn to it the usual riff-raff
of the country that follows on the heels of troops,
wherever armed men are gathered together, predatory
women too wise in their generation, a sample or two
of the nearly extinct species of professional
card-sharper, a host of the sons of Lazarus intent upon
crumbs that should fall from the pay-table, and a fair
collection of ordinary thieves.  These gave the single
street a vivacity beyond anything it had known, and
the armed burgher, carrying his rifle slung on his back
from mere habit, would be greeted by the name of
"Piet" and invited to drink once for every ten steps he
took upon it.

Hither came Christian—twenty-two years of age,
six-foot in his bare soles of slender thew and muscle, not
yet bearded and hungry with many appetites after a
campaign against Kafirs.  The restless town was a bait
for him.

At that time, there was much in him of that
solemn-eyed quality which came to be Paul's.  The steely
women laughed harshly as he passed them by, with all
the sweetness of his youth in his still face, his lips parted,
his look resting on them and beyond them to the virtues
and the delicacy they had thrown off to walk the faster
on their chosen road.  His ears softened their
laughter, his eyes redeemed their bitterness; everything
was transfigured for him by the dynamic power of his
mere innocence and his potent belief in his own
inferiority to the splendor of all that offered itself to
his vision.  He saw his comrades, fine shots and hard
men on the trek, lapse into drunkenness and evil
communications, and it was in no way incompatible with his
own ascetic cleanliness of apprehension that he
excused them on the grounds of the hardships they had
undergone.  He could idealize even a sot puking in
a gutter.

It was here that he saw a stage-play for the first
time in his life, sitting in a back-seat in the town hall
among young shop-assistants and workmen, not a little
distracted between the strange things upon the stage
which he had paid to witness and the jocular
detachment from them by the young men about him.  The
play at first was incomprehensible; the chambermaid
and the footman, conversing explanatorily, with which
it opened, were figures he was unable to recognize, and
he could not share the impression that seemed to
prevail among the characters in general that the fat, whitish
heroine was beautiful.  The villain, too, was murderous
in such a crude fashion; not once did he make a
clean job of an assassination.  Christian felt himself
competent to criticize, since it was only a week or so
since he had pulled a trigger and risen on his elbow
to see his man halt in mid-stride and pitch face
forward to the earth.  He was confirmed in his
dissatisfaction by the demeanor of his neighbors; they, men
about town, broken to the drama and its surprises, were
certainly not taking the thing seriously.  After a while,
therefore, he made no effort to keep sight of the thread
of the play; he sat in an idle content, watching the
women on the stage, curious to discover what it was in
each one of them that was wrong and vaguely repellent.

His neighbors had no doubts about it.  "There 's not
a leg in the whole caboodle," one remarked.  "It 's all
mouth and murder, this is."

Christian did not clearly understand the first phrase,
but the second was plain and he smiled in agreement.
He looked up to take stock of another character, a girl
who made her entrance at that moment, and ceased to
smile.  Her share in the scene was unimportant enough,
and she had but a few words to speak and nothing to do
but to walk forward and back again.  She was thin
and girlish and carried herself well, moving with a
graceful deliberation and speaking in an appealing little
tinkle to which the room lent a certain ring and
resonance; she accosted the villain who replied with
brutality; she smiled and turned from him, made a face
and passed out again.  And that was all.

The young man who had deplored the absence of legs
nudged his neighbor to look at the tall young Boer and
made a joke in a cautious whisper.  His precaution
was unnecessary; he might have shouted and Christian
would not have heard.  He was like a man stunned by
a great revelation, sitting bolt upright and staring at
the stage and its lighted activity with eyes dazzled by
a discovery.  For the first time in his life he had seen
a woman, little enough to break like a stick across his
knee, brave and gay at once, delicate and tender,
touching him with the sense of her strength and courage
while her femininity made all the male in him surge
into power.  Gone was his late attitude of humorous
judgment, that could detach the actress from her work
and assess her like a cow; the smile, the little
contemptuous grimace had blown it all away.  He was aghast,
incapable of reducing his impression to thoughts.  For a
while, it did not occur to him that it would be possible
to see her again.  When it did, he leaned across the
two playgoers who were next to him and lifted a
program from the lap of the third, who gaped at him but
found nothing to say.

"That *meisjie*, the one in a red dress—is her name
in this?" he inquired of his neighbor, and surprised
him into assistance.  Together they found it; the
unknown was Miss Vivie Sinclair.

"Skinny, wasn't she?" commented the helpful
neighbor sociably.

But Christian was already on his feet and making
his way out, and the conversational one got nothing
but a slow glare for an answer across intervening
heads.

And yet the truth of it was, a connoisseur in girls
could have matched Miss Vivie Sinclair a hundred
times over, so little was there in her that was peculiar
or rare.  The connoisseur would have put her down
without hesitation for a product of that busy
manufactory which melts down the material of so many good
housemaids to make it into so many bad actresses.  Her
sex and a grimace—these were the total of her assets,
and yet she was as good a peg as another for a cloudy
youth to drape with the splendors of his inexperienced
fancy and glorify with the hues of his secret longings.
Probably she had no very clear idea of herself in those
days; she was neither happy nor sad, as a general thing;
and her aspirations aimed much more definitely at
the symptoms of success—frocks, bills lettered large
with her name, comely young men in hot pursuit of her,
gifts of jewelry—than at success itself.  As she passed
down the main street next morning, on her way to
the telegraph office in the town hall, she offered to
the slow, appraising looks from the stoeps a sketchy
impression of a rather strained modernity, an effect of
deftly managed skirts and unabashed ankles which in
themselves were sufficient to set Fereira thinking.  It
was as she emerged from the telegraph office that she
came face to face with Christian.

"Well, where d'you think you 're comin' to?"

This was her greeting as he pulled up all standing to
avert a collision.  Clothes to fit both his stature and
his esthetic sense had not been procurable, and he had
been only able to wash himself to a state of levitical
cleanliness.  But his youthful bigness and his obvious
reverence of her served his purpose.  She stood looking
at him with a smile.

"I saw you," he said, "in the play."

"Did you?  What d' you think of it?"

"*Allemachtag,*" he answered.  "I have been thinking
of it all night."

To his eye, she was all she had promised to be.  The
fragility of her was most wonderful to him, accustomed
to the honest motherly brawn of the girls of his
own race.  The rather aggressive perkiness of her
address was the smiling courage that had thrilled and
touched him.  He stood staring, unable to carry the
talk further.

But it was for this kind of thing that Miss Vivie
Sinclair had "gone on the stage," and she was not at
all at a loss.

"I 'm going this way," she said, and in her hands,
Christian was wax—willing wax.  He found himself
walking at her side under the eyes of the town.  She
waited before she spoke again till they were by the
stoep of Pagan's store, where a dozen loungers became
rigid and watchful as they passed.

"You 've heard about the smash-up?" she inquired then.

"Smash-up?"

"Our smash-up?  Oh, a regular mess we 're in, the
whole lot of us.  You had n't heard?"

"No," he answered.

"Padden 's cleared out.  He was our manager, you
know, and now he 's run away with the treasury and
left us high and dry.  Went last night, it seems, after
the show."

"Left you?" repeated Christian.  The old story was
a new one to him and he did not understand.  Miss
Sinclair thought him dense, but proceeded to enlighten
him in words of one syllable, as it were.

"That 's why I was telegraphing," she concluded.
"There was a feller in Capetown I used to know; I
want to strike him for my fare out of this."

So she was in trouble; there was a call upon her
courage, an attack on her defenselessness.  Miss Sinclair,
glancing sidelong at his face, saw it redden quickly
and was confirmed in her hope that the "feller" in
Capetown was but an alternative string to her bow.

"That telegram took all I 'd got but a couple of shillings,"
she added.  "Padden had been keeping us short
for a long time."

The long street straggled under the sun, bare to its
harsh illumination, a wide tract of parched dust hemmed
between walls and roofs of gray corrugated iron.  The
one thing that survived that merciless ordeal of light
without loss or depreciation was the girl.  They halted
at the door of the one-storied hotel where her room
was and here again the shaded stoep was full of ears
and eyes and Christian had to struggle with words to
make his meaning clear to her and keep it obscure to
every one else.

"It 'll be all right," he assured her stammeringly.
"I 'll see that it 's all right.  I 'll come here an' see
you."

"When?" she asked, and helped him with a suggestion.
"This evening?  There 'll be no show to-night."

"This evening," he agreed.

Miss Sinclair gave him her best smile, all the better
for the mirth that helped it out.  She was as much
amused as she was relieved.  As she passed the bar on
her way indoors, she winked guardedly to a florid youth
within who stood in an attitude of listening.

If Christian had celebrated the occasion with
libations in the local fashion, if he had talked about it
and put his achievement to the test of words—if, even,
he had been capable of thinking about it in any clear
and sober manner instead of merely relishing it with
every fiber of his body—the evening's interview might
have resolved itself into an act of charity, involving
the sacrifice of nothing more than a few sovereigns.
As it was, he spent the day in germinating hopes and
educating his mind to entertain them.  Under the
stimulating heat of his sanguine youth, they burgeoned
superbly.

As he walked away from the hotel, the florid youth
spoke confidentially to the fat shirt-sleeved barman.

"Hear that?" he asked.  "*She* 'll do all right, she
will.  That 's where a girl 's better off than a man.
Who 's the feller, d'you know?"

The barman heaved himself up to look through the
window, and laughed wheezily.  He was a married man
and adored his children, but it was his business to be
knowing and worldly.

"It 's young Du Preez," he answered, as Christian
stalked away.  "One of them Boers, y'know.  Got a
farm out on the Karoo."

"Rich?" queried the other.

"Not bad," said the barman.  "Most of those Dutch
could buy you an' me an' use us for mantel ornaments,
if they had the good taste."

"So—ho," exclaimed the florid youth.  "But they
don't carry it about with 'em, worse luck."

He sighed and grew thoughtful.  He was thoughtful
at intervals for the rest of the morning, and by the
afternoon was melancholy and uncertain of step.  But
he was on hand and watchful when Christian arrived.

Christian was vaguely annoyed when a young man of
suave countenance and an expression of deep solemnity
thrust up to him at the hotel door and stood swaying and
swallowing and making signs as though to command his
attention.

"What d'you want?" he demanded.

"Word with you," requested the other.  "Word
with you."

He was sufficiently unlike anything that was native
to Fereira to be recognizable as an actor and Christian
suffered himself to be beckoned into the bar.

"Shall I do it or you?" asked the other.  "I shtood
so many to-day, sheems to me it 's your turn.  Mine 's
a whisky.  Now, 'bout this li'l girl upshtairs."

"Eh?"  Christian was startled.

"I 'm man of the world," the other went on, with the
seriousness of the thoroughly drunken.  "Know more
'bout the world then ever you knew in yer bally life.
An' I don't blame you—norra bit.  Now what I want
shay is this: I can fix it for you if you 're good for
a fiver.  Jush a fiver—shave trouble and time, eh?
Nice li'l girl, too.  Worth it."

Christian watched him lift his glass and drink.  He
was perplexed; these folk seemed to have a language of
their own and to be incomprehensible to ordinary folk.

"Worth it?" he repeated.  "Fix *what*?" he demanded.

"Nod 's good 's wink," answered the other.  "Don't
want to shout it.  Bend your long ear down to me—tell
you."

They had a corner by the bar to themselves.  Near
the window the barman had a customer after his own
heart and was repeating to him an oracular saying by
his youngest daughter but two, glancing sideways while
he spoke to see if Christian and the other were listening.

Christian bent, and the hot breath of the other,
reeking of the day's drinking, beat on his neck and the side
of his head.  The hoarse whisper, with its infernal
suggestion, seemed to come warm from a pit of vileness
within the man's body.

"Is that plain 'nough?"

Christian stood upright again, trembling from head
to foot with some cold emotion far transcending any
rage he had ever felt.  For some instant he could not
lift his hand; he had seen the last foul depths of evil
and was paralyzed.  The other lifted his glass again.
His movement released the Boer from the spell.

He took the man by the wrist that held the glass with
so deadly a deliberation that the barman missed his
hostile purpose and continued to talk, leaning with his fat,
mottled arms folded on the bar.

"What you doin', y' fool?"  The cry was from the
florid youth.

"Ah!"  Christian put out his strength with a maniac
fury, and the youth's hand and the glass in it were
dashed back into that person's face.  No hand but his
own struck him, and the countenance Christian saw as
a blurred white disk broke under the blow and showed
red cracks.  He struck again and again; the barman
shouted and men came running in from outside.  Christian
dropped the wrist he held and turned away.  Those
in the doorway gave him passage.  On the floor in the
corner the florid youth bled and vomited.

Christian knew him later as a bold and serene face
in a plush photograph frame, signed across the lower
right corner: "Yours blithely, Boy Bailey."

How he made inquiries for the girl's room and came
at last to the door of it was never a clear memory to
him.  But he could always recall that small austere
interior of whitewash and heat-warped furniture to which
he entered at her call, to find her sitting on the narrow
bed.  He came to her bereft of the few faculties she
had left him, grave, almost stern, gripping himself by
force of instinct to save himself from the outburst of
emotion to which the scene in the bar had made him
prone.  Everything tender and protective in his nature
was awake and crying out; he saw her as the victim of
a sacrilegious outrage, threatened by unnamable dangers.

She looked at him under the lids of her eyes, quickly
alive to the change in him.  It is necessary to record
that she, too, had made inquiries since the morning, and
learned of the farm that stood at his back to guarantee
him solid.

"I wondered if you 'd come," she said.  "That feller
in Capetown has n't answered."

"I said I 'd come," he replied gravely.

"Yes, I know.  All the same, I thought—you know,
when a person 's in hard luck, nothing goes right, an'
a girl, when she 's in a mess, is anybody's fool.  Is n't
that right?"

She knew her peril then; she lived open-eyed in face
of it.

"You shall not be anybody's fool," he answered.  "If
anybody tries to be bad to you, I 'll kill him."

He was still standing just within the closed door, no
nearer to her than the size of the little chamber compelled.

"Won't you sit down?" she invited.

"Eh?"  His contemplation of her seemed to absorb
him and make him absent-minded.  "No," he replied,
when she repeated her invitation.

"As you like," she conceded, wondering whether after
all he was going to be amenable to the treatment she
proposed for him.  It crossed her mind that he was
thinking of getting something for his money and her silly
mouth tightened.  If her sex was one of her assets, her
virtue—the fanatic virtue which is a matter of prejudice
rather than of principle,—was one of her liabilities.
She had nothing to sell him.

"You know," she said, "the worst of it is, none of us
have n't had any salary for weeks.  That's what puts
us in the cart.  We 're all broke.  If Padden had let
us have a bit, we would n't be stranded like this.  And
the queer thing is, Gus Padden 's the last man you 'd
have picked for a wrong 'un.  Fat, you know, and
beaming; a sort of fatherly way, he had.  He used to remind
me of Santa Claus.  An' now he 's thrown us down
this way, and how I 'm going to get up again I can't
say."  She gave him one of her shrewd upward glances;
"tell me," she added.

"I can tell you," he replied.

"How, then?" she asked.

"Marry me," said Christian.  "This acting—it's no
good.  There 's men that is bad all around you.  One
of them—I broke his face like a window-glass downstairs
just now—he said you was—bad, like him.  And
it was time to see what he was worth.  Unless you can
you are ach—so—so little, so weak.  Marry me, my
*kleintje* and you shall be nobody's fool."

The girl on the bed stared at him dumbly: this was
what she had never expected.  Salvation had come to
her with both hands full of gifts.  She began to laugh
foolishly.

"Marry me," repeated Christian.  "Will you?"

She jumped up from her seat, still laughing and took
two steps to him.

"Will I?" she cried.  "Will a duck swim?  Yes, I
will; yes, yes, yes!"

Christian looked at her dazed; events were sweeping
him off his feet.  He took one of her hands and dropped
it again and turned from her abruptly.  With his arm
before his face he leaned against the door and burst
into weeping.  The girl patted him on the back soothingly.

"Take it easy," she said kindly.  "You'll be all
right, never fear."


"That 's all the Port Elizabeth ones," said Paul.
"How many do you make them?"

Christian du Preez looked up uncertainly.  "*Allemachtag,*"
he said.  "I forgot to count.  I was thinking."

"Oh.  About the tramp?"

"Yes.  Paul, what did you bring him in for?
Couldn't you see he was a *skellum*?"

Paul nodded.  "Yes, I could see that.  But—*skellums*
are hungry and tired, too, sometimes."

His father smiled in a worried manner.  He and Paul
never talked intimately with each other, but an intimacy
existed of feeling and thought.  They took many of the
same things for granted.

"Like us," he agreed.  "Come on to supper, Paul."





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`CHAPTER X`:

.. class:: center large bold

   CHAPTER X

.. vspace:: 2

It was nearing the lunch hour when Margaret
walked down from the Sanatorium to the farm,
leaving Ford and Mr. Samson to their unsociable
preoccupations on the stoep, and found Paul among the
kraals.  He had some small matter of work in hand,
involving a wagon-chain and a number of yokes; these
were littered about his feet in a liberal disorder and
he was standing among them contemplating them
earnestly and seemingly lost in meditation.  He turned
slowly as Margaret called his name, and woke to the
presence of his visitor with a lightening of his whole
countenance.

"Were you dreaming about models?" inquired Margaret.
"You were very deep in something."

Paul shook his head.  "It was about wagons," he
answered seriously.  "I was just thinking how they are
always going away from places and coming to more
places.  That's all."

"Wishing you had wheels instead of feet?  I
see," smiled the girl.  "What a traveler you are,
Paul."

He smiled back.  In their casual meetings they had
talked of this before and Paul had found it possible to
tell her of his dreams and yearnings for what lay at
the other end of the railway and beyond the sun mist
that stood like a visible frontier about his world.

"I shall travel some day," he answered.  "Kamis
says that a man is different from a vegetable because
he hasn't got roots.  He says that the best way to see
the world is to go on foot."

"I expect he 's right," said Margaret.  "It's jolly
for you, Paul, having him to talk to.  Do you know
where he is now?"

"Yes," answered the boy.

"Well, then, when can I see him?  He told me you
could always let him know."

"This afternoon?" suggested Paul.  "If you could
come down to the dam wall then, he can be there.
There is a signal I make for him in my window and he
always sees it."

"I 'll come then," promised Margaret.  "Thank you,
Paul.  But that signal—that 's rather an idea.  Did
you think of it or did he?"

"He did," answered Paul.  "He said it wouldn't
trouble him to look every day at a house that held a
friend.  And he does, every day.  There was only once
he didn't come, and then he had twisted his ankle a
long way off on the veld, walking among ant-bear holes
in the dark."

"Which window is it?" asked Margaret.

Paul pointed.  "That end one," he showed her.

Margaret looked, and a figure lounging against one
of the doorposts of the house took her look for himself
and bowed.

"That's nobody," said Paul quickly.  "Don't look
that way.  It 's—it 's a tramp that came to me—and I
gave him a shilling to keep still and be modeled—and
he knows my mother—and he 's staying in the house.
He 's beastly; don't look that way."

His solicitude and his jealousy made Margaret smile.

"I shouldn't see him if I did," she said.  "Don't
you worry, Paul.  Then—this afternoon?"

"Under the dam," replied Paul.  "Good-by.  He's
waiting for a chance to come and speak to you."

"Let him wait," replied Margaret, and turned homewards,
scrupulously averting her face from the ingratiating
figure of Boy Bailey.

That pensioner of fortune watched her pass along
the trodden path to the Sanatorium till she was clear
of the farm, and then put himself into easy movement
to go across to Paul.  The uncanny combination of
Christian's clothes and his own personality drifted
through the arrogant sunlight and over the sober earth,
a monstrous affront to the temperate eye.  He was like
a dangerous clown or a comical Mephistopheles.  Paul,
pondering as he came, thought of a pig equipped with
the venom of the puff-adder of the Karoo.  As he drew
near, the boy fell to work on the chain and yokes.

"Well, my dear boy."  The man's shadow and his
voice reached Paul together.  He did not look up, but
went on loosening the cross bar of a yoke from its
link.

"There 's more in this place of yours than meets the
eye at a first glance," said Boy Bailey.  "You 're well
off, my lad.  Not only milk and honey for the trouble
of lifting 'em to your mouth, but dalliance, silken
dalliance in broad daylight.  What would your dear mother
say if she knew?"

"I don't know," said the boy.  "Ask her?"

"And spoil sport?  Laddie, you 'll know me better
some day.  Not for worlds would I give a chap's game
away.  It's not my style.  Poor I may be, but not that.
No.  I admire your taste, my boy.  You 've an eye in
your head.  But you forgot to introduce the lady to your
mother's old friend.  However, you 'll be seeing her
again, no doubt, an' then—"

"I didn't forget," said Paul.  Still he did not look
up.  The iron links shook in his hands, and he detached
the stout crosspiece and laid it across his knees.

"Eh?"  Boy Bailey's face darkened a little, and his
wary eyes narrowed.  He looked down on the boy's
bent back unpleasantly.

"You didn't?" he said.  "I see.  Well, well.  A
chap that 's poor must put up with these slights."  His
slightly hoarse voice became bland again.  "But have
it your own way; Heaven knows, *I* don't mind.  She 's
a saucy little piece, all the same, an' p'r'aps you 're
right not to risk her with me.  If I got her by herself,
there 's no saying—"

He stopped; the boy had looked up and was rising.
His face stirred memories in Boy Bailey; it roused
images that were fogged by years, but terrible yet.  In
the instant's grace that was accorded him, he felt his
wrist gripped once more and saw the livid clenched
face, tense with the spirit of murder, that burned above
his ere his own hand and the glass it held were dashed
athwart his eyes.  The boy was rising and he held the
cross-bar of the yoke like a weapon.

Boy Bailey made to speak but failed.  With a sort of
squeak he turned and set off running towards the house,
pounding in panic over the ground with his grotesque
clothes flapping about him like abortive wings.  Paul,
on his feet amid the tangled chains, watched him with
the heavy cross-bar in his hand.

If he had any clear feeling at all, it was disappointment
at the waste of a rare energy.  He could have
killed the man in the heat of it, and now it was wasted.
Boy Bailey was whole, his pulpy face not beaten in, his
bones functioning adequately as he ran instead of
creaking in fractures to each squirm of his broken body.  It
was an occasion squandered, lost, thrown away.  It had
the unsatisfying quality of mere prevention when it
might have been a complete cure.

Margaret returned to the Sanatorium in time to meet
Mrs. Jakes in the hall as she led the way to lunch and to
receive the unsmiling movement of recognition which
had been her lot ever since the night of Dr. Jakes'
adventure.  Contrary to Margaret's expectation,
Mrs. Jakes had not come round; no treatment availed to
convince her that she had not been made a victim of black
treachery and the doctor wantonly exposed and humiliated.
When she was cornered and had to listen to explanations,
she heard them with her eyes on the ground
and her face composed to an irreconcilable woodenness.
When Margaret had done—she tried the line of humorous
breeziness, and it was a mistake—Mrs. Jakes sniffed.

"If you please," she said frigidly, "we won't talk
about it.  The subject is very painful.  No doubt all
you say is very true, but I have my feelings."

"So have I," said Margaret.  "And mine are being hurt."

"I am extremely sorry," replied the little wan woman,
with stiff dignity.  "If you wish it, I will ask the doctor
to recommend you a Sanatorium elsewhere, where you
may be more comfortable."

"You know that is n't what I want," protested Margaret.
"This is all very silly.  I only want you to
understand that I have n't done you any harm and that I
did the best I could and let's stop acting as if one of
us had copied the other's last hat."

"No doubt I am slow of understanding, Miss Harding,"
retorted Mrs. Jakes formidably.  "However—if
you have quite finished, I 'm in rather a hurry and I
won't detain you."

And she made her escape in good order, marching
unhurried down the matted corridor and showing to
Margaret a retreating view of a rigid black alpaca back.

Dr. Jakes was equally effective in his treatment of
the incident.  He went to work upon her lungs quite
frankly, sending her to bed for a couple of days and
gathering all his powers to undo the harm of which he
had been the cause.  On the third day, there was a
further interview in the study, a businesslike affair,
conducted without unnecessary conversation, with
monosyllabic question and reply framed on the most
formal models.  At the close of it, he leaned back in his
chair and faced her across the corner of his desk.  He
was irresistibly plump and crumpled in that attitude,
with his sad, uncertain eyes expressing an infinite
apprehension and all the resignation of a man who has
lost faith in mercy.

"That is all, then, Miss Harding.  Unless—?"

The last word was breathed hoarsely.  Margaret
waited.  He gazed at her owlishly, one nervous hand
fumbling on the blotting-pad before him.

"There is nothing else you want to say to me?" he
asked.

"I can't think of anything," said Margaret.

He continued to look at her, torpidly, helplessly.  It
was impossible to divine what fervencies of inarticulate
emotion burned and quickened behind his mask of
immobile flesh.  The rumpled hair, short and blond, lay
in disorder upon his forehead and his lips were parted
impotently.  He had to blink and swallow before he
could speak again, visibly recalling his wits.

"If you don't tell me, I can't answer," he said, and
sighed heavily.  He raised himself in his big chair
irritably.

"Nothing more, then?" he asked.  "Well—take care
of yourself, Miss Harding.  That 's all you have to do.
Whatever happens, your business is to take care of
yourself; it's what you came here for."

"I will," answered Margaret.  She wished she could
find a plane on which it would be possible to talk to
him frankly, without evasions and free from the
assumptions which his wife wove about him.  But the
resignation of his eyes, the readiness they expressed to
accept blows and penalties, left her powerless.  The gulf
that separated them could not be bridged.

"Then—" he rose, and in another pair of moments
Margaret was outside the study door in the hall, where
Mrs. Jakes, affecting to be concerned in the arrangement
of the furniture, examined her in sidelong glances,
to know whether she had used the weapon which the
doctor's adventure had put into her hand.  Apparently
there was no convincing her that the girl's intentions
were not hostile.

It did not simplify life for Margaret, this enmity of
Mrs. Jakes.  Lunch and breakfast under her pale,
implacable eye, that glided upon everything but skipped
Margaret with a noticeable avoidance, had become
ordeals to be approached with trepidation.  Talk, when
there was anything to talk about, died still-born in that
atmosphere of lofty displeasure.  It was done with a
certain deftness; Mrs. Jakes was incapable of anything
crude or downright; and when it was necessary, in
order that the state of affairs should not be conspicuous,
she could smile towards the wall at the girl's back and
spare her an empty word or so, in a way that was
sometimes as galling as much more dexterous snubs that
Margaret had seen administered.  One can "field" a snub
that conveys its purpose in its phrasing and return it
with effect to the wicket; but there is nothing to be
done with the bare word that just stops a gap from
becoming noticeable.

Ford was waiting outside the front door when Margaret
came out after exercising the virtue of forbearance
throughout a meal for which she had had no appetite.

"What 's the row with Mrs. Jakes?" he asked,
without wasting words on preamble.

"Oh, nothing," answered Margaret crossly.  "You 'd
better ask her if you want to know.  I 'm not going to
tell you anything."

"Well, don't, then.  But you couldn't arrange a
truce for meal-times, could you?  It turns things
sour—the way you two avoid looking at each other."

"I don't care," said Margaret.  "It 's not my fault.
I 've been as loyal as anybody—more loyal, I think, and
certainly more helpful.  I 've done simply everything
she asked of me, and now she 's like this."

Ford gave her a whimsical look of question.

"Sure you haven't at some time done more than she
asked you?" he inquired.

"Why?"  Margaret was surprised.  She laughed
unwillingly.  "Is it shrewdness or have you heard
something?"

"I haven't heard a word," he assured her.  "But is
that it?"

"It 's just your natural cleverness, then?  Wonderful,"
said Margaret.  "You ought to go on the stage,
really.  Yes, that 's what it is—I suppose.  And now
d'you think she 'll see the reasonable view of it?  Not
she!  I 'm a villain in skirts and if I won't stand it,
she 'll ask the doctor to recommend a Sanatorium where
I can be more comfortable.  And just at this moment, I
don't think I can stand much more of it."

"Eh?"  Ford scowled disapprovingly.  "That 's a
rotten thing to say.  You don't feel inclined to tell me
about it?"

"I can't; I mustn't.  That 's the worst of it,"
answered Margaret.  "I can't tell you anything."

"At any rate," said Ford, "don't take it into your
head to go away.  This won't do you any harm in the
end.  You weren't thinking of it seriously, were you?"

"Wasn't I?  I was, though.  I hate all this."

Ford took a couple of steps toward the door and a
couple back.

"It won't weigh with you," he said, "but I 'd be
sorry if you went.  *I* would, personally—awfully sorry.
But if you must go, you must.  It 's a thing you can
judge for yourself.  Still, I 'd be sorry."

Margaret shrugged impatiently.

"Oh, I 'd be sorry, too.  It 's been jolly, in a way,
with you here, and all that.  I 'd miss you, if you want
to know.  But—"

She stopped.  Ford was looking at her very gravely.

"Don't go," he said, and put his thin, sun-browned
hand upon her shoulder.  "It 'll make things simpler
for me if you say you won't.  Things will arrange
themselves, but even if they don't—don't go away."

"Simpler?  How do you mean?"

"Just that," he answered.  "If you stay, here we
are—friends.  We help each other out and talk and
see each other and have time before us and there 's no
need to say anything.  And it's because a lunger like
me must n't say anything till he sees whether he 's
going to get well or—or stay here forever, that it 'll be
simpler if you don't go.  Do you see?"

His hand upon her shoulder was pleasant to feel; she
liked the freedom he took—and gave—in resting it there;
and his young, serious face, touched to delicacy by the
disease that governed him, was patient and wise.

"It 's not because of that *that* you mustn't say
anything," she answered.  "I did n't know—you 've given
me no warning.  What can I say?"

"Say you won't go," he begged.  "Say you won't
act on any decision you 've made at present.  And then
we can go on—me lecturing you, and you flouting me,
till—till I can say things—till I 'm free to say what I
like to anybody."

She smiled rather nervously.  "If I agree now," she
answered, "it will look as if—" she paused; the thing
was difficult to put in its nicety.  But he was quick in
the uptake.

"It won't," he said.  "I 'm not such a bounder as that."

"But I 'd rather be here than take my chance among
other people," she went on.  "I suppose I can
stand Mrs. Jakes if I give my mind to it, particularly
if you 'll see me through."

"I 'll do what I can," he promised.  "You 'll do it,
then?  You'll stay?"

"I suppose so," said Margaret.  His hand for a
moment was heavier on her shoulder; she felt as though she
had been slapped on the back, with the unceremoniousness
of a good friend; and then he loosed her.

"Good of you," he answered shortly.

Both were weighted by the handicap of their race;
they had been, as it were, trapped into a certain depth
of emotion and self-revelation, and both found a
difficulty in stepping down again to the safe levels of
commonplace intercourse.  Ford shoved both hands into his
pockets and half-turned from her.

"Well—doing anything this afternoon?" he inquired
in his tersest manner.

"Yes," said Margaret, whom the position could amuse.

"What?"

"Oh—going yachting," she retorted.

He sniffed and nodded.  "I 'm going to paint," he
announced.  "So long."

Margaret smiled at his back as he went, and its
extravagant slouch of indifference and ease.  She knew
he would not look round; once his mood was defined, it
was reliable entirely; but she felt she would have
forgiven him if he had.  The last word in such a matter
as this is always capable of expansion, and probably
some such notion was in the mind of the oracle who first
pronounced that to women the last word is dear.

He was still at his easel when she set forth to keep her
appointment under the dam wall, working on his helpless
canvas with an intensity that spared not a look as
she went by on the parched grass below the stoep.  It
was a low easel, and he sat on a stool and spread his
legs to each side of it, like a fighter crouched over an
adversary, and his thumb was busy smudging among
masses of pigment.  Margaret could see the canvas as a
faintly shining insurrection of colors which suggested
that he had broken an egg upon it.  A score of times
in the past weeks those cryptic messes had irritated her
or showed themselves as a weakness in their author.
The domineering thumb and the shock tactics of the
palette knife had supplied her with themes for ridicule,
and the fact that the creature could not paint and yet
would paint and refused all instruction had put the seal
of bitterness on many a day of weary irritation.  But
suddenly his incompetence and his industry, and even
the unlovely fruit of their union—the canvases that he
signed large with his name and hung unframed upon
the walls of his room—were endearing; they were laughable
only as a little child is laughable, things to smile
at and to prize.

Her smiling and thoughtful mood went with her
across the grass and dust and around the curved
shoulder of the dam wall, where Kamis, obedient to
Paul's signal, sat in the shade and awaited her.  At her
coming he sprang up eagerly with his face alight.  His
tweed clothes were, if anything, shabbier than before,
but it seemed that no usage could subdue them to
congruity with the broad black face and its liberal smile.

"This is great luck," he said.  "I half expected
you 'd find it too hot for you.  Are you all right again
after that night?"

Margaret seated herself on the slope of the wall and
rested with one elbow on the freshness of its water-fed
grass.

"Quite all right," she assured him.  "Dr. Jakes has
done everything that needed to be done.  But I didn't
thank you half enough for what you did."

He smiled and murmured deprecatingly and found
himself a place to sit on at the foot of the wall, with legs
crossed and his back to the sun.  Leaning forward a
little in this posture, with his drooping hat-brim
shadowing him, it was almost possible for Margaret to avoid
seeing the blunt negro features for which she had come
to feel something akin to dread; they affected her in the
same way that darkness with people moving in it will
affect some children.

"I saw Paul's signal," said Kamis.  "We have an
understanding, you know.  He hangs a handkerchief in
his window when he wants me and when you want me
he hangs two.  It shows as far as one can see the
window; all the others are just black squares, and his has a
white dash in it.  That 's rather how I see Paul, you
know.  Other people are just blanks, but he means
something—to me, at any rate.  By the way, before I
forget—did you want me for anything in particular?"

Margaret shook her head.  "I wanted to talk," she
said; "and to make that police matter clear to you."

"Oh, that."  He looked up.  "Thank you."

"Do you know of a Mr. Van Zyl, a police-officer?"
she asked him.  "He thinks you are guilty of sedition
among the natives.  I suppose it 's nonsense, but he
means to arrest you, and I thought you 'd better
know."

"It 's awfully good of you to bother about it," he
answered.  "I 'll take care he doesn't lay hands on me.
But it is nonsense, certainly, and anybody but he would
know it.  He 's been scouring the kraals in the south
for me and giving the natives a tremendous idea of my
importance.  They were nervous enough of me before,
but now—"

He shrugged his shoulders disgustedly, but still
smiled.

"That is what he said—they 're uneasy," agreed
Margaret.  "But why are they?  You see, I know scarcely
more of you than Mr. Van Zyl.  What is it that
troubles them about you?"

"Oh," the Kafir deliberated.  "It's simple enough,
really.  You see," he explained, "the fact is, I 'm out
of order.  I don't belong in the scheme of things as the
natives and Mr. Van Zyl know it.  These Kafirs are the
most confirmed conservatives in the world, and when
they see a man like themselves who can't exist without
clothes and a roof to sleep under, who can't walk
without boots or talk their language and is unaccountable
generally, they smell witchcraft at once.  Besides, it has
got about that I 'm Kamis, and they know very well
that Kamis was hanged about twenty years ago and his
son taken away and eaten by the soldiers.  So it's
pretty plain to them that something is wrong somewhere.
Do you see?"

"Still"—Margaret was thoughtful—"Mr. Van Zyl
is n't an ignorant savage."

"No," agreed Kamis.  "He isn't that.  For dealing
with Kafirs, he 's probably the best man you could find;
the natives trust him and depend on him and when
they 're in trouble they go to him and he gives them the
help they want.  When they misbehave, he 's on hand
to deal with them in the fashion they understand and
probably prefer.  And the reason is, Miss Harding—the
reason is, he 's got a Kafir mind.  He was born among
them and nursed by them; he speaks as a Kafir,
understands as a Kafir and thinks as a Kafir, and he 'll never
become a European and put away Kafir things.
They 've made him, and at the best he 's an ambassador
for the Kafirs among the whites.  That 's how they
master their masters.  Oh, they 've got power, the Kafirs
have, and a better power than their hocus-pocus of
witchcraft."

The afternoon was stored with the day's accumulated
heat and the cool of the grass beneath and the freshness
of the water, out of sight beyond the wall but diffusing
itself like an odor in the air, combined to contrast the
spot in which they talked with the dazed sun-beaten
land about them and gave to both a sense of privacy and
isolation.  The Kafir's words stirred a fresh curiosity
in Margaret.

"He thinks you are making the natives dangerous,"
she said.  "I don't believe that, of course, but what are
you doing?"

"What am I doing?"

The black face was lifted to hers steadily and regarded
her for a space of moments without replying.  Nothing
mild or subtle could find expression in its rude shaping
of feature; the taciturnity of the Karoo itself
governed it.

"What am I doing?" repeated Kamis.  He dropped
his eyes and his hands plucked at the grass absently.
"Well, I 'm looking for a life for myself."

Margaret waited for him to continue but he was silent,
plucking the grass shoots and shredding them in his fingers.

"A life," she prompted.  "Yes; tell me."

Kamis finished with the grass in his hand and threw
it with an abrupt gesture from him.

"I 'll tell you if you like," he said, as though
suppressing a feeling of reluctance.  "It isn't anything
wonderful; still—.  You know already how I began;
Paul told me how you learnt that; and you can see where
I 've got to with my education and my degree and my
profession and all that.  I 'm back where I came from,
and besides what I 've learned, I 've got a burden of
civilized habits and weaknesses that keep me tied by the
leg.  I need friendship and company and equality with
people about me, just as you do, and I 'm apt to find
myself rather forlorn and lost without them.  In England,
I had those things—I had some of them, at any rate;
but what was there for a black doctor to do, do you
think, among all those people who look on even a white
foreigner as rather a curiosity?"

"Wasn't there anything?"  Margaret was watching
the nervous play of his gesticulating hands, so oddly
emphasizing his pleasant English voice.

"Nothing worth while.  That 's another of my troubles,
you see.  They taught me and trimmed me till I
could n't be content with occasional niggers at the docks
suffering from belaying-pin on the brain.  It was n't odd
jobs I wanted, handed over to me to keep me happy; I
wanted work.  We niggers, we 're a strong lot and we
can stand a deal of wear and tear, but we don't improve
by standing idle.  I wanted to come out of that glass
case they kept me in, with tutors and an allowance from
the Government and an official guardian and all that
sort of thing, and make myself useful."

He paused.  "You understand that, don't you?" he asked.

"Of course I do," replied Margaret.  "If I could
only come out too!  But I 've got all those weaknesses
of yours and this as well."  Her hand rested on her
chest and he nodded.

"You 're different," he said.  "You must n't be worn
and torn."

"Well, so you came out here?"

"It 's my country," he answered, and waved a hand
at its barrenness.  "It was my father's, a good deal of
it, in another sense too.  When I saw that living in
England wasn't going to lead to anything, I thought of
this.  Somebody ought to doctor the poor beggars who
live here and give them a lead towards a more comfortable
existence, and I hoped I was the man to do it.  I
must have relations among them, too; that 's queer, is n't
it?  Aunts—my father had lots of wives—and lashings
of cousins.  I thought the steamer was bringing me out
to them and I had a great idea of a welcome and all
that; but I 'm no nearer it now than I was when I
started.  If ever I seem too grateful to you for your
acquaintance, Miss Harding—if I seem too humble to be
pleasant when I thank you for letting me talk to you—just
remember I know that over there my poor black
aunts are slaving like cattle and my uncles are driving
them, and when I come they dodge among the huts and
maneuver to get behind me with a club."

"No," answered Margaret slowly.  "I 'll remind you
instead of all you 're doing while I do nothing."

He shook his head.  "I know what you do to me," he
said.  "And I can't let you pity me.  It was n't for want
of warnings I came out here.  I even had a letter from
the Colonial Secretary.  And I must tell you about the
remonstrances of my guardian."

He laughed, with one of those quick transitions of
mood which characterize the negro temperament.  It
jarred a little on Margaret.

"He was the dearest old thing," he went on.  "He 's
one of the greatest living authorities on the Bantu
tongues—those are the real old negro languages, I
believe—and he was out here once in his wild youth.  The
Colonial Office appointed him to take charge of me and
he used to come down to the schools where I was and
give me a sovereign.  He 'd have made a capital uncle.
He had a face like a beefy rose, one of those big flabby
ones that tumble to pieces when you pick them—all pink
and round and clean, with kind, silly blue eyes behind
gold spectacles.  I had to get his consent before I could
move, and I went to see him in a little room at the
British and Foreign Bible Society's place in Queen Victoria
Street, where they grow the rarer kinds of Bible under
glass in holes in the wall; you know.  He was correcting
the proofs of a gospel in some Central African dialect
and he had smudges of ink round his mouth.  Sucking
the wrong end of the pen, I suppose.  He really was
rather like a comic-paper professor, but as kind as could
be.  I sat down in the chair opposite to him, with the
desk between us, and he heard what I 'd got to say,
wiping his pen and sucking it while I told him.  I fancy I
began by being eloquent, but I soon stopped that.  He 's
good form to the finger-tips and he looked so pained.
So I cut it short and told him what I wanted to do and
why.  And when I 'd finished, he gave me a solemn
warning.  I must do what seemed right to me, he said;
he wouldn't take the responsibility of standing in my
way; but there were grave dangers.  He had known
young men, promising young men, talented young
men—all negroes, of course—who had returned to
Africa after imbibing and accepting the principles of
our civilization.  They, it was true, were West
Africans, but my danger was the same.  They had left
England in clothes, with a provision of soap in their trunks,
and the result of their return to their own place
was—they had lapsed!  They had discontinued the clothes
and forsworn the soap.  'One of them,' he said,
'presented a particularly sad example.  He whom we had
known and respected as David Livingstone Smith
became the leader of a faction or party whose activities
necessitated the despatch of a punitive expedition.
Under a name which, being interpreted, signifies "The
Scornful," he presided over the defeat and massacre
of that armed force.'  And he went on warning me
against becoming an independent monarch and forcing
an alliance on Great Britain by means of an ingenious
war.  He seemed relieved when I assured him that I had
no ambition to sit in the seat of the Scornful."

He laughed again, looking up at Margaret with his
white teeth flashing broadly.

"Yes," she said.  "That was—funny."

Odd!  It made her vaguely restive to hear the Kafir
make play with the shortcomings of the white man.  It
touched a fund of compunction whose existence she had
not suspected.  Something racial in her composition,
something partizan and unreasoning, lifted its obliterated
head from the grave in which her training and the
conscious leanings of her mind had buried it.

He had no thoughts of what it was that kept her from
returning his smile.  He imagined that his mission, his
loneliness and his danger had touched her and made her
grave.

"Well, you see how it all came about?" he went on.
"It isn't really so extraordinary, is it?  And I 'm not
discouraged, Miss Harding.  I shall find a way, sooner
or later; they 're bound to get used to me in the end.
In the meantime, Paul is teaching me Kafir, and there 's
you.  You make up to me for a lot."

"Do I?"  Margaret roused herself and sat up, deliberately
thrusting down out of her consciousness that
instinctive element which bade her do injustice and
withhold from the man before her his due of acknowledgment.

"Do I?" she said.  "I 'd be glad if that were so."

He made to speak but stopped at her gesture.

"No," she said.  "I *would* be glad.  It 's a wonderfully
great thing you 've started to do, and you 're lucky
to have it.  You feel that, don't you?"

"Yes," he said thoughtfully.  "Oh, yes."

She eyed him with a moment's hesitation, for he had
not agreed with any alacrity, and a martyr who regards
his stake with aversion is always disappointing.

"Oh, you 're sure to succeed," she said.  "People
who undertake things like this don't fail.  And if, as
you say, I 'm any kind of help to you, I 'm glad.  I 'm
awfully glad of it.  It makes coming out here worth
while, and I shall always be proud that I was your
friend."

"Will you?  Does it strike you like that?"

"Yes," said Margaret.

She was above him on the bank and he sat on the
ground with his head at the level of her knees.  His
worn and shabby clothes, the patience of his face, and
even the hands that lay empty in his lap, joined with
his lowly posture to give him an aspect of humility.
He was like a man acclimatized to oppression and ill
fortune, accepting in a mild acquiescence, without
question and without hope, the wrongs of a tyrannous
destiny.

"I shall be proud," she repeated.  "Always."  She
held forth her hand to him in token of that friendship,
leaning down that he might take.

He did not do so at once.  His eyes flashed to her
with a startled glance, and he seemed at a loss.  He
lifted himself to his knees and put his own hand, large
and fine for all the warm black of the back of it, the
hand of a physician, refined to nice uses, under hers
without clasping it.  His movement had some of the
timidity and slavishness of a dog unused to caresses; a
dumb-brute gratitude was in his regard.  He bent his
black head humbly and printed a kiss upon her slender
fingers.

It was a thing that exhausted the situation; Margaret,
a little breathless and more than a little moved, met
his gaze as he rose with a smile that was not clear of
embarrassment.  Neither knew what to say next; the
kiss upon her hand had transformed their privacy into
secrecy.

   |  "My love is like a black, black rose."
   |

It sounded above them, from the top of the dam wall,
an outrageous bellow of melody that thrust itself
obscenely between them and split them asunder with the
riving force of a thunderbolt.  Intolerably startled by
the suddenness of it, Margaret nearly fell down the
slope, and saving herself with her hands turned her
face, whitened by the shock, towards the source of the
noise.  Another face met hers, parting the long grasses
on the crown of the wall.

Her amazed and ambushed faculties saw it as a face
only.  It was attached to no visible body, solitarily
self-sufficient in an unworthy miracle.  It did not occur to
her that the owner of it must be lying on his belly at
the water's edge, and for the moment she was not
equal to deducing that he must have heard, and possibly
even seen, all that had passed.  She saw merely a
face projected over her, that grinned with a fixity that
was not without an imbecile suggestion.  It was old with
a moldy and decayed quality, bunched into pouches
between deep wrinkles, and yet weak and appealing.  A
wicked captive ape might show that mixture of gleeful
sin and slavishness.

"Don't think I 'm not shocked, because I am," it
uttered distinctly.  "Kissing!  *I* saw you.  An' if
anybody had told me that a lady of your looks would take
on a Kafir, I wouldn't ha' believed it."

The face heaved and rose and lifted to corroborate it
the cast-off clothes of Christian du Preez, enveloping
the person of Boy Bailey.  He shuffled to a sitting
position on the edge of the wall, and it was a climax to
his appearance that his big and knobly feet were bare
and wet.  He had been taking his ease with his feet in
the water while they talked below, a hidden audience
to their confidences.  He shook his head at them.

"Dam walls have got dam ears," he observed.  "You
naughty things, you."

Margaret turned helplessly to Kamis for light.

"What is it?" she asked.

He had jumped to his feet and away from her at
the first sound, and now turned a slow eye upon her.
The negro countenance is the home of crude emotions;
the untempered extremes have been its sculptors through
the ages.  Its mirth is a guffaw, its sorrow is a howl,
its wrath is the naked spirit of murder.  He looked
at her now with a face alight and transfigured with
slaughterous intention.

"Go away," he said, in a whisper.  "Go away now.
He must have heard.  I 'll deal with him."

"Don't," said Margaret.  She rose and put a hand
on his arm.  "Will you speak to him, or shall I?"

"Not you," he answered quickly.  "But—" he was
breathless and his face shone as with a light sweat.
"He 'll *tell*," he urged, still whispering.  "You don't
know—it would be frightful.  Go quickly away and
leave me with him."

"They 're at it still," sounded the voice above them.
"Damme, they can't stop."

Kamis was desperate and urgent.  He cast a wild eye
towards the man on the top of the wall, and went on
with agitated earnestness.

"I tell you, you don't know.  It 's enough that you
were here with a Kafir and he kissed your hand."  He
slapped his forehead in an agony.  "Oh, I ought to be
hanged for that.  They 'll never believe—nobody will.
In this country that sort of thing has only one
meaning—a frightful one.  I can't bear it.  If you don't
go"—he gulped and spoke aloud—"I 'll go up and
kill him before your eyes."

"Now, now!"  The voice remonstrated in startled tones.

Margaret still had her hand on his arm, and could
feel that he was trembling.  She had recovered from
the shock of the surprise and was anxious to purge the
situation of the melodramatic character which it seemed
to have assumed.  Kamis' whispered fears failed to
convince her.

"You 'll do nothing of the kind," she said.  "I don't
care what people think.  Speak to the man or I will."

Kamis lifted his head obediently.

"Come down," he said.  "Come down and say what
you want."

Mr. Bailey recovered his smile as he shook his head.

"I can say it here," he replied.  "Don't you worry,
Snowball; it won't strain my voice."

Kamis gulped.  "What do you want?" he repeated.

"Ah!  What?" inquired Boy Bailey rhetorically.
"I come here of an afternoon to collect my thoughts an'
sweeten the dam by soaking my Trilbies in it an' what
happens?  I 'm half-deafened by the noise of kissing.
I look round, an' what do I see?  I ask you—what?"

He brought an explanatory forefinger into play, thick
and cylindrical like a damaged candle.

"First, thinks I, here 's a story that's good for
drinks in any bar between Dopfontein and Fereira—with
perhaps a tar-and-feathering for the young
lady thrown in."  He nodded meaningly at Margaret.
"And it wouldn't be the first time that's happened
either."

"Ye-es," said Kamis, who seemed to speak with
difficulty.  "But you won't get away alive to tell that
story."

"Hear me out."  Boy Bailey shook his finger.
"That 's what I thought *first*.  My second thought was:
what 's the sense of making trouble when perhaps
there 's a bit to be got by holdin' my tongue?  How
does that strike you?"

Margaret had been leaning on her stick while he
spoke, prodding the earth and looking down.  Now she
raised her eyes.

"The first thought was the best," she said.  "You
won't get anything here."

"Eh?"  Mr. Bailey was astonished.  "You don't
understand, Miss," he said.  "Ask Snowball, there—he 'll
tell you.  In this country we don't stand women
monkeying with niggers.  Hell—no.  It 's worth,
well—"

"Not a penny," said Margaret.  "I don't care in
the least whom you tell.  But—not one penny."

Kamis was listening in silence.  Margaret smiled at
him and he shook his head.  On the top of the wall
Mr. Bailey leaned forward persuasively.  He had
something the air, in so far as his limitations permitted, of
benevolence wrestling with obstinacy, the air which in
auctioneers is an asset.

"You don't mean that, I know," he said indulgently.
"I can see you 're going to be sensible.  You would n't
let a trifle of ready money stand between you an'
keepin' your good name—a nice, ladylike girl like
you.  Why, for less than what you 've done, women
have been stoned in the streets before now.  Come now;
I 'm not going to be hard on you.  Make an offer."

He sat above them against the sky, beaming painfully,
always with a wary apprehension at the back of
his regard.

"You won't go away?" demanded Kamis suddenly.
"You won't?  You know I can't do it if you 're here.
Then I 'm going to pay."

"You shan't," retorted Margaret.  "I won't have
it, I tell you.  I don't care what he does."

"I 'm going to pay," repeated Kamis.  "It 's that
or—you won't go away?"

"No," said the girl angrily.

"Then I 'm going to pay."  He turned from her.
"I 'll give you twenty pounds," he called to Bailey.

"Double it," replied Boy Bailey promptly; "add
ten; take away the number you thought of; and the
answer is fifty pounds, cash down, and dirt cheap at
that.  Put that in my hand and I 'll clear out of here
within the hour and you 'll never hear of me again."

Kamis nodded slowly.  "If I do hear of you again,"
he said, "I 'll come to you.  Paul will bring you the
money to-morrow morning, and then you 'll go."

"Right-O."  Mr. Bailey rose awkwardly to his feet
and made search for his boots.  With them in his hands,
he looked down on the pair again.

"It's your risk," he warned them.  "If that cash
don't come to hand, you look out; there 'll be a slump
in Kafirs."

He went off along the wall, disappearing in sections
as he descended its shoulder.  His gray head in its
abominable hat was the last to disappear; it sailed
loftily, as became the heir to fifty pounds.

Margaret frowned and then laughed.

"What an absurd business," she cried.  "Supposing
he had told and there had been a row—it would have
been better than this everlasting stagnation.  It would
have been more like life."

The Kafir sighed.  "Not life," he answered gently.
"Not your life.  It meant a death in life—like mine."

His embarrassed and mournful look passed beyond
her to the Karoo, spreading its desolation to the skies
as a blind man might lift his eyes in prayer.





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`CHAPTER XI`:

.. class:: center large bold

   CHAPTER XI

.. vspace:: 2

The deplorable hat which shielded Mr. Bailey
from the eye of Heaven traveled at a thoughtful
pace along the path to the farmhouse, cocked at a
confident angle upon a head in which faith in the
world was re-established.  Boy Bailey had no doubt
that the money would be forthcoming.  What he had
heard of the conversation between Margaret and Kamis
had assured him of the Kafir's resources and he felt
himself already as solvent as if the minted money were
heavy in his pockets.  A pleasant sense of security
possessed his versatile spirit, the sense that to-morrow
may be counted upon.  For such as Mr. Bailey, every
day has its price.

He gazed before him as he walked, at the house, with
its kraals clustered before it and its humble appanage
of out-buildings, with a gentle indulgence for all its
primitive and domestic quality.  Meals and a bed were
what they stood for, merely the raw framework of
intelligent life, needing to be supplemented and filled
in with more stimulating accessories.  They satisfied
only the immediate needs of a man adrift and hungry;
they offered nothing to compensate a lively mind for
its exile from the fervor of the world.  Fifty pounds,
the fine round sum, not alone made him independent
of its table and its roof, but opened afresh the way to
streets and lamplight, to the native heath of the
wandering Bailey, who knew his fellow men from above and
below—Kafirs, for instance, he saw from an altitude—but
had few such opportunities as this of meeting
them on a level of economic equality.  There came to
him, as he dwelt in thought upon his good fortune,
a clamorous appetite for what fifty pounds would buy.
Capetown was within his reach, and he recalled small
hotels on steep streets, whose back windows looked
forth on flat roofs of Malay houses, where smells of
cooking and people loaded the sophisticated air and
there was generally a woman weeping and always a man
drunk.  A little bedroom with an untidy bed and beer
bottles cooling in the wash-hand basin by day;
saloons where the afternoon sun came slanting upon
furtive men initiating the day's activities over glasses;
the electric-lit night of Adderley Street under the big
plate-glass windows, where business was finished for the
shops and offices and newly begun for the traders in
weakness and innocence—he knew himself in such
surroundings as these.  He could slip into them as
noiselessly as a snake into a pool, with no disturbance to
those inscrutable devotees of daylight and industry
who carry on their plain affairs and downright
transactions without suspecting the existence of the world
beneath them, where Boy Bailey and his fellows stir
and dodge and hide and have no illusions, save that
hunger is ever fed or thirst quenched.

He paused at the open door of the farmhouse, recalled
to the present by the sound of voices from the
kitchen at the end of the passage, where Christian du
Preez and his wife were engaged in bitter talk.  Boy
Bailey stepped delicately over the doorstep on to the
mat within and stood there to listen, if there should be
anything worth listening to.  A smile played over his
large complacent features, and he waited with his head
cocked to one side.  Something in which the word
"tramp" occurred as he came through the door
flattered him with the knowledge that the dispute was
about himself.

Mrs. du Preez spoke, and her shrill tones were
plainly audible.

"I don't make no fuss when your dirty old Doppers
outspan here an' come sneakin' in for coffee, an' some
of them would make a dog sick.  Bailey 's got his
troubles, but he don't do like Oom Piet Coetzee did
when—"

An infuriate rumble from Christian broke in upon
her.  Boy Bailey smiled and shook his head.

"Now, now," he murmured.  "Language, please."

"He 's worse than a Kafir in the house," Christian
went on.  "Woman, it makes me sick when he looks at
you, like an old silly devil."

"So long as he don't look like an old silly Dutchman,
I don't mind," retorted his wife.  "I 'm fairly
sick of it all—you an' your Doppers and all.  And just
because you can't tell when a gentleman 's having his
bit of fun, you come and howl at me."

"Howl."  The word seemed to sting.  "Howl.  Yes,
instead of howling I should take my gun and let him
have one minute to run before I shoot at him.  You
like that better, eh?  You like that better?"

"Christian."  There was alarm in Mrs. du Preez's
voice.  Behind the shut door of the kitchen, Bailey
could picture Christian reaching down the big Martini
that hung overhead with oiled rags wrapped about its
breech.

"Time for me to cut in at this," reflected Mr. Bailey.
"I never was much of a runner."

He walked along the passage with loud steps, acting
a man returned from a constitutional, restored by the
air and at peace with the whole human race.

Mrs. du Preez and Christian were facing one another
over the length of the table; they turned impatient and
angry faces towards the door as he opened it and thrust
his personality into the scene.  He fronted them with
his terrible smile and his manner of jaunty amity.

"Hot, ain't it?" he inquired.  "I 've been down by
the dam and the water 's nearly on the boil."

Neither answered; each seemed watchful of the
other's first step.  Christian gave him only a dark
wrathful look and Mrs. du Preez colored and looked
away.  Boy Bailey, retaining his smile under difficulties,
tossed his hat to a chair and entered.

"Not interrupting anything, am I?" he inquired.

"You 're not interrupting *me*," replied Mrs. du
Preez.  "I 've said all I 'd got to say."

"But I haven't said all I 've got to say," retorted
Christian from his end of the table.  "We was talking
about you."

"About me?" said Bailey, with mild surprise.  "Oh."

"Yes."  The Boer, leaning forward with his hands
gripping the thick end of the table, had a dangerous
look which warned Bailey that impudence now might
have disastrous consequences.

"Yes—about you.  My wife says you are a gentleman
and got gentleman's manners and you are her old
friend.  She says you don't mean harm and you
don't look bad and dirty.  She says I don't know how
gentlemen speak and look and I am wrong to say you
are a beast with the mark of the beast."

Bailey shifted uncomfortably under his gaze of fury
held precariously in leash, and edged a little towards
Mrs. du Preez.  He was afraid the big, bearded man
might spring forward and help out his words with his
fist.

"Very kind of Mrs. du Preez," he murmured warily.

"She says all that.  But *I* say"—the words rasped
from Christian's lips—"*I* say you are a man rotten
like an old egg and the breath in your mouth is a stink
of wickedness.  And I tell her that sometimes I get up
from my food and go out because if I don't I shall
stamp you to death.  *Gott verdam*!  Your dirty eyes
and your old yellow teeth grinning—I stand them no
longer.  You have had rest and *skoff*—now you go."

Bailey's face showed some discomposure.  His
disadvantage lay in the danger that the Boer was plainly
willing to be violent.  He had returned to the house
with the intention of announcing that on the morrow
he would take his departure, but it was not the prospect
of spending a night in the open that disconcerted him.
It was simply that he disliked to be treated thus loftily
by a man he despised.  He stole a glance at Mrs. du
Preez.

She was staring at her husband with shrewdness and
doubt expressed in her face, as though she were checking
her valuation of him by the fierce figure at the other
end of the table, with big, leathery hands clutched on
the edge of the board and thin, sun-tanned face intent
and wrathful above the uneven beard.  She was
revisiting with an unsympathetic eye each feature of that
irreconcilable factor in her life, her husband.

"D'you hear me?" thundered the Boer.  "You go."

He pointed with sudden forefinger to the door, and his
gesture was unspeakably daunting and wounding.

"Ye-es," hesitated Boy Bailey, and sighed.  The
pointing finger compelled him like a hand on his
collar, and he moved with shuffling and unwilling feet to
the chair where his hat lay.  He fumbled with it as
he picked it up and it fell to the floor.  The finger did
not for a moment pretermit its menacing command.
He sighed again and drew the door open.

"Bailey."  Mrs. du Preez spoke sharply, with a
trembling catch in her voice.  "Bailey, you stop here."

"Eh?"  He turned in the doorway with alacrity.
Another moment and it might have been too late.

"Go on," cried the Boer.  "Out you go, or I 'll—"

"Stop where you are, Bailey," cried Mrs. du Preez.

She came across the room with a run and put herself
in front of Bailey, facing her husband.

"Now," she said, "*now* what d'you think you'll do?"

The Boer heaved himself upright, and they fronted
one another stripped of all considerations save to be
victor in the struggle for the fate of Boy Bailey.  It
was the iron-hard cockney against the Boer.

"I told him to go," said Christian.  "If he doesn't
go—I'll shoot."

He cast an eye up to the gun in its place upon the wall.

"You will, will you?" The bitter voice was mocking.
"Now, Christian, you just listen to me."

"He 'll go," said the Boer.

"Oh, he 'll go," answered Mrs. du Preez.  "He 'll
go all right, if you say so.  But mark my words.  You
go turning my friends out of the house like this, and
so help me, I 'll go too.  Get that straight in your head,
old chap—it's right.  Bailey 's not fretting to stay
with you, you know.  You 're not such good company
that you need worry about it.  It 's me he came to
see, not you.  And you pitch him out; that 's all.
Bailey goes to-night, does he?  Then I go in the morning."

She nodded at him, the serious, graphic nod that
promises more earnestly than a shaken fist.

"What!"  The Boer was taken by surprise.  "If
he goes—"

"I 'll go—yes."

She was entirely in earnest; her serious purpose was
plain to him in every word she spoke.  She threatened
that which no Boer could live down, the flight of a
wife.  He stared at her almost aghast.  In the slow
processes of his amazed mind, he realized that this, too,
had had to come—the threat if not the deed; it was
the due and logical climax of such a marriage as his.
Her thin face, still pretty after its fashion, and her
slight figure that years had not dignified with matronly
curves, were stiffened to her monstrous purpose.
Whether she went or not, the intention dwelt in her.
It was another vileness in Boy Bailey that he should
have given it the means of existence.

Both of them, his wife and Mr. Bailey, screened by
her body, thought that he was vanquished.  He stood
so long without answering that they expected no
answer.  Bailey was framing a scene for the morrow in
which he should renounce the reluctant hospitality of
the Boer: "I can starve, but I can't stand meanness."  He
had got as far as this when the Boer recovered himself.

With an inarticulate cry he was suddenly in motion,
irresistibly swift and forceful.  A sweep of his arm
cleared Mrs. du Preez from his path and sent her
reeling aside, leaving Boy Bailey exposed.  Christian
seemed to halt at the threshold of the room and thrust
a long arm out, of which the forked hand took Boy
Bailey by the thick throat and dragged him in.  He
held the shifty, ruined face, now contorted and writhen
from his grip like the face of a hanged man, at the
level of his waist and beat upon it with the back of
his unclenched right hand again and again.  Boy
Bailey's legs trailed upon the floor lifelessly; only at
each dull blow, thudding like a mallet on his blind
face, his weak arms fluttered convulsively.  Mrs. du
Preez, who had fallen against the table, leaned forward
with hands clasped against her breast and watched with
a fascinated and terror-stricken stare.

Boy Bailey uttered a windy moan and Christian
dropped him with a gesture of letting fall something
that defiled his hand.  The beaten creature fell like a
wet towel and was motionless and limp about his feet.
Across his body, Christian looked at his wife.  He
seemed to her to tower above that meek and impotent
carcass, to impend hatefully and dreadfully.

"Throw water on him," he said.  "In an hour, I will
come back and if I see him then, I will shoot."

She did not answer, but continued to stare.

"You hear?" he demanded.

She gulped.  "Yes."

"Good," he said.  He stepped over the body of Boy
Bailey and mounted on a chair, where he reached down
the rifle.  He gave his wife another look; she had not
moved.  He shrugged and went out with the gun under
his arm.

It was not till the noise of his steps ceased at the
house-door that Mrs. du Preez moved from her attitude
of defeat and fear.  She came forward on tiptoe, edged
past Boy Bailey's feet and crouched to peer round the
doorpost.  She had to assure herself that Christian was
gone.  She went furtively along the passage and
peeped out over the kraals to be finally certain of it
and saw him, still with the gun, walking down to the
further fold where Paul was knee-deep in sheep.  She
came back to the room and closed the door carefully,
going about it with knitted brows and a face steeped
in preoccupation.  Not till then did she turn to attend
to Boy Bailey.

"Oh, God," she cried in a startled whisper as she bent
above him, for his eyes were open in his bloody face
and the battered features were feeling their way to the
smile.

She fell on her knees beside him.

"Bailey," she said breathlessly.  "I thought you—I
thought he 'd killed you."

Boy Bailey rose on one elbow and felt at his face.

"Him!" he exclaimed, with all the scorn that could
be conveyed in a whisper.  "Him!  He couldn't kill
me in a year.  Why, he never even shut his fist."

He wiped the blood from his fingers by rubbing them
on the smooth earth of the floor and sat up.

"Why," he said, "take his gun away and I wouldn't
say but what I 'd hammer him myself.  Him kill
me—why, down in Capetown once I had a feller go for
me with a bottle an' leave me for dead, an' I was
havin' a drink ten minutes after he 'd gone.  He isn't
coming back yet, is he?"

"No—not for an hour."

She had hardly heard him, so desperately was she
concentrated on the one idea that occupied her mind.

"Well, I won't wait for him," said Mr. Bailey.
"I 'll get some of this muck off my face an'—an' have
a drink, if you 'll be so kind, and then I 'll fade.  But
if ever I see him again—"

"Bailey," said Mrs. du Preez, "where 'll you go?"

"Where?  Well, to-night I reckon to sleep in plain
air, as the French say—or is it the Germans?—somewhere
about here till I can get word with a certain
nigger who owes me money.  And then, off to the
station on my tootsies and take train back to the land
of ticky (threepenny) beer and Y.M.C.A.'s."

"England?" asked Mrs. du Preez.

"England be—" Boy Bailey hesitated—"mucked,"
he substituted.  "Capetown, me dear; the metropolis
of our foster motherland.  It 's Capetown for me, where
the Christian Kafirs come from."

"Bailey," said Mrs. du Preez.  "Bailey, take me."

"What?" demanded Boy Bailey.  "Take you where?"

"Take me with you."  She was still kneeling beside
him and she put a hand on his arm urgently, looking
into his blood-stained and smashed face.  "I won't stay
with him now.  I said I wouldn't and I won't.  I 'd
die first.  And you and me was always good pals,
Bailey.  Only for that breakdown at Fereira, we 'd
have—we might have hitched up together.  You were
always hinting—you know you were, Bailey.  Don't
you know?"

"Hinting?"  He was surprised at last, but still
wary.  "But I wasn't hinting at—supporting you?"

"I didn't say you were," she answered eagerly.
"Bailey, I 'm not a fool; I 've got temperament too.
You said yourself I had, only the other day.  And—and
I can't stop with him now."

Mr. Bailey looked at his fingers thoughtfully and felt
his face again.

"Fact is," he said deliberately, "you 're off your
balance.  You 'll live to thank me for not taking
advantage of it.  You 'll say, 'Bailey had me and let me
go, as a gentleman would.  He remembered I was a
mother.  Bless him.'  That 's what you 'll say when
you 're an old woman with your grandchildren at your
knee.  And anyhow, what d'you think you 'd do in
Capetown?  You ain't far off forty, are you?"

She shook him by the arm she held to fix his attention.

"Bailey," she said.  "That don't matter for a time.
I 've got a bit of money, you know.  I 'm not leaving
that behind."

"Money, have you?"

The wonderful thing in women such as Mrs. du Preez
is that they see so clearly and yet act so blindly.
They know they are sacrificed for men's gain and do
not conceal their knowledge.  They count upon
baseness, cruelty and falsity as characteristics of men in
general and play upon these qualities for their purposes.
But furnish them with a reason for depending upon a
man, and they will trust him, uphold him, obey him, lean
upon him and compensate the flimsiest rascal for the
world's contempt and hardness by yielding him a
willing victim.

They looked at each other.  Bailey still sitting on
the floor, she on her knees, and each read in the other's
eyes an appraisement and a stratagem.  The coffee-pot
that stood all day beside the fire to be ready for
Boer visitors, sibilated mildly at their backs.

"It would n't last for ever, the bit you 've got," said
Bailey.  "There 's that to think of."

"It 's a good bit," she replied.

"Is it—is it as much as fifty pounds?" he asked.

"It 's more," she answered.  "Never you mind how
much it is, Bailey.  It's a good bit and it 's mine, not
his."

He thought upon it with his under-lip caught up between
his teeth, almost visibly reviewing the possibilities
of profit in the company of a woman who had money
about her.  Mrs. du Preez continued to urge him in hard
whispers.

"I 'd never manage it by myself, Bailey, or I
wouldn't be begging you like this.  I 've tried to bring
myself to it again and again, but I was n't game enough.
And it isn't as if I was goin' to be a burden to you.
It won't be long before I 'll get a job—you 'll see.
A barmaid, p'r'aps, or I might even get in again with
a show.  I haven't lost my figure, anyhow.  And as
for staying here now, with him, after this—Bailey, I 'll
take poison if you leave me."

Boy Bailey frowned and looked up at the clock which
swung a pendulum to and fro against the wall, as
though to invite human affairs to conduct themselves in
measure.

"Well, we haven't got too much time to talk about
it," he said.  "He said an hour.  Now supposin' I
take you, you know it's a case of footin' it down the
line to the next siding?  It wouldn't suit me to be
nabbed with you on my hands.  He 'd shoot as soon
as think about it, and then where would I be?"

"I can walk," Mrs. du Preez assured him eagerly.
"You 'll take me with you, then, Bailey?"

Boy Bailey sighed.  "Oh, I'll take you," he said.
"I 'll take you, since your mind 's made up.  My good
nature has been the ruin of me—that and my temperament.
But don't forget later on that I warned you."

Mrs. du Preez jumped up.  "I won't forget," she
promised.  "This is my funeral.  Get up from there,
Bailey, and we 'll have a drink on it."

They made their last arrangements over the glasses.
Christian's absence was to be counted upon for the
greater part of the next day; their road would be clear.

The first word above a whisper which had been
spoken since Christian left them was by Mrs. du Preez.
She sat down her glass at the last with a jolt.

"But, Bailey," she cried, on a note of hysterical
gaiety, "Bailey—we got to be careful, I know, and all
that—but what a lark it 'll be."

He stared at her, not quick enough to keep up with
her mounting mood.  She was flushed and feverish with
excitement and the reaction of strong feeling and her
eyes danced like a child's on the brink of mischief.

"The woman 's a fool," thought Boy Bailey.

His own attitude towards the affair, as he reviewed
it that night in the forage-shed, where he reposed full
dressed in the scent of dry grasses and stared reflectively
through a gap in the roof at the immortal patience of
the stars, was strictly businesslike.  Not even a desire
to be revenged upon Christian du Preez, who had called
him names and beaten him, impaired the consistency of
that attitude.  Boy Bailey allowed for a certain
proportion of thrashings in his experiences; they ranked
in the balance-sheet of his transactions as a sort of
office expenses.  They had to be kept down to the
lowest figure compatible with convenience and good
business, but they were not to be weighed against a
lucky deal.  The one thing that engaged his fancy was
the fact that the woman, though close on forty, would
come with money about her—more than fifty pounds.
It would make up his equipment to a handsome, an
imposing, figure.  Never before had he possessed a round
hundred pounds in one sum.  The mere possibilities
that it opened out were exciting; it seemed as large
and as inexhaustible as any other large sum.  He did
not dwell on the fact that it belonged to Mrs. du Preez
and not to him; he did not even give his mind to a
scheme for securing it.  All that was detail, a thing to
be settled at any advantageous moment.  A dodge, a
minute of drowsiness on her part—or perhaps, at most,
a blow on the breasts—would secure the conveyance of
the money to him.  In the visions of Capetown that
hovered on the outskirts of his thought, a ghostly
seraglio attending his nod, there moved many figures,
but Mrs. du Preez was not among them.  His imagination
made a circuit about her and her fate, or at most
it glanced with brevity and distaste on the spectacle of a
penniless woman weeping on a bench at a wayside
station, seeing the tail-lights of a vanishing train
blurred through tears.

"I knew I 'd strike it lucky one of these days," was
Mr. Bailey's reflection, as he composed himself to
slumber.  "With two or three more like her—I 'll be a
millionaire yet."

The stars watched his upturned face as he slept with
a still scrutiny that must have detected aught in its
unconscious frankness that could redeem it or suggest
that once it had possessed the image of God.  He
slept as peacefully, as devotedly, as a baby, confiding
his defenselessness to the night with no tremors or
uncertainty.  He left unguarded the revelations of his
loose and feeble face that the mild stars searched,
always with their stare of stagnant surprise.

In the farmhouse, there was yet a light in the
windows when dawn paled the eastward heaven.  Christian
du Preez slept in his bed unquietly, with clenched hands
outstretched over the empty place beside him, and in
another room Paul had transferred himself from
waking dreams to a dream-world.  Tiptoeing here and there
in the house, Mrs. du Preez had gathered together the
meager handful of gear that was to go with her; she
had shaken out a skirt that she treasured and made
ready a hat that smelt of camphor.  Her money, in
sovereigns, made a hard and heavy knob in a knotted
napkin.  All was gathered and ready for the journey
and yet the light shone in the window of the parlor
where she sat through the hours.  Her hands were in
her lap and there were no tears in her eyes—it was
beyond tears.  She was taking leave of her furniture.

She saw her husband at breakfast, facing him across
the table with a preoccupied expression that he took
for sullenness.  She did not see the grimness of his
countenance nor mark his eye upon her; she was
thinking in soreness of heart of six rosewood chairs,
upholstered in velvet, a rosewood table, a sofa, and the
rest of it—the profit of her marriage, her sheet-anchor
and her prop.  She felt as though she had given her
life for them.

Christian rode away with his back to the sun, with
no word spoken between them, and as his pony broke
into a lope—the Boer half-trot, half-canter,—he caught
and subdued an impulse to look back at the house.
Even if he had looked, he would hardly have seen the
cautious reconnoiter of Boy Bailey's head around the
corner of it, as that camp-follower of fortune made
sure of his departure.  Thrashings Mr. Bailey could
make light of, but the Boer's threat of shooting had
stuck in his mind.  He rested on his hands and knees
and stuck his chin close to the ground in prudent care
as he peered about the corner of the house to see the
owner of the rifle make a safe offing.

Even when the Boer had dwindled from sight, swallowed
up by the invisible inequalities of the ground
that seemed as flat as a table, he avoided to show
himself in the open.  He lurked under the walls of kraals,
frightening farm Kafirs who came upon him suddenly
and finally made a sudden appearance before Paul at
the back of the house.

"I won't waste words on you," he said to the boy.
"I 've got something better to do, thank God.  But I 'm
told you have a message for me."

"Two messages," said Paul.

"One 'll do," replied Boy Bailey.  "I don't want to
hear you talking.  I 've been insulted here and I 'm
not done with you yet.  Mind that.  So hand over what
you 've got for me and be done with it—d'you hear?"

"Here it is."  Paul put his hand into the loose bosom
of his shirt and drew out a small paper packet.  He
held it out to Boy Bailey.

"That!" Boy Bailey trembled as he seized it, with
a frightful sense of disappointment.  He had seen the
money as gold, a brimming double handful of minted
gold, with gold's comforting substance and weight.
The packet he took into his hand was no fatter than
a fat letter and held no coin.

He rent the covering apart and stared doubtfully at
the little wad of notes it contained, sober-colored paper
money of the Bank of Africa.  It had never occurred
to him that the Kafir, Kamis, would have his riches in so
uninspiring a shape.  Two notes of twenty pounds each
and one of ten and all three of them creased and dirty.
No chink, no weight to drag at his pocket and keep him
in mind of it, none of the pomp and panoply of riches.

"Why—why," he stammered.  "I told him—cash
down.  Damn the dirty Kafir swindler, what does he
call this?"

"Blackmail, I think he said," replied Paul.  "That
was the other message.  If you don't do what you said
you 'd do, you 'll go to *tronk* (jail) for it, and I am to
be a witness.  That 's if he does n't kill you himself—like
I told him he 'd better do."

Boy Bailey arrived by degrees at sufficient composure
to pocket the notes, thrusting them deep for greater
security and patting them through the cloth.

"Oh, you told him that, did you?" he said.  "And
you call yourself a white man, do you?  Murder, is it?
You look out, young feller.  You don't know the risks
you 're running.  I 'm not a man that forgets."

But Paul was not daunted.  He watched the battered
face that threatened him with an expression which the
other did not understand.  There was a curious warm
interest in it that might have flattered a man less bare
of illusions as to his appearance.

"I suppose you 've never seen a black eye before,
you gaping moon-calf," he cried irritably.  "What are
you staring like that for?"

Paul smiled.  "I would give you a shilling again to
let me make a model of you," he answered.  "I 'd give
you two shillings."

Boy Bailey swore viciously and swung on his heel.
He was stung at last and he had no answer.  He made
haste to get around the corner and away from eyes that
would keep the memory of him as he appeared to Paul.

It was more than an hour later that Mrs. du Preez
discovered him, squatting under the spikes of a dusty
aloe, humped like a brooding vulture and grieving over
that last affront.  He lifted mournful eyes to her as she
stood before him.

"Bailey," she said breathlessly.  "I hunted everywhere
for you.  I thought you 'd gone without me."

She was ready for the long flight on foot.  All that
she had in the way of best clothes was on her body,
everything she could not bring herself to leave.  The
seemliness of Sunday was embodied in her cloth coat
and skirt, her cream silk bosom and its brooches, the
architectural elaborateness of her hat.  She stood in the
merciless sun in all her finery, with sweat on her
forehead and a small bundle in each hand.

"You 're coming, then?" he asked stupidly.

She stamped her foot impatiently.  "Of course I 'm
coming," she said.  "Don't go into all that again,
Bailey.  D' you think I 'd stop with him now,
after—after everything?"

She was holding desperately to her resolution, eager
to be off before the six rosewood chairs, the table and
the sofa should overcome her and make good their claim
to her.

"What 's those?"  Bailey nodded at the bundles torpidly.

"Oh," she was burning to be moving, to be committed,
to see her boats flaming and smoking behind
her.  "This is grub, Bailey.  We 'll want grub, won't
we?  And this is my things."

"The—er—money, I suppose, an' all that?"

"Yes, yes.  Oh, do come on, Bailey.  The money 's
all here.  Everything 's here.  You carry the grub an'
let 's be going."

"The grub, eh?"  Mr. Bailey rose grunting to his
feet.  "You 'd rather—well, all right."

None viewed that elopement to mark how Mrs. du
Preez slipped her free hand under Bailey's arm and
went forth at his side in the bravery she had donned
as though to bring grace to the occasion.  Paul was
down at the dam with sheep, and before he returned the
brown distances of the Karoo had enveloped them and
its levels had risen behind them to blot out the
dishonored roof of the house.

At the hour of the midday meal, Paul ate alone,
contentedly and unperturbed by his mother's absence.
For all he knew she had one of her weeping fits
upstairs in her bedroom, and he was careful to make no
noise.





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`CHAPTER XII`:

.. class:: center large bold

   CHAPTER XII

.. vspace:: 2

Margaret entered the drawing-room rather
late for tea and Mrs. Jakes accordingly
acknowledged her arrival with an extra stoniness of
regard.  In his place by the window, Ford turned from
his abstracted contemplation of the hot monotony
without and sent her a discreet and private smile
across the tea-table.  Mrs. Jakes, noting it and the
girl's response, tightened her mouth unpleasantly as
the suspicion recurred to her that there was "something
between" Mr. Ford and Miss Harding.  More than
once of late she had noticed that their intercourse had
warmed to the stage when the common forms of expression
need to be helped out by a code of sympathetic looks
and gestures.  She addressed the girl in her thinnest
tones of extreme formality.

"I thought perhaps you were n't coming in," she said.
"I 'm afraid the tea 's not very hot now."

"I 'll ring," said Mr. Samson, diligently handing a
chair.

"Please don't," said Margaret, taking it.  "I don't
mind at all.  Don't bother, anybody."

"I forget if you take sugar, Miss Harding," said
Mrs. Jakes, pouring negligently from the pot.  Ford
grinned and turned quickly to the window again.

"No sugar, thanks," answered Margaret agreeably;
"and no milk and no tea."

"No tea?"  Mrs. Jakes raised her eyebrows in severe
surprise and looked up.  The movement sufficed to
divert the stream from the tea-pot so that it flowed
abundantly on the hand which held the cup and splashed
thence into the sugar basin.  She sat the pot down
sharply and reached for her handkerchief with a
smothered ejaculation of annoyance.

"Oh, I 'm sorry," said Margaret.  "But how lucky
you didn't keep it hot for me.  You might have been
scalded, might n't you?"

"Thank you," replied Mrs. Jakes, with all the dignity
she could summon while she mopped at her sleeve.
"Thank you; I am not hurt."

That was the second time Margaret had turned her
own guns, her own little improvised pop-guns of
ineffectual enmity, back upon her; and she did not quite
understand how it was done.  The first time had been
when she had pretended not to hear a remark
Margaret had addressed to her.  The girl had crossed the
room and joined Dr. Jakes in his hearth-rug exile, and
Mr. Samson had stared while Ford laughed silently
but visibly.  Mrs. Jakes had not understood the
implication of it; she was only aware, reddening and
resentful, that Margaret had scored in some subtle
fashion.

The hatred of Mrs. Jakes was a cue to consistency
of action no less plain than her love.  "I like people to
know their own minds," was one of her self-revelations,
and she believed that worthy people, decent people, good
people were those who saw their way clear under all
circumstances of friendship and hostility and were
prepared to strike and maintain a due attitude upon any
encounter.  Her friends were those who indulged her
the forms of courtesy and consideration; her
enemies those who opposed her or were rude to her.  To
her friends she returned their indulgence in kind; her
enemies she pursued at each meeting and behind their
backs with an implacable tenacity of hate.  One
conceives that in the case of such lives as hers, only those
survive whose feebleness is supplemented by claws.
Take away their genuine capacity for making themselves
disagreeable at will, and they would be trodden under
and extinguished.  Mrs. Jakes' girlhood was illuminated
by the example of an aunt, who lived for fourteen years
with only a thin wall between her and a person with
whom she was not on speaking terms.  The aunt had
known her own mind with such a blinding clearness that
she was able to sit with folded hands, listening through
the wall to the sounds of a raving husband murdering
her enemy, and no impulse to cry for help had arisen
to dim the crystal of that knowledge.  "She was a bad
one at forgiving, was your Aunt Mercy," Mrs. Jakes
had been told, always with a suggestion in the speaker's
voice that there was something admirable in such
inflexibility.  Primitive passions, the lusts of skin-clad
ancestors, fortified the anemia of the life from which she
was sprung.  Marriage by capture would have shocked
her deeply, but she would not have been the worse squaw.

She dropped into a desultory conversation with
Mr. Samson, with occasional side-references to Dr. Jakes,
and managed at the same time to keep an eye on the other
two.  Margaret had walked across to Ford, and was
sitting at his side on the window-ledge; he had a
three-days-old copy of the *Dopfontein Courant*, in which the
scanty news of the district was printed in English and
Dutch and they were looking it over together.  Ford
held the paper and Margaret leaned against his arm to
share it; the intimacy of their attitude was disagreeable
to Mrs. Jakes.  An alliance between the two of them
would be altogether too strong for her, and besides, it
was warfare as she understood it to destroy the foe's
supports whenever possible.

"Nothing in the rag, I suppose, Ford?" asked
Mr. Samson, in his high, intolerant voice.

"Not a thing," answered Ford, "unless you 're
interested in the price of wools."

"Grease wool per pound," suggested Margaret.
"Guess how much that is, Mr. Samson."

"It ought to be cheap," said Mr. Samson.  "It sounds
beastly."

"Well, then, how 's this?"  Margaret craned across
Ford's shoulder and read: "'Mr. Ben Bongers of Tomtown,
the well-known billiard-marker, underwent last
week the sad experience of being kicked at the hands of
Mr. Jacobus Van Dam's *quaai* cock.  Legal proceedings
are pending.'  There now.  But does anybody know
what kicked him?"

"Cock ostrich," rumbled Dr. Jakes from the back of
the room.  "*Quaai*—that means bad-tempered."

"You see," said Ford, "ostriches are common hereabouts.
They say cock and ostrich is understood.  What
would they call a barn-door cock, though?"

"A poultry," said Mr. Samson.  "But we must watch
for those legal proceedings; they ought to be good."

Mrs. Jakes had listened in silence, but now an idea
occurred to her.

"There 's nothing about that woman in Capetown
this week?" she asked, and smiled meaningly as she
caught Margaret's eye.

"No," said Ford.  "I was looking for that, but
there 's nothing."

"What woman was that?" inquired Margaret.

"Oh, a rotten business.  A woman married a Kafir
parson—a white woman.  There 's been a bit of a row
about it."

"Oh," said Margaret, understanding Mrs. Jakes'
smile.  "I didn't see the paper last week."

She looked at Mrs. Jakes with interest.  Evidently
the little woman saw the matter of Kamis, and Margaret's
familiar acquaintance with him, as a secret with
which she could be cowed, a piece of dark knowledge that
would be held against her as a weapon of final resort.
The fact did more than all Kamis' warnings and Boy
Bailey's threats to enlighten her as to the African view
of a white woman who had relations, any relations but
those of employer and servant, with a black man.  Not
only would a woman in such a case expose herself to the
brutal scandal that flourishes in the atmosphere of bars
where Boy Baileys frame the conventions that society
endorses, but she would be damned in the eyes of all the
Mrs. Jakes in the country.  They would tar and feather
her with their contumely and bury her beneath their
disgust.

She returned Mrs. Jakes' smile till that lady looked
away with a long-drawn sniff of defiance.

"But why a row?" asked Margaret.  "If she was
satisfied, what was there to make a row about?"

She really wanted to hear what two sane and average
men would adduce in support of Mrs. Jakes' views.

Old Mr. Samson shook his head rebukingly.

"Men and women ain't on their own in this world,"
he said seriously.  "They 've got to think of the rest of
the crowd.  We 're all in the same boat out here—white
people holdin' up the credit of the race.  Can't afford
to have deserters goin' over to the other camp, don't y'
know.  Even supposin'—I say, *supposin'*—there was
nothing else to prevent a white girl from taking on a
nigger, it's lowerin' the flag—what?"

"A woman like that deserves to be horsewhipped,"
cried Mrs. Jakes, with sudden vigor.  "To go and marry
a *Kafir*—the vile creature."

"This is very interesting," said Margaret.  "Do you
mean the Kafir is vile, Mrs. Jakes, or the woman?"

"I mean both," retorted Mrs. Jakes.  "In this
country we know what such creatures are.  A respectable
woman does n't let a Kafir come near her if she can help
it.  She never speaks to them except to give them their
orders.  And as to—to marrying them, or being friendly
with them—why, she 'd sooner die."

Margaret had started a subject which no South
African can exhaust.  They discuss it with heat, with
philosophic impartiality, with ethnological and eugenic
inexactitudes, and sometimes with bloodshed; but they
never wear it out.

"You see, Miss Harding, there are other reasons against
it," Mr. Samson struck in again.  "There 's the general
feelin' on the subject and you can't ignore that.  One
woman mustn't do what a million other women feel
to be vile.  It 's makin' an attack on decency—that 's
what it comes to.  A woman might feel a call in the
spirit to marry a monkey.  It might suit her all right—might
be the best thing she could do, so far as a woman
of that sort was concerned; but it would n't be playin'
the game.  It wouldn't be cricket."

He shook his spirited white head with a frown.

"I see," said Margaret.  "But there 's one other
point.  I only want to know, you know."

"Naturally," agreed Mr. Samson.  "What's the point?"

"Well, there are about ten times as many black people
as white in this country.  What about their sense of
decency?  Doesn't that suffer a little by this—this
trades-union of the whites?  That woman in Capetown
has all the whites against her and all the blacks for her—I
suppose.  There 's a majority in her favor, at any rate."

"Hold on," cried Mr. Samson.  "You can't count
the Kafirs like that, you know.  They 're not in it.
We 're talking about white people.  The whole point is
that Kafirs *are n't* whites.  A white woman belongs to
her own people and must stand by their way of lookin'
at things.  If we take Kafir opinion, we 'll be chuckin'
clothes next and goin' in for polygamy."

"Would we?" said Margaret.  "I wonder.  D'you
think it will come to that when the Kafirs are all as
civilized as we are and the color line is gone?"

"The color line will never go," replied Mr. Samson,
solemnly.  "You might as well talk of breakin' down
the line between men and beasts."

"Well, evolution did break it down," said Margaret.
"Think, Mr. Samson.  There will come a day when we
shall travel on flying machines, and all have lungs
like drums.  We shall live in cities of glazed brick
beside running streams of disinfectant.  There will be no
poverty and no crime and no dirt, and only one language.
Where will the Kafirs be then?  Still in huts on the
Karoo being kept in their place?"

"I 'm not a prophet," said Mr. Samson.  "I don't
know where they 'll be.  It won't bother me when that
time comes.  I 'll be learning the harp."

"There 'll be a statue in one of those glazed-brick
cities to the woman in Capetown," Margaret went on.

"It 'll be inscribed in letters of gold—'To —— (whatever
her name was): She felt the future in her bones.'"

Mr. Samson blew noisily.  "Evolution 's not in my
line," he said.  "It 's all very well to drag in Darwin
and all that but black and white don't mix and you can't
get away from that."

"I should think not, indeed."  Mrs. Jakes corroborated
him with a shrug.  She had found herself intrigued
by the glazed-brick cities, and shook them from
her as she remembered that she was not "friends" with
their inventor.

But Margaret was keen on her theory and would not
abandon it for a fly-blown aphorism.

"You 'd never have been satisfied with that woman,"
she said.  "Supposing she had n't married the Kafir?
Supposing that being fond of him and believing in him,
she had bowed down to your terrible decency and not
married?  You 'd still have been down on her for liking
him, and she 'd have been persecuted if she spoke to him
or let him be friendly with her.  Is n't that so?"

Mr. Samson pursed his lips and bristled his white
mustache up under his nose.

"Yes," he said.  "That is so.  I won't pretend I 've
got any use for women who go in for Kafirs."

"Nobody has."  Mrs. Jakes came in again at the tail
of his reply with all the confidence of a faithful
interpreter.

Margaret, marking her righteous severity, had an
impulse to stun them both with a full confession.  She
found in herself an increasing capacity for being
irritated by Mrs. Jakes, and had a vision of her, flattened
beyond recovery, by the revelation.  She repressed the
impulse because the vision went on to give her a glimpse
of the tragedy that would close the matter.

Ford had not yet spoken.  He sat beside her, listening.
Across the room, Dr. Jakes was listening also.
She put the question to him.

"What do you think, Dr. Jakes?" she asked.

"Eh?"  He started at the sound of his name and
put up an uncertain hand to straighten his spectacles.

"About all this—about the general principle of it?"
she particularized.

"Oh, well."  He hesitated and cleared his throat.
There was a fine clear-cut idea floating somewhere in
his mind, but he could not bring it into focus with his
thoughts.

"It's simply that—Kafirs are Kafirs," he said dully.
Mrs. Jakes interposed a warm, "Certainly," and further
disordered him.  He gave her a long and gloomy look
and tried to go on.  "When they are—further
advanced, that will be the time to—to think about
inter-marriage, and all that.  Now—well, you can see what
they are."

He wiped his forehead nervously with his handkerchief,
and Ford entered the conversation.

"Jakes has got it," he said.  "Intermarriage may
come—perhaps; but at present every marriage of a
white person with a Kafir means a loss.  It's a sacrifice
of a civilized unit.  D' you see, Miss Harding?  You 've
got to reckon not only what that woman in Capetown
does but what she doesn't do as well.  She might have
been the mother of men and women.  Well, now she 'll
bear children to be outcasts.  She ought to have waited
a couple of hundred years."

"Perhaps she was in a hurry," answered Margaret.
"But there 's the other question—what if she hadn't
married?"

"Oh," said Ford.  "In point of reason and all that,
she 'd have been right enough.  But people are n't
reasonable.  Look at Samson—and look at me."

"You mean—you 've 'no use' for her?"

"It's prejudice," he answered.  "It's anything you
like.  But the plain fact is, I 'd probably admire such
a woman if I met her in a book; but as flesh and blood,
I decline the introduction.  Does that shock you?"

Margaret smiled rather wryly.  "Yes," she said.
"It does, rather."

He turned towards her, humorous and whimsical, but
at that moment Dr. Jakes made a movement doorward
and Mrs. Jakes began her usual brisk fire of small-talk
to cover his retreat.

"I only wish there was some way we could get the
papers regularly—such a lot of things seem to be
happening just now," she prattled.  "Some of the papers
have cables from England and they are most interesting.
That *Cape Times* you lent me, Mr. Samson—it
had the names of the people at the Drawing-Room.
Do you know, I 've often been to see the carriages drive
up, and it 's just like reading about old friends.  There
was one old lady, rather fat, with a mole on her chin,
who always went, and once we saw her drinking out of
a flask in the carriage.  My cousin William—William
Penfold—nicknamed her the Duchess de Grundy, and
when we asked a policeman about her, it turned out she
really was a Duchess.  Was n't that strange?"

Mr. Samson heard this recital with unusual attention.

"A flask?" he asked.  "Leather-covered thing, big
as a quart bottle?  Fat old girl with an iron-gray
mustache?"

"Why," cried Mrs. Jakes.  "You 've seen her too."

Mr. Samson glared around him.  "Seen her," he
exclaimed.  "Why, ma 'am, once—she would walk with
the guns, confound her—once I put a charge of shot
into her.  And why I didn't give her the other barrel
while I was about it, I 've never been able to imagine.
Seen her, indeed.  I 've seen her bounce like a bally
india-rubber ball with a gunful of lead to help her
along.  Used to write to me, she did, whenever a pellet
came to the surface and dropped out.  I should just
think I had seen her."

"Fancy," said Mrs. Jakes.

Mr. Samson did not go off forthwith, as his wont was.
He showed a certain dexterity in contriving to keep
Margaret in the room with himself till the others had
gone.  Then he closed the door and stood against it,
smiling paternally but still with gallantry.

"I wanted just a word with you, if you 'll allow me,"
he said, with a hand to the point of his trim mustache.
He was a beautifully complete thing as he stood with his
back to the door, groomed to a hair, civilized to the
eyebrows.  He presented a perfected type of the utterly
conventionalized, kindly and uncharitable gentleman of
England.

"Oh, Mr. Samson, this is so sudden," said Margaret.

"What's that?  Oh, you be—ashamed of yourself," he
answered.  "Tryin' to fascinate an old buffer like me.
But, I say, Miss Harding, I wish you 'd just let me say
something I 've got on my mind—and forgive
beforehand anything that sounds like preaching.  We old
crocks—we 've got nothing to do but worry the
youngsters, and we have to be indulged—what?"

"Go ahead," agreed Margaret.  "But if you preach
at me, after shooting a duchess,—I'll scream for help.
What is it?"

"It's a small matter," said Mr. Samson.  "I want
you just to let us go on likin' and admirin' you, without
afterthought or anything to spoil the effect.  You're
new out here, and of course you don't know and could n't
know; you 're too fresh and too full of sweetness and
innocence; but—well, it kind of jars to hear you standin'
up for a woman like that woman in Capetown.  You
mean a lot to us, Miss Harding.  We have n't got much
here, you know; we had to leave what we had and run
out here for our lives—run like bally rabbits when a
terrier comes along.  It 'ud be a kindness if you
wouldn't—you know."

There was no mistaking the kindliness with which he
smiled at her as he spoke.  It was another warning, but
conveyed differently from the others she had received.
Mr. Samson managed to make his air of pleading for a
matter of sentiment convincing.

"You—you 're awfully kind," she said.

"Not kind," he replied.  "Oh no; it is n't that.  It 's
what I said.  It 's us I 'm thinking of.  You 've no idea
of what you stand for.  You 're home, and afternoons
when one meets pretty girls who are all goin' to marry
some bally cub, and restaurants full of nice women with
jolly shoulders, and fields with tailor-made girls runnin'
away from cows.  You 're the whole show.  But if you
start educatin' us, though we 're an ignorant lot, we lose
all that."

He looked at her with a trace of anxiety.

"It 's cheek, I know, puttin' it to you like this," he
added.  "But I 'm relyin' on your being a sportsman,
Miss Harding."

"It is n't cheek," Margaret answered.  "It's awfully
good of you.  I—I see what you mean, and I should be
sorry if I—well, failed you."

He stood aside from the door at once, throwing it open
as he did so.

"Sportsman to the bone," he said.  "Bless your heart,
did n't I know it.  Though I could n't have blamed you
if you 'd kicked at all this pow-wow from a venerable
ruin old enough to be your grandfather."

Hand to mustache, crooked elbow cocked well up,
brows down over bold eyes, the venerable ruin
challenged the title he gave himself.  Margaret found
his simple and comely tricks of posture and
expression touching; he played his little game of pose so
harmlessly and faithfully.  She stopped in front of him
as she walked to the door.

"If you 'll shut your eyes and keep quite still, I 'll
give you something," she offered.

"Ha!" snorted Mr. Samson zestfully.

He closed his eyes and stood to attention, smiling.
The lids of his eyes were flattened and seamed with blue
veins, and they gave him, as he waited unmoving, some
of the unreality and remoteness of a corpse.  He looked
like a man who had died suddenly while proposing a
loyal toast or paying a compliment, who carries his
genial purpose with him into the dark and leaves only the
shell of it behind.

Margaret put a light hand on his trim gray shoulder
and rising on tiptoe touched him with her lips between
the eyes.  Then she turned and went out, unhurrying,
and Mr. Samson still stood to attention with closed eyes
till the sound of her feet was clear of the stone-flagged
hall and had passed out to the stoep.

She did not go at once to the spot where a square stone
pillar screened Ford's easel, as her custom was.  She
came to rest at the side of the steps and stood
thoughtfully looking out to the veld, where the brown showed
hints of gold as the sun went westward.  It hung now,
very great and blinding, above the brim of the earth, and
bathed her with steep rays that riddled the recesses of the
stoep with their radiant artillery.  To one hand, a road
came from the horizon and passed to the opposite
horizon on the other hand, linking unseen and unheard-of
stopping-places across the gulf of that emptiness.

"What has all this got to do with me?" was her
thought, as her eyes traveled over the flat and unprofitable
breast of land, whose featurelessness seemed to defy
her even to fasten it in her memory.  She recollected
Ford's saying that she was a bird of passage, with all
this but a stage in her flight from sickness to health.
Her starting and halting points were far from Karoo;
she touched it only as the dust that moves upon it when
a chance wind raises fantastic spirals and drives them
swaying and zigzagging till they break and are gone.
Nothing that she did could be permanent here; her pains
would be spent in vain.  Even the martyrdom that had
been held up to her for a warning—even that, if she
accepted it, would be ineffectual, the "sacrifice of a
civilized unit."

Along the stoep, Ford's leg protruded from behind the
pillar as he sat widely asprawl on his camp-stool; the
heel of the white canvas shoe was on the flags and the
toe cocked up energetically.  He found things simple
enough, reflected Margaret; as simple as Mrs. Jakes
found them.  Where knowledge and reason failed him,
he availed himself frankly of prejudices and dealt
honestly with his instincts.  He permitted himself the
indulgence of plain dislikings and was not concerned to
justify or excuse them.  It was possible to conceive him
wrong, irrational, perverse, but never inconsistent or
embarrassed.  In the drawing-room he had spoken
lightly, but Margaret knew the steadfastness of mind
that was behind the trivial manner of speech.  Well, he
would have to be told, sooner or later, of the secret she
shared with the veld.  That confession was pressing
itself upon her.  With Mrs. Jakes and Boy Bailey already
privy to it, it could not be withheld much longer.  She
stood, gazing at the outstretched leg, and tried to
foresee his reception of the news.

"Well," said Ford, looking up absently when
presently she walked down to him.  "Did Samson crush you
or did you crush him?"

"It was a draw," answered Margaret.  "He 's a dear
old thing, though.  And what a guarantee of good faith
to be able to cap a duchess story like that.  Wasn't it
good?"

"Rotten shooting, though," said Ford.  "He
wouldn't have admitted he 'd peppered a commoner."

"You're jealous," retorted Margaret.  "Mr. Samson 's
quite all right, and I won't have him sneered at
after he 's been paying me compliments."

"Once I hit an Honorable with a tennis racket.  It
slipped out of my hand just as I was taking a fearful
smack at a high one and hit him like a boomerang.  So
I 'm not as jealous as you might think."

"One can't throw a tennis racket without hitting an
Honorable nowadays.  That 's nothing," said Margaret.
"And you 're just an ordinary person, anyhow.  Mr. Samson,
now—he 's not only a gentleman, but he looks
like it and sounds like it, and you could tell him with a
telescope twenty miles off for the real thing."

"Ye-es."  Ford drew a leisurely thumb across the
foreground of his picture and surveyed the result with
his head on one side.  "You know," he went on, kneading
reflectively at the sticky masses of paint, "some of
that 's true.  He does sound exactly like it.  If you
wanted to know the broad general view of the class that
he represents, and all the other classes that take a pattern
from it, you 'd be fairly safe in asking Samson.  Those
dashing men of the world, you know—they 're all for the
domestic virtues and loyalty and fair play.  If you find
fault with gambling and drinking and cursing, they say
you 've got the Nonconformist Conscience.  But when
they stand for a principle, they 've got the consciences
of Sunday School pupil-teachers.  Samson's ideal of
England is a nation of virtuous women and honest men,
large families, Sunday observance, and no damned
French kickshaws.  For that, he 'd go to the stake smiling."

"Well," said Margaret, "why not?"

"Oh, I 'm not saying anything against him," answered
Ford.  "I 'm telling you what he stands for and how
far he counts when he turns on the oracle."

"You mean that Kafir business, of course?"

"Yes," said Ford.  "That 's what I mean."

"I gathered," said Margaret slowly, "that you agreed
with him about that."

He was still at work with his colors and did not raise
his head as he answered.

"Not a bit of it.  I don't agree with him at all.  He
talks absolute drivel as soon as he begins to argue."

"But," began Margaret.

"I say I don't agree with him," continued Ford;
"but that 's not to say I don't feel just the same.  As a
matter of fact I do."

"Oh, you 're too subtle," said Margaret impatiently.

"That 's not subtle," said Ford imperturbably.  "You
were sounding us all inside there and you got eloquence
from old Samson and a shot in the dark from Jakes and
thunder and lightning from Mrs. Jakes.  Now, if you
listen, you 'll get the real thing from me.  As you said,
I 'm just an ordinary person.  Well, the ordinary
person knows all right that a matter of tar-brush in the
complexion doesn't make such a mighty difference in
two human beings.  He sees they 're both bustling along
to be dead and done with it as soon as possible, and that
they 'll turn into just the same kind of earth and take
their chance of the same immortality or annihilation—as
the case may be.  He sees all right; he even sees a sort
of romance and beauty in it, and makes it welcome when
it doesn't suggest the real thing too clearly.  But all
that doesn't prevent him from barring niggers utterly
in his own concerns.  It doesn't stop his flesh from
creeping when he reads of the woman in Capetown, and
imagines her sitting on the Kafir's knee.  And it does n't
hinder him from looking the other way when he meets
her in the street.  It isn't reason, I know.  It isn't
sense.  It is n't human charity.  But it is a thing that's
rooted in him like his natural cowardice and his bodily
appetites.  Is that at all clear?"

Margaret did not answer at once.  She seemed to be
looking at the canvas.

"Yes," she said finally.  "It 's clear enough.  But
tell me—is that you?  I mean, were you describing your
own feelings about it?"

"Yes," he said.

"You and I are going to quarrel before long," Margaret
answered.  "We 'll have to.  You won't be able
to help yourself."

"Oh," said Ford.  "Why 's that?"

"Because you 're such an ordinary person," retorted
Margaret.

He lifted his head at the tone of her voice, but further
talk was arrested by the sight of a man on horseback
coming across from the road towards them.  Both
recognized Christian du Preez.  They saw him at the
moment that he switched his cantering pony round towards
the house, and came swiftly over the grass.  He had his
rifle slung upon his back by a sling across the chest, and
he reined up short immediately below them, so that he
remained with his face just above, the rail of the stoep.

"*Daag,*" he said awkwardly.

"Afternoon," replied Ford.  "Are you painted for
war, or what, with that gun of yours?"

The Boer, checking his fretting pony with heel and
hand, gave him a bewildered look.  The dust was thick
in his beard, as from long traveling, and lay in damp
streaks in each furrow of his thin face.  The faint, acrid
smell of sweating man and horse lingered about him.
He moistened his lips before he could speak further.

"My wife is gone out," he said, speaking as though
he restrained many eager words.  "I must speak to her
at once.  She is not here—not?"

"I don't think so," said Ford.

Margaret was more certain.  "Mrs. du Preez has n't
been here this afternoon," she assured the Boer.
"There 's nothing wrong, I hope."

Christian looked from one to the other as they
answered with quick nervous eyes.

"No," he said.  "But it is something—I must speak
to her.  She is not here, then?"

They answered him again, wondering somewhat at his
strangeness.  He tried to smile at them but bit his lip
instead.

"Well—" he hesitated.

"I will fetch Mrs. Jakes if you like," said Margaret.
"But I 'm quite sure Mrs. du Preez hasn't been here."

"No," he said forlornly.  "Thank you.  Good-by,
Miss Harding."

The pony leaped under the spur, and they saw him
gallop back to the road and across it towards the farm.

"Queer," said Ford.  "Did you notice how humble
he was while his eyes looked like murder?"

But Margaret had been struck by something else.

"I thought he looked like Mrs. Jakes," she said,
"when I answer her back."





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`CHAPTER XIII`:

.. class:: center large bold

   CHAPTER XIII

.. vspace:: 2

It was Kamis, the Kafir, ranging upon one of his
solitary quests, who came upon them in the late
afternoon, arriving unseen out of the heat-haze and
appearing before them as incomprehensibly as though he
had risen out of the ground.

Mrs. du Preez had groaned and sat down for the
fourth or fifth time in three miles and Mr. Bailey's
patience was running dry.  For himself, the trudge
through the oppression of the sun was not a new
experience; he was inured to its discomforts and pains by
many years of use while he had been a pilgrim from door
to distant door of the charitable and credulous, and he
had gathered a certain adeptness in the arts of the trek.
He had set a good lively pace for this journey, partly
because a single vigorous stage would see them at the
railway line, but also because he sincerely believed in
Christian du Preez's willingness to shoot him, and was
concerned to be beyond the range of that vengeance.
Therefore, at this halt, he turned and swore.

Mrs. du Preez fanned herself feebly with one hand
while the other still held the little bundle that contained
her money.

"I can't help it, Bailey," she said painfully.  "I mus'
have a rest.  I 'm done."

"Done."  He spat.  "Bet I could make you walk if
I started.  Are you goin' to come on?"

She shook her head slowly, with closed eyes.

"I can't," she said.  "I mus' jus'—have a sit down,
Bailey."

Her elaborate hat nodded drunkenly on her head, and
all the dust of the long road could not make her clothes
at home in the center of the wide circle of dumb and
forsaken land in which she sat, surrendered to her
weariness, but never relaxing her hold on her money.  Not
once since their setting out had she loosed her grip on
that, save when she changed the burden of it from one
hand to the other.  Her faith was in the worth and
power of that double handful of sovereigns, and she
would have felt poorer on a desert island by the loss of
a single one of them.

"I 've been patient with you," Boy Bailey said,
looking at her fixedly.  "I 've been very patient with you.
But it 's about time there was an end of this
two-steps-and-a-squat business.  There 's no knowing what minute
that husband of yours might come ridin' up with his gun."

"I 'll be—all right—soon," she said.  "Give me a
half hour, Bailey."

"Take your own time," he replied.  "Take all the
time there is.  Only—I 'm goin' on."

She opened her eyes at that and blinked at him in an
effort to see him through the hot mist that stood before
them.

"Goin'—to leave me?"

"Yes," he said.  "What d' you think?"

Her look, her parted lips and all her accusing
helplessness were before his eyes; he looked past them and
shuffled.  To the weak man, weakness is horrible.

"I warned you about comin'," he said, seeking the
support of reasonable words as such men do.  "You 've
got yourself to blame, and I don't see why I should stop
here to be shot by a man that grudged me a bite and a
bed.  It isn't as if I 'd asked you to come."

"I 'll be better soon," was all she could say, still
holding him with that look of a wounded animal, the reproach
that neither threatens nor defies and is beyond all answer.

"Better soon," he grumbled scornfully, and fidgeted.
Her hand never left the little bundle.  Would she
struggle much, he was thinking.  He could take it from her,
of course, but he did n't want her to scream, even in that
earless solitude.  The thought of her screams made him
uneasy.  She might go on crying out even when he had
torn the bundle from her and the cries would follow at
his back as he carried it off, and he would know that she
was still crying when he had passed out of hearing.

Still—a kick, perhaps.  Boy Bailey looked at her
bowed body and at the toe of his shoe.  He began to
breathe short and to tremble.  It was necessary to wait
a moment and let energy accumulate for the deed.

"Don't—go off," gasped Mrs. du Preez, with her face
bent over her knees, and Bailey relaxed.  The words
had snapped the tension of his resolve, and it would have
to be keyed up again.

"Give me that bundle," he said hoarsely.  "Give it to
me, or else—"

She sat up with an effort and he stopped in the middle
of his threat.  He was pale now and trembling strongly.
She drew the bundle closer to her defensively.

"No," she answered.  "I won't."

"Give it here," he croaked, from a dry throat.
"Come on—God!  I'll—"

The moment of resolution had come to him, and for
the instant he was fit and strong enough to do murder.
He plunged forward with his lower lip sucked in and
his ragged teeth showing in a line above his chin, and
all his loose and fearful face contorted into a maniac
rage.  The woman fell over sideways with a strident
cry, her bundle hugged to her breast.  Boy Bailey
gasped and flung back his foot for the swinging kick that
would save him from the noise of her complainings.

He kicked, blind to all but the woman on the ground,
alone with her in a narrow theater of bestial purpose
and sweating terrors.  He neither heard nor saw the
quick spring of the waiting Kafir, who charged him
with a shoulder, football fashion, while the kick still
traveled in the air and pitched him aside to fall brutally
on his ear and elbow.  He tumbled and slid upon the
dust with the unresisting lifelessness of a sack of flour
and lay, making noises in his throat and moving his
head feebly, till the world grew visible again and he
could see.

The Kafir stood above Mrs. du Preez, who lay where
she had thrown herself, and stared up at him with eyes
in which the understanding was stagnant.

"Don't be frightened," he said.  "I know who you
are.  I 'll take you safely where you want to go."

He spoke in tones as matter-of-fact as he could make
them, for his professional eye told him that the woman
was at the limit of her endurance and could support
no further surprises.  But he took in the pretentious
style of her dress with the dust upon it and the fact
that she was in company with the tramp upon a path
that led to the railway and wondered darkly.  It was
almost inconceivable, in spite of the situation in which
he found her, that she could be running away from her
husband in favor of the creature who now lay in the
road, moving his limbs tentatively and watching with
furtive eyes to see if it was safe to sit up.

Mrs. du Preez moistened her lips.  "I got nowhere to
go, now," she said.

"Then you 'd better go home," said Kamis.  "Rest
a little first—there 's plenty of time, and it 'll be cooler
presently.  Then I 'll take you back."

He turned to look over his shabby tweed shoulder at
Boy Bailey and addressed him curtly.

"You can go now," he said.

Boy Bailey sat up awkwardly, with an expression of
pain, as though it hurt him to move.  He had not yet
mastered the change in the state of affairs and
attempted to temporize till matters should define themselves.

"I 've got to see first if I can stand," he said.  "It's
all very well, but you can't slam a man down on his
funny-bone and then order him to do the goose-step."

"Hurry," said the Kafir.

Mr. Bailey passed an exploring hand about his
shoulder.  "Ouch!" He winced.  "Broken bone," he
explained.  "You say you 're a doctor—see for
yourself.  And anyhow, I want a word in private with the
lady."

Kamis took two deliberate steps in his direction
and—

"Hey!" yelled Boy Bailey, and scrambled to his
feet.  "What d'you kick me like that for, you black
swine?"

He backed before the Kafir, with spread hands in
agitated protestation.

"Kickin' a man when he 's down," he cried.  "Is
that a game to play?  All right, all right; I 'm goin',
aren't I?  You keep where you are and let me turn
round.  No, you stop first.  I 'm not goin' to be kicked
again like that if I can help it."

Kamis came to a halt.

"Next time I see you, I 'll murder you," he
promised.  "Murder you."  He paused at Mr. Bailey's
endeavor to save his dignity with a sneer.  "Don't you
believe that?" he asked.  "Say—don't you believe I 'll
do it?"

Mr. Bailey's sneer failed as he looked into the black
face that confronted him.  By degrees the sheer
sinister power that inhabited it, lighting it up and making
it imminently terrible with its patent willingness to
kill, burned its way to his slow intelligence.  His
pendulous underlip quivered.

"Don't you?" repeated the Kafir, with a motion of
his shoulders like a shrug.  "Don't you believe I 'll
slaughter you like a pig next time I see you?
Answer—don't you believe it?"

"Ye-es," stammered Boy Bailey.

The Kafir's deliberate nod was indescribably menacing.

"That's right," he said.  "It's very true indeed.
And you remember what I paid you fifty pounds for,
too.  A word about that, Bailey, and I 'll have you.
Now go."

A hundred paces off, Boy Bailey halted, to get breath
and ideas, and stood looking back.

He waited, watching the Kafir bring Mrs. du Preez to
a condition in which she could stand again and bear the
view of the backward road coiling forth to the featureless
skyline, and thence to further and still featureless
skylines, traversing intolerably far vistas that gave no
sign of a destination.  With his returning wits, he
found himself wondering what arguments the man had
to induce her to brave her husband.

As it happened, there was need of none.  The woman
was broken and beyond thought.  She was reduced to
instincts.  The homing sense that sets a wounded
rock-rabbit of the kranzes crawling in agony to die in its
burrow moved in her dimly; she could not even summon
force to wonder at the apparition of the English-speaking,
helpful Kafir.  Under the practised deftness
of his suggestion and persuasion she rose and put her
limp arm in his, and they moved away together, following
their long shadows that went before them, gliding
upon the dust.

"There they go," said Mr. Bailey bitterly.  "There
they go.  And what about *me*?"

He saw that the Kafir propped the exhausted woman
with his arm and helped her.  He was protecting and
assured, a strength and a shield.  Almost unconsciously
Boy Bailey followed after them.  He could not have
given a reason for doing so; he only knew that he was
very unwilling to be left alone with his bruises and his
sense of failure and defeat.  In less than a quarter of
an hour, the veld that had been comfortingly empty
had become lonely.  He went on tiptoe, with long
ungainly strides and much precaution to be unheard.

He followed perhaps for half a mile and then the
Kafir looked back and saw him.  Mr. Bailey stopped
within speaking distance.

"I was coming to apologize," he called.  "That 's
all.  I lost my temper and I want to apologize."

The Kafir let Mrs. du Preez sit down and came
walking back slowly.  When half the distance to
Mr. Bailey was covered he broke suddenly into a run.  For
some seconds Mr. Bailey abode, his mind racing, and
then he too turned and ran as he had never run before.
With fists clenched and head back, he faced the west
and fled in leaps, and as he went he emitted small
squeals and fragments of speech.

"My mistake," he would utter, through failing
breath.  "As long as I live, I 'll never—I swear
it—I swear it.  O-o-oh.  You 're very—hard—on me."

The Kafir had ceased to run when Mr. Bailey
turned to flee.  He stood and watched him go,
unpursued and terrified, with the dust spirting under
his feet like the smoke of a powder-train.  Then he
went back and aided Mrs. du Preez to rise and together
they set out again.

The last of Boy Bailey was a black blot against the
sky; he was too far off for Kamis to see whether he
still ran or stood.  It merely testified that a
degenerate human frame will stand blows and much emotion
and effort under a hot sun and yet hold safe for
further evil the life within it.  Man of all animals is the
most tenacious of his existence; he lives not for food
but for appetite.  What was assured was that the far
blot that represented Boy Bailey was still avid and still
unsatisfied.  He had not even gratified his last desire
to apologize.

The sun dawdled over the final splendid ceremony
of his setting, drawing out the pomp of departure while
night waited in the east for his going with pale
premature stars.  The small wind that clears the earth
of the sun's leavings of heat sighed about them, and
produced from each side of their path a faint rustle as
though it stirred trees at a little distance.  Above
them the sky began to light up with a luminous powder
of stars, that strained into radiant clearness before
the west was empty of its last pink stain.  They went
slowly, Mrs. du Preez leaning heavily on Kamis' arm,
and still faithfully carrying her bundle.  She had not
spoken since they started.  She went with her eyes on
the ground, and unequal steps, till the evening breeze
touched her and she lifted her face to its gentle
refreshment.

She had to sit down every little while, but she was
stronger after the setting of the sun, and it was not
till the night had surrounded them that she spoke.

"When I saw you first," she said suddenly, "the sun
was in my eyes.  And I thought you was—*black*?"

"Yes?" said Kamis.  "That wasn't the sun," he
said slowly.  "I am black."

"But—" she hesitated.  "I don't mean just black,"
she said vaguely.  "I meant—a black man, a nigger."

She was peering up at him anxiously, while her
weight rested in his arm.

"Well, wouldn't you have let a nigger help you?"
asked Kamis quietly.  "Isn't it a nigger's business,
when he sees a white woman in trouble, to do what he
can for her?  One of your farm niggers, now—wouldn't
you have called to him if he 'd been there?"

"Yes," fretfully.  "But I thought *you* was a nigger."

"I 'm a doctor," said Kamis.  "I was at schools and
colleges in England.  The English Government gives
me hundreds of pounds a year.  You 're quite safe with me."

"It was the sun in my eyes," she murmured uncertainly.
"I said it was the sun."

"No, it wasn't the sun," he said.  "You saw quite
well.  I am a nigger."

"How can a doctor be a nigger?" she asked.  "Niggers—why,
I know all about niggers.  You can't fool me."

"I won't try," answered Kamis.  "But—one thing;
you 've got to get home, haven't you?  And you can't
do it alone.  You wouldn't refuse to let a nigger help
you to walk, would you?"

"No," she said wonderingly.  "I *got* to get home.
I got to."

"All right," said Kamis.  "Then look here.  Take
a good look and satisfy yourself.  There 's no sun now
to get in your eyes."

He had halted and drawn his arm from hers.  A
match crackled and its flame showed him to her,
illuminating his negro features, and her drawn face,
frowning in an effort to comprehend.  He held it till it
burned to his fingers and then dropped it, and the
darkness fell between them again like a curtain.

"Now do you see?" he asked.  "A Kafir like any
other, flat nose, big lips, woolly hair, everything—just
plain Kafir; but a doctor none the less.  The Kafir will
help you to walk and the doctor will see to you if you
find by and by that you can't walk any further.  Will
that satisfy you?"

She did not answer immediately; she stood as though
she were still trying to scan the face which the match
flame had revealed.  She was searching for a formula,
he told himself with a momentary bitterness, which
would save her white-skinned dignity and yet permit
her to avail herself of his services.

Then her moving hand touched him on the arm,
gently and unexpectedly, and she answered.

"You poor devil," she said.  "You poor devil."

Kamis stood quite still, her timid touch upon him,
the ready pity of her voice in his ears.  Mingled with
his surprise he felt a sense of abasement in the presence
of this other outcast, so much weaker than he, and he
could have begged for her pardon for the wrong which
his thoughts had done her.

"Thank you," he said abruptly.  "Thank you, Mrs. du
Preez.  It's—it's kind of you.  You shall be very
safe with me."

It was a strange companionship in which they went
forward through the night, he matching his slow steps
to her weariness, with her thin arm, bony and rigid
through the cloth sleeve, weighing within his.  She was
too far spent for talk; they moved in a silence of effort
and desperate persistence, with only her harsh and
painful breathing sounding in reply to the noises which
the darkness evoked upon the veld.  Every little while
she had to sit down on the ground, and at each such
occasion she would make her small excuse.

"I 'll have to take a spell, now," she would say
apologetically.  "You see, I was walking since before noon."

Then her arm would slide from his and she would
sink to earth at his feet, panting painfully, with her
head bowed on her bosom and her big hat roofing her
over.  Thus she would remain motionless for a space
till her breath came more easily, and then the hat
would tilt up again.

"I could move on a bit, now, if you 'd give me a
hand up."

Her courage was a thing he wondered at.  Again
and again, as the hours spun themselves out, she rose
to her feet, groped for his sustaining arm, with her
face a pallid disk against the shadow of her hat, and
faced the cruel miles.  Her feet, in her smart town
boots, tormented her without ceasing; her strength was
drained from her like blood from an opened vein; and
the slowness of their progress protracted the dreary
horror of the road that remained to be covered.  At
times she seemed to talk to herself in whispers
between sobbing breaths, and his ear caught hints of
words shaped laboriously, but nothing that had
meaning.  But she uttered no complaint.

At one point where she rested rather longer than
usual, he tried to find out what she expected at the
journey's end.

"Have you thought what you 'll say," he asked,
"when you get home?"

She raised her head slowly.

"I don't know," she answered.  "I—I got to take my
gruel, I suppose.  Whatever it is, I got to take it.
It 's up to me."

It was the sum of her wisdom; those free-lances of
their sex add it early into the conclusion that saves
them the futile effort of evading payment for the
fruit they snatch when the world is not looking.  After
the fun, the adventure, the thrill, comes the gruel, and
they have to take it.  It is up to them.  By the short
cut of experience, they reach thus the end and destination
of a severe morality.

"He can't shut you out, at any rate," said Kamis,
half-aloud.

"Can't he?" she said.  "Can't he, though!  Can't
stand there feelin' noble and righteous and point to the
veld and shut the door with a big slam?  You don't
know him."

She rose again presently, clicking her tongue
between her teeth at the anguish of her swollen and
abraded feet.

"The Boers got sense," she said.  "A person 's a
fool to go on foot."

It was the only reference she made to her pain and
weariness.

It was long past midnight when they came at last
past the sheds behind the farmhouse and saw that there
was yet a light in the kitchen.  The window shone
broad and yellow in the vague bulk of the house, and
as they lifted their faces towards it, a shadow moved
across it, grotesque and abrupt after the manner of
shadows, which seem to have learned from men how to
mock their makers.

"That 's Christian," said Mrs. du Preez, whispering
harshly.

"Are you afraid?" asked Kamis.  "Will you sit
here while I go and speak to him first?"

"No," she replied.  "No use.  This is where I get
what's comin' to me.  I wish I wasn't so done up,
though.  If he knew, I believe p'r'aps he 'd let me off
till the morning.  But he doesn't know, and it
wouldn't be him if he did."

"Better let me speak to him first," urged Kamis.
"I could tell him—"

"No," she said again.  "No use dodging it.  We 'll
go to the back door; I 'd rather have him shut that on
me than the front."

Near the door she drew her arm away from the
Kafir's and left him standing to one side, while she
approached and knocked upon it with the back of her
hand.  She meant to eat the dreaded gruel alone.

Silence succeeded upon her knocking, and then
deliberate footsteps within that came towards the door.
A pair of bolts were thrust back, crashing in their
sockets.  Mrs. du Preez gathered her sparse energies
and stood upright as the door opened and the figure of
her husband appeared, tall and black against the light
inside which leaked past him and spilt itself about her
feet.  For some moments they stood facing each other,
and neither spoke.

There was drama in the atmosphere.  The Kafir
standing without its scope, watched absorbedly.

"Christian," said Mrs. du Preez, at length; "it's me."

"Yes."  The Boer's deep voice was grave.  "Where
have you been?"

She lifted her shoulders in a faint hopeless shrug.

"I ran away," she said.  "Like I said I would.  But
I wasn't up to it."

"You ran away," he repeated slowly.  "With that Bailey?"

"Yes, Christian.  But—"

Christian caught sight of the dark figure of the Kafir
and started sharply.

"Is that him there?" he cried.  "Is that Bailey?"

"No, no," she answered eagerly.  "That 's—that 's
a Kafir, Christian; he helped me to get back.  He came
up when I was too tired to go any further, and Bailey
was starting to kick me to get my money away from
me—I 've got it here, Christian, all safe—an' he
knocked Bailey over and chased him off.  If it hadn't
ha' been for him—"

"What?"  Christian interrupted strongly.  "What
did you say?  Bailey was going to—kick you?  You
was too tired to walk and he was going to kick you?"

"Yes, Christian.  And if it hadn't ha' been for this
Kafir, he would ha' done.  I was sitting down, you see,
and he got mad with me and wanted me to hand him
over the money.  So when I screamed—what did you
say, Christian?"

"I swore," answered the Boer.

"Oh," exclaimed Mrs. du Preez, as though she
apologized for interrupting.  "And then the Kafir
came up.  If it was n't for him, Christian, I 'd—I 'd ha'
had to die out of doors.  I could never have managed
to get back by myself."

The effort merely to stand upright taxed her
sorely, but she went on doggedly to praise the Kafir
and to try in her confused and inadequate tongue to
convey to the Boer that this Kafir was not as other
Kafirs.  Her small voice, toneless and desperate, beat
on pertinaciously.

"He 's a doctor, Christian," she concluded.  "He 's
been educated an' all that, an' he speaks English like a
gentleman.  And he 's been a white man to me."

"Yes," said the Boer.  His mind was stuck fast
upon one point of her story.  "Yes.  But—you said
Bailey was going to *kick* you—out there all alone by
yourselves in the veld?"

It daunted him; his intelligence shrank from the
picture of that brutality unleashed under the staring
skies.

"Yes, Christian," answered Mrs. du Preez submissively.

"Here—come in," he bade abruptly, and stood aside
to make room for her to pass.  "Come in.  Come in."

It was a couple of seconds before she fully
comprehended.  She made a small moaning sound and began
to totter.  The Boer took her by the arm.

"Wait," he said curtly, over her head, to the Kafir,
and led her within.

Kamis waited, leaning against the wall of the house.
He had brought his task to an end and the finish had
arranged itself fortunately; it had been worthy of his
pains.  The Boer had been startled from his balance;
he had seen that nothing he could do would bear an
equality with Boy Bailey's natural impulses; pardon
and generosity were the only course left open to him.
The work was complete and pleasing; and now he had
leisure to feel how weary he was.  He shut his eyes
with an exhausted man's content at the relaxation of
effort, and opened them again to find the Boer had
returned and was standing in the doorway.  He started
upright, amazed to find that sleep had trapped him
while he leaned and was aware that the Boer made a
sudden and indistinct movement.  Something heavy
struck the ground at his feet.

He looked down at it where it lay, white and
rounded, and recognized Mrs. du Preez's bundle, for
which Boy Bailey had been ready to kick her into
dumbness.  Without addressing a word to him, the
Boer had tossed him that double handful of money.

It took him a moment to realize what had taken place.

"What's this for?" he demanded then, possessed by
a sudden anger that forgot he spoke from the mouth
of a negro to ears of a white man.

"It is true you speak English, then?" said the Boer.
"That is money—about a hundred pounds.  It is for
you.  Pick it up."

"Pick it up yourself," retorted the Kafir.  "I don't
want your money."

"Eh?"  The Boer did not understand in the least.
"It is for you," he repeated.  "A hundred sovereigns,
because you have been good, very good, to the Vrouw
du Preez.  It is in that bundle."

The Kafir turned on his heel.  "Take care of your
wife," he said shortly.  "If you worry her now,
she 'll be ill.  Good night."

"Here," cried the Boer, as Kamis walked away.
"Here, boy, wait.  Come back."

Kamis halted.  "I 've plenty of money," he
answered.  "I 'm not Boy Bailey, you know."

"Come here," called the Boer.

Kamis did not move, so he stepped down and went
forward himself.  The Kafir's last word stuck in his
thought.

"No," he agreed.  "But who are you?  Man, why
don't you take the money?"

"If I were a Boer, I should take it," answered
Kamis.  "I 'd pick it up from a dunghill, wouldn't I?
But, then, you see, I 'm not a Boer.  I 'm a Kafir."

"What do you want, then?" demanded Christian.

"Oh, nothing that you can give," was the retort.

"Well—but you must have something," urged
Christian.  "You—you have saved my wife."

"And you haven't even said 'thank you,'" replied
the Kafir.

"I threw you the money," protested Christian.  "It
is a hundred pounds.  But—well—you have been
good and I thank you."

The Kafir laughed.  He knew the mere words
created an epoch, for Boers do not thank Kafirs.
They pay them, but no more.  Strange how a matter
of darkness abrogates a difference of color.  It would
never have happened in the daytime.

"You 're satisfied, then?" he inquired.

"Me?"  The Boer was puzzled.  "You will take the
money now?"

"No, thanks.  I 'm too—oh, much too tired and
hungry to carry it.  You see, I brought your wife a
long way."

"Yes," said Christian.  "She said so—a very long
way.  I will wake the boys [the Kafirs of the household].
They will find you a place to sleep and I will
make them bring you some food."

"No, thanks," said the Kafir again.  "I don't
speak their language.  You—you haven't a man who
speaks English, I suppose?"

"No," said Christian.  "You want—yes, I see.
But—you 'd better take the money."

"I don't want it."

"But take it," urged the Boer.  "A hundred
pounds—it is much.  Perhaps it is more; I have not
counted it.  If it is less, I will give the rest, to make
a hundred pounds.  You will take it—not?"

"No."  The answer was definite.  "No—I won't
take it, I tell you."

"Then—"  Christian half-turned towards the
house, with a heaviness in his movements which had
not been noticeable before.  "Come in and eat," he
bade gloomily.  "*Gott verdam*—come and eat."

The Kafir checked another laugh.  "With
pleasure," he said, and followed at the Boer's back.

The Boer stooped to pick up the bundle of money
where it lay on the earth and led the way without
looking round to the kitchen where he had left his
wife.  The Kafir paused in the kitchen door, looking in,
acutely alive to the delicacy of a situation in which he
figured, under the Boer's eye, as part of the company
which included the Boer's wife.  He waited to see how
Christian would adjust matters.

The table was spread with the materials of supper.
Mrs. du Preez had a chair by it, and now leaned over
it, with her head resting on her arms, to make room
for which plates and cups were disordered.  Her
flowery hat was still on her head; she had not
commanded the energy necessary to withdraw the long
pins that held it and take it off.  In her dust-caked
best clothes, she sprawled among the food and slept,
and the paraffin lamp on the wall shed its uncharitable
glare on her unconscious back.

Christian dumped the heavy little bundle on the
table beside her and she moved and muttered.  He
called her by name.  With a sigh she dragged her heavy
head up and her black-rimmed tragic eyes opened to
them in an agony of weariness.  They rested on the
waiting Kafir on the doorway.

"You 've brought him in?" she said.  "Christian,
I hoped you would."

"He is going to eat with me," said Christian, with
eyes that evaded hers.

"Yes," she said dully.

"And you go to bed," he urged, with an effort to
seem natural.  "You—you're too sleepy; you go to
bed now.  I 'll be up soon."

"But, Christian," she protested, while she wrestled
with the need for slumber that possessed her; "I got to
speak to you.  There—there 's something I want to say
to you first about—about—"

"No."  His hand rested on her shoulder.  "It's all
right.  There 's nothing to say; I don't want to hear
anything.  It 's all right now; you go on up to bed."

She rose obediently, but with an effort, and her hands
moved blindly in front of her as she made for the
door, as though she feared to fall.

"Good night, Christian," she quavered.  "You 're
awful good.  An' good night, you"—to the Kafir.
"You been a white man to me."

"Good night," replied Kamis, and made way for her
carefully.

The queer little scene was sufficiently clear to him.
He understood it entirely.  The Boer, face to face with
an emergency for which his experience and his training
prescribed no treatment, could stoop to sit at meat
with a Kafir, but he could not suffer his wife to share
that descent.  The white woman must be preserved at
any cost in her aloofness, her sanctity, none the less
strong for being artificial, from contact and communion
with a black man.  Better anything than that.

"Sit down," bade Christian.  "Take one of those
cups, and I will bring you coffee."

"Thank you," replied the Kafir, and obeyed.

The paraffin lamp shed its unwinking light on a
scene that challenged irresponsible fancy with the
reality of crazy fact.  The Boer's consciousness of the
portentous character of the event governed him
strongly; there was majesty in his bearing as he brought
the coffee pot from the fire and stood at the side of
the seated Kafir and poured him a cupful.  It was done
with the high sense of ceremony, the magnificent
humility, of a Pope washing the immaculate feet of
highly sanitary and disinfected beggars.

"There is mutton," he said, pointing; "or I have
sardines.  Shall I fetch a tin?"

"I will have mutton, thanks," replied Kamis, with
an equal formality, and drew the dish towards him.

The Boer seated himself at the opposite side of the
table.  The compact, as he understood it, required that
he should eat also.  He cut himself meat and bread
very precisely, doubtfully aware that he was rather
hungry.  This, he felt vaguely, stained a situation
where all should have been formal and symbolic.  He
ate slowly, with a dim, religious appetite.

Kamis might have found the meal more amusing if he
had been less weary.  An idea that he would insist
upon conversation visited him, but he dismissed it; he
was really too tired to assault the heavy solemnity which
faced him across the table.  It would yield to no casual
advances; he would have to exert himself, to be
specious and dexterous, to waylay the man's interest.

He pushed his unfinished food from him.

"I will go home, now," he said.

"You have had enough?" questioned the Boer.

"Thank you," said Kamis, and rose.

The Boer rose, too, very tall and aloof.  His hand
touched the money which still lay on the table.

"You will take this with you?" he questioned.
"No?" as the Kafir shook his head.  "You are sure?
You will not have it?  Nor anything else?"

"I have had all I want," replied Kamis, taking up
his battered hat.  "You 've done everything, and more
than I thought you would."

The Boer was insistent.

"I want you to be—satisfied," he said, still standing
in the same place.  Kamis found his lofty, still face
rather impressive.  It had a certain high austerity.

"You must say if you want anything more," he
went on, with a grave persistence.  "All you want you
shall have—till you are satisfied."

("Can't rest under an obligation to me," thought Kamis).

"I 'm quite satisfied," he replied.  "You don't owe
me anything, if that's what 's worrying you.  I 'm
paid in full."

"In full," repeated the Boer.  "You are paid in full?"

"Yes."

"Very well, then.  And now you shall go."

He went before and stood at the side of the door
while Kamis went forth, ready to bolt it at his back.

"Tell me," he said, as the Kafir stepped over the
threshold.  "Who are you?"

The other turned.  "My name is Kamis," he replied.

"Kamis?"  The Boer leaned forward, trying to
peer at him.  "You said—Kamis?  You are the little
Kafir that the General Lascelles took when—"

"Yes," said the Kafir.

The Boer did not answer at once.  He hung in the
doorway, staring.

"I saw them hang your father," he said at last,
very slowly.

"Did you?" said Kamis.  "Good night."

"Good night," replied the Boer when he was some
paces distant and closed the door carefully.

The noise of its bolts being shot home was the last
sound the Kafir heard from the house.  The wind that
comes before the dawn touched him and he shivered.
He turned up the collar of his coat and set off walking
as briskly as his fatigue would allow.





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`CHAPTER XIV`:

.. class:: center large bold

   CHAPTER XIV

.. vspace:: 2

The drawing-room of the Sanatorium was available
until tea-time for the practice of correspondence.
It offered for this purpose a small table with
the complexion of mahogany and a leather top, upon
which reposed an inkstand containing three pots,
marked respectively in plain letters, "black," "red,"
and "copying," and a number of ancient pens.  When
a new arrival had overcome his wonder and consternation
at the various features of the establishment, he
usually signalized his acceptance of what lay before
him by writing to Capetown for a fountain-pen.  As
old inhabitants of the Cape reveal themselves to the
expert eye by carrying their tobacco loose in a side
pocket of their coats, so the patient who had conceded
Dr. Jakes' claims to indulgence was to be distinguished
by the possession of a pen that made him independent
of the establishment's supply and frequently by stains
of ink upon his waistcoat in the region of the
left-hand upper pocket, where custom has decided a man
shall carry his fountain-pen.

Margaret had brought her unanswered letters to this
privacy and her fountain-pen was busy in the
undisturbed interval following the celebration of lunch.
Hers was the common task of the exile in South Africa,
to improvize laboriously letters to people at home who
had plenty to see and do and no need of the post
to inject spice into their varied lives.  There was
nothing to write about, nothing to relate; the heat
of the sun, the emptiness of the veld, the grin of Fat
Mary—each of her letters played over these worn
themes.  Yet unless they were written and sent, the
indifferent folk to whom they were addressed would
not write to her, and the weekly mail, with its
excitements and its reminders, would fail her.  No dweller
in lands where the double knock of the postman comes
many times in the day can know the thrill of the
weekly mail, discharged from the steamship in
Capetown and heralded in its progress up the line by
telegrams that announce to the little dorps along the
railway the hour of its coming.  They have not waited
with a patient, preoccupied throng in the lobby of
the post-office where the numbered boxes are, and heard
beyond the wooden partition the slam of the bags
and the shuffle of the sorters, talking at their work
about things remote from the mail.  The Kafir
mail-runners, with their skinny naked legs and their
handfuls of smooth sticks know how those letters are
awaited in the hamlets and farms far remote from the
line, by sun-dried, tobacco-flavored men who are up
before the dawn to receive them, by others whose
letters are addressed to names they are not called by,
and by Mrs. Jakes, full-dressed and already a little
tired two hours before breakfast.  All those letters are
paid for by screeds that suck dry the brains of their
writers, desperately searching over the chewed ends
of penholders for suggestions on barren ground.

There was one letter which Margaret had set herself
to compose that had a different purpose.  There were
not lacking signs that her position in Dr. Jakes'
household would sooner or later become impossible, and it
was desirable to clear the road for a retreat when
no other road would be open to her.  It was not only
that Mrs. Jakes burned to be rid of her and had taken
of late to dim hints of her desire in this respect, for
Margaret was prepared, if she were forced to it, to
find Mrs. Jakes' enmity amusing and treat it in that
light.  Such a course, she judged would paralyze
Mrs. Jakes; in the face of laughter, the little woman was
impotent.  But there was also the prospect, daily
growing nearer and more threatening, of an exposure
which would show her ruthlessly forth as the friend
and confidante of the Kafir, Kamis, the woman for
whom Ford and Mr. Samson, had, in their own
phrase, "no use."  The hour when that exposure
should be made loomed darkly ahead; nothing could
avert its sinister advance upon her, nor lighten it of
its quality of doom.  She no longer invited her secret
to make itself known.  By degrees the warnings of
Kamis, the threats of Boy Bailey, the malice of
Mrs. Jakes, had struck their roots in her consciousness,
and she was becoming acclimatized to the South-African
spirit which threatens with vague penalties,
not the less real for being vague, such transgressors
as she of its one iron rule of life and conduct.  When
it should come upon her, she decided, she would
summon her strength to accept it, and confront it serenely,
in the manner of good breeding.  But when that was
done, she would have to go.

She was writing therefore to the legal uncle of
Lincoln's Inn Fields, who controlled her affairs and
manifested himself with sprightly letters and punctual
cheques.  He was an opinionative uncle, like most men
who jest along the established lines of humor, but
amenable to a reasonable submissiveness on the part
of his ward and niece.  He liked to be inflexible—good-naturedly
inflexible, like an Olympian who condescends
to earth, but he could be counted upon to repay an
opportunity for a display of his inflexibility by liberal
indulgence upon other points.  Therefore Margaret,
after consideration, commenced the serious part of her
epistle to the heathen with a suggestion in regard to
investments which she knew would rouse him.  Then, in a
following paragraph:

.. vspace:: 2

I am better than I was when I came out, but not
better than I was a month ago, and I don't think I
am improving as rapidly as Dr. David hoped.  It may
be that I am a little too far to the East of the Karoo.
Was it you or somebody else who advised me to keep
to the West?

.. vspace:: 2

"That 'll help to fetch him," murmured Margaret, as
she wrote the last words.

.. vspace:: 2

Perhaps, later on, if Dr. Jakes thinks well of it, I
might move to a place I hear of over in the West.  I 'm
letting you know now in plenty of time; but I don't
want you to think there is anything seriously wrong.
Please don't be at all anxious.

.. vspace:: 2

"Now something fluffy," pondered Margaret.  "If I
get it right, he 'll order me to go."

.. vspace:: 2

What makes me hesitate, she wrote, is the trouble
it will cost me to move from here.  Would you please
show this letter to Dr. David and ask his opinion?

.. vspace:: 2

"That 'll do the trick," she decided unscrupulously.
"Dr. David will see there 's something in it and he 'll
back me up.  And then, when the row comes, they shall
each have a cut at me,—Mrs. Jakes and Fat Mary and
all—they shall each have their chance to draw blood,
and then I 'll go."

While she wrote, there had been the sound of footsteps
on the stone floor of the hall outside the room, but she
had been too busy to note them.  Otherwise, she would
quickly have marked an unfamiliar foot among them.
They were reduced to that at the Sanatorium; they knew
every foot that sounded on its floors and a strange one
fetched them running to look from doors.  But Margaret's
occupation had robbed her of that mild exhilaration,
and she looked up all unsuspiciously as Mrs. Jakes
pushed open the door of the drawing-room, entered and
closed it carefully behind her.

She came a couple of paces into the room and halted,
looking at the girl in a manner that recalled to
Margaret that fantastic night when she had come with a
candle to seek aid for Dr. Jakes.  Though she had not
now her little worried smile, she wore the same
bewildered and embarrassed aspect, as of a purpose crossed
and complicated by considerations and doubts.

"Are you looking for me, Mrs. Jakes?" asked Margaret,
when she had waited in vain for her to speak.

"Yes," replied Mrs. Jakes, in a hushed voice, and
remained where she stood.

Again Margaret waited in vain for her to speak.

"I 'm rather busy just now," she said.  "What is
it you want with me, please?"

Mrs. Jakes looked to see that the door was closed
before she answered.

"It isn't me," she said then.  "We—we don't get
on very well, Miss Harding; but this isn't my doing.
I 've never whispered a word to a soul.  I haven't,
indeed, if I never speak another word."

Margaret stared at her, perceiving suddenly that the
small bleak woman was all a-thrill with some nervous
tension.  Her own nerves quivered in response to it.

"What is it?" she demanded.  "What has happened?"

"It 's the police," breathed Mrs. Jakes.  She gave
the word the accent in which she felt it.  "The police,"
she said, with a stricken sense of all that police stand
for, of which unbearable and public shame is chief.
She was trembling, and her small hands, with their
rough red knuckles like raw scars upon them, were
picking feverishly at her loose black skirt.

Margaret's heart beat the more quickly at the mere
tone of her whisper, fraught with dim fears; but the
words conveyed nothing to her.  If anything, they
relieved her.  In the hinterland of her consciousness the
forward-cast shadow of that impending hour was
perpetually dark; but the police could have no concern in
that.

"Oh, do please talk plainly," she said irritably.
"What exactly do you want to tell me?  And what
have I got to do with the police?"

The stimulus of her impatient tones was what was
needed to restore Mrs. Jakes to coherence.  She stared
at the girl with a sort of stupefaction.

"What have you got to do with it," she repeated.
"Why—it 's all about you.  Somebody 's told about you
and that Kafir—about you knowing him and all about
him, and now Mr. Van Zyl is in the doctor's study.
He 's come to inquire about it."

"Oh," said Margaret slowly.

It had struck then, the bitter hour of revelation; it
had crept upon her out of an ambush of circumstance
when she least expected it, and the reckoning was due.
There was to be no time allowed her in which to build
up her courage; even her retreat must be over strange
roads.  Before the gong went to gather the occupants
of the house for tea, the stroke would have fallen, and
her place in the minds of her fellows would be with
Dr. Jakes on the hearth-rug, an outcast from their circle.
Unless, indeed, Dr. Jakes should also decline her
company, as seemed likely.

It was the image in her mind of a scornful and superior
Jakes that excited the smile with which she looked
up at Jakes' frightened wife.

"So long as he does n't bother me, he can inquire as
much as he likes," she said.

Mrs. Jakes did not understand.  "It 's you he 's
going to inquire of," she said.  "I suppose, of course—I
suppose you 'll tell him about—about that night?"

"I shan't tell him anything," replied Margaret.
"Oh, you needn't be afraid, Mrs. Jakes.  I 'm not
going to take this opportunity of punishing you for all
your unpleasantness.  I shall simply refuse to answer
any questions at all."

"You can't do that."  Mrs. Jakes showed her relief
plainly in her face and in the relaxation of her attitude.
She had forgotten one of the first rules of her manner
of warfare, which is to doubt the enemy's word.  But
in spite of a reluctant gratitude for the contemptuous
mercy accorded to her, she felt dully resentful at this
high attitude of Margaret's towards the terrors of the
police.

"You can't do that," she said.  "He 's got a right
to know—and he 's a sub-inspector.  He 'll insist—he 'll
make you tell—"

"I think not," said Margaret quietly.

"But he 's—"

Mrs. Jakes broke off sharply as a hand without turned
the handle of the door and pushed it open.  Ford
appeared, and paused at the sight of them in conversation.

"Hallo," he said.  "Am I interrupting?"

Mrs. Jakes hesitated, but Margaret answered with
decision.

"Not at all," she said.  "Come in, please."

It occurred to her that the blow would be swifter if
Ford himself were present when it fell and there were
no muddle of explanations to drag it out.

Ford entered reluctantly, scenting a quarrel between
the two and suspicious of Margaret's intentions in
desiring his presence.

"There 's a horse and orderly by the steps," he said.
"Is Van Zyl somewhere about?  That's why I came
in, to see if he was here."

"He—he is in the study," answered Mrs. Jakes, in
extreme discomfort.  She turned to Margaret.  "If
you will come now, I will take you to him."

Ford turned, surprised.

"What for?" asked Margaret.

"He—sent for you."  Mrs. Jakes did not understand
the question; she only perceived dimly that some quality
in the situation was changed and that she no longer
counted in it.

"But what the dickens did he do that for?" asked Ford.

"We 'll see," said Margaret, forestalling Mrs. Jakes'
bewildered reply.  "Please tell him, Mrs. Jakes, that
I am here and can spare him a few minutes at once."

"Yes," acquiesced Mrs. Jakes, helplessly, and departed.

Ford came lounging across the room to Margaret.

"What's up?" he inquired.  "You haven't been
murdering somebody and not letting me help?"

Margaret shook her head.  She was standing guard
over her composure and could not afford to jest.

"Sit down over there," she bade him, motioning him
towards the couch at the other side of the wide room.
"And don't go away, even if he asks you to.  Then
you 'll hear all about it."

He wondered but obeyed slowly, leaning back against
the end of the couch with one long leg lying up on the
cushions.

"If he talks in the tone of his message to you,"
he said meditatively, "I shall be for punching his
head."

Sub-Inspector Van Zyl had had the use of a clothes-brush
before expressing his desire to see Margaret; it
was a tribute he paid to his high official mission.  He
had cleared himself and his accoutrement of dust and
the stain of his journey; and it was with the enhanced
impressiveness of spick-and-span cleanliness that he
presented himself in the drawing-room, pausing in the
doorway with his spurred heels together to lift his hand
in a precise and machine-like salute.  At his back,
Mrs. Jakes' unpretentious black made a relief for his rigid
correctitude of attire and pose, and the pallid agitation
of her countenance, peering in fearful curiosity to one
side of him, heightened his military stolidity.  His
stone-blue eyes rested on Ford's recumbence with a
shadow of surprise.

"Afternoon, Ford," he said curtly.  "You 'll excuse
me, but I 've a word or two to say to Miss Harding."

"Afternoon, Van Zyl," replied Ford, not moving.
"Miss Harding asked me to stay, so don't mind me."

Van Zyl looked at him inexpressively.  "I 'm on
duty," he said.  "Sorry, but I wish you 'd go.  My
business is with Miss Harding."

"Fire away," replied Ford.  "I shan't say a word
unless Miss Harding wishes it."

Margaret moved in her chair.

"You will say what you please," she said.  "Don't
regard me at all, Mr. Ford.  Now—what can I do for
you, Mr. Van Zyl?"

Van Zyl finished his scrutiny of Ford and turned to
her.

"I sent to ask you to see me in the other room, Miss
Harding, because I thought you would prefer me to
speak to you in private," he said, with his wooden
preciseness of manner.  "That was why.  Sorry if it
offended you.  However—"

He stood aside and held the door while Mrs. Jakes
entered, and closed it behind her.  Stalking imperturbably,
he placed a chair for her and drew one out for
himself, depositing his badged "smasher" hat on the
ground beside it.  Seated, he drew from his smoothly
immaculate tunic a large note-book and snapped its
elastic band open and laid it on his knee.  Ford, from
his place on the couch, watched these preparations with
gentle interest.

Van Zyl looked up at Margaret with a pencil in his
fingers.  His pale, uncommunicative eyes fastened on
her with an unemotional assurance in their gaze.

"First," he said; "where were you, Miss Harding,
on the afternoon of the —th?"

He mentioned a date to which Margaret's mind ran
back nimbly.  It was the day on which Boy Bailey had
made terms from the top of the dam wall, the day on
which the Kafir had kissed her hand, nearly two weeks
before.

She had herself sufficiently in hand, and returned
his gaze with a faint smiling tranquillity that told him
nothing.

"I have no information to give you, Mr. Van Zyl,"
she replied evenly.  "It is quite useless to ask me any
questions; I shan't answer them."

He was not disturbed.  "Sorry," he said, "but I 'm
afraid you must.  I hope you 'll remember that I have
my duty to do, Miss Harding."

"Must, eh?"

That was Ford, thoughtfully, from the couch.  Van
Zyl looked in his direction sharply with a brief frown,
but let it pass.

"It's no use, Mr. Van Zyl," said Margaret.  "I
simply am not going to answer any questions, and your
duty has nothing to do with me.  So if there is nothing
else that you wish to say to me, your business is
finished."

"No," he said; "it isn't finished yet, Miss Harding.
You refuse to say where you were on that afternoon?"

Margaret smiled slowly and he made a quick note
in his book.

"I ought to say, perhaps," he went on, looking up
when he had finished writing, "that the information I
am asking for relates to a—a person, who is wanted by
the police on a charge of sedition and incitement to
commit a breach of the peace.  You were seen on the
afternoon in question in the company of that—person,
Miss Harding; and I believe—I *believe* you can help us
to lay hands on him."

"Is it Samson?" inquired Ford, raising his head.
"I 've always had my suspicions of Samson."

"Oh, Mr. Ford," exclaimed Mrs. Jakes, pained.

"It 's not Mr. Samson," said the sub-inspector
calmly; "and it is not any business of yours, Ford."

"Oh, yes; it is," answered Ford.  "Because if it
isn't Samson it must be me—unless it 's Jakes.  You
seem to think we see a good deal of company here, Van
Zyl."

"I don't think anything at all," retorted the sub-inspector
stiffly; "and I 've nothing to say to you.  My
business is with Miss Harding, and you won't help her
by making a nuisance of yourself."

"Eh?"  Ford sat up suddenly.  "What's that—won't
help her?  Are you trying to frighten Miss Harding
by suggesting that you can use any sort of compulsion
to her?  Because, if that 's your idea, you 'd better
look out what you 're doing."

"I 'm not responsible to you, Ford," replied Van Zyl
shortly.  "You can hold your tongue now.  Miss
Harding understands well enough what I mean."

"Oh, yes," said Margaret, as Ford looked towards
her.  "I understand, but I don't care."

It was taking its own strange course, but she was not
concerned to deflect it or make it run more directly.
She conserved her powers for the moment when the
thing would be told, and Ford's indignant championship
arrested brusquely by the mere name of her offense.
Presently Van Zyl would cease to speak of "a person"
and come out with the plain word, "Kafir."  How he
had gained his information she did not attempt to guess;
but that he had the means to break her there was no
doubting.  She would answer no questions; she was
determined upon that; but now that the hour of revelation
was come, she would do nothing to fog it.  It should
pass and be done with and leave her with its
consequences clear to weigh and abide.

She made a motion of the hand that hung over the
back of her chair to Ford, as though she would hush
him.  He was puzzled and looked it, but subsided
provisionally against the end of the couch again.

Van Zyl eased his shoulders in their bondage of slings
and straps with a practised shrug, crossed one booted leg
over the other and faced her afresh.

"Now, Miss Harding, you see that I am not speaking
by guess; and it 's for you to say whether you will have
the rest of this here or in private.  I 'm anxious to give
you every possible consideration."

"I shan't answer any questions," said Margaret,
"and I decline any privacy, Mr. Van Zyl."

"No?  Very well.  I must do my duty as best I
can," replied the sub-inspector, with official resignation.
He referred to a back page of his note-book perfunctorily.

"On the —th of this month, man discovered weeping
and disorderly on the platform at Zeekoe Siding, stated
to Corporal Simms that he had been robbed of five
hundred pounds by confidence trick on down train.  Under
examination, varied the sum, and finally adhered to
figure of forty-three pounds odd, which he alleged was
part of fifty pounds he had received from the—person
in whose company he had seen you."

"Ah!"  Margaret found herself smiling absently at
the memory of Boy Bailey making his bargain on the
top of the dam wall, with his bare unbeautiful feet
fidgeting in the grass.

Sub-inspector Van Zyl surveyed her with his
impersonal stare and continued:

"He gave the name of Claude Richmond, but was
afterwards identified as one Noah Bailey, alias Boy
Bailey, alias Spotted Dog, etc., wanted by the police in
connection with—a certain affair.  On being charged,
feigned to fall in a fit but came to under treatment, and
made a certain communication, which was transmitted
to me as bearing upon my search for this—person.  The
communication was detailed, Miss Harding, and he stood
to it under a searching examination, and satisfied us
that we were getting the truth out of him.  Acting upon
the information thus received, I next called upon you."

He looked up.  "You see what I have to go upon?"
he said.  "Since you know yourself what took place on
the afternoon about which I asked you, you can understand
that the police require your assistance.  Do you
still refuse to answer me, Miss Harding?"

"Of course," replied Margaret.

Now it would come, she thought.  Van Zyl would
spare her no longer.  She watched his smooth, tanned
face with nervous trepidation.

He frowned slightly at her answer, and leaned forward
with the note-book in his hand, his forefinger
between the pages to keep the place.

"You do?" he demanded, his voice rising to a sharp
note.  Ford sat up again, watchful and angry.  "You
refuse, do you?  Now, look here, Miss Harding, we 'll
have to make an end of this."

Ford struck in crisply.  "Good idea," he said.  "I
suggest Miss Harding might quit the room for that
purpose, and leave you to explain to me what the devil
you mean by this."

Van Zyl turned on him quickly.  "You look out," he
said.  "If I 've got to arrest you to shut your mouth,
I 'll do it—and quick too."

"Why not?" demanded Ford.  "That 'll be as good
a way for you to get the lesson you need as any
other."

"*You'll* get a lesson," began Van Zyl, making as
though to rise and put his threat into action.

"Oh, please," cried Margaret; "none of this is
necessary.  Sit down, Mr. Ford; please sit down and listen.
Mr. Van Zyl, you have only to speak out and you will be
free from further trouble, I 'm sure."

"I 've taken too much trouble as it is," retorted the
sub-inspector.  "I 'll have no more of it."

He glared with purpose at Ford.  Though he had not
at any moment doffed his formality of demeanor, the
small scene had lit a spark in him and he was newly
formidable and forceful.  Ford met his look with the
narrow smile with which a man of his type masks a
rising temper, but so far yielded to Margaret's urgency
as to lean back upon one elbow.

"You 'll be sorry for all this presently," Margaret
said to him warningly.

"Very soon, in fact," added the sub-inspector, "if
he repeats the offense."

He settled himself again on his chair, confronting
Margaret.

"Now, Miss Harding," lie resumed briskly.  "Out
with it?  You admit you were there, eh?"

"Oh, no," said Margaret.  "You 're asking
questions again, Mr. Van Zyl."

"And I 'm going to have an answer, too," he replied
zestfully.  "You 've got a wrong idea entirely of
what 's before you.  You can still have this in private,
if you like; but here or elsewhere, you 'll speak or out
comes the whole thing.  Now, which is it going to
be—sharp?"

"I 've nothing to tell you," she maintained.

His blond, neat face hardened.

"Haven't you, though.  We'll see?  You know a
Kafir calling himself—" he made a lightning reference
to his book—"calling himself Kamis?"

She made no answer.

"You know the man, eh?  It was with him you spent
the afternoon of the —th, was n't it?  Under the wall of
the dam down yonder—yes?  You 've met him more
than once, and always alone?"

She kept a constraint on herself to preserve her
faintly-smiling indifference of countenance, but her face
felt stiff and cold, and her smile as though it sagged to
a blatant grin.  She did not glance across to see how
Ford had received the news; that had suddenly become
impossible.

"You see?"  There was a restrained triumph in Van
Zyl's voice.  "We know more than you think, young
lady—and more still.  You won't answer questions,
won't you?  You let a Kafir kiss you under a wall, and
then put up this kind of bluff."

There was an explosion from Ford as he leaped to his
feet, with the hectic brilliant on each cheek.

"You liar," he cried.  "You filthy Dutch liar."

Van Zyl did not even turn his head.  A hard smile
parted his squarely-cut lips as he watched Margaret.
At his word, she had made a small involuntary
movement as though to put a hand on her bosom, but had let
it fall again.

"You may decide to answer that, perhaps," suggested
the sub-inspector.  "Do you deny that he kissed
you?"

There was a pause, while Ford stood waiting and the
sound of his breathing filled the interval.  The fingers
of Margaret's left hand bent and unbent the flap of the
envelope destined for the legal uncle, but her mind was
far from it and its contents.  "You liar," Ford had
cried, and it had had a fine sound; even now she had
but to rise as though insulted and walk from the room,
and his loyalty would endure, unspotted, unquestioning,
touchy and quick.  She might have done well to
choose the line that would have made that loyalty valid,
and she felt herself full of regrets, of pain and loss,
that it must find itself betrayed.  The vehemence of the
cry was testimony to the faith that gave it utterance.

And then, for the first time in the interview, she dwelt
upon the figure that stood at the back of all this
disordered trouble—that of Kamis, remote from their
agitated circle, companioning in his solitude with griefs of
his own.  He came into her mind by way of comparison
with the directness and vivid anger of Ford, standing
tense and agonized for her reply, with all his honest
soul in his thin dark face.  His flimsy silk clothes made
apparent the lean youth of his body.  The other went
to and fro in the night and the silence in shabby tweeds,
and his face denied an index to the strong spirit that
drove him.  He suffered behind blubber lips and a
comical nose; he was humble and grateful.  The two had
nothing in common if it were not that faith in her, to
which she must now do the peculiar justice that the
situation required.

"Let 's have it," urged the sub-inspector.  "He
kissed you, this nigger did, and you let him?  Speak up."

Boy Bailey had said, imaginatively: "She held out
both her arms to him—wide; and he took hold of her an'
hugged her, kissin' her till I couldn't stand the sight
any longer.  'You shameless woman!' I shouted"—at
that point he had been kicked by a scandalized corporal,
and had screamed.  "I wish I may die if he did n't kiss
her," was the form that kicking finally reduced it to,
but they could not kick that out of him.  He stood for
one kiss while bruises multiplied upon him.

"Well, did he kiss you or didn't he?"

Margaret sighed.  "I will tell you that," she said
wearily.  "Yes, he did—he kissed my hand."

Sub-inspector Van Zyl sat up briskly.  "I thought
we 'd get something before we were done," he said, and
smiled with a kind of malice at Ford.  "You 'd like to
apologize, I expect?"

Ford did not answer him; he was staring in mere
amazement at Margaret's immovable profile.

"Is that true?" he demanded.

Margaret forced herself to look round and meet the
wonder of his face.

"Oh, quite," she answered.  "Quite true."

His eyes wavered before hers as though he were
ashamed and abashed.  He put an uncertain hand to
his lips.

"I see," he said, very thoughtfully, and sat again
upon the couch.

"Well, after that, what 's the sense of keeping
anything back?" Van Zyl went on confidently.  "You see
what comes of standing out against the police?  Now,
what are your arrangements for meeting this Kafir?
Where do you send to let him know he 's to come and see
you?"

"No," said Margaret.  "It 's no use; I won't tell
you any more."

"Oh, yes, you will."  Van Zyl felt quite sure of it.
He eyed her acutely and decided to venture a shot in
the dark.  "You 'll tell me all I ask,—d'you hear?  I
have n't done with you yet.  You 've seen him at night,
too, when you were supposed to be in bed.  You can't
deceive me.  I 've seen your kind before, plenty of them,
and I know the way to deal with them."

His shot in the dark found its mark.  So he knew of
that night when Dr. Jakes had fallen in the road.
Mrs. Jakes must have told him, and her protests had been
uneasy lies.  Margaret carefully avoided looking at her;
in this hour, all were to receive mercy save herself.

Van Zyl went on, rasping at her in tones quite unlike
the thickish staccato voice which he kept for his unofficial
moments.  That voice she would never hear again; impossible
for her ever to regain the status of a person in
whom the police have no concern.

"You 'll save yourself trouble by speaking up and
wasting no time about it," he urged, with the kind of
harsh good nature a policeman may use to the offender
who provides him with employment.  "You 've got to
do it, you know.  How do you get hold of your
nigger-friend when you want him?"

She shook her head without speaking.

"Answer!" he roared suddenly, so that she started
in her chair.  "What 's the arrangement you 've got
with him?  None of your airs with me, my girl.  Out
with it, now—what 's the trick?"

She looked at him affrightedly; he seemed about to
spring upon her from his chair and dash at her to wring
an answer out of her by force.  But from the sofa,
where Ford sat, with his head in his hands, came no
sign.  Only Mrs. Jakes, frozen where she sat, uttered
a vague moan.

"Wha—what 's this?"

The door opened noiselessly and Dr. Jakes showed his
face of a fallen cherub in the opening, with sleepy eyes
mildly questioning.  Margaret saw him with quick
relief; the intolerable situation must change in some
manner by his arrival.

"I heard—I heard—was it *you* shouting, Van Zyl?"
he inquired, stammeringly, as he came in.

"Yes," replied the sub-inspector, shortly.

"Oh!"  Jakes felt uncertainly for his straggling
mustache.  "Whom were you shouting at?" he
inquired, after a moment of hesitation.

"I was speaking to her," replied the other impatiently.

The doctor followed the movement of his hand and
the light of his spectacles focused on Margaret stupidly.

"Well."  He seemed baffled.  "Miss Harding, you
mean, eh?"

The sub-inspector nodded.  "You 're interrupting an
inquiry, Dr. Jakes."

"Oh."  Again the doctor seemed to wrestle with
thoughts.  "Am I?"

"Yes.  You 'll excuse us, but—"

"No," said Jakes, with an appearance of grave
thought.  "No; certainly not.  You—you mustn't
shout here."

"Look here," began Van Zyl.

The doctor turned his back on him and came over
to Margaret, treading lumberingly across the worn carpet.

"Can't allow shouting," he said.  "It means—temperature.
I—I think you 'd better—yes, you 'd better
go and lie down for a while, Miss Harding."

He was as vague as a cloud, a mere mist of benevolence.

As unexpectedly and almost as startlingly as Van
Zyl's sudden loudness, Mrs. Jakes spoke from her
chair.

"You must take the doctor's advice, Miss Harding,"
she said.

Margaret rose, obediently, her letters in her hand.
Van Zyl rose too.

"Once and for all," he said loudly, "I won't allow
any—"

"I 'll report you, Van Zyl," said the little doctor,
huskily.  "You 're—you 're endangering life—way
you 're behaving.  Go with Mrs. Jakes, Miss Harding."

"*You 'll* report me," exclaimed Van Zyl.

"Ye-es," said Jakes, foggily.  "I—I call Mr. Ford
to witness—"

He turned quaveringly towards the couch and stopped
abruptly.

"What 's this?" he cried, in stronger tones, and
walked quickly toward the bent figure of the young
man.  "Van Zyl I—I hold you responsible.  You 've
done this—with your shouting."

Margaret was in the door; she turned to see the doctor
raise Ford's head and lift it back against the cushions.
Van Zyl went striding towards them and aided to place
him on his back on the couch.  As the doctor stood up
and stepped back, she saw the thin face with the high
spot of red on each cheek and the blood that ran down
the chin from the wry and painful mouth.

"Hester," Dr. Jakes spoke briskly.  "The ergotin—and
the things.  In the study; you know."

"I know."  And Mrs. Jakes—so her name was
Hester—ran pattering off.

They shut Margaret out of the room, and she sat on
the bottom step of the stairs, waiting for the news
Mrs. Jakes had promised, between breaths, to bring out to
her.  Van Zyl, ordered out unceremoniously—the
doctor had had a fine peremptory moment—and allowing a
certain perturbation to be visible on the regulated
equanimity of his features, stood in the hall and gave her
side glances that betrayed a disturbed mind.

"Miss Harding," he said presently, after long
thought; "I hope you don't think it 's any pleasure to
me to do all this?"

Margaret shook her head.  "You can do what you
like," she said.  "I shan't complain."

"It is n't that," he answered irritably, but she
interrupted him.

"I don't care what it is," she said.  "I don't care; I
don't care about anything.  Stand there, if you like,
or come and sit here; but don't talk any more till we
know what 's happened in there."

Sub-inspector Van Zyl coughed, but after certain
hesitation, he made up his mind.  When Mrs. Jakes came
forth, tiptoe and pale but whisperingly exultant, she
found them sitting side by side on the stairs in the
attitude of amity, listening in strained silence for sounds
that filtered through the door of the room.  She was
pressed and eager, with no faculty to spare for surprise.

"Splendid," she whispered.  "Everything 's all
right—thank God.  But if it hadn't been for the
doctor, well!  I'm going to fetch the boys with the
stretcher to carry him up to his room."

"I 'm awfully glad," said Van Zyl as she hurried away.

"So am I," said Margaret.  "But I ought to have
seen before the doctor did.  I ought to have known—and
I did know, really—that he would have taken
you by the throat before then, if something hadn't
happened to him."

She had risen, to go up the stairs to her room and
now stood above him, looking down serenely upon him.

"Me by the throat," exclaimed Van Zyl, slightly
shocked.

Margaret nodded.

"As Kamis would," she said slowly.  "And choke
you, and choke you, and choke you."

She went up then without looking back, leaving him
standing in the hall, baffled and outraged.





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`CHAPTER XV`:

.. class:: center large bold

   CHAPTER XV

.. vspace:: 2

Not the stubbornness of a race too prone to
enthusiasms, any more than increasing years and
the *memento mori* in his chest, could withhold Mr. Samson
from the zest with which he initiated each new day.
Bathed, razored and tailored, he came out to the
stoep for his early constitutional, his hands joined
behind his back, his soft hat cocked a little forward on
his head, and tasted the air with puffs and snorts of
appetite, walking to and fro with a eupeptic briskness
in which only the closest observer might have detected
a delicate care not to over do it.  Nothing troubled
him at this hour of the morning; it belonged to a duty
which engrossed it to the exclusion of all else, and
not till it was done was Mr. Samson accessible to the
claims of time and place.

He looked straight before him as he strode; his
manner of walking did not allow him to bestow a glance
upon the Karoo as he went.  Head well up, chest
open—what there was of it—and neck swelling over the
purity of his collar: that was Mr. Samson.  It was only
when Mrs. Jakes came to the breakfast-room door and
set the gong booming melodiously, that he relaxed and
came back to a mild interest in the immediate earth,
as though the gong were a permission to stand at ease
and dismiss.  He halted by the steps to wipe his
monocle in his white abundant handkerchief, and
surveyed, perfunctorily at first and then with a narrowing
interest, the great extent of brown and gray-green that
stretched away from the foot of the steps to a silvery
and indeterminate distance.

A single figure was visible upon it, silhouetted
strongly against the low sky, and Mr. Samson worked
his monocle into his eye and grasped it with a pliant
eyebrow to see the clearer.  It was a man on a horse,
moving at a walk, minutely clear in that crystal air
in spite of the distance.  The rider was far from the
road, apparently aimless and at large upon the veld;
but there was something in his attitude as he rode
that held Mr. Samson gazing, a certain erectness and
ease, something conventional, the name of which
dodged evasively at the tip of his tongue.  He knew
somebody who sat on a horse exactly like that; dash
it, who was it, now?  It wasn't that Dutchman, Du
Preez, nor his long-legged youngster; they rode like
Dutchmen.  This man was more like—more like—ah!
Mr. Samson had got it.  The only folk who had that
look in the saddle were troopers; this must be a man
of the Mounted Police.

A tinge of annoyance colored his thoughts, for the
far view of the trooper, slowly quartering the land,
brought back to his mind a matter of which it had
been purged by the ritual morning march along the
stoep, and he found it returning again as distasteful
as ever.  He had been made a party to its details by
Mrs. Jakes, when he inquired regarding Ford's breakdown.
The communication had taken place at the foot
of the stairs, when he was preparing to ascend to
bed, on the evening of Van Zyl's visit.  At dinner
he had noted no more than that Ford was absent and
that Margaret was uneasy; he kept his question till
her skirt vanished at the bend of the stairs.

"I say; what 's up?" he asked then.

Mrs. Jakes, standing by to give good night, as her
wont was, fluttered.  She gave a little start that shook
her clothes exactly like the movement of an agitated
bird in a cage, and stared up at him, rather breathlessly,
while he leaned against the balustrade and
awaited her answer.

"I don't know what you mean."  It was a formula
that always gave her time to collect her thoughts.

"Oh, yes, you do," insisted Mr. Samson, with severe
geniality.  "Ford laid up and Miss Harding making
bread pills, and all that.  What 's the row?"

Mrs. Jakes regarded him with an eye as hard and
as wary as a fowl's, and then looked round to see that
the study door was securely shut.

"I 'm afraid, Mr. Samson," she said, in the low
tones of confidential intercourse—"I 'm afraid we 've
been mistaken in Miss Harding."

"Eh?  What 's that?"

Old Mr. Samson *would* speak as though he were
addressing a numerous company, and Mrs. Jakes'
nervousness returned at his loud exclamation.  She made
hushing noises.

"Yes, but what's all this nonsense?" demanded
Mr. Samson.  "Somebody 's been pullin' your leg,
Mrs. Jakes."

"No, indeed, Mr. Samson," Mrs. Jakes assured him
hastily, as though urgent to clear herself of an imputation.
"There is n't any doubt about it,—I 'm sorry to
gay.  You see, Mr. Van Zyl came here this afternoon and
wanted to see Miss Harding in the study.  Well, she
would n't go to him."

"Why the deuce should she?" inquired Mr. Samson
warmly.  "Who 's Van Zyl to send for people like this?"

"It was about a Kafir," said Mrs. Jakes.  "The
police are looking for the Kafir and Miss Harding
refused to help them.  So—"

Mr. Samson's lips moved soundlessly, and he changed
his position with a movement of lively impatience.

"Let 's have it from the beginning, please, Mrs. Jakes,"
he said, with restraint.  "Can't make head or
tail of it—way you 're telling it.  Now, why did this
ass Van Zyl come here?"

It was the right way to get the tale told forthright.
His indignation and his scorn fanned the spark of
spite in the core of Mrs. Jakes, who perceived in
Mr. Samson another victim to Margaret's duplicity.  She
was galled by the constant supply of champions of the
girl's cause who had to be laid low one after the other.
She addressed herself to the incredulity and anger in
the sharp old face before her, and spoke volubly and
low, telling the whole thing as she knew it and perhaps
a little more than the whole.  As she went on, she
became consumed with eagerness to convince Mr. Samson.
Her small disfigured hands moved jerkily in incomplete
gestures, and she rose on tiptoe as though to approach
nearer to the seat of his intelligence.  He did not again
interrupt her, but listened with intentness, watching
her as the swift words tumbled on one another's heels
from her trembling lips.  His immobility and silence
were agonizing to her.

"So that's why I say that we 've been mistaken in
Miss Harding," she concluded at last.  "You wouldn't
have thought it of her, would you, Mr. Samson?  And
it is a shocking thing to come across here, in the house,
isn't it?"

Mr. Samson withdrew a hand from his pocket,
looked thoughtfully at three coins in the palm of it, and
returned them to the pocket again.

"You 're quite certain," he asked, "that she admitted
the kissin'?  There 's no doubt about that?"

"If I never speak another word," declared Mrs. Jakes,
with fervor.  "If I die here where I stand.  If I never
move from this spot—those were her exact words.  It
was then that poor Mr. Ford had his attack—he was so
horrified."

"Well," said Mr. Samson, with a sigh, after another
inspection of his funds, "so that 's the trouble, is it?"

"The doctor and I are much disturbed," continued
Mrs. Jakes.  "Naturally disturbed.  Such a thing has
never happened here before."

Mr. Samson heaved himself upright and put one foot
on the bottom stair.

"It's only ignorance, of course," he said.  "The poor
little devil don't know what she 's letting herself in
for.  If she 'd only taken a bad turn after a month
or so and—and gone out, Mrs. Jakes, we 'd have
remembered her pleasantly enough then.  Now, of course,
she 'll have this story to live with.  Van Zyl 'll put it
about; trust him.  Poor little bally fool."

"I 'm sorry for her, too, of course," replied Mrs. Jakes,
putting out her hand to shake his.  "Only of
course I 'm—I 'm disgusted as well.  Any woman would be."

"Yes," said Mr. Samson thoughtfully, commencing
the ascent; "yes, she 'll be sure to get lots of that, now."

It was a vexation that abode with him that night and
through the next day; it kept him from the sincere
repose which is the right of straightforward and
uncompromising minds, whose cleanly-finished effects have no
loose ends of afterthought dangling from them to goad
a man into revising his conclusions.  Lying in the
dark, wide awake and regretful, he had a vision of her
in her room, welcoming its solitude and its freedom
from reproachful eyes, glad now not of fellows and
their companionship but of this refuge.  It gave him
vague pain.  He experienced a sense of resentment
against the arrangement and complexity of affairs that
had laid open this gulf at Margaret's feet, and made
its edges slippery to trap her.  A touch of a more
personal anger entered his thoughts as he dwelt on the
figure of the girl, the fine, dexterous, civilized creature
that she had been.  She had known how to hold him
with a pleasant humor, a light and stimulating irreverence,
and to soften it to the point at which she bade
him close his eyes and kissed him.  But—and Mr. Samson
flushed to the heat at which men swear—the Kafir,
the roaming criminal nigger, had had that much out
of her.  Mrs. Jakes had not been faithful to detail on
that head.  "Kiss," she had said, not "kissed her
hand."  Mr. Samson might have seen a difference
where Van Zyl, lacking his pretty discrimination of
degrees in the administration and reception of kisses, had
seen none.

The morning had brought no counsel; the day had
delivered itself of nothing that enlightened or
consoled him.  Margaret had managed somehow, after a
manner of her own, to withdraw herself from his
immediate outlook, and there were neither collisions nor
explanations.  It was not so much that she preserved
a distance as avoided contact, so that meals and
meetings in the drawing-room or about the house suffered
from no evidences of a change in their regard for each
other.  The adroitness with which it was contrived
moved him to new regrets; she might, he thought, have
done so well for herself, whereas now she was wasted.

This was the second morning since he had invaded
Mrs. Jakes' confidences at the foot of the stairs and
extracted her story from her.  The gong at the
breakfast-room door made soft blurred music at his back
while he stood watching the remote figure of the
trooper, sliding slowly across the skyline.  It finished
with a last note of added emphasis, a frank whack at
the middle of the instrument, and he turned deliberately
from his staring to obey it.

Mrs. Jakes, engine-driving the urn, was alone in the
room when he entered, and gave him good morning with
the smile which she had not varied for years.

"A beautiful day, is n't it?" she said.

"Oh, perfect," agreed Mr. Samson, receiving a cup
of coffee from her.  "I say.  You haven't seen any
signs of Van Zyl to-day, have you?"

"To-day?  No," replied Mrs. Jakes, surprised.
"Were you expecting—did he say—?"

Mr. Samson shook his head.  "No; I don't know anything
about him," he told her.  "It 's just that matter
of Miss Harding, you know.  From the stoep, just now,
I was watching a mounted man riding slowly about on
the veld, and it looks as if they were arranging a
search.  Eh?"

"Oh, dear," exclaimed Mrs. Jakes, "I do hope they
won't come here again.  I 've never had any trouble
with the police before.  And Mr. Van Zyl, generally
so gentlemanly—when I saw how he treated Miss
Harding, I was really sorry for her."

Mr. Samson sniffed.  "Man must be a cad," he said.
"Anyhow, I don't see what right he 's got to put his
foot inside these doors.  It was simply a bluff, I fancy.
Next time he comes, I hope you 'll let me know,
Mrs. Jakes.  Can't have him treatin' that poor little fool
like that, don't y' know."

"But they 've got a *right* to search, surely?"
protested Mrs. Jakes.  "And it never does to have the
police against you, Mr. Samson.  I had a cousin once—at
least, he wasn't exactly a cousin—but he took
a policeman's number for refusing to arrest a man
who had been rude to him, and the policeman at once
took him in custody and swore the most dreadful oaths
before the magistrate that he was drunk and disorderly.
And my cousin—I always used to call him a
cousin—was next door to a teetotaller."

"Perhaps the teetotaller bribed the policeman,"
suggested Mr. Samson, seriously.  "Still—what about
Miss Harding?  She has n't said anything to you about
goin' back home, has she?"

"No," said Mrs. Jakes.  She let the teetotaller pass for
the time being as the new topic opened before her.  "But
I wanted to speak to you about that, Mr. Samson."

"Best thing she can do," he said positively.
"There 's a lot of people at Home who don't mind
niggers a bit.  Probably would n't hurt her for a month
and her doctors can spot some other continent for her
to do a cure in."

"Now I 'm very glad to hear you say so, Mr. Samson,"
declared Mrs. Jakes.  "You see, what to do with
her is a good deal on our minds—the doctor's and
mine.  My view is—she ought to go before the story
gets about."

"Quite right," agreed Mr. Samson.

"But Eustace—he 's so considerate, you know.  He
thinks of her feelings.  He 's dreadfully afraid that
she 'll fancy we 're turning her out and be hurt.  He
really doesn't quite see the real state of affairs; he
has an idea it 'll all blow over and be forgotten."

Mr. Samson shook his head.  "Not out here," he
said.  "That sort of story don't die; it lives and grows.
Might get into the papers, even."

"Well, now," Mrs. Jakes' voice was soft and
persuasive; "do you mind my telling the doctor how you
look at it?  He doesn't pay any attention to what I
say, but coming from you, it 's bound to strike him.
It would be better than you talking to him about it,
because he would n't care to discuss one of his patients
with another; but if I were just to mention, as an
argument, you know—"

"Oh, certainly," acquiesced Mr. Samson, "certainly.
Those are my views; anybody can know 'em.  Tell
Jakes by all means."

"Thank you," said Mrs. Jakes, with feeling.  "It
does relieve me to know that you agree with me.  And
it is such a responsibility."

Margaret's entrance shortly afterwards brought their
conference to a close, and Mr. Samson was able to
return to his food with undivided attention.

Margaret's demeanor since the exposure was a
phenomenon Mrs. Jakes did not profess to understand.
The tall girl came into the room with a high serenity
that stultified in advance the wan little woman's
efforts to meet her with a remote dignity; it suggested
that Mrs. Jakes and her opinions were things already
so remote from her interest that they could not recede
further without becoming invisible.  What she lacked,
in Mrs. Jakes' view, was visible scars, tokens of
punishment and suffering; she could conceive no other
attitude in a person who stood so much in need of the
mercy of her fellows.  To a humility commensurate
with her disapproval, she would have offered a forbearance
barbed with condescension, peppered balm of her
own brand, the distillation of her narrow and
purposeful soul.  As it was, she not only resented the
girl's manner—she cowered.

"Good morning," said Margaret, smiling with intention.

"Good morning, Miss—ah—Miss Harding," was the
best Mrs. Jakes could do.

"Morning," responded Mr. Samson, lifting his white
head jerkily, hoping to convey preoccupation and casual
absence of mind.  "Morning, Miss Harding.  Jolly
day, what?"

"Oh, no end jolly," agreed Margaret, dropping into
her place.  "Yes, coffee, please, Mrs. Jakes."

"Certainly, Miss Harding," replied Mrs. Jakes, who
had made offer of none, and fumbled inexpertly with
the ingenious urn whose chauffeur and minister she was.

"How is Mr. Ford?" inquired Margaret next.

"Oh, yes," chimed in Mr. Samson, anxious to
prevent too short a reply; "how 's he this morning,
Mrs. Jakes.  Nicely, thank you, and all that—eh?"

Mrs. Jakes was swift to seize the opportunity to reply
in Mr. Samson's direction exclusively.

"He 's not to get up to-day," she explained.  "But
he 's doing very well, thank you.  When I asked him
what he 'd like for breakfast, he said: 'Oh, everything
there is, please.'  But, of course, he 's had a
shock."

"Er—yes," said Mr. Samson hurriedly.  "I 'll look
him up before lunch, if I may."

"Certainly," said Mrs. Jakes graciously.

"Good idea," said Margaret.  "So will I."

Mrs. Jakes shot a pale and desperate glance at her
and then looked for support to Mr. Samson.  But that
leaning tower of strength was eating devotedly and
would not meet her eye.

She envisaged with inward consternation a future
punctuated by such meals, with every meal partaking of
the nature of a hostile encounter and every encounter
closing with a defeat.  Her respectability, her sad
virtue, her record clean of stain, did not command
heavy enough metal to breach the gleaming panoply
of assurance with which Margaret opposed all her
attacks, and she felt the grievance common to those who
are ineffectually in the right.  The one bright spot in
the affair was the possibility that she might now bend
Jakes to her purpose, and be deputed to give the girl
notice that she must leave the Sanatorium.  She felt
she could quote Mr. Samson with great effect to the
doctor.

"Mr. Samson feels strongly that she should leave at
once.  He said so in the plainest words," she would
report, and Jakes would be obliged to take account of
it.  Hitherto, her hints, her suggestions and even her
supplications, had failed to move him.  He had a way,
at times, of producing from his humble and misty
mildness a formidable obstinacy which brooked no
opposition.  With bent head, he would look up at her out of
the corners of his eyes, while she added plausibility
to volubility, unmoving and immovable.  When she had
done, for he always heard her ominously to an end, he
would shake his head slightly and emit a negative.  It
was rather impressive; there was so little show of force
about it; but Mrs. Jakes had long known that it
betokened a barrier of refusal that it was useless to hope
to surmount.  If he were pressed further, he would
rouse a little and amplify his meaning with phrases of
a deplorable vulgarity and force.  In his medical
student days, the doctor had been counted a capable
hand at the ruder kinds of out-patient work.

The last time she had pressed him to decree Margaret's
departure was in the study, where he sat with
his coat off and his shirt-sleeves turned up, as though
he contemplated an evening of strenuousness; the
bottles and glasses were grouped on the desk at his
elbow.  Mrs. Jakes had represented vivaciously her
sufferings in having to meet Miss Harding and contain
the emotions that effervesced in her bosom.  She sat in
the patient's chair, and carefully guided her eyes away
from the drinking apparatus.  The doctor had uttered
his "No" as usual, and she tried, against her better
sense, to reason with him.

"There 's me to think of, too," she urged anxiously.
"The way she walks past me, Eustace, you 'd think I 'd
never had a silk lining in my life."

"No," said the doctor again, with a little genteel
cough behind three fingers.  "No, we can't.  'T would
n't do, Hester.  Bringing her out o' bed in her
night-gown that night—it was doing her dirt.  Yes, I know
all about the nigger, and dam lucky it was for me
she 'd got him handy.  I might have been there yet
for all you did.  And as for silk linings, don't you get
your shirt out, Hester.  She 's all right."

He put out a hand to the whisky bottle, looking at
her impatiently with red-rimmed eyes, and she had
risen with a sigh, knowing it was time for her to go.
She fired one parting shot of sincere feeling.

"Well, I suppose I 've got to suffer in silence, if
you say so, Eustace," she observed resignedly.  "But
it 's as bad as if we kept a shop."

But as the mouthpiece of Mr. Samson, she would be
better equipped.  It could be made to appear to Jakes
that remonstrances were in the air and that there was
a danger of losing Samson and Ford, and he would
have to give ground.  Mrs. Jakes thought well of the
prospects of her enterprise now.  She would have been
alarmed and astonished if any responsible person had
called her spiteful and unscrupulous, for she knew she
was neither of these things.  She was merely creeping
under obstacles that she could not climb over, going to
work with such means as came to her hand to secure
an entirely worthy end.  She knew her own mind, in
short, and if it had wavered in its purpose, she would
have known it no longer.

Margaret, all unconscious of the ingenuity that spent
itself upon her, ate a leisurely breakfast, giving
Mr. Samson ample time to escape to the stoep alone and
establish himself there.  She didn't at all mind being
left alone with Mrs. Jakes.  That lady's stiffness and
the facial expressions which she tried on, one after
the other, in an endeavor to make her countenance
match her mind, could be made ineffective by the simple
process of ignoring them and her together.  By dint of
preserving a seeming of contented tranquillity and
speaking not one word, it was possible to abash poor
Mrs. Jakes utterly and leave her writhing in impotence
behind her full-bodied urn.  This was the method that
commended itself to Margaret and which she employed
successfully.  Everybody should have a cut at her, she
had decided; she would not baulk one of them of the
privilege; but Mrs. Jakes had had her turn, and could
not be permitted to cut and come again.

There were several remarks that Mrs. Jakes might
have made with effect, but none of them occurred to
her till Margaret had left the room, departing with an
infuriating rustle of silk linings.  Mrs. Jakes moved in
her chair to see her cross the hall and go out.  A look
of calculation overspread her sour little face.

"I didn't notice the silk in *that* one," she murmured
thoughtfully.

Mr. Samson, with a comparatively recent weekly
edition of the *Cape Times* to occupy him did not notice
her rubber-soled approach till her shadow fell on the
page he was reading.  He looked up sharply.

"Ah, Miss Harding," he said weakly.

She leaned with her back against the rail, looking
down at him in his basket chair, half-smiling.

"You want to speak to me, don't you?" she asked.

Mr. Samson did not understand.  "Do I?" he said.
"Did I say so?  I wonder what it was."

"You didn't say so," Margaret answered, "But I
know you do.  You wouldn't send me finally to
Coventry without saying anything at all, would you?"

"Ah!"  He made a weary gesture with one hand,
as though he would put the subject from him.
"But—but I 'm not sending you to Coventry, my—Miss
Harding, I mean.  Don't think it, for a moment."

He shook his white head with a touch of sadness,
looking up at her slender, civilized figure as she stood
before him with a gaze that granted in advance every
claim she could make on his consideration and forbearance.

"You know what I mean," said Margaret steadily.

"Do I though?  Well, yes, I suppose I do," he
said.  "No use fumbling with it, is there?  And you're
not the fumbling kind.  Each of us knows what the
other means all right, so what's the use of talking
about it?"

Margaret would not let him off; she did not desire
that he should spare her and could see no reason for
sparing him.

"I want to talk about it, this once," she answered.
"You won't have many more chances to tell me what
you think of me.  I know, of course; but I was n't
going to shirk it.  I 've disappointed you, have n't I?"

"I don't say so," he replied, with careful gentleness.
"I don't say anything of the kind, Miss Harding.
You took your own line as you 'd every right to do.  If
I had—sort of—imagined you were different, you 're
not to blame for my mistake.  God knows I don't set
up for an example to young ladies.  Not my line at
all, that sort of thing."

"Nothing to say, then?" queried Margaret.  He
shook his head again.  "You know," she added, "I 'm
not a bit ashamed—not of anything."

"Of course you 're not," he agreed readily.  "You
did what you thought was right."

"But you don't think so?" she persisted.

"Miss Harding," replied Mr. Samson; "so far as I
can manage it, I don't think about the matter at all."

Margaret had a queer impulse to reply to this by
bursting into tears or laughter, whichever should offer
itself, but at that moment Mrs. Jakes came out, and
restrained a too obvious surprise at the sight of the
pair of them in conversation.  Circumstances were
forever lying in ambush against Mrs. Jakes and deepening
the mystery of life by their unexpected poppings up.

She addressed Mr. Samson and pointedly ignored Margaret.

"Mr. Ford could see you now, if you cared to go
up," she announced.

"Certainly, certainly," said Mr. Samson, with alacrity.

Margaret spoke, smiling openly at Mrs. Jakes'
irreconcilable side-face.

"Oh, would you mind if I went first?" she asked.
"I rather want to see him."

"By all means," agreed Mr. Samson, with the same
alacrity.  "I 'm not perishin' to inspect him, you
know.  Tell him I 'll look him up afterwards."

Mrs. Jakes turned a fine bright red, and swallowed
two or three times.  She had matured a plan for
declaring that Ford must not be disturbed again after
Mr. Samson's visit, and she was fairly sure that
Margaret had suspected it.  She watched the girl's
departure with angry and baffled eyes.

"She 's doing it on purpose," was her thought.
"She swings them like that so as to make me hear the
frow-frow."

Ford was propped against pillows in his bed, with
most of the books in the house piled alongside of him
on chairs and a bedside table.  He was expecting
Mr. Samson and sang out a hearty, "Come in; don't stand
drumming there," at Margaret's rap on the door.

"It's me," announced Margaret, pushing it open;
"not Mr. Samson.  He 'll look you up afterwards.  Do
you mind?"

He flushed warmly, staring at her unexpected appearance.

"Of course I don't mind," he said.  "It 's awfully
good of you.  If you 'd shove these books off on the
floor, I could offer you a chair."

Margaret did as he suggested, but rose again at once
and set the door wide open.

"The proprieties," she remarked, as she returned to
her seat.  "Also Mrs. Jakes.  That keyhole might
tempt her beyond her strength."

The room was a large one, with a window to the
south full of sunshine and commanding nothing but the
eternal unchanging levels of the Karoo and the hard
sky rising from its edge.  Its walls were rainbow-hued
with unframed canvasses clustering upon them,
exemplifying Ford's art and challenging the view through
the window.  She liked vaguely the spareness of the
chamber's equipment and its suggestions of uncompromising
masculinity.  The row of boots and shoes, with
trees distributed among the chief of them, the leather
trunks against the wall, the photographs about the
dressing table, and the iron bath propped on end under
the window,—these trifles seemed all to corroborate the
impression she had of their owner.  They were so
consistent with the Ford she knew, units in the sum of him.

"Well," she said, looking at him frankly; "are we
going to talk or just exchange civilities?"

"We won't do that," he answered, meeting her look.
"Civilities be blowed, anyhow."

"But I 'd like to ask you how you feel, first of all,"
said Margaret.

"Oh, first-rate.  I 'd get up if it wasn't for Jakes,"
he assured her eagerly.  "And I say," he added, with
a quick touch of awkwardness, "I hope, really, you
haven't been bothering about me, and thinking it was
that affair in the drawing-room that made the trouble.
Because it wasn't, you know.  I 'd felt something of
the kind coming on before lunch.  Jakes says that
running up stairs may have done it—thing I 'm always
forgetting I mustn't do.  A chap can't always be
thinking of his in'ards, can he?"

"No," agreed Margaret.

She recognized a certain tone of politeness, of civil
constraint, in his manner of speaking.  He was doing
his best to be trivial and ordinary, but she could not be
deceived.

"It was rotten, though," he went on quickly.  "That
brute Van Zyl—look here!  I 'm most fearfully sorry
I wasn't able to put a stop to his talk, Miss Harding.
It makes me sick to think of you being badgered by that
fellow."

"It didn't hurt me," said Margaret thoughtfully.
"All that is nothing.  But are n't we being rather civil,
after all?"

He made a slight grimace.  He looked very frail
against the pillows, with his nervous, sun-tanned hands
fidgeting on the coverlet.  One button of his pyjamas
was loose at the throat, and let his lean neck be seen,
with the tan stopping short where the collar came and
giving place to white skin below.

"Oh, well," he said, in feeble protest.  "Why bother?"

"I thought you 'd want to," replied Margaret.  "I
don't expect you to—to approve, but I did rely on
your bothering about it all a little.  But if you 'd
rather not, that ends the matter."

"I didn't mean it like that," he said.

"Tell me," demanded Margaret; "don't you think
I owe you an explanation?"

He considered her gravely for some seconds.

"Yes," he answered finally.  "I think you ought to
tell me about it."

"I 'm willing to," she said earnestly.  "Oh, I
wanted to often and often before.  But I had to be
careful.  This Kafir is in danger of arrest by Mr. Van
Zyl, and though he could easily clear himself before
a court, you know what it means for a native to be
arrested by him.  He 'takes the kick out of them.'  So
I was n't really free to speak."

"Perhaps you weren't," granted Ford.  "But you
were free to keep away from him, and from niggers
in general—were n't you?"

"Quite," agreed Margaret.  "It is n't niggers in
general, though—it 's just this one."

She leaned forward, with both elbows on the edge
of the bed and her fingers intertwined.  She felt that
the color had mounted in her face, but she was sedulous
to keep her eyes on his.

"He 's a nigger—yes," she said; "black as your hat,
and all that.  But there 's a difference.  This—nigger—I
hate that word—was taken away when he was six
years old and brought up in England.  He was
properly educated and he 's a doctor, a real doctor with
diplomas and degrees, and he 's come out here to try
and help his own people.  As yet, he can't even speak
Kafir, and he 's had a fearful time ever since he landed.
Talking to him is just like talking to any one else.
He 's read books and knows a bit about art, and all
that; and he 's ever so humble and grateful for just
a few words of talk.  He 's out there in the veld, all
day and all night, lonely and hunted.  Of course I
spoke to him and was as friendly as I could be.  Don't
you see, Mr. Ford?  Don't you see?"

He nodded impartially.

"Yes, I see," he answered.  "Well?"

"Well, that's all," said Margaret.  "Oh, yes—you
mean the—the kiss?  That was absolutely nothing.  I
used to make him talk and he 'd been telling me about
how hard it was to make a start with his work, and
how grateful he was to me for listening to him, and
I said there was no need to be so grateful, and that it
was a noble thing he had undertaken and that—yes—that
I 'd always be proud I 'd been a friend of his.
I held out my hand as I was saying this, and instead of
shaking it, he kissed it."

"That was what the blackmailer saw, was it?" asked
Ford.  Margaret nodded.  "By the way, who paid him?"

"*He* did," Margaret answered.  "I wouldn't have
paid a penny.  He insisted on paying."

She was watching him anxiously.  He was frowning
in deep thought.  She felt her heart beat more rapidly
as he remained for a time without answering.

"It was worth paying for, if the fellow had kept
faith," he said at last.  "The whole thing 's in
that—you don't know what such a secret is worth.  It 's
the one thing that binds people together out here,
Dutch and English, colonials and Transvaalers and all
the rest—the color line.  But you didn't know."

"Oh, yes," Margaret made haste to correct him.  "I
did know.  But I didn't care and I don't care now.
I 'm not going to take that kind of thing into account
at all.  I won't be bullied by any amount of prejudices."

"It isn't prejudice," said Ford wearily.  "Still—we
can't go into all that.  I 'm glad you explained to
me, though."

"You 're wondering still about something," Margaret
said.  She could read the doubt and hesitation that he
strove to hide from her.  "Do let 's have the whole thing
out.  What is it?"

He had half-closed his eyes but now he opened them
and surveyed her keenly.

"You 've told me how reasonable the whole thing
was," he said, in deliberate tones.  "It was reasonable.
That part of it 's as right as it can be.  I understand
the picturesqueness of it all and the sadness; it is a sad
business.  I could understand your connection with it,
too, in spite of the man's hiding from the police, if only
he wasn't a nigger.  Beg pardon—a negro."

Margaret was following his words intently.

"What has that got to do with it?" she asked.

"You don't see it?" inquired Ford.  "Didn't you
find it rather awful, being alone with him?  Didn't it
make you creepy when he touched your hand?"

He was curious about it, apart from her share in the
matter.  He was interested in the impersonal aspect of
the question as well.

"I didn't like his face, at first," admitted Margaret.

"And afterwards?"

"Afterwards I didn't mind it," she replied.  "I 'd
got used to it, you see."

He nodded.  Upon her answer he had dropped his
eyes and was no longer looking at her.

"Well, that 's all," he said.  "Don't trouble about
it any more.  You 've explained and—if you care to
know—I 'm quite satisfied."

Margaret sat slowly upright.

"No, you 're not," she answered.  "That isn't true;
you 're not satisfied.  You 're disappointed that I did n't
shrink from him and feel nervous of him.  You are—you
are!  I 'm not as good as you thought I was, and
you're disappointed.  Why don't you say so?  What's
the use of pretending like this?"

Ford wriggled between the sheets irritably.

"You 're making a row," he said.  "They 'll hear
you downstairs."

Margaret had risen and was standing by her chair.

"I don't care," she said, lowering her voice at the
same time.  "But why are n't you honest with me?
You say you 're satisfied and all the time you 're
thinking: 'A nigger is as good as a white man to her.'"

"I 'm not," protested Ford vigorously.

"I *did n't* shrink," said Margaret.  "My flesh didn't
crawl once.  When I shake his hand, it feels just the
same as yours.  That disgusts you—I know.  There 's
something wanting in me that you thought was there.
Mrs. Jakes has got it; her flesh can crawl like a
caterpillar; but I have n't.  You did n't know that when you
asked me not to go away, did you?"

"Sit down," begged Ford.  "Sit down and let me
ask you again."

"No," said Margaret.  "You shan't overlook things
like that.  I 'm going—going away from here as soon
as I can.  I 'm not ashamed and I won't be indulged."

She walked towards the door.  There was a need to get
away before the tears that made her eyes smart should
overflow and expose themselves.

"Come back," cried Ford.  "I say—give a fellow a
chance.  Come back.  I want to say something."

She would not answer him without facing him, even
though it revealed the tears.

"I 'm not coming," she replied, and went out.

She had fulfilled her purpose; they had all had their
cut at her, save Dr. Jakes, who would not take his turn,
and Mrs. Jakes, to whom that privilege was not due.
Only one of them had swung the whip effectually and
left a wheal whose smart endured.

Mrs. Jakes did not count on being left out of the
festival.  Her rod was in pickle.  She was on hand
when the girl came out of her room, serene again and
ready to meet any number of Mrs. Jakeses.

"Oh, Miss Harding."

Mrs. Jakes arrested her, glancing about to see that the
corridor was empty.

"The doctor wishes me to tell you," said Mrs. Jakes,
aiming her words at the girl's high tranquillity, "that
he considers you had better make arrangements to
remove to some other establishment.  You understand, of
course?"

"Of course," agreed Margaret.

"A month's notice, then," said Mrs. Jakes smoothly.
"That is usual.  But if it should be convenient for you
to go before, the doctor will be happy to meet you."

"Very good of the doctor," smiled Margaret, and
walked on, her skirts rustling.





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`CHAPTER XVI`:

.. class:: center large bold

   CHAPTER XVI

.. vspace:: 2

Voices below the window of her room that
alternated briskly and yet guardedly, drew Margaret
to look out.  On the stoep beneath her, Fat Mary was
exchanging badinage of the most elementary character
with a dusty trooper of the Mounted Police, who stood
on the ground under the railing with his bridle looped
over his arm and his horse awaiting his pleasure at his
elbow.  Seen from above, the main feature of Fat Mary
was her red-and-yellow headkerchief tied tightly over
her large and globular skull, presenting the appearance
of a strikingly-colored bubble at the summit of her
person.

"You savvy tickle?" the trooper was saying.  "By'-mby
I come up there and tickle you.  You like that plenty."

Fat Mary giggled richly.  "You lie," she returned,
with immense enjoyment.

"Tickle do you good," rejoined the trooper.

He was a tall lathy man, with the face of a tired
Punchinello, all nose and chin with a thin fastidious
mouth hidden between.  His eyes wandered restlessly
while he talked as though in search of better matter for
his interest; and he chaffed the stout Kafir woman with
a mechanical ease suggesting that this was a trick he
had practised till it performed itself.  The tight-fitting
blue uniform, in spite of the dust that was thick upon
it, and all his accoutrement of a horseman, lent a
dandified touch to his negligent attitude; and he looked
like—what he probably was—one of those gentlemen of
sporting proclivities in whom the process of decay is arrested
by the preservative discipline and toil of service in a
Colonial force.

Margaret, examining him unseen from above, with
hatpins in her hands, found his miserable and well-bred
face at once repellent and distantly terrible; he seemed
to typify so completely what she had learned to fear in
the police, a humanity at once weak and implacable.
His spurs, his revolver, his authority were means of
inflicting pain given into feeble hands to supply the place
of power.  Within a few days she had come to know
the dread which the street-hawker in the gutter feels
for the policeman on the pavement who can destroy him
when he chooses.  It did not call for much imagination
to see how dreadful the bored perfunctory man below
might become when once he had fastened on his quarry
and had it to himself to exercise upon it the arts of which
the revolver and the rest were the appliances.

His presence under her window was a sign that the
search for Kamis' hiding-place was still going forward.
At any hour of the day now the inmates of the
Sanatorium might lift up their eyes to see the unusual
phenomenon of a human being sharing with them the
solitude and the silence.  Van Zyl had high hopes of laying
his hands on the mysterious Kafir who had committed
the crime of being incomprehensible to nervous kraals,
whose occupants had a way of shaking off wonder and
alarm by taking exercise with their weapons among the
cattle of their neighbors.  The Sanatorium, under his
orders, was being watched for any indications of
messages passing between Margaret and the Kafir, and the
dusty, armed men came and went continually, a succession
of drilled shoulders, tanned, unconcerned faces, and
expressionless eyes puckered against the sun's stare.

Their chief effect was to keep Margaret in a state of
anxious fear lest their search should be successful, and
she should be a witness of their return, riding past at
the walk with a handcuffed figure trudging helplessly
before them.  She saw in painful dreams the dust that
rose about them cloudily and the prisoner's bowed back
as he labored to maintain the pace.  The worst of
the dreams followed their progress to a moment when
the man on foot flagged, or perhaps fell, and one of the
riders pressed forward with a foot disengaged from its
stirrup and the spur lifted to rowel him to livelier
efforts.  Such was the fruit of Van Zyl's pregnant word
when he spoke of prisoners who had had "the kick
taken out of them."

She had had no opportunity of seeing Paul, to send
through him a warning message to Kamis, since her
interview with Van Zyl; but on this day she had glimpsed
him from the stoep, as he moved about among the farm
buildings, and she lost no time in preparing to go to
him.  She was putting on her hat as she watched the
trooper and Fat Mary.

The couple of them were still at work upon their
flirtation when she came out of the Sanatorium and descended
the steps.  The man's wandering eyes settled on her at
once with grateful interest, and followed her as she
went across to the path at a pace suited to the ardor of
the sun.  His Punchinello features brightened almost
hopefully.

Fat Mary, observing the direction of his gaze, giggled
afresh and gave information in a whisper.

"What—her?  That lady there?"

Fat Mary nodded corroboratively.  The trooper swore
softly in mere amazement.

"You're sure that's her?" he demanded.  "Well, I 'm—"

He stared at Margaret's receding back with a frown
of perplexity, then drew the reins over his horse's head
and prepared to mount.

"You go now?" asked Fat Mary, disappointed at the
effect of her news.

"You bet," was the answer, as he swung up into the
saddle and moved his horse on.

Margaret turned as the sound of hoofs padding on the
dust approached from behind and was met by a salute
and bold avaricious eyes above the drooping beak.  He
reined up beside her, looking down from the height of
his saddle at her.

"Miss Harding, isn't it?" he said.  "May I ask
where you 're goin'?"

There was jocular invitation in his manner of saying
it, the gallantry of a man who despises women.

"I 'm going to the farm, there," Margaret answered.
The unexpected encounter had made her nervous,
and she found herself ill at ease under his regard.
"Why?"

"Because I 'll ask you for the pleasure of accompanyin'
you so far, if you don't mind," he returned.
"I want a look at the happy man you 're goin' to see.
Hope you don't object?"

"I can't stop you," replied Margaret.  "You will do
as you please, of course."

She turned and walked on, careful not to hurry her
steps.  The trooper rode at her side, and though she
did not look up, she felt his eyes resting on her profile
as they went.

"Bit slow, livin' out here, Miss Harding," he remarked,
after they had gone for a minute or so in silence.
"Not what you 've been use to, I imagine.  Found
yourself rather short of men, didn't you?"

"No," replied Margaret thoughtfully; "no."

"Oh, come now."  The mounted man laughed thinly,
failing utterly to get his tolerant and good-natured
effect.  "If you 'd had a supply of decent chaps to do
the right thing by a girl as pretty as you—admire you,
an' flirt, and all that, I mean—you wouldn't have fallen
back on this nigger we 're lookin' for, would you, now?"

This was what it meant, then, to have one's name
linked with that of a Kafir.  She was anybody's game;
not the lowest need look upon her as inaccessible.  She
had to put a restraint upon herself to keep from
quickening her pace, from breaking into a run and fleeing
desperately from the man whose gaze never left her.
Its persistence, though she was aware of it without
seeing it, was an oppression; she imagined she could detect
the taint of his breath blowing hot upon her as she
walked.

He saw the flush that rose in her cheek, and laughed
again.

"You needn't answer," he said.  "I can see for
myself I 'm right.  Lord, whenever was I wrong when it
came to spottin' a girl's feelings?  Say, Miss
Harding—did n't I hit it first shot?  Of course I did.
Of course I did," he repeated two or three times,
congratulating himself.  "Trust me.

"I say," he began again presently.  "This little
meetin'—I hope it 's not goin' to be the last.  I expect
you 've learnt by now that niggers have their drawbacks,
and it is n't a safe game for you to play.  People simply
won't stand it, you know.  Now, what you want is a
friend who 'll stand by you and show you how to make
the row blow over.  With savvy and a touch of tact, it
can be done.  Now, Miss Harding—I don't know your
Christian name, but I fancy we could understand each
other if you 'd only look up and smile."

The farm was not far now.  Paul had seen them
coming and was standing at gaze to watch them approach,
with that appearance of absorbed interest which almost
anything could bring out.  Soon he must see, he could
not fail to see, that she was in distress and needing aid,
and then he would come forward to meet them.

"No?" the trooper inquired, cajolingly.  "Come
now—one smile.  No?  No?"

He waited for an answer.

"I wouldn't try the haughty style," he said then.
"Lord, no.  You wouldn't find it pay.  After the
nigger business, haughtiness is off.  What I 'm offering you
is more than most chaps would offer; it isn't everybody
'll put on a nigger's boots, not by a long sight.
Now, we don't want to be nasty about it, do we?  One
smile, or just a word to say we understand each other,
and it 'll be all right."

It was insupportable, but now Paul was coming
towards them, shyly and not very fast.

"Who 's this kid?" demanded the trooper.  "Quick,
now, before he 's here.  Look up, or he 'll smell a rat."

Margaret raised her eyes to his slowly, cold fear and
disgust mingling in her mind.  He met her with a smile
in which relief was the salient character.

"When Mr. Van Zyl hears how you have insulted me,"
she began trembling.

"Eh?"  He stared at her suspiciously.  "Van Zyl?"  He
seemed suddenly enlightened.  "I say, I could n't
tell you 'd—you 'd made your arrangements.  Could I,
now?  I would n't have dreamed—look here, Miss
Harding; I 'm awfully sorry.  Couldn't we agree to forget
all this?  You can't blame a chap for trying his luck."

She did not entirely understand; she merely knew that
what he said must be monstrous.  No clean thing could
issue from that hungry, fastidious mouth.  She walked
on, leaving him halted and staring after her, perturbed
and apprehensive.  His patient horse stood motionless
with stretched neck; he sat in the saddle erect as to the
body, with the easy secure seat which drill had made
natural to him, but with the Punchinello face drooped
forward, watching her as she went.  He saw her meet
Paul, saw the pair of them glance towards him and then
turn their backs and walk down to the farm together.
Pain, defeat and patience expressed themselves in his
countenance, as in that of an ignoble Prometheus.
Presently he pulled up the docile horse's head with a jerk
of the bridoon.

"My luck," he said aloud, and swung his horse about.

Paul had not time to question Margaret as to her
trouble, for she spoke before he could frame his slow
words.

"Paul," she cried, "I want to speak to you.  But—oh,
can I sit down somewhere?  I feel—I feel—I must
sit down."

She looked over her shoulder nervously, and Paul's
glance followed.

"Is it him?" he inquired.  "Sit here.  I 'll go to him."

"No," she said vehemently.  "Don't.  You mustn't.
Let 's go to your house.  I want to sit down indoors."

Her senses were jangled; she felt a need of relief from
the empty immensity of sun and earth that surrounded
her.

"Come on," said Paul.  "We 'll go in."

He did not offer her his arm; it was a trick he had yet
to learn.  He walked at her side between the kraals, and
brought her to the little parlor which housed and was
glorified by Mrs. du Preez's six rosewood chairs,
upholstered in velvet, sofa to match, rosewood center-table
and the other furniture of the shrine.  He looked at her
helplessly as she sank to a seat on the "sofa to match."

"You want some water," he said, with an inspiration,
and vanished.

Margaret had time somewhat to recover herself before
he returned with his mother and the water.

Mrs. du Preez needed no explanations.

"Now you 'll have a bit of respect for our sun, Miss
Harding," she said, after a single, narrow-eyed look at
the girl.  "Hand that water here, Paul; you didn't
bring it for show, did you?  Well, then.  And just you
let me take off this hat, Miss Harding.  Bond Street,
I 'll bet a pound.  They don't build for this sun in
Bond Street.  Now jus' let me wet this handkerchief
and lay it on your forehead.  Now, ain't that better?"

She turned her head to drive a fierce whisper at Paul.

"Get out o' this.  Come in by an' by."

"Thanks awfully."  Margaret shivered as the dripping
handkerchief pressed upon her brow let loose drops
that gravitated to her neck and zigzagged under the
collar of her blouse.  "I 'm feeling much better now.  I 'd
rather sit up, really."

"So long as you haven't got that tight feeling,"
conceded Mrs. du Preez.

She stood off, watching the girl in a manner that
expressed something striving within her mind.

"All right now?" she asked, when Margaret had got
rid of the wet handkerchief.

"Quite," Margaret assured her.  "Thanks ever so much."

Mrs. du Preez arranged the glass and jug neatly upon
the iron tray on which they had made their appearance.

"Miss Harding," she said suddenly.  "I know."

"Oh?  What do you know?" inquired Margaret.

Mrs. du Preez glanced round to see that Paul had
obeyed her.

"I know all about it," she answered, with reassuring
frowns and nods.  "Your Fat Mary told my Christian
Kafir and she told me.  About—about Kamis; *you* know."

"I see."

The story had the spreading quality of the plague; it
was an infection that tainted every ear, it seemed.

"You mean—you 'd like me to go?" suggested Margaret.

"No!  *No*!  NO!"

Mrs. du Preez brought both hands into play to aid her
face in making the negatives emphatic.  "Go?  Why, if
it was n't for the mercy of God I 'd be in the same box
myself.  I would—Me!  I 've got nothing to come the
heavy about, even if I was the sort that would do it.  So
now you know."

"I don't understand," said Margaret.  "Do you mean
that you—?"

"I mean," interrupted Mrs. du Preez, "that if it
wasn't for that Kafir I 'd ha' been hopping in hell
before now; and if people only knew it—gosh!  I 'd have
to hide.  I wanted to tell you so 's you should know there
was some one that could n't throw any stones at you.
You 're beginnin' to find things rather warm up there,
aren't you?"

Margaret smiled.  The true kindness of Mrs. du
Preez's intention moved her; charity in this quarter was
the last thing she had expected to find.

"A little warm," she agreed.  "Everybody 's rather
shocked just now, and Mrs. Jakes has given me notice to
leave."

"*Has* she?" demanded Mrs. du Preez.  "Well, I suppose
it was to be expected.  I 've known that woman now
for more years than I could count on my fingers, and
I 've always had my doubts of her.  She 's no more
got the spirit of a real lady than a cow has.  That 's
where it is, Miss Harding.  She can't understand that a
lady 's got to be trusted.  For two pins I 'd tell her so,
the old cross-eyed *skellpot*.  So you 're going?  Well,
you won't be sorry."

"But—how did you come across Kamis?" asked Margaret.

"Oh, it 's a long story.  I was clearin' out of here—doing
a bolt, you know, an' I got into trouble with a feller
that was with me.  It was a feller named Bailey that
was stoppin' here," explained Mrs. du Preez, who had
not heard the whole history of Margaret's exposure.
"He was after a bit of money I 'd got with me, and he
was startin' in to kick me when up jumps that nigger
and down goes Bailey.  See?"

Margaret saw only vaguely, but she nodded.

"That 's Bailey," said Mrs. du Preez, drawing her
attention to the Boy's photograph.  "Christian warned
me against smashing it when I wanted to.  He 's got
notions, Christian has.  'Leave it alone,' he says; 'we 're
not afraid of it.'  So of course I had to; but I 'd be
more 'n a bit thankful if it was gone.  I can't take any
pleasure in the room with it there."

"I could help you in that, perhaps," suggested Margaret.
"You 've helped me.  It was sweet of you to tell
me what you did, the friendliest thing I ever knew."

"I 'd rather you did n't speak about it to Christian,"
objected Mrs. du Preez.

"I did n't mean to," Margaret assured her, rising.

She crossed to the narrow mantel as though to look
more particularly at Boy Bailey's features.  She lifted
the plush frame from its place.

"There are people who would call this face handsome,"
she remarked.

"Heaps," agreed Mrs. du Preez.  "In his best days,
he 'd got a style—Lord!  Miss Harding."

Margaret had let the photograph fall face-downwards
on the edge of the fender and the crash of its glass cut
Mrs. du Preez short.  She stared at Margaret in astonishment
as the girl put a foot on the picture and broke it.

"Wasn't that clumsy of me?" she asked, smiling.

"Well, of all the cheek," declared Mrs. du Preez,
slowly.  "I never guessed what you were after.  But I
don't know what Christian will say."

"He can't mend it, anyhow," replied Margaret.
"You did want it gone, did n't you?"

"You bet," said Mrs. du Preez.  "But—but that was
a dodge.  Here, let's make sure of it while we 're at it;
those two pieces could be easily stuck together.  I 'll
stamp some of that smashed glass into it.  Still—I
should think, after this, you 'd be able to hold your own
with Mrs. Jakes."

She kicked the pieces of the now unrepairable
photograph into a little heap.

"I 'll leave it like that for Christian to see," she said.
"But, look here.  Didn't you want to speak to Paul?
You 'll be wondering when I 'm goin' to give you a
chance.  I 'll just tap the drum for him."

Paul's whistle from behind the house answered the first
strokes and Mrs. du Preez, with an unusual delicacy, did
not return to the parlor with him.

"You 're all right now?" he asked, as he entered.

"Oh, yes.  That was nothing," said Margaret.

Paul took his stand by the window, leaning with a
shoulder against it, looking abstractedly at her face, and
waiting to hear her speak.

"Paul," asked Margaret, "do you know where Kamis is now?"

"Yes," he said.

"Do you see him?  Can you speak to him for me?"

"I don't see him much now," answered Paul.  "That
is because the policemen are riding about looking for him.
But I can speak to him to-night."

"He must take care not to be caught," said Margaret.
"They 're very anxious to find him just now.  You 've
heard, Paul, that they 've found out about me and him?"

"Ye-es," answered Paul.  "I heard something."

"It's true," said Margaret.  "So I 've got to go away
from here.  They won't have me at the Sanatorium any
longer and the police are watching to see if Kamis comes
anywhere near me and to catch him if he does.  You
must warn him to keep right away, Paul.  He mustn't
send any messages, even."

"I will tell him," said Paul.  "But—you are going
away?  To England?"

"Perhaps," replied Margaret.  "I expect I shall have
to now.  They tell me that people won't let me live in
South Africa any more.  I 'm a sort of leper, and I must
keep my distance from healthy people.  So we shan't
see each other again after a few more days.  Are you
sorry, Paul?"

He reddened boyishly and fidgeted.

"Oh, it is best for you to go," he answered, uncomfortably.

"Paul!  But why?"

"It 's—it 's not your place," he said, facing the
difficulty of putting an elusive thought into words.  "This
country—people don't know what 's good and what 's
bad—and there isn't enough people.  Not like
London.  You should go to London again.  Kamis was
telling me—theaters and streets and pictures to see,
and people everywhere.  He says one end of London
is just like you and the other end is like that Bailey.
That is where you should go—London, not here.  I
will go to London soon, too."

"I see," said Margaret.  "I was afraid at first that
you were sick of me too, Paul.  I needn't have been
afraid of that, need I?  Wouldn't it be fine if we
could meet in London?"

"We can," said Paul seriously.  "I have got a
hundred and three pounds, and I will go."

"That's a good deal," said Margaret.

"It's a lot," he agreed.  "My father gave it to me
the other day, all tied up tight in a little dirty bundle,
and there was my mother's marriage lines in it too.
He said he didn't mean me to have those but the
money was for me.  It was on the table in the morning
and he rolled it over to me and said: 'Here, Paul.
Take this and don't bring any more of your tramps
in the house.'  That was because I brought that
Bailey here, you know.  So now—soon—I will go
to London and Paris and make models there.  Kamis says—"

"What?" asked Margaret.

"He says I will think my eyes have gone mad at
first when I see London.  He says that coming to
Waterloo Station will be like dying and waking in
another world.  But he says too—blessed are the pure
in heart, for they will see God even in Waterloo
Station."

"He ought to go back himself," said Margaret, with
conviction.  "He 's wasted here."

"Will you see him before you go?" asked Paul.

"No," said Margaret.  "No; I daren't.  Tell him,
Paul, please, that I 'd like to see him ever so much,
but that it 's too dangerous.  Say I wish him well with
all my heart, and that I hope most earnestly that he
won't let himself be caught."

"He won't," said Paul, with confidence.  "But I 'll
tell him."

"And say," continued Margaret—"say he 's not to
feel sorry about what has happened to me.  Tell him
I 'm still proud that I was his friend, and that all this
row is worth it.  Can you remember all that?"

Paul nodded.  "I can remember," he assured her.
"It is—it is so fine to hear, for me, too.  I won't forget
anything."

"Please don't, if you can help it.  I want him to
have that message," said Margaret.  "And now, Paul,
I 'll have to say good-by to you, because I shan't come
here again."

Paul stood upright as she rose.  His slow smile was
very friendly.

"It doesn't matter," he said.  "You are going to
London, and soon I shall see you there."

"I wonder," she said, giving him her hand.  "I 'll
write you my address and send it you before I leave,
Paul."

"I should find you anyhow," he assured her confidently.

Mrs. du Preez, also, had to be taken leave of, and shed
a tear or so at the last.  In her, a strong emotion
found a safety valve in ferocity.

"As for that Jakes woman," she said, in conclusion,
"you tell her from me, Miss Harding—from *me*,
mind,—that it wouldn't cost me any pain to hand her a
slap acrost the mug."

Margaret went homeward through the late light
dreamily.  Far away, blurred by the sun's horizontal
rays, the figure of the trooper occupied the empty
distance, no larger than an ant against the flushed sky.
Peace and melancholy were in the mood of the hour,
a cue to lead her thoughts towards sadness.  It caused
her to realize that she would not leave it all without
a sense of loss.  She would miss its immensity, its effect
of setting one at large on an earth without trimmings
under a heaven without clouds, to make the most of
one's own humanity.  It would be a thing she had
known in part, but which henceforth she would never
know even as she herself was known.  She could never
now find the word that expressed its wonder and its appeal.

Mr. Samson was on the stoep as she went up the
steps to enter the Sanatorium.  He put down his paper
and toddled forward to open the door for her, anxiously
punctilious.

"Ford was down for tea," he said.  "Askin' for
you, he was."

"Oh, was he?" replied Margaret inanely, and went in.

.. vspace:: 2

At supper that evening in the farmhouse kitchen,
Christian du Preez, glancing up from the food which
occupied him, observed by a certain frowning deliberation
on Paul's face, that his son was about to deliver
himself in speech.

"Well, what is it, Paul?" he inquired encouragingly.

Paul looked up with a faint surprise at having his
purpose thus forecasted.

"That money," he said doubtfully.

"Oh."  The Boer glanced uneasily at his wife, who
laid down her knife and fork and began to listen with
startled interest.

"That 's all right," said Christian.  "Do what you
like with it.  Go to the dorp and spend it; it 's yours.
Now eat your supper."

"I am going to London," said Paul then, seriously,
and having got it off his mind, said, heard and done
with, he resumed his meal with an appetite.

"London," echoed the Boer.  "London?" exclaimed
Mrs. du Preez.

"Yes," said Paul.  "To make models.  Here there
is nobody to see them."

"He is gone mad," said the Boer with conviction.
"He has been queer for a long time and now he is
mad.  Paul, you are mad."

"Am I?" asked Paul respectfully, and continued to eat.

His father and mother had much to say, agitatedly,
angrily, persuasively, but people were always saying
things to him that had no real meaning.  It was
ridiculous, for instance, that the Boer should call him a
dumb fool because at the close of a lecture he should
ask for more coffee.  He wasn't dumb and didn't
believe he was a fool.  People were n't fools because they
went to London; on the contrary, they had to be rather
clever and enterprising to get there at all.  And at
the back of his mind dwelt the thing he could not hope
to convey and did not attempt to—a sense he had,
which warmed and uplifted him, of nearing a goal after
doubt and difficulty, the Pisgah exaltation and
tenderness, the confidence that to him and to the work which
his hands should perform, Canaan was reserved,
virgin and welcoming.  It was a strength he had in
secret, and the Boer knew himself baffled when after
an hour of exhortation to be sane and explanatory and
obedient and comprehensible, he looked up and said,
very thoughtfully:

"In London, people pay a shilling to look at clays,
father."





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`CHAPTER XVII`:

.. class:: center large bold

   CHAPTER XVII

.. vspace:: 2

Ford's return to normal existence coincided with
the arrival of mail-morning, when the breakfast
menu was varied by home letters heaped upon the
plates.  Mrs. Jakes had one of her own this morning
and was very conscious of it, affecting to find her
correspondent's caligraphy hard to read.  Old Mr. Samson
had his usual pile and greeted him from behind
a litter of torn wrappers and envelopes.

"Hullo, Ford," he cried, "up on your pins, again?
Feelin' pretty bobbish—what?"

"Nice way you 've got of putting it," replied Ford,
taking his seat before the three letters on his plate.
"I 'm all right, though.  You seem fairly well
supplied with reading-matter this morning."

"The usual, the usual," said Mr. Samson airily.
"People gone to the country; got time to write, don't
you know.  Here 's a feller tells me that the foxes down
his way are simply rotten with mange."

"Awful," said Ford, glancing at the first of his own
letters.  "And here 's a feller tells *me* that he 's sent
in the enclosed account nine times and must press for
a cheque without delay.  What 's the country coming
to?  Eh?"

"You be blowed," retorted Mr. Samson, and fell
again to his reading.

From behind the urn Mrs. Jakes made noises indicative
of lady-like exasperation.

"The way some people write, you 'd never believe
they 'd been educated and finished regardless of
expense," she declared.  "There 's a word here—she 's
telling me about a lady I used to know in Town—and
whether she suffers from her children (though I never
knew she was married) or from a chaplain, I can't
make out.  Can you see what it is, Mr. Ford?  There,
where I 'm pointing?"

"Oh, yes," said Ford.  "It 's worse than you think,
Mrs. Jakes.  It 's chilblains."

"O-oh."  Mrs. Jakes was enlightened.  "Why, of
course.  I remember now.  Even when she was a girl
at school, she used to suffer dreadfully from them.  I
thought she couldn't have been married, with such
feet.  But is n't it a dreadful way to write?"

She would have indulged them with further information
regarding the lady who suffered, but Margaret's
entrance drove her back behind the breastwork of the
urn.  She distrusted her own correctness when the
girl's eyes were on her, and her sure belief that
Margaret had revealed herself as anything but correct by
every standard which Mrs. Jakes could apply, failed to
reassure her.

"Good morning, Miss Harding," she said frostily.
"You will take coffee?"

"Good morning," replied Margaret, passing to her
place at the table.  "Yes, it is lovely."

"Er—the coffee?" asked Mrs. Jakes, suspicious and
uncomprehending.

"Oh, coffee.  Yes, please," said Margaret.  "I
thought you said something about the weather."

Ford grinned at the letter he was reading and
greeted her quietly.

"Glad you 're better," she replied, not returning his
smile, and turned at once to the letters which awaited
her.

He was watching her while she sorted them, examining
first the envelopes for indications of what they
held.  One seemed to puzzle her, and she took it up to
decipher the postmark.  Then she set it down and
opened the fattest of all, a worthy, linen-enveloped
affair, containing a couple of typewritten sheets as well
as a short letter.  She read it perfunctorily and looked
through the business-like typescripts impatiently,
folded them all up again and tucked them back into
the linen envelope.  Then followed the others, and the
one with the smudged postmark last of all.  She
scrutinized the outside of this again before she opened
it; it was not an English letter, but one from some
unidentifiable postal district in South Africa.  At last
she opened it, and drew out the dashing black scrawl
which it harbored.  A glance at the end of the letter
seemed to leave her in the dark, and Ford saw her
delicate brows knit as she began to read.

He found himself becoming absorbed in the mere
contemplation of her.  He was aware of a character in
her presence at once familiar to him by long study and
intangible; it had the quality of bloom, that a touch
destroys.  She had hair that coiled upon her head and
left its shape discernible, and beneath it a certain
breadth and frankness of brow upon which the eyebrows
were etched marvelously.  She was like a lantern
which softens and tempers the impetuous flame within
it, and turns its ardor into radiance.  The Kafir and
the shame and the imprudence of that affair did not
suffice to darken that light; at the most, they could but
cause it to waver and make strange shadows for a
moment, like the candle one carries, behind a guarding
hand, through a windy corridor.  It did not cool the
strong flame that was the heart of the combination.

Suddenly Margaret laid the letter down.  She put
it back on her plate with an abrupt gesture and he
noted that she had gone pale, and that her mouth was
wry as though with a bitter taste.  She even withdrew
her fingers from the sheet with exactly the movement
of one who has by accident set his hand on some
unexpected piece of foulness.

She went on with her breakfast quietly enough, but
she did not look at her letters again.  They were
perhaps the first letters in years to come to the Sanatorium
and be dismissed with a single perusal.

"Fog in London," said Mr. Samson, suddenly.
"Feller writes as though it was the plague.  *He*
does n't know what it is to have too much bally sun."

The glare that shone through the window returned
his glance unwinking.

"Fog?" responded Mrs. Jakes, alertly.  "That is
bad.  Such dreadful things happen in fogs.  I
remember a lady at Home, who was divorced afterwards, who
lost her way in a fog and didn't get home for two
days, and even then she had somebody else's umbrella
and could no more remember where she 'd got it than
fly.  And she was so confused and upset that all she
could say to her husband was: 'Ed,'—his name was
Edwin—'Ed, did you remember to have your hair cut?'"

"Had he remembered?" demanded Mr. Samson.

"I think not," replied Mrs. Jakes.  "What with
the worry, and the things the servant said, I don't
believe he 'd thought of it.  He always did wear it
rather long."

"Think of that," said Mr. Samson, with solemn surprise.

Margaret finished her breakfast in silence and then
gathered up her letters.  Ford thought that as she
picked up the sheet which had distressed her, she
glanced involuntarily at him.  But the look conveyed
nothing and she departed in silence.  He was careful
not to follow her too soon.

It was not difficult to find her.  For some two hours
after breakfast was over, the only part of the
Sanatorium which it was possible to inhabit with comfort
was the stoep.  The other rooms were given over to
Fat Mary and her colleagues for the daily ceremony
known as "doing the rooms," a festival involving
excursions and alarms, skylarking, breakages and fights.
To seek seclusion in the drawing-room, for example,
was to be subjected to a cinematograph impression of
surprised and shocked black faces peering round the
door and vanishing, to scuffling noises on the mat and
finally to hints from Mrs. Jakes herself: "*Would* you
mind the girls just sweeping round your feet?
They 're rather behindhand this morning."

Margaret had betaken herself and her chair to the
extreme end of the stoep, beyond the radius of Ford's
art and Mr. Samson's meditations.  Her letters were
in her lap, but she was not looking at them.  She was
gazing straight before her at the emptiness which
stretched out endlessly, affording no perch for the eye
to rest on, an everlasting enigma to baffle sore minds.

Ford was innocent of stratagem in his manner of approach.

"I say," he said, and she looked up listlessly.  "I
say—I 'm sorry.  Can't we make it up?"

"All right," she answered.

He looked at her closely.

"But is it all right?" he persisted.  "You 're hurt
about something; I can see you are; so it 's not all right
yet.  Look here, Miss Harding: you were wrong about
what I was thinking."

"Oh no."  Margaret shifted in her chair with a tired
impatience.  "I wasn't wrong," she answered.  "I
could see; and I think you should n't go back on it now.
The least you can do is stand by your beliefs.  You
won't find yourself alone.  I had a letter from some
one this morning who would back you up to the last
drop of his blood, I 'm sure."

"Who 's that?"

"I don't know," she answered.  "It 's my first
anonymous letter.  Somebody has heard about me and
therefore writes.  He thinks just as you do.  Would
you like to see it?"

She handed him the bold, crowded scrawl and sat back
while he leaned on the rail to read it.

At the second sentence in the letter he looked up
sharply and restrained an ejaculation.  She was not
looking at him, but a tinge of pink had risen in her
quiet face.

It was an anonymous letter of the most villainous
kind.  Something like horror possessed him as he
realized that her grave eyes had perused its gleeful and
elaborate offense.  The abominable thing was a vileness
fished from the pit of a serious and blackguard mind.
It had the baseness of ordure, and a sort of frivolity
that transcended commonplace evil.

"I say," he cried, before the end of the ingenious
thing was reached.  "You have n't read this through?"

"Not quite," she answered.

"I—I should think not."

With quick nervous jerks of his fingers which
betrayed the hot anger he felt, he tore the letter into
strips and the strips again into smaller fragments,
and strewed them forth upon the stiff dead shrubs
below.

"It's getting about, you see," said Margaret, with a
sigh.  "I suppose, before I manage to get away, I shall
be accustomed to things of that kind."

"But this is awful," cried Ford.  "I can't bear
this.  You, of all people, to have to go through all
that this means and threatens—it 's awful.  Miss
Harding, let me apologize, let me grovel, let me do
anything that 'll give you the feeling that I 'm with you
in this.  You can't face it alone—you simply can't.
I'm sorry enough to—to kick myself.  Can't you let
me stand in with you?"

He stopped helplessly before Margaret's languid
calm.  She was not in the least stirred by his appeal.
She lay back in her chair listlessly, and only withdrew
her eyes from the veld to look at him as he ceased to
speak.

"Oh, it doesn't matter," she said indifferently.
"It's a silly business.  Don't worry about it, please."

"But—" began Ford, and stopped.  "You mean—you
won't have me with you, anyhow?" he asked.
"What you thought I thought, upstairs—you can't
forget that?  Is that it?"

She smiled slowly, and he stared at her in dismay.
Nothing could have expressed so clearly as that faint
smile her immunity from the passion that stirred in him.

"Perhaps it 's that," she answered, always in the
same indifferent, low voice.  "I 'm not thinking more
about it than I can help."

"I didn't think any harm of you," Ford protested
earnestly, leaning forward from his perch on the rail
and striving to compel her to look at him.  "We 've
been good friends, and you might have trusted me
not to think evil of you.  I simply didn't
understand—nothing else.  You can't seriously be offended
because you imagined that I was thinking certain
thoughts.  It isn't fair."

"I 'm not offended," she answered.

"Hurt, then," he substituted.  "Anything you please."

He stepped down from his seat and walked a few
paces away, with his hands deeply sunk in his pockets,
and then walked back again.

"I say," he said abruptly; "it 's a question of what
I think of you, it seems.  Let me tell you what I do
think."

Margaret turned her face towards him.  He was
frowning heavily, with an appearance of injury and
annoyance.  He spoke in curt jets.

"It 's only since I 've known you that I 've really
worried over being a lunger," he said.  "The Army—I
could stand that.  But seeing you and talking to
you, and knowing I 'd no right to say a word—no right
to try and lead things that way, even, for your sake
as much as mine—it 's been hard.  Because—this is
what I do think—it 's seemed to me that you were
worth more than everything else.  I 'd have given the
world to tell you so, and ask you—well, you know what
I mean."

Margaret was not so steeped in sorrows but she
could mark this evasion of a plain statement with amusement.

Ford, staring at her intently, clicked with impatience.

"Well, then," he said in the tone of one who is
goaded to extreme lengths; "well then, Miss—er—Margaret—"
he paused, seemingly struck by a pleasant
flavor in the name as he spoke it—"Margaret," he
repeated, less urgently; "I 'm hanged if I know how
to say it, but—I love you."

There was an appreciable interval while they
remained gazing at each other, he breathless and
discomposed, she grave and unresponding.

"Do you?" she said at last.  "But—"

"I do," he urged.  "On my soul, I do.  Margaret,
it 's true.  I 've been—loving—you for a long time.
I thought perhaps you might care a little, too,
sometimes, and I 'd have told you if it was n't for this
chest of mine.  That 's what I meant when you said
you were going away and I asked you to stay.  I
thought you understood then."

"I did understand," she replied, and sat thoughtful.

She wondered vaguely at the apathy that mastered
her and would not suffer her to feel even a thrill.
Some virtue had departed out of her and drawn with
it the whole liveliness of her mind and spirit, so that
what remained was mere deadness.  She knew, in
some subconscious and uninspiring manner, that Ford
was what he had always been, with passion added to
him; he was waiting in a tension of suspense for her
to answer, with his thin face eager and glowing.  It
should have moved her with compassion and liking for
the stubborn, faithful, upright soul she knew him to
be.  But the letter, the confident approaches of the
Punchinello policeman, and even Mrs. Jakes'
ill-restrained joy in bidding her leave the place, had been
so many blows upon her function of susceptibility.
The accumulation of them had a little stunned her, and
she was not yet restored.

Ford saw her lips hesitate before she spoke, and his
heart beat more quickly.

She looked up at him uncertainly and made a
movement with her shoulders like a shrug.

"Oh, I can't," she said suddenly.  "No, I can't.
It 's no use; you must leave me alone, please."

His look of sheer amazement, of pain and bewilderment,
returned to her later.  It was as though he had
been struck in the face by some one he counted on as
a friend.  He stood for an instant rooted.

"Sorry," he said, then.  "I might have seen I was
worrying you.  Sorry."

His retreating feet sounded softly on the flags of
the stoep, and she sank back in her chair, wondering
wearily at the event and its inconsequent conclusion,
with her eyes resting on the wide invitation of the
veld.

"Am I going to be ill?" was the thought that came
to her relief.  "Am I going to be ill?  I 'm not really
like this."

The ordeal of lunch had to be faced; she could not
eat, but still less could she face the prospect of
Mrs. Jakes with a tray.  Afterwards, there was the dreary
labor of writing letters to go before her to England
and make ready the way for her return.  There
would have to be explanations of some kind, and it
was a sure thing that her explanations would fail to
satisfy a number of people who would consider
themselves entitled to comment on her movements.  There
would have to be some mystery about it, at the best.
For the present, she could not screw herself up to the
task of composing euphemisms.  "Expect me home by
the boat after next.  I will tell you why when I see
you"; that had to suffice for the legal uncle, his lawful
wife, the philosophic aunt and all the rest.

Then came tea and afterwards dinner; the day
dragged like a sick snake.  Dr. Jakes made mournful
eyes at her and talked feverishly to cover his
nervousness and compunction, and now and again he looked
down the table at his wife and Mr. Samson with furtive
malevolence.  Afterwards, in the drawing-room,
Mrs. Jakes, having made an inspection of the doctor, played
the intermezzo from "Cavalleria Rusticana" five times,
and Ford and Samson spent the evening over a
chessboard.  Margaret, on the couch, found herself coming
to the surface of the present again and again from
depths of heavy and turgid thought, to find the
intermezzo still limping along and Mr. Samson still
apostrophizing his men in an undertone ("Take his bally
bishop, old girl; help yourself.  No, come back—he 'll
have you with that knight").  It was interminable, a
pocket eternity.

Then the view of the stairs sloping up to the dimness
above and the cool air of the hall upon her neck and
face, and the sourness of Mrs. Jakes trying to give her
"good night" the intonation of an insult—these
intruded abruptly upon her straying faculties, and she
came a little dazed into the light of the candles in her
own room, where her eyes fell first on the breadth of
Fat Mary's back, as that handmaid stood at the
window with the blind in her hand and peered forth into
the dark.  As she turned, Margaret gained an impression
that the stout woman's interest in something below
was interrupted by her entrance.

Fat Mary had been another of Margaret's
disappointments since the exposure.  The Kafir woman's
manner to her had undergone a notable change.  There
was no longer the touch of reverence and gentleness
with which she had tended Margaret at first, which
had made endearing all her huge incompetence and
playfulness.  There had succeeded to it a manner of
familiarity which manifested itself chiefly in the
roughness of her handling.  Margaret was being called
upon to pay the penalty which the African native
exacts from the European who encroaches upon the
aloofness of the colored peoples.

Fat Mary grinned as Margaret came through the door.

"Mo' stink," she observed, cheerfully, and pointed
to the dressing-table.

Margaret's eyes followed the big black finger to
where a bunch of aloe plumes lay between the candles
on the white cloth, brilliantly red.  The sight of them
startled the girl sharply.  She went across and raised
them.

"Where did they come from?" she asked quickly.

"That Kafir," grinned Fat Mary.  "Missis's Kafir,
he bring 'im."

"What did he say?  Did he give any message?"

"No," replied Fat Mary.  "Jus' stink-flowers, an'
give me Scotchman."

"Scotchman" is Kafir slang for a florin; it has for
an origin a myth reflecting on the probity of a great
race.  But Margaret did not inquire; she was pondering
a possible significance in this gift of bitter
blooms.

Fat Mary eyed her acutely while she stood in thought.

"He say don't tell nobody," she remarked casually.
"I say no fear—me!  I don't tell.  Missis like that
Kafir plenty?"

"Mary," said Margaret.  "You can go now.  I
shan't want you."

"All a-right," replied Fat Mary willingly, and took
herself off forthwith.  She had her own uses for a
present of spare time at this season.

Margaret put the red flowers down as the door
closed behind Fat Mary, and set herself before the
mirror.  There was still that haze between her thoughts
and the realities about her, a drifting cloudiness that
sometimes obscured them all together, and sometimes
broke and let matters appear.

She noted in the mirror the strange, familiar specter
of her own face, and saw that the hectic was strong
and high on either cheek.  Then the aloe plumes plucked
at her thoughts, and the haze closed about her again,
leaving her blind in a deep and aimless preoccupation
in which her thoughts were no more than a pulse,
repeating itself to no end.  Ford's declaration and his
manner of making it; the Punchinello countenance of
the trooper, bestially insinuating; Mrs. Jakes eating soup
at Mr. Samson;—these came and went in the dreadful
arena of her mind and made a changing spectacle that
baffled the march of the clock-hands.

She did not know how long she had been sitting
when a rattle at the window surprised her into
looking up.  She stared absently at the blind till it came
again.  It had the sound of some one throwing earth
from below.  She rose and went across and looked out.

It had not touched her nerves at all; it was not
the kind of thing which could frighten her.  The
window was raised at the bottom and she kneeled on the
floor and put her head, cloudily haloed with her loose
hair, out to the star-tempered dark.

A whisper from below, where the whisperer stood
invisible in the shadow at the foot of the wall, hailed
her at once.

"Miss Harding," it said.  "Miss Harding.  I 'm
here, directly below you."

She could see nothing.

"Who is it?" she asked.

"Hush."  She had spoken in her ordinary tones.
"Not so loud.  It 's dangerous."

"Who is it?" she asked again, subduing her voice.

"Why—Kamis, of course."  The answer came in a
tone of surprise.  "You expected me, did n't you?
Your light was burning."

"Expected you?  No," said Margaret "I didn't
expect you; you ought n't to have come."

"But—" the voice was protesting; "my message.
It was on the paper around the aloe plumes.  I
particularly told the fat Kafir woman to give you that,
and she promised.  If your light was burning, I 'd
throw something up at your window, and if not, I 'd
go away.  That was it."

The night breeze came in at the tail of his words
with a dry rustling of the dead vines.

"There was no paper," said Margaret.

The Kafir below uttered an angry exclamation which
she did not catch.

"If only you don't mind," he said, then.  "I got
Paul's message from you and I had to try and see you."

"Yes," said Margaret.  She could not see him at
all; under the lee of the house the night was black,
though at a hundred paces off she could make out the
lie of the ground in the starlight.  His whispering
voice was akin to the night.

"Then you don't mind?" he urged.

"I don't mind, of course," said Margaret.  "But it 's
too risky."

Further along the stoep there was a dim warmish
glow through the red curtains of the study and a leak
of faint light under the closed front door.  The house
was loopholed for unfriendly eyes and ears.  There
was no security under that masked battery for their
privacy.  At any moment Mrs. Jakes might prick up
her ears and stand intent and triumphant to hear their
strained whispers in cautious interchange.  Margaret
shrank from the thought of it.

"I only want a word," answered Kamis from the
darkness.  "I may not see you again.  You won't let
me drop without a word—after everything?"

Margaret hesitated.  "Some one may pick up that
paper and read your message and watch to see what
happens.  I couldn't bear any more trouble about it."

There was a pause.

"No," agreed Kamis, then.  "No—of course.  I
didn't think of that.  I 'll say good-by now, then."

Margaret strained to see him, but the night hid him
securely.

"Wait!" she called carefully.  "I don't want you
to go away like that; it 's simply that this is too
risky."  She paused.  "I 'd better come down to you,"
she said.

She could not tell what he answered, whether joy or
demurral, for she drew her head in at once, and then
opened the door and went out to the corridor.

It was good to be doing something, and to have to
do with one whose sympathies were not strained.  She
went lightly and noiselessly down the wide stairs, and
recognized again, with a smile, the secret aspect of the
hall in the dark hours.  There was a thread of light
under the door of Dr. Jakes' study, and within that
locked room the dutiful small clock was still ticking
off the moments as stolidly as though all moments were
of the same value.  The outer door was closed with
a mighty lock and a great iron key, and opened with a
clang that should have brought Dr. Jakes forth to
inquire.  But he did not come, and she went unopposed
out to the stoep under the metallic rustle of its dead
vines.

She was going swiftly, with her velvet-shod feet, to
that distant part of it which was under the broad light
of her window, when the Kafir appeared before her so
suddenly that she almost ran into him.

"Oh."  She uttered a little cry.  "You startled me."

"I 'm sorry," he answered.

"You ought n't to be here," Margaret said, "because
it 's dangerous.  But I am glad to see you."

"That 's good of you," he said.  "I got Paul's
message.  I had to come.  I had to see you once more,
and besides, he said you were—in trouble.  About me?"

"Oh, yes," said Margaret.  "No end of trouble, all
about you.  An anonymous letter, notice to quit, pity
and smiles, two suitors, one with intentions which were
strictly dishonorable, and so on.  And the simple truth
is, I don't care a bit."

"Oh, Lord!" said the Kafir.

They were standing close to the wall, immersed in its
shadow and sheltered from the wind that sighed above
them and beside them and made the vines vocal.
Neither could see the other save as a shadowy presence.

"I don't care," said Margaret, "and I refuse to
bother about it.  I 've got to go, of course, and I don't
like the feeling of being kicked out.  That rankles a
little bit, when I relax the strain of being superior and
amused at their littleness.  But as for the rest, I don't
care."

"It's my fault," said the Kafir quietly.  "It's all
my fault.  I knew all the time what the end of it would
be; and I let it come.  There 's something mean in a
nigger, Miss Harding.  I knew it was there well enough,
and now it shows."

"Don't," said Margaret.

There fell a pause between them, and she could hear
his breathing.  She remembered the expression on
Ford's face when he had questioned her as to whether
she did not experience a repulsion at a Kafir's
proximity to her, and tried now to find any such aversion
in herself.  They stood in an intimate nearness, so that
she could not have moved from her place without
touching him; but there was none.  Whoever had it
for a pedestal of well and truly laid local virtues, she
had it not.

"This is good-by, of course," said the Kafir, in his
pleasant low tones.  "I 'll never see you again, but
I 'll never forget how good and beautiful you were to
me.  I must n't keep you out here, or there are a
hundred things I want to say to you; but that 's the chief
thing.  I 'll never forgive myself for what has
happened, but I 'll never forget."

"There 's nothing you need blame yourself for," said
Margaret eagerly.  "It 's been worth while.  It has,
really.  You 're somebody and you 're doing something
great and real, while the people in here are just shams,
like me.  Oh," she cried softly; "if only there was
something for me to *do*."

"For you," repeated the Kafir.  "You must be—what
you are; not spoil it by doing things."

"No," said Margaret.  "No.  That 's just chivalry
and nonsense.  I want something to do, something real.
I want something that *costs*—I don't care what.  Even
this silly trouble I 'm in now is better than being a
smiling goddess.  I want—I want—"

Her mind moved stiffly and she could not seize the
word she needed.

"It would be wasting you," Kamis was saying.  "It
would be throwing you away."

"I want to suffer," she said suddenly.  "Yes—that 's
what I want.  You suffer—don't you?  That woman
in Capetown will have to suffer; everybody who really
does things suffers for it; and I want to."

"Do you?" said Kamis, with a touch of awkwardness.
"But—what woman in Capetown do you mean?"

"Oh, you must have heard," said Margaret impatiently.
"She married a Kafir; it 's been in the papers."

"Yes," he said, "I remember now."

"I told them all, in here, a long time ago, that in
some city of the future there would be a monument
to her, with the inscription: 'She felt the future in
her bones.'  But while she lives they 'll make her
suffer; they 'll never forgive her.  I wish I could have
met her before I go."

There was a brief pause.  "Why?" asked Kamis
then, in a low voice.

"Why?  Because she 'd understand, of course.  I 'd
like to talk to her and tell her about you.  Don't you
see?"  Margaret laughed a little.  "I could tell her
about it as though it were all quite natural and
ordinary, and she 'd understand."

She heard the Kafir move but he did not reply at
once.

"Perhaps she would," he said.  "However, you 're
not going to meet her, so it does n't matter."

"But," said Margaret, puzzled at the lack of
responsiveness in his tone and words, "don't you think
she was splendid?  She must have known the price she
would have to pay; but it didn't frighten her.  Don't
you think it was fine?"

"Well," Kamis answered guardedly; "I suppose she
knew what she was about."

"Then," persisted Margaret, "you don't think it
was fine?"

She found his manner of speaking of the subject
curiously reminiscent of Ford.

Kamis uttered an embarrassed laugh.  "Well," he
said, "I 'm afraid I 'm not very sympathetic.  I
suppose I 've lived too long among white people; my proper
instincts have been perverted.  But the fact is, I think
that woman was—wrong."

"Oh," said Margaret.  "Why?"

"There isn't any why," he answered.  "It 's a
matter of feeling, you know; not of reason.  Really, it
amounts to—it 's absurd, of course, but it 's practically
negrophobia.  You can't bring a black man up as a
white man and then expect him to be entirely free from
white prejudices.  Can you?"

"But—" Margaret spoke in some bewilderment.
"What's the use of being black," she demanded, "if
you 've got all the snobbishness of the white?  That 's
the way Mr. Ford spoke about it.  He said he could
feel all that was fine in it, but he wouldn't speak to
such a woman.  I thought that was cruel."

"Oh, I don't know," said Kamis.

"Another time," said Margaret deliberately, "he
asked me whether it didn't make my flesh creep to
touch your hand."

"He thought it ought to?"

"Yes.  But it doesn't," said Margaret.  "How does
your negrophobia face that fact?  Doesn't it condemn
me to the same shame as the woman in Capetown?  Or
does it make exceptions in the case of a particular negro?"

"I said I did n't reason about it," replied Kamis.
"I told you what I felt.  You asked me and I told you."

"I wish you hadn't," said Margaret.  "I thought
that you at any rate—"

She broke off at a quick movement he made.  A
sudden sense came to her that they two were no longer
alone, and, with a stiffening of alarm, she turned
abruptly to see what had disturbed him.  Even as she
turned, she lifted her hand to her bosom with a
premonition of imminent disaster.

At the head of the steps that led down to the garden,
and in the dim light of the half-open front door, a figure
had appeared.  It came deliberately towards them, with
one hand lifted holding something.

"Hands up, you boy!" it said.  "Up, now, or I 'll—"

By the door, the face was visible, the unhappy, greedy,
Punchinello features that Margaret knew as those of the
policeman.  Its hard eyes rested on the pair of them
over the raised revolver that threatened the Kafir.

The driving mists returned to beat her back from the
spectacle; she was helpless and weak.  Warmth filled
her throat, chokingly; an acrid taste was in her mouth.
She took two groping steps forward and fell on the flags
at the policeman's feet and lay there.

From a window over their heads, there came the
gurgle of Fat Mary's rich mirth.





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`CHAPTER XVIII`:

.. class:: center large bold

   CHAPTER XVIII

.. vspace:: 2

It was the scream of Mrs. Jakes that woke Ford,
when, hearing unaccountable noises and attributing
them to the doctor, she went to the hall and was
startled to see in the doorway the figure of the Kafir,
with his hands raised strangely over his head, as though
he were suspended by the wrists from the arch, and
behind him the shadowy policeman, with his revolver
protruded forward into the light.  She caught at her heart
and screamed.

Ford found himself awake, leaning up on one elbow,
with the echo of her scream yet in his ears, and
listening intently.  He could not be certain what he had
heard, for now the house was still again; and it might
have been some mere incident of Jakes' transit from
the study to his bed, into which it was better not to
inquire.  But some quality in the cry had conveyed to
him, in the instant of his waking, an impression of
sudden terror which he could not dismiss, and he continued
to listen, frowning into the dark.

His room was over the stoep, but at some distance
from the front door, and for a while he heard nothing.
Then, as his ears became attuned to the night's
acoustics, he was aware that somewhere there were voices,
the blurred and indistinguishable murmur of people
talking.  They were hardly audible at all; not a word
transpired; he knew scarcely more than that the
stillness of the night was infringed.  His curiosity
quickened, and to feed it there sounded the step of a booted
foot that fell with a metallic clink, the unmistakable
ring of a spur.  Ford sat upright.

A couple of moments later, some one spoke distinctly.

"Keep those hands up," Ford heard, in a quick
nasal tone; "or I 'll blow your head off."

Ford thrust the bedclothes from his knees and got out
of bed.  He lifted the lower edge of the blind and
leaned forth from the open window.  Below him the
stone stoep ran to right and left like a gray path, and a
little way along it the light in the hall, issuing from the
open door, cut across it and showed the head of the wide
steps.  Beyond the light, a group of dark figures were
engaged with something.  As he looked, the group began
to move, and he saw that Mrs. Jakes came to the side
of the door and stood back to give passage to four
shuffling Kafirs bearing the stretcher which was part of the
house's equipment.  There was somebody on the
stretcher, as might have been seen from the laborious
gait of the bearers, but the thing had a hood that
withheld the face of the occupant as they passed in, with
Mrs. Jakes at their heels.

Two other figures brought up the rear and
likewise entered at the doorway and passed from sight.
The first, as he became visible in the gloom beyond the
light, was dimly grotesque; he seemed too tall and not
humanly proportioned, a deformed and willowy giant.
Once he was opposite the door, his height explained
itself; he was walking with both arms extended to their
full length above his head and his face bowed between
them.  Possibly because the attitude strained him, he
went with a gait as marked as his posture, a measured
and ceremonial step as though he were walking a slow
minuet.  The light met him as he turned in the
doorway and Ford, staring in bewilderment, had a
momentary impression that the face between the raised arms
was black.  He disappeared, with the last of the figures
close behind him, and concerning this one there was
no doubt whatever.  It revealed itself as a trooper of
the Mounted Police, belted and spurred, his "smasher"
hat tilted forward over his brows, and a revolver held
ready in his hand, covering the back of the man who
walked before him.

"Here," ejaculated Ford, gazing at the empty stoep
where the shadow-show had been, with an accent of
dismay in his thoughts.  The affair of Margaret and the
Kafir leaped to his mind; all that had occurred below
might be a new and poignant development in that bitter
comedy, and but for a chance he might have missed it all.

He was quick to make a light and find his dressing-gown
and a pair of slippers, and he was knotting the
cord of the former as he passed out to the long corridor
and went swiftly to the head of the stairs, where the
lamp that should light Dr. Jakes to his bed was yet
burning patiently.

The stretcher was already coming up the staircase
and he paused and stood aside to make room for it.
The four Kafirs were bringing it up head first, treading
carefully and breathing harshly after the manner of
the Kafir when he is conscious of eyes upon him.
Behind them followed Mrs. Jakes, shepherding them up
with hushing noises.  A gray blanket covered the form
in the stretcher with limp folds.

The Kafirs saw Ford first and acknowledged his
presence with simultaneous grins.  Then Mrs. Jakes saw
him and made a noise like a startled moan, staring up
with vexed, round eyes.

"Oh, Mr. Ford," she exclaimed faintly.  "Please go
back to bed.  It 's—it 's three o'clock in the morning."

Beyond and below her was the hall, in which the lamp
had now been turned up.  Ford looked past her
impassively, and took in the two men who waited there, the
Kafir, with his raised arms—trembling now with the
fatigue of keeping them up—and the saturnine policeman
with his revolver.  The stretcher had come abreast of
him and he bent to look under the hood.  The bearers
halted complaisantly that he might see, shifting their
grips on the poles and smiling uneasily.

Margaret's face had the quietude of heavy lids closed
upon the eyes and features composed in unconsciousness.
But the mouth was bloody, and there were stains of
much blood, bright and dreadful, on the white linen
at her throat.  For all that Ford knew what it betokened,
the sight gave him a shock; it looked like murder.
They had broken her hair from its bonds in lifting her
and placing her in the stretcher and now her head was
pillowed on it and its disorder made her stranger.

Mrs. Jakes was babbling nervously at him.

"Mr. Ford, you really must n't.  I wish you 'd go
back to bed.  I 'll tell you about it in the morning, if
you 'll go now."

Ford motioned to the Kafirs to go on.

"Where's the doctor?" he demanded curtly.

"Oh," said Mrs. Jakes, "I 'll see to all that.  Mr. Ford,
it 's *all right*.  You 're keeping me from putting
her to bed by standing talking like this.  Don't you
believe me when I say it 's all right?  Why are you
looking at me like that?"

"Is he in the study?" asked Ford.

"Yes," replied Mrs. Jakes.  "But *I 'll* tell him,
Mr. Ford.  I—I—promise I will, if only you 'll go back
to bed now.  I will really."

Ford glanced along the corridor where the Kafirs
had halted again, awaiting instructions from Mrs. Jakes.
There was a picture on the wall, entitled "Innocence"—early
Victorian infant and kitten—and they were staring
at it in reverent interest.

"Better see to Miss Harding," he said, and passed
her and went down to the hall.  She turned to see what
he was going to do, in an agony of alertness to preserve
the decency of the locked study door.  But he went
across to speak to the policeman, and she hurried after
the Kafirs, to get the girl in bed and free herself to deal
with the demand for the presence of the doctor.

The Kafir stood with his back to the wall, near the
big front door, closer to which was the trooper, always
with the revolver in his hand and a manner of watching
eagerly for an occasion to use it.  Ford went to them,
knitting his brows at the spectacle.  The prisoner saw
him as a slim young man of a not unusual type in a
dressing-gown, with short tumbled hair; the policeman,
with a more specialized experience, took in the quality
of his manner with a rapid glance and stiffened to
uprightness.  He knew the directness and aloofness that
go to the making of that ripe fruit of our civilization,
an officer of the army.

"Have n't you searched him for weapons?" demanded Ford.

"No," said the policeman, and added "sir," as an
afterthought.

Ford stepped over to the Kafir and passed his hands
down his sides and across his breast, feeling for any
concealed dangers about his person.

"Nothing," he said.  "You can handcuff him if you
want to, but there 's no need to keep him with his hands
up.  It's torture—you hear?"

"Yes, sir," responded the policeman again.  "Put
them down," he bade his prisoner.

Kamis, with a sigh, lowered his hands, wincing at the
stiffness of his cramped arms.

"Thank you," he said to Ford, in a low voice.  "I 've
had them up—it must be half an hour."

"Well, you 're all right now," responded Ford, with
a nod.

He tried the study door but it was locked and there
was no response to his knocks and his rattling of the
handle.

"Jakes," he called, several times.  "I say, you 're
wanted.  Jakes, d'you hear me?"

Kamis and the trooper watched him in silence, the
latter with his bold, unhappy features set into something
like a sneer.  They saw him test the strength of the lock
with a knee; it gave no sign of weakness and he stood
considering on the mat.  An idea came to him and he
went briskly, with his long stride, to the front door.

"I say," called the Kafir as he went by.

Ford paused.  "Well?"

"In case you can't rouse him," said the Kafir, "you
might like to know that I am a doctor—M.B., London."

"Are you?" said Ford thoughtfully.  "You're
Kamis, are n't you?"

"Yes," answered the Kafir.

"I 'll let you know if there 's anything you can do,",
said Ford.

The contrast between the Kafir's pleasant, English
voice and his negro face was strange to him also.  But
stranger yet, he could not in the presence of the
contemptuous policeman speak the thing that was in his
mind and tell the Kafir that he was to blame for the
whole business.  The voice, the address, the manner of
the man were those of his own class; it would have been
like quarreling before servants.

"Thank you," said the Kafir, as Ford went out to the
stoep.

The sill of the study window was only three feet
above the ground, a square of dull light filtering through
curtains that let nothing be seen from without of the
interior of the room.  Ford wasted no more time in knocking
and calling; he drew off a slipper and using it as a
hammer, smashed the glass of the window close to the
catch.  Half the pane went crashing at the first blow,
and the window was open.  He threw a leg over the sill
and was in the room.

A bracket lamp was burning on the wall and shooting
up a steady spire of smoke to the ceiling, where a thick
black patch had assembled and was shedding flakes of
smut on all below it.  The slovenliness of the smoking
lamp was suddenly an offense to him, and before he
even looked round he went across and turned the flame
lower.  It seemed a thing to do before setting about the
saving of Margaret's life.

The room was oppressively hot with a sickening
closeness in its atmosphere and a war of smells pervading
it.  The desk had whisky bottles, several of them, all
partly filled, standing about its surface, with a water
jug, a syphon and some glasses.  Papers and a book or
two had their place there also, and liquor had been spilt
on them and a tumbler was standing on the yellow cover
of a copy of "Mr. Barnes of New York."  A collar
and a tie lay on the floor in the middle of the room and
near them was a glass which had fallen and escaped
breakage.  Dr. Jakes was in the padded patient's chair;
it had its back to the window, and at first Ford had
imagined with surprise that the room was empty.  He
looked round wonderingly, till his eyes lighted on the
top of the doctor's blond, childish head, showing round
the chair.

Dr. Jakes had an attitude of extreme relaxation.  He
had slipped forward on the smooth leather seat till his
head lay on one of the arms and his face was upturned
to the smirched ceiling.  His feet were drawn in and
his knees protruded; his hands hung emptily beside him.
The soot of the lamp had snowed on him copiously,
dotting his face with black spots till he seemed to have
broken out in some monstrous plague-rash.  His lips
were parted under his fair mustache, and the eyes were
closed tight as if in determination not to see the ruin
and dishonor of his life.  He offered the spectacle of a
man securely entrenched against all possible duties and
needs, safe through the night against any attack on his
peace and repose.

"Jakes," cried Ford urgently, in his ear, and shook
him as vigorously as he could.  "Jakes, you hog.  Wake
up, will you."

The doctor's head waggled loosely to the shaking and
settled again to its former place.  It was infuriating to
see it rock like that, as though there were nothing stiffer
than wool in the neck, and yet preserve its deep
tranquillity.  Ford looked down and swore.  There was no
help here.

He unlocked the door and threw it open.  In the
hall the Kafir and the policeman were as he had left them.

"Come in here," he ordered briefly.

The Kafir came, with the trooper and the revolver
close at his back.  The latter's eye made notes of the
room, the glasses, the doctor, all the consistent details;
and he smiled.

"You 're a doctor," said Ford to the Kafir.  "Can
you do anything with this?"

"This" was Dr. Jakes.  Kamis made an inspection
of him and lifted one of the tight eyelids.

"I can make him conscious," he answered, "and sober
in a desperate sort of fashion.  But he won't be fit for
anything.  You mustn't trust him."

"Will he be able to doctor Miss Harding?" demanded Ford.

"No," answered Kamis emphatically.  "He won't."

"Then," said Ford, "what the deuce are we to do?"

The Kafir was still giving attention to Dr. Jakes, and
was unbuttoning the neck of his shirt.  He looked up.

"If you would let me see her," he suggested, "I 've
no doubt I could do what is necessary for her."

Ford ran his fingers through his short stiff hair in
perplexity.

"I don't see what else there is to do," he said, frowning.

The trooper had not yet spoken since he had entered
the room.  He and his revolver had had no share in
events.  He had been a part of the background, like
the bottles and the soot, forgotten and discounted.  Not
even his prisoner, whose life hung on the pressure of his
trigger-finger, had spent a glance on him.  But at
Ford's reply to the suggestion of the Kafir he restored
himself to a central place in the drama.

"There will be none of that," he remarked in his
drawling nasal voice.

Both turned towards him, the Kafir to meet the pistol-barrel
pointing at his chest.  The trooper's mouth was
twisted to a smile, and his Punchinello face was mocking
and servile at once.

"None of what?" demanded Ford.

"None of your taking this nigger into women's
bedrooms.  He 's my prisoner."

"I 'll take all responsibility," said Ford impatiently.

The trooper's smile was open now.  He had Ford
summed up for such another as Margaret, a person who
held lax views in regard to Kafirs and white women.
Such a person was not to be feared in South Africa.

"No," he said.  "Can't allow that.  It isn't done.
This nigger 'll stay with me."

"Look here," said Ford angrily.  "I tell you—"

"You look here," retorted the other.  "Look at this,
will you?"  He balanced the big revolver in his fist.
"That Kafir tries to get up those stairs, and I 'll drill a
hole in him you could put your fist in.  Understand?"

He nodded at Ford with a sort of geniality more
inflexibly hostile than any scowls.

Ford would have answered forcibly enough, but from
the doorway came a wail, and he looked up to see
Mrs. Jakes standing there, with a hand on each doorpost and
her small face, which he knew as the shopwindow of the
less endearing virtues, convulsed with a passion of alarm
and horror.  At her cry, they all started round towards
her, with the single exception of Dr. Jakes, who lay in
his chair with his face in that direction already, and was
not stirred at all by her appearance on the scene that
had created itself around him.

"O-o-oh," she cried.  "Eustace—after all I 've done;
after all these years.  Why didn't you lock the door,
Eustace?  And what will become of us now?  O-oh, Mr. Ford,
I begged you to go to bed.  And the Kafir to see it,
and all.  The disgrace—o-o-h."

The tears ran openly down her face; they made her
seem suddenly younger and more human than Ford had
known her to be.

"Oh, come in, Mrs. Jakes," he begged.  "Come in;
it 's—it 's all right."

"All right," repeated Mrs. Jakes.  "But—everybody
will know, soon, and how can I hold up my head?  I 've
been so careful; I 've watched all the time—and I 've
prayed—"

She bowed her face and wept aloud, with horrible sobs.

Ford was at the end of his wits.  While he pitied
Mrs. Jakes, Margaret might be dying in her room, under
the bland and interested eyes of Fat Mary.  He turned
swiftly to the Kafir.

"Could you prescribe if I told you what she looked
like?" he asked, in a half-whisper.  "Could you do
anything in that way?"

"Perhaps."  The Kafir was quick to understand.
Even in the urgency of the time, Ford was thankful
that he had to deal with a man who understood readily
and replied at once, a man like himself.

"Let me pass, Mrs. Jakes," he said, and made for the
stairs.

As soon as he had gone, the trooper advanced to the
desk and laid hands on a bottle and a glass.  He mixed
himself a satisfactory tumbler and turned to Mrs. Jakes.

"The ladies, God bless 'em," he said piously, and
drank.

Kamis, looking on mutely, saw the little woman blink
at her tears and try to smile.

"Don't mention it," she murmured.

She came into the room and examined Dr. Jakes,
bending over him to scan his tranquil countenance.
There was nothing in her aspect of wrath or rancor;
she was still submissive to the fate that stood at the
levers of her being and switched her arbitrarily from
respectability to ruin.  She seemed merely to make sure of
features in his condition which she recognized without
disgust or shame.

"Would you please just help me?" she asked, looking
up at the policeman, very politely, with her hands on the
doctor's shoulders.

"Charmed," declared the policeman, with an equal
courtesy, and aided her to raise the drunken and
unconscious man to a more seemly position in his chair.  It
was seemlier because his head hung forward, and he
looked more as if he were dead and less as if he were
drunk.

"Thank you," she said, when it was done.  "It is—it
is quite a fine night, is it not?  The stars are
beautiful.  There is whisky on the desk—very good whisky,
I believe.  Won't you help yourself?"

"You 're very good," said the trooper, cordially, and
helped himself.

Ford came shortly.  He ignored Mrs. Jakes and the
trooper entirely and spoke to the Kafir only.  His
manner made a privacy from which the others were excluded.

"I say," he said, with a manner of trouble.  "She 's
still in a faint.  Very white, not breathing much, and
rather cold.  She looks bad."

The Kafir nodded.  "You could n't take her temperature,
of course," he said.  "There hadn't been any
fresh hemorrhage?"

"No," replied Ford.  "I asked Fat Mary.  She was
there, and she said there 'd been no blood.  I say—is
it very dangerous?"

He was a layman; flesh and blood—blood particularly—were
beyond his science and within the reach only of
his pity and his fear.  He had stood by Margaret's bed
and looked down on her; he had bent his ear to her lips
to make sure that she breathed and that her white
immobility was not death.  His hand had felt her forehead
and been chilled by the cold of it; and he had tried
inexpertly to find her pulse and failed.  Fat Mary,
holding a candle, had illuminated his researches, grinning the
while, and had answered his questions humorously, till
she realized that she was in some danger of being
assaulted; and then she had lied.

He made his appeal to the Kafir as to a man of his
own kind.

"I 'm afraid it 's not much use," he said—"what I
can tell you, I mean.  But do you think there 's much
danger?"

Kamis shook his head.  "There should n't be," he
answered.  "I wish I could see her.  Cold, was she?  Yes;
temperature subnormal.  I could cup,—but you could
n't.  Do you think you could make a hypodermic
injection, if I showed you how?"

"I could do any blessed thing," declared Ford, fervently.

"Digitalin and adrenalin," mused Kamis.  "He won't
have those, though.  Do you know if he 's got any
ergotin?"

"He has," replied Ford.  "He shoved some into me.
Mrs. Jakes—ergotin? where is it?"

Mrs. Jakes was leaning on the back of the chair which
contained the doctor.  She had recovered from the
emotion which had convulsed and unbalanced her at the
discovery of the study's open door.  She looked up now
languidly, in imitation of Margaret's manner when she
was not pleased with matters.

"Really, you must ask the doctor," she said.  "I
couldn't think of—ah—disposing of such things."

Kamis had not waited to hear her out.  Already he
was overhauling the drawers of the desk for the syringe.
Ford aided him.

"Is this it?" he asked, at the second drawer he
opened.

"Thank God," ejaculated Kamis.  He could not help
sending a glance of triumph at Mrs. Jakes.

"Now attend to me," he said to Ford.  "First I 'll
show you how to inject it.  Give me your arm; can you
stand a prick?"

"Go ahead," said Ford; "slowly, so that I can watch."

"Take a pinch of skin like this," directed the Kafir,
closing his forefinger and thumb on a piece of
Ford's forearm.  "See?  Then, with the syringe in
your hand, like this, push the needle in—like this.
See?"

"I see."

"Well, now do it to me.  Here 's the place."

The arm he bared was black brown, full and
muscular.  Ford took the syringe and pinched the smooth
warm skin.

"In with it," urged the Kafir.  "Don't be afraid,
man.  Now press the plunger down with your forefinger.
See?  Go on, can't you?  You mustn't mess the
business upstairs.  Do it again."

"That 's enough," said Ford.

Drops of blood issued from the puncture as he withdrew
the needle, and he shivered involuntarily.  It had
been horrible to press the point home into that smooth
and rounded arm; his own had not bled.

"Mind now," warned the Kafir.  "You must run it
well in.  And now about the drug."

He was minute in his instructions and careful to
avoid technical phrases and terms of art.  He took the
syringe and cleaned and charged and gave it to Ford.

"Don't funk it," was his final injunction.  "This is
nothing.  There may be worse for you to do yet."

"I won't funk it," promised Ford.  "But—" he appealed
to the Kafir with a shrug of deprecation—"but
isn't it a crazy business?"

It was like a swiftly-changing dream to him.  The
hot and dirty room, with the Kafir busy and thoughtful,
the malevolent trooper and his revolver, the sprawl of
the doctor and his slumberous calm and Mrs. Jakes
groping through the minutes for a cue to salvation, were
unconvincing even when his eyes dwelt on them.  They
had not the savor of reality.  Six paces away was the
hall, severe and grand, with its open door making it a
neighbor of the darkness and the stars.  Then came the
vacant stairs and the long lifeless corridors running
between the closed doors of rooms, and the light leaking
out from under the door of Margaret's chamber.
Through such a variety one moves in dreams, where
things have lost or changed their values and nothing is
solid or immediate, and death is not troublous nor life
significant.

Fat Mary was resting in Margaret's armchair when
he pushed open the door and came in, carrying the syringe
carefully with its point in the air.  She rose hastily,
fearful of a rebuke.

"Miss Harding wake up yet?" Ford asked her.

"No.  Missis sleep all-a-time," replied Fat Mary.
"She plenty quiet, all-'e-same dead."

"Shut up," ordered Ford, in a harsh whisper.
"You're a fool."

Fat Mary sniffed in cautious defiance and muttered
in Kafir.  Since her duties had lain about Margaret's
person, she had become unused to being called a fool.
She pouted unpleasantly and stood watching unhelpfully
as Ford went to the bedside.

The blood had been washed away and there was
nothing now to suggest violence or brutality.  The girl
lay on her back in the utter vacancy of unconsciousness;
the face had been wiped clean of all expression and left
blank and void.  Mrs. Jakes had known enough to
remove the pillows, which were in the chair Fat Mary had
selected for her ease, and the head lay back on the level
sheet with the brown hair tumbled to each side of it.
Ford, looking down on her, was startled by a likeness to
a recumbent stone figure he had seen in some church,
with the marble drapery falling to either side of it as
now the bedclothes fell over Margaret Harding.  It
needed only the crossed arms and the kneeling angel to
complete the resemblance.  The idea was hateful to him,
and he made haste to get to the work he had to do in
order to break away from it.

The sleeve of the nightgown had soft lace at the wrist
and a band of lace inserted higher up; softness and
delicacy surrounded her and made his task the harder.  The
forearm, when he had stripped the sleeve back, was cool
and silk-smooth to his touch, slender and shining.  His
fingers almost circled its girth; it was strangely
feminine and disturbing.  A blue vein was distinct in the
curve of the elbow, and others branched at the wrist
where his finger could find no pulse.

Fat Mary forgot her indignation in her curiosity, and
came tiptoeing across the floor, holding a candle to light
him, and stood at his shoulder to watch.  Her big ridiculous
face was gleeful as he took up the syringe; she knew
a joke when she saw one.

Ford pinched the white skin with thumb and forefinger
as he had been bidden and touched it with the
point of the needle.  The point slipped and was reluctant
to enter; he had to take hold firmly and thrust it, like a
man sewing leather.  The girl's hand twitched slightly
and fell open again and was passive.  He felt sickish
and feeble and had to knit himself to run the needle in
deep and depress the plunger that deposited the drug in
the arm.  Over his shoulder Fat Mary watched avidly
and grinned.

He drew the sleeve down again and laid the arm back
in its place.  He passed a hand absently over his
forehead and found it damp with strange sweat, and he was
conscious of being weary in every limb as though he had
concluded some extreme physical effort.  He looked
carefully at the unconscious girl, seeking for signs and
indices which he should report to Kamis.  The likeness of
the marble figure did not recur to him; his thoughts
were laborious and slow.

He woke Mr. Samson on his way downstairs,
invading his room without knocking and shaking him
by the shoulder.  Mr. Samson snorted and thrust up
a bewildered face to the light of the candle.  His white
mustache, which in the daytime cocked debonair points
to port and starboard, hung down about his mouth and
made him commonplace.

"What the devil 's up?" he gasped, staring wildly.
"Oh, it 's you, Ford."

"Get up," said Ford.  "There 's the deuce to pay.
That Kafir 's arrested—Kamis, you know; Miss
Harding 's had a bad hemorrhage and Jakes is dead drunk.
I want you to go to Du Preez's and send a messenger
for another doctor.  Hurry, will you?"

"My sainted aunt," exclaimed Mr. Samson, in
amazement.  "You don't say.  I 'll be with you in
a jiffy, Ford.  Don't you wait."

He threw a leg over the edge of the bed, revealing
pyjamas strikingly striped, and Ford left him to
improvise a toilet unwatched.

The trooper was talking to Mrs. Jakes in the study
when Ford returned there.  He had relieved himself
of his hat, and his big head, on which the hair was
scant, was naked to the lamp.  He had found himself
a chair at the back of the desk, and reclined in it
spaciously, with his half-empty tumbler at his elbow.
The Kafir still stood where Ford had left him, his eyes
roving gravely over the room and its contents.  The
trooper looked up as Ford came in, lifting his saturnine
and aggressive features with a smile.  He had drunk
several glasses in a quick succession and was already
thawed and voluble.

"Well," he said loudly.  "How's interestin'
patient?  'S well 's can be expected—what?  Didn't
express wish to thank med'cal adviser in person, I
s'pose?"

Ford bent a hard look on him.

"I 'll attend to you in good time," he said, with
meaning.  "For the present you can shut up."

He turned at once to the Kafir and began to tell him
what he had seen and done, while the other steered him
with brief questions.  The trooper gazed at them with
a fixed eye.

"Shup," he said, to Mrs. Jakes.  "Says I can
shup—for the present.  Supposin' I don't shup,
though."

He drank, with a manner of confirming by that action
a portentous resolution, and sat for some minutes
grave and meditative, with his bitter, thin mouth
sucked in.  He never laid down the big revolver which
he held.  Its short, businesslike barrel rested on the
blue cloth of his knee, and the blued metal reflected
the light dully from its surfaces.

"Is it dangerous?" Ford was asking.  "From what
I can tell you, do you think there 's any real danger?
She looks—she looks deadly."

"Yes, she would," replied the Kafir thoughtfully.
"I think I 've got an idea how things stand.  As long
as that unconsciousness lasts, there 'll be no more
hemorrhage, and there 's the ergotin too.  If there 's
nothing else, I don't see that it should be serious—more
serious, that is, than hemorrhages always are."

"You really think so?" asked Ford.  "I wish you
could see her for yourself, and make certain.  Perhaps
presently that swine with the revolver will be drunk
enough to go to sleep or something, and we might
manage it."

The Kafir shook his head.

"If it were necessary, the revolver wouldn't stop
me," he said.  "But as it is—"

"What?"

"Oh, do you think it would make things better for
Miss Harding if you took me into her bedroom?  You
see what has happened already, because she has spoken
to me from time to time.  How would this sound, when
it was dished up for circulation in the dorps?"

Ford frowned unhappily.  He did not want to meet
the mournful eyes in the black face.

"You think," he began hesitatingly—"you think
it—er—it wouldn't do?"

"You were here when the other story came out,"
retorted Kamis.  "Can you remember what you thought
then?"

"Oh, I was a fool of course," said Ford; "but,
confound it, I did n't think any harm."

"Didn't you?  But what did everybody think?
Isn't it true that as a result of all that was said
and thought Miss Harding has to risk her life by
returning to England?"

"No, it wouldn't do, I suppose," said Ford.  "Between
us we 've made it a pretty tough business for
her.  We 're brutes."

The thick negro lips parted in a smile that was not
humorous.

"At a little distance," said Kamis, "say, from the
other side of the color line, you certainly make a poor
appearance."

Mr. Samson made his entry with an air of coming to
set things right or know the reason.

"Well, I 'll be hanged," he exclaimed in the doorway,
making a sharp inspection of the scene.

He had got together quite a plausible equivalent
for his daily personality, and had not omitted to make
his mustache recognizable with pomade.  A Newmarket
coat concealed most of his deficiencies; his
monocle made the rest of them insignificant.

Mrs. Jakes sighed and fidgeted.

"Oh, Mr. Samson," she said.  "What can I say to you?"

"Say 'good-morning,'" suggested Mr. Samson, with
his eye on Jakes.  "Better send for the 'boys' to carry
him up to bed, to begin with—what?  Well, Ford, here
I am, ready and waiting.  This the fellow, eh?"

His arrogant gaze rested on the Kafir intolerantly.

"This is Kamis," said Ford.  "Dr. Kamis, of
London, by the way.  He is treating Miss Harding at
present."

"Eh?"  Mr. Samson turned on him abruptly.
"You 've taken him up there, to her room?"

"No," said Ford.  "Not yet."

"See you don't, then," said Mr. Samson strongly.
"What you thinkin' about, Ford?  And look here,
what 's your name!"—to the Kafir.  "You speak
English, don't you?  Well, I don't want to hurt your
feelin's, you know, but you 've got to understand quite
plainly—"

Kamis interrupted him suavely.

"You need n't trouble," he said.  "I quite agree with
you.  I was just telling Mr. Ford the same thing."

"Were you, by Jove," snorted Mr. Samson, entirely
unappeased.  "Pity you didn't come to the same
conclusion a month ago.  You may be a doctor and all
that; I 've no means of disprovin' what you say; but
in so far as you compromised little Miss Harding,
you 're a black cad.  Just think that over, will you?
Now, Ford, what d'you want me to do?"

There was power of a sort in Mr. Samson, the power
of unalterable conviction and complete sincerity.  In
his Newmarket coat and checked cloth cap he thrust
himself with fluency into the scene and made himself
its master.  He gave an impression of din, of shouting
and tumult; he made himself into a clamorous crowd.
Mrs. Jakes trembled under his glance and the trooper
blinked servilely.  Ford, concerned chiefly to have a
messenger despatched without delay, bowed to the
storm and gave him his instructions without protest.

"Mind, now," stipulated Mr. Samson, ere he departed
on his errand; "no takin' the nigger upstairs,
Ford.  There 's a decency in these affairs."

The trooper nodded solemnly to the departing flap of
the Newmarket tails, making their exit with a
Newmarket *aplomb*.

"Noble ol' buck," he observed, approvingly.  "Goo'
style.  Gift o' the gab.  Here 's luck to him."

He gulped noisily in his glass, spilling the liquor on
his tunic as he drank.

"Knows nigger when he sees 'im," he said.  "Frien'
o' yours?"

"Mr. Samson," replied Mrs. Jakes seriously, "is a
very old friend."

"Goblessim," said the trooper.  "Less 'ave anurr."

Kamis and Ford regarded one another as Mr. Samson
left them and both were a little embarrassed.
Plain speaking is always a brutality, since it sets every
man on his defense.

"I 'm sorry there was a fuss," said Ford
uncomfortably.  "Old Samson 's such a beggar to make
rows."

"He was right," said Kamis; "perfectly right.
Only—I didn't need to be told.  I 've been cursing
myself ever since I heard that the thing had come
out.  It 's my fault altogether—and I knew it long
before the row happened, and I let it go on."

Ford nodded with his eyes on the ground.

"You could hardly—order her off," he said.

"That wasn't it," answered Kamis.  "Man, I was
as lonely as a man on a raft, and I jumped at the
chance of her company now and again.  I sacrificed
her, I tell you.  Don't try to make excuses for me.
I won't have them.  Go up and see how she is.  What
are we talking here for?"

"God knows," said Ford drearily.  "What else 'is
there to do?  We 've both wronged her, haven't we?"

There was no change in Margaret; she was as he had
left her, pallid and motionless, a temptation to death.

Fat Mary was asleep in the armchair, gross and
disgustful, and he woke her with the heel of his slipper
on her big splay foot.  She squeaked and came to life
angrily and reported no movement from Margaret.  He
had an impulse to hit her, she was so obviously
prepared to say anything he seemed to require and she was
so little like a woman.  It was impossible in reason and
sentiment to connect her with the still, fragile form
on the bed, and he had to exercise an actual and
conscious restraint to refrain from an openhanded smack
on her bulging and fatuous countenance.  He could
only call her wounding names, and he did so.  She
drooped her lower lip at him piteously and again he
yearned to punch her.

There was no change to report to Kamis, who nodded
at his account and spoke a perfunctory, "All right.
Thanks."  The trooper sat in a daze, scowling at his
boots; Mrs. Jakes was lost in thought; the doctor had
not moved.  Ford fidgeted to and fro between the
desk and the door for a while and finally went out to
the stoep and walked to and fro along its length,
trying to realize and to feel what was happening.

He knew that he was not appreciating the matter
as a whole.  He was like a man dully afflicted, to
whom momentary details are present and apparent,
while the sum of his trouble is uncomprehended.  He
could dislike the apprehensive and timidly presumptuous
face of the trooper, pity Mrs. Jakes, distaste
Mr. Samson's forceful loudness, smell the foulness of the
study and wonder at the Kafir; but the looming
essential fact that Margaret lay in a swoon on her bed,
lacking the aid due to her and in danger of death
in a dozen forms—that had been vague and diffused
in his understanding.  He had not known it passionately,
poignantly, in its full dreadfulness.

He told himself the facts carefully, going over them
with a patient emphasis to point them at himself.

"Margaret may die; it 's very likely she will, with
only a fool like me to see how she looks.  I never
called her Margaret till to-day—but it 's yesterday
now.  And here 's this damned story about her, which
every one knows wrongly and adds lies to when he
tells it.  It would look queer on the stage—Kamis
doctoring her like this.  But the point is—she may die."

The sky was full of stars, white and soft and misty,
like tearful eyes, and the Southern Cross, in which he
had never been able to detect anything like a cross,
rode high.  He could not hold his thoughts from
wandering to it and the absurdity of calling a mere
blotch like that a cross.  Heaps of other stars that did
make crosses—neat and obvious ones.  The sky was
full of crosses, for that matter.  Astronomers were
asses, all of them.  But the point was, Margaret might die.

"That you, Ford?"

Mr. Samson was coming up the steps and with him
were Christian du Preez and his wife.

"These good people are anxious to help," explained
Mr. Samson.  "Very good of 'em—what?  And young
Paul 's gone off on a little stallion to send Dr. Van
Coller.  Turned out at the word like a fire engine and
was off like winkin'.  Never saw anything smarter.
If the doctor 's half as smart he 'll be here in four
hours."

"That's good," said Ford.

"And Mrs. du Preez 'll stay with Miss Harding an'
do what she can," said Mr. Samson.

"I 'll do any blessed thing," declared Mrs. du Preez
with energy.

Mr. Samson stood aside to let his companions enter
the house before him.  He whispered with buoyant
force to Ford.

"A chaperon to the rescue," he said.  "We 've got
a chaperon, and the rest follows.  You see if it don't."

There was a brief interview between Mrs. du Preez
and the Kafir under the eyes of the tall Boer.
Mr. Samson had already informed them of the situation
in the study, and they were not taken by surprise, and
the Kafir fell in adroitly with the tone they took.
Ford thought that Mrs. du Preez displayed a curious
timidity before the negro, a conspicuous improvement
on her usual perky cocksureness.

"Just let me know if there is any change," Kamis
said to her.  "That is all.  If she recovers
consciousness, for instance, come to me at once."

"I will," answered Mrs. du Preez, with subdued
fervor.

There seemed nothing left for Ford to do.  Mrs. du
Preez departed to her watch, and it was at least
satisfactory to know that Fat Mary would now have to
deal with one who would beat her on the first
occasion without compunction.  Mr. Samson and the Boer
departed to the drawing-room in search of a breathable
air, and after an awkward while Ford followed them
thither.

"Ah!" exclaimed Mr. Samson, as he appeared.
"Here you are.  You 'd better try and snooze, Ford.
Been up all night, haven't you?"

"Pretty nearly," admitted Ford.  "I couldn't
sleep, though."

"You try," recommended Mr. Samson urgently.
"Lie down on the couch and have a shot.  You 're
done up; you 're not yourself.  What d' you think,
Du Preez?  He was nearly takin' that nigger up to
Miss Harding's room.  What d' you think of that, eh?"

He was sitting on the music stool, an urbane and
adequate presence.

The Boer shook his head.  "That would be bad," he
said seriously.  "He is a good nigger—*ya*!  But better
she should die."

Ford laughed wearily as he sat down.  "That was his
idea," he said.

He leaned back to listen to their talk.  Sleep, he
felt, was far from him.  Margaret might die—that had
to be kept in mind.  He heard them discuss the Kafir
stupidly, ridiculously.  It was pothouse talk, the
chatter of companionable fools, frothing round and
round their topic.  Their minds were rigid like a pair
of stiffened corpses set facing one another; they never
reached an imaginative hand towards the wonder and
pity of the matter.  And Margaret—the beautiful
name that it was—Margaret might die.

Half an hour later, Mr. Samson slewed his monocle
towards him.

"Sleepin' after all," he remarked.  "Poor devil—no
vitality.  Not like you an' me, Du Preez—what?"

Ford knew he had slept when the Boer woke him
in the broad daylight.

"The doctor is here," said Christian.  "He says it
is all right.  He says—she has been done right with.
She will not die."

"Thank God," said Ford.

Mr. Samson was in the room.  The daylight showed
the incompleteness of his toilet; he was a mere
imitation of his true self.  His triumphant smile failed to
redeem him.  The bald truth was—he was not dressed.

"Everything 's as right as rain," he declared,
wagging his tousled white head.  "Sit where you are,
my boy; there 's nothing for you to do.  Dr. Van
Coller had an infernal thing he calls a motor-bicycle,
and it brought him the twenty-two miles in fifty
minutes.  Makes a noise like a traction engine and stinks
like the dickens.  Got an engine of sorts, you know,
and goes like anything.  But the point is, Miss
Harding 's going on like a house on fire.  Your nigger-man
and you did just the right thing, it appears."

"Where is he?" asked Ford.

"The nigger-man?"

Mr. Samson and the Boer exchanged glances.

"Look here," said Mr. Samson; "Du Preez and I
had an understanding about it, but don't let it go
any further.  You see, after all that has happened,
we could n't let the chap go to gaol.  No sense in that.
So the bobby being as drunk as David's sow, I had a
word with him.  I told him I didn't retract anything,
but we were all open to make mistakes, and—to cut it
short—he 'd better get away while he had the chance."

"Yes," said Ford.  "Did he?"

"He didn't want to at first," replied Mr. Samson.
"His idea was that he had to clear himself of the
charge on which he was arrested.  Sedition, you know.
All rot, of course, but that was his idea.  So I
promised to write to old Bill Winter—feller that owes
me money—he 's governor of the Cape, or something,
and put it to him straight."

"He will write to him and say it is lies," said the
Boer.  "He knows him."

"Know him," cried Mr. Samson.  "Never paid me
a bet he lost, confound him.  Regular old welcher,
Bill is.  Van Coller chipped in too—treated him like
an equal.  And in the end he went.  Van Coller says
he 'd like to have had his medical education.  I say,
what 's that?"

A sudden noise had interrupted him, a sharp report
from somewhere within the house.  The Boer nodded
slowly, and made for the door.

"That policeman has shot somebody," he said.

.. vspace:: 2

Dr. Jakes waked to the morning light with a taste
in his mouth which was none the more agreeable for
being familiar.  He opened his hot eyes to the strange
disarray of his study, the open door and the somnolent
form of the policeman, and sat up with a jerk, almost
sober.  He stared around him uncomprehending.
The lamp burned yet, and the room was stiflingly hot;
the curtains had not been put back and the air was
heavy and foul.  He got shakily to his feet and went
towards the hall.  His wife, with coffee cups on a
tray, was coming down the stairs.  She saw him and
put the tray down on the table against the wall and
went to him.

"Well, Eustace?" she said tonelessly.  "What is it
now?"

He cleared his burning throat.  "Who opened the
door?" he asked hoarsely.

She shook her head.  "I don't know," she answered.
"It does n't matter—we 're ruined at last.
It 's come, Eustace."

He made strange grimaces in an endeavor to clear
his mind and grasp what she was saying.  She watched
him unmoved, and went on to tell him, in short bald
sentences of the night's events.

"Dr. Van Coller will be down presently," she
concluded.  "He 'll want to see you, but you can lock
your door if you like.  He 's seen me already."

He had her meaning at last.  He blinked at her
owlishly, incapable of expressing the half-thoughts that
dodged in his drugged brain.

"Poor old Hester," he said, at last, and turned
heavily back to his study.

Mrs. Jakes smiled in pity and despair, and took up
her tray again.  She thought she knew better than
he how poor she was.

He slammed the door behind him, but he did not
trouble to lock it.  Something he had seen when he
opened his eyes stuck in his mind, and he went
staggeringly round the untidy desk, with its bottles and
papers, to where the policeman sprawled in a chair
with his Punchinello chin on his breast.  His loose
hands retained yet the big revolver.

"He 'll come to it too," was Dr. Jakes' thought as
he looked down on him.  He drew the weapon with
precaution from the man's hand.

He stood an instant in thought, looking at its neat
complication of mechanism and then raised it slowly
till the small round of the muzzle returned his look.
His face clenched in desperate resolution.  But he did
not pull the trigger.  At the critical moment, his eye
caught the lamp, burning brazenly on the wall.  He
went over and turned it out.

"Now," he said, and raised the revolver again.





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`CHAPTER XIX`:

.. class:: center large bold

   CHAPTER XIX

.. vspace:: 2

Upon that surprising morning when Mr. Samson,
taking his early constitutional, was a witness
to the cloud that rode across the sun and presently
let go its burden of wet to fall upon the startled
earth in slashing, roaring sheets of rain, there stood
luggage in the hall, strapped, locked, and ready for
transport.

"Gad!" said Mr. Samson, breathless in the front
door and backing from the splashes of wet that leaped
on the railing of the stoep and drove inwards.
"They 'll have a wet ride."

He flicked at spots of water on the glossy surface of
his gray coat and watched the rain drive across and
hide the Karoo like a steel-hued fog.  The noise of it,
after months of sun and stillness, was distracting; it
threshed vehemently with uproar and power, in the
extravagant fashion of those latitudes.  It was the
signal that the weather had broken, justifying at length
Mrs. Jakes' conversational gambit.

She came from the breakfast-room while he watched,
with the wind from the open door romping in her thin
skirts, and stood beside him to look out.  They
exchanged good mornings.

"Is n't it wet?" said Mrs. Jakes resourcefully.
"But I dare say it 's good for the country."

"Rather," agreed Mr. Samson.  "It 'll be all green
before you know it.  But damp for the travelers—what?"

"They will have the hood on the cart," replied Mrs. Jakes.

She was not noticeably changed since the doctor's
death, three weeks before.  Her clothes had always
been black, so that she was exempt from the gruesome
demands of custom to advertise her loss in her
garments.  The long habit of shielding Jakes from open
shame had become a part of her; so that instead of
abandoning her lost position, she was already in the
way of canonizing him.  She made reverential references
to his professional skill, to his goodness, his
learning, his sacrifices to duty.  She looked people
steadily and defiantly in the eyes as she said so, and
had her own way with them.  The foundations were
laid of a tradition which presented poor Jakes in a
form he would never have recognized.  He was in his
place behind the barbed wire out on the veld, sharing
the bed of little Eustace, heedless that there was
building for him a mausoleum of good report and loyal
praise.

"Hate to see luggage in a house," remarked Mr. Samson,
as they passed the pile in the hall on their
way to the breakfast-room.  "Nothing upsets a house
like luggage.  Looks so bally unsettled, don't you
know."

"Things *are* a little unsettled," agreed Mrs. Jakes
civilly.  "What with the rain and everything, it
doesn't seem like the same place, does it?"

She gave a tone of mild complaint to her voice,
exactly as though a disturbance in the order of her life
were a thing to be avoided.  It would not have been
consistent with the figure of the late Jakes, as she
was sedulous to present it, if she had admitted that
the house and its routine, its purpose, its atmosphere,
its memories, the stones in its walls and the tiles on
its roof, were the objects of her living hate.  She was
already in negotiations for the sale of it and what she
called "the connection," and had called Mr. Samson
and Ford into consultation over correspondence with
a doctor at Port Elizabeth, who wrote with a
typewriter and was inquisitive about balance-sheets.
Throughout the consequent discussions she maintained
an air of gentle and patient regret, an attitude of
resigned sentiment, the exact manner of a lady in a story
who sells the home of her ancestors to a company
promoter.  Even her anxiety to sell Ford and
Mr. Samson along with the house did not cause her to
deflect for an instant from the course of speech and
action she had selected.  There were yet Penfolds in
Putney and Clapham Junction, and when the sale was
completed she would see them again and rejoin their
congenial circle; but her joy at the prospect was
private, her final and transcendent secret.

Nothing is more natural to man than to pose; by a
posture, he can correct the crookedness of his nature
and be for himself, and sometimes for others too, the
thing he would be.  It is the instinct towards
protective coloring showing itself through broadcloth and
bombazine.

Mr. Samson accepted his coffee and let his monocle
fall into it, a sign that he was discomposed to an
unusual degree.  He sat wiping it and frowning.

"Did I tell you," he said suddenly, "that—er—that
Kafir 's going to look in just before they start?"

Mrs. Jakes looked up sharply.

"You mean—that Kamis?" she demanded.  "He 's
coming *here*?"

"Ye-es," said Mr. Samson.  "Just for a minute or
two.  Er—Ford knows about it."

"To see Miss Harding, I suppose?" inquired
Mrs. Jakes, with a sniff.

"Yes," replied Mr. Samson again.  "It isn't my
idea of things, but then, things have turned out so
dashed queer, don't you know.  He wrote to ask if he
might say good-by; very civil, reasonable kind of
letter; Ford brought it to me an' asked my opinion.
Couldn't overlook the fact that he had a hand in
saving her life, you know.  So on my advice, Ford wrote
to the feller saying that if he 'd understand there was
going to be no private interview, or anything of that
kind, he could turn up at ten o'clock an' take his
chance."

"But," said Mrs. Jakes hopefully, "supposing the
police—

"Bless you, that 's all right," Mr. Samson assured
her.  "The police don't want to see him again.  Seems
that old Bill Winter—you know I wrote to him?—seems
that old Bill went to work like the dashed old
beaver he is, and had Van Zyl's head on a charger
for his breakfast.  The Kafir-man 's got a job of some
sort, doctorin' niggers somewhere.  The police never
mention him any more."

"Well," said Mrs. Jakes, "I can't prevent you, of
course, from bringing Kafirs here, Mr. Samson, but
I 've got my feelings.  When I think of poor Eustace,
and that Kafir thrusting himself in—well, there!"

Mr. Samson drank deep of his coffee, trying vaguely
to suggest in his manner of drinking profound
sympathy with Mrs. Jakes and respect for what she
sometimes called the departed.  Also, the cup hid her from
him.

It was strange how the presence of Margaret's
luggage in the hall pervaded the house with a sense of
impermanence and suspense.  It gave even to the
breakfast the flavor of the mouthful one snatches while
turning over the baffling pages of the timetable.
Ford, when he came in, was brusk and irresponsive,
though he was not going anywhere, and Margaret's
breakfast went upstairs on a tray.  Kafir servants were
giggling and whispering up and down stairs and were
obviously interested in the leather trunks.  A house
with packed luggage in it has no character of a
dwelling; it is only a stopping-place, a minister to
transitory needs.  As well have a coffin in the place as
luggage ready for removal; between them, they comprise
all that is removable in human kind.

"Well," said Mr. Samson to Ford, attempting conversation;
"we 're goin' to have the place to ourselves
again.  Eh?"

"You seem pleased," replied Ford unamiably.

"I 'm bearin' up," said Mr. Samson.  "You seem
grieved, though."

"That," said Ford, with venom, "is because I 'm
being bored."

"The deuce you are."  Mr. Samson was annoyed.
"I don't want to talk to you, you know.  Sulk all you
want to; doesn't affect me.  But if you could substitute
a winnin' smile for the look you 're wearin' at
present, it would be more appetizin'."

"Er—the rain seems to be drawing-off, I think,"
remarked Mrs. Jakes, energetically.  "It might be quite
fine by-and-by.  What do you think, Mr. Samson?"

Mr. Samson, ever obedient to her prompting, made
an inspection of the prospect through the window.  But
his sense of injury was strong.

"There are things much more depressing than rain,"
he said, rancorously, and occupied himself pointedly
with his food.

Ford made his apology as soon as they were free
from Mrs. Jakes.  She had much to do in the unseen
organization of the departure, and apologized for
leaving them to themselves.  It was another adjunct of
the luggage; not within the memory of man had inmates
of the Sanatorium sat at table without Mrs. Jakes.

"Sorry," said Ford then, in a matter-of-fact way.

"Are you?" said Mr. Samson grudgingly.  "All right."

And that closed the incident.

Soon after breakfast, when the stoep was still
uninhabitable and the drawing-room unthinkable and the
hall uncongenial, Margaret came downstairs,
unfamiliar in clothes which the Sanatorium had not seen
before.  Mrs. Jakes made mental notes of them, gazing
with narrow eyes and lips moving in a soundless
inventory.  She came down smiling but uncertain.

"I didn't know it could rain," was her greeting.
"Did you see the beginning of it?  It was
wonderful—like an eruption."

"I saw it," said Mr. Samson.  "I got wet in it.
It 'll be cool for your drive to the station, even if it 's
a bit damp."

"There 's still half an hour to wait before the cart
comes," said Margaret.  "Where does one sit when
it 's raining?"

"One doesn't," said Mr. Samson.  "One stands
about in draughts and one frets, one does."

"Come into the drawing-room," said Ford briefly.

Margaret looked at him with a smile for his seriousness
and his manner of one who desires to get to business,
but she yielded, and Mr. Samson ambled in their
wake, never doubting that he was of their company.
Ford, holding the door open for Margaret, surprised
him with a forbidding scowl.

"We don't want *you*," he whispered fiercely, and
shut the affronted and uncomprehending old
gentleman out.

The drawing-room was forlorn and very shabby in the
cold light of the rainy day and the tattoo of the
rain-splashes on its window.  Margaret went to the hearth
where Dr. Jakes had been wont to expiate his crimes,
and leaned her arm on the mantel, looking about the
apartment.

"It 's queer," she said; "I shall miss this."

"Margaret," said Ford.

She turned to him, still smiling.  She answered
nothing, but waited for him to continue.

"I wanted to tell you something," he went on
steadily.  "You know I love you, don't you?"

"Yes," she answered slowly.  "You—you said so."

"I said it because I do," he said.  "Well, Dr. Van
Coller was here yesterday, and when he had done
with you, I had a word with him.  I wanted to know
if I could go Home too; so he came up to my room
and made an examination of me, a careful one."

Margaret had ceased to smile.  "Yes," she said.
"Tell me: what did he say?"

"He said No," replied Ford.  "I mustn't leave
here.  He was very clear about it.  I 've got to stay."

The emphasis with which he spoke was merely to
make her understand; he invited no pity for himself
and felt none.  He was merely giving information.

"But," said Margaret,—"never?  It isn't as bad
as *that*, is it?"

"He couldn't tell.  He isn't really a lung man,
you know.  But it doesn't make any real difference,
now you 're going.  Two years or ten years or
forever—you 'll be away among other people and I 'll be
here and the gap between us will be wider every day.
We 've been friends and I had hopes—nothing cures
a chap of hoping, not even his lungs; but now I 've
got to cure myself of it, because it's no use.  I would
n't have told you, Margaret—"

"Yes, you would," interrupted Margaret.  "You
wouldn't have let me go away without knowing, since
you—you love me."

"That's it, exactly."  He nodded; he had been
making a point and she had seen it.  "I felt you were
entitled to know, but I can't say why.  You understand,
though, don't you?"

"Yes," she said.  "I understand."

"I knew you would," he answered.  "And you
won't think I 'm whining.  I 'm not.  I 'm so
thankful that we 've been together and understood each
other and that I love you that I don't reckon myself
a loser in the end.  It 's all been pure gain to me.
As long as I live I shall be better off for it; I shall
live on it always and never let any of it go.  If I never
see you again, I shall still be to the good.  But perhaps
I shall.  God knows."

"Oh, you will," cried Margaret.  "You 're sure to."

He smiled suddenly.  "That's what I tell myself.
If I get all right, it 'll be the easiest thing in the world.
I 'll come and call on you, wherever you happen to be,
and send in my card.  And if I 'm not going to get
well, I shall have to know it sooner or later, and then,
if you 'd let me, I 'd come just the same.

"I shouldn't expect anything," he added quickly.
"Not a single thing.  Don't be afraid of that.  Just
send in my card, as I said, and see you again and talk
to you, and call you Margaret.  I would n't cadge; you
could trust me not to do that, at least."

"You must get well and then come," said the girl
softly.  "And if you call me Margaret, I will call
you—"

She stopped.  "I never heard your Christian
name," she said.

"Just John," he answered, smiling.  "John—not
Jack or anything.  I will come, you can be sure.
Either free or a ticket-of-leave, I 'll come.  And now,
say good-by.  I mustn't keep you any longer; I 've
hurt old Samson's feelings as it is.  Good-by, Margaret.
You 'll get well in Switzerland, but you won't forget
the Karoo, will you?  Good-by."

"I won't forget anything," said Margaret, with eyes
that were bright and tender.  "Good-by.  When your
card comes in, I shall be ever so glad.  Good-by."

There was a fidgety interval before the big cart drove
up to the house, its wheels rending through the gritty
mud and its horses steaming as though they had been
boiled.  Mr. Samson employed each interlude in the
talk to glare at Ford in lofty offense; he seemed only
to be waiting till this dull business of departure was
concluded to call him to account.  Mrs. du Preez, who had
come across in the cart to bid Margaret farewell, was
welcome as a diversion.

"Well, where 's the lucky one?" she cried.  "Ah,
Miss Harding, can't you smell London from here?  If
you could bottle that smell, with a drop o' fog, a drop
o' dried fish and a drop o' Underground Railway to
bring out the flavor, you 'd make a fortune, sellin' it
to us poor Afrikanders.  But you 'll be sniffin' it from
the cask in three weeks from now.  Lord, I wish it was me."

"You ought to make a trip," suggested Margaret.

"Christian don't think so," declared Mrs. du Preez,
with her shrill laugh.  "He knows I 'd stick where I
touched like a fly in a jam-pot, and he 'd have to come
and pull me out of it himself."

She took an occasion to drop a private whisper into
Margaret's ear.

"Kamis is outside, waitin' to see you go.  He 's
talkin' to Paul."

The farewells accomplished themselves.  That of Mrs. Jakes
would have been particularly effective but for the
destructive intrusion of Mrs. du Preez.

"Er—a pleasant voyage, Miss Harding," she said,
in a thin voice.  "I may be in London soon myself—at
Putney.  But I suppose we 're hardly likely to meet
before you go abroad again."

"I wonder," said Margaret peaceably.

It was then that Mrs. du Preez struck in.

"Putney," she said, in a loud and callous voice, in
itself sufficient to scrape Mrs. Jakes raw.  "South the
water, eh?  But you can easy run up to London from
there if Miss Harding sends for you, can't you?"

Kamis came eagerly to the foot of the steps as
Margaret came down, and Mr. Samson, with a loud cough,
posted himself at the head of them to superintend.

"I am glad you came," said Margaret.  "I didn't
want to go away without seeing you."

He glanced up at Mr. Samson and the others, a
conscientious audience ranged above him, deputies of the
Colonial Mrs. Grundy, and smiled comprehendingly.

"Oh, I had to come," he said.  "I had to bid you
good-by."

There was no change in his appearance since she had
seen him last.  His tweed clothes were worn and shabby
as ever, and still strange in connection with his negro
face.

"And I wanted to thank you for what you did for
me that night," said Margaret earnestly.  "It was a
horrible thing, wasn't it?  But I hear—I have heard
that it has come all right."

Mr. Samson coughed again.  Mrs. Jakes, with an
elbow in each hand, coughed also.

"All right for me, certainly," the Kafir answered.
"They have given me something to do.  There 's an
epidemic of smallpox among the natives in the Transkei,
and I 'm to go there at once.  It couldn't be better
for me.  But you.  How about you?"

The Kafir boys who were carrying out the trunks and
stacking them under Paul's directions in the cart were
eyeing them curiously, and the audience above never
wavered in its solemn watch.  It was ridiculous and
exasperating.

"Oh, I shall do very well," said Margaret, striving
to be impervious to the influence of those serious eyes.
"You have my address, have n't you?  You must write
me how you get on."

"If you like," he agreed.

"You must," she said.  "I shall be keen to hear.  I
believed in you when nobody else did, except Paul."

A frightful cough from above did not silence her.
She answered it with a shrug.  She meant to say all she
had to say, though the ground were covered with
eaves-droppers.

"I shan't forget our talks," she went on; "under
the dam, with Paul's models.  You 'll get on now;
you 'll do all you wanted to do; but I was in at the
beginning, wasn't I?"

"You were, indeed," he answered; "at the darkest
part of it, the best thing that ever happened to me.
And now you 've got to go.  I 'm keeping you too
long."

Mr. Samson coughed again as they shook hands and
came down the steps to assist Margaret into the cart.

"Remember," said the girl; "you must write.  And
I shall always be glad and proud I knew you.
Good-by and good luck."

"Good-by," said the Kafir.  "I 'll write.  The best
of luck."

Paul put his rug over her knees and reached for his
whip.  The tall horses leaned and started, and the stoep
and its occupants, and the Kafir and Mr. Samson, slid
back.  A thin chorus of "good-bys" rose, and Margaret
leaned out to wave her hand.  A watery sun shone on
them feebly between clouds and they looked like the
culminating scene in some lugubrious drama.

When next she looked back, she saw the house against
the gray sky, solitary and little, with all the Karoo for
its background.  It looked unsubstantial and vague, as
though a mirage were left over from the months of sun,
to be the abode of troubles and perplexities that would
soon be dim and remote also.  Paul pulled his horses to
a standstill that she might see better; but even at that
moment fresh rain drummed on the hood of the cart
and came threshing about them, blotting the house from
view.

"That 's the last of it, Paul," said Margaret.  "No
more looking back now."

Paul smiled slowly and presently found words.

"When we come to the station," he said, "I will find
a Kafir to hold the horses and I will take you to the
train.  But I will not say much good-by."

"Why not?" inquired Margaret.

"Because soon I am coming to London too," he
answered happily, "and I will see you there."

Mr. Samson and Ford were the last to reënter the
house.  The Kafir had gone off unnoticed, saying nothing;
and Mrs. Jakes could not escape the conversational
attentions of Mrs. du Preez and was suffering in the
drawing-room.  The two men stayed to watch the cart
till the rain swept in and hid it.  Then Mr. Samson
resumed his threatful glare at Ford.

"Look here," he said formidably.  "What d'you
mean by your dashed cheek?  Eh?"

"Sorry," said Ford calmly.

Mr. Samson snorted.  "*Are* you?" he said.  "Well—all
right!"

.. vspace:: 4

.. class:: center medium

   THE END

.. vspace:: 6

.. pgfooter::