Blue Aloes Part 10

Saltire went to meet Bernard van Cannan at Cradock, taking with him the papers left in his care by Richard Saxby. There was not so much to explain to the owner of Blue Aloes, as might have been expected. The doctor who treated him for neuritis and found him dying of slow poisoning by antimony had lifted the scales from his eyes, and a little clear thought, away from the spell of the woman known as Isabel van Cannan, had done much to show him that the sequence of tragedies in his home was due to something more than the callousness of fate. Thus he was, in some measure, prepared for Saxby's confession, though not for the fact that the woman he had adored to fanaticism had never been his wife, or more to him than might have been an adder gathered from his own aloe hedge, with all the traits and attributes peculiar to adders who are gathered to the bosom and warmed there.

He came back to a home from which the spell of the golden, laughing woman was lifted. The evil menace that had hung for so long over the old farm was lifted for ever. Part was buried by the blue-aloe hedge; part of it, plucked from the dregs of an ebbing river, lay in a far grave with no mark on it but the plain words, "Isabel Saxby." While the sad watcher in the kraal had no more need to walk and whisper warnings by night.

It was the children who laughed now at Blue Aloes, merry and free as elves in a wood. There was a glow came out of Christine Chaine that communicated itself to all. She and Saltire were to be married as soon as a Quentin aunt, who was on her way, had settled down comfortably with the children. Afterward, Roddy would live with them at the Cape until his schooldays were over. In the meantime, they walked in a garden of Eden, for the rains had made the desert bloom, and life offered them its fairest blossoms with both hands.

The Leopard

PART I

It was nine o'clock, and time for the first waltz to strike up. The wide, empty floor of the Falcon Hotel lounge gleamed with a waxen glaze under the brilliant lights, and the dancers' feet were tingling to begin. Michael Walsh, who always played at the w.a.n.kelo dances, sat down at the piano and struck two loud arresting bars, then gently caressed from the keys the crooning melody of the _Wisteria Waltz_.

Two by two, the dancers drew into the maze of music and movement, and became part of a weaving rhythmic, kaleidoscopic picture.

There was not an ill-looking person in the room. The men were of a tanned, hard-bitten, adventurous brand; the women were nearly all pretty or attractive or both, and mostly young. These are the usual attributes of women in a new country like Rhodesia; for men do not take ugly, unattractive women to share life with them in the wilds, and girls born in such places have a gift all their own of beauty and charm.

Many of them were badly dressed, however, for that, too, is an attribute of the wilds, where women mostly make their own clothes, unless they are rich enough to get frequent parcels from England.

There was this to be noted about the gowns: When they were new, they were patchy affairs, made up at home from materials bought in Rhodesian shops; but when well cut, they were battered and worn. Take, for instance, Mrs. Lisle's gown of pale-green satin and sequins. She had been an actress before she married Barton Lisle and came out to the ups and downs of a mining speculator's life, and all her clothes were _rechauffees_ of the toilettes in which she had once dazzled provincial audiences. Gay Liscannon's frock of pale rose-leaf silk, with a skirt that was a flurry of delicious little frills and a bodice of lace, sewn with little paste dew drops that folded around her fresh young form like the filmy wings of a b.u.t.terfly, had Bond Street stamped all over it, as they who ran might read; but it had not been paid for, although it was already tumbling into little tears and tatters. For Gay was no Penelope to sit patiently at home and ply the nimble needle. She had worn it to six dances already, and would probably wear it another six before she summoned up the nerve to present her father with the bill.

Berlie Hallett possessed a London G.o.dmother in the shape of an aunt who sent her an occasional frock, and her white-tulle-and-forget-me-nots was all that it should have been except that it had turned to an ashen creamy hue, possessed a long tear down the back (unskilfully concealed by a ribbon sash), lacked about six yards of lace (accidentally ripped off the flounces), and was minus a few dozen posies of forget-me-nots (now in the possession of various amorous young men). Berlie no more than her friend Gay was a sit-by-the-fire-and-mend creature. They were real, live, out-of-door, golfing, hard-riding girls, full of spirits and gaiety and _joie de vivre_.

Berlie, at that moment, was dancing with all her soul as well as her feet, melted in the arms of Johnny Doran, a rich rancher who had proposed to her eight times and whom she intended should propose another ten before she finally refused him. But Gay, the best dancer in Rhodesia, was not dancing. Her feet were tingling, and the music was in her brain like wine, and her heart was burning, and her eyes, though not turned that way, were watching, with impatient wrath, the door across the room. But with her lips she smiled at the little group of clamouring, protesting men about her, and gave out one brief statement.

"My shoe hurts me."

"Which one?" they clamoured, like a lot of school-boys. "And why?

It's the same pair you danced to the dawn in last week--why should it hurt you now? And why does one hurt you? Why not two? Who will bet that it won't stop hurting after this dance?" they inquired of one another, "and who is the man it is hurting for?"

Gay surveyed them dispa.s.sionately with her misty, violet eyes.

"Don't be silly," said she serenely; "my shoe hurts."

They gave her up as hopeless and faded away, one by one, bent on finding someone to finish the waltz with. Men out-numbered girls by about four to one in w.a.n.kelo. Only Tryon stayed, lounging against the wall, smiling subtly to himself.

"There's Molly Tring just coming in," said Gay to him. "You'd better go and get a dance from her, d.i.c.k."

"By and by," said Tryon, with his cryptic smile. "I'm waiting for something."

Even as he spoke, Gay saw across the room the face she had been watching for. A tall man had come into the doorway and stood casting a casual but comprehensive eye about him. He was not in evening dress, but wore a loose grey lounge suit of rather careless aspect, and his short, fairish, curly hair was ruffled as though he had been running his fingers through it. Accompanying him was a small black dog with a large stone in its mouth, which came into the ballroom and sat down.

Gay gave one look at the pair of them, and the colour went out of her face. There was more than a glint of pa.s.sion in the eyes she turned to Tyron, who was smiling no longer.

"I'll finish this dance with you, if you like, d.i.c.k."

"My shoe hurts," said Tryon.

She flung away from him in a rage and a moment later, was lost among the rest of the dancers in the arms of one Claude Hayes, a man not too proud to take the goods the G.o.ds offered, even if they were short ratio. Tryon sauntered over to the doorway tenanted by the man in grey, who appeared to be delightfully impervious to the fact that he was the only person on the scene not in evening dress.

"h.e.l.lo, Tryon!" said he.

"h.e.l.lo, Lundi! Thought you meant to turn up and dance tonight?"

"Yes, so I did," said Lundi Druro, looking at Tryon with the blithe and friendly smile that made all men like him. "But I forgot."

"I won't ask what you were doing, then," was Tryon's dry comment. To which Druro responded nothing. He was one of those who did before the sun and moon that which seemed good unto him to do, with a sublime indifference to comments. Everyone knew what he was doing when he "forgot," and he didn't care if they did.

"Lundi meant to get married, but he forgot," was a household jest in Rhodesia, founded on a legend from home that, at a certain supper-party, a beautiful actress had inveigled him into making her an offer of marriage, and the ceremony had been fixed for the following day. But, though bride and wedding-party turned up at the appointed hour, the bridegroom never materialized. He had gone straight from the supper-party at the Savoy to the Green Room Club and fallen into a game of poker that lasted throughout the night and all the next day, with the result that all memory of the proposed wedding had faded from his mind. The lady, very much injured in her tenderest feeling (professional and personal vanity), had sued him for a large sum of money, which he had paid without blinking and returned to South Africa, heart-free, to make some more.

"Did you pull in the pot?" asked Tryon, who was a poker player himself.

"No," said Druro regretfully; "hadn't time. I left the game and came away as soon as I remembered this blessed dance."

Just then the waltz came to an end, its last notes trailing off into nothingness and blowing away like a handful of leaves on a breeze. The kaleidoscopic patterns sorted themselves and turned into a circle of perambulating couples, and Gay and her partner pa.s.sed the two men in the doorway.

"Hi! I want to speak to you," said Druro, whose manners were unique, making an imperious sign at Gay. She looked at him with eyes like frozen violets and walked on. Druro, looking after her, observed that she and her partner pa.s.sed out of a door leading to the east veranda.

"H'm!" said he, reflective but unperturbed. Then he turned to Tryon.

"Go and get Hayes away from her, Tryon."

"That's a nice job!" commented Tryon.

"Go on, old man!" said Druro, kindly but firmly. "Tell him there's a man in the bar wants to see him on a matter of life and death. He'll thank you for it afterward."

Tryon went grumbling through the ballroom, and Druro stepped back out of the front hall into the street and made a circuit of the hotel. By the time he had reached the east veranda, Tryon was gently leading away the unresisting Hayes, and a rose-leaf shoe, visible between two pots of giant croton, guided the stalker to his prey. He sat down on a seat beside her.

"Did you mean it when you cut me in that brutal manner just now--or was it an accident?" he asked reproachfully.

Gay did not answer or stir. His manner changed.

"Gay, I am most awfully sorry and ashamed of myself. Will you forgive me?"

The girl sat up straight in her chair at that, and looked at him. She was too generous to ignore a frank appeal for pardon, but she had that within which demanded propitiation.

"Have you any explanation to offer?" she asked, and he answered:

"I clean forgot all about it."

She stared at him in exasperation and scorn, her eyes sparkling with anger, and he returned her gaze with his frank and fearless smile.

"_M'Schlega_," the natives called him--"the man who always laughs whether good or bad comes to him."

Gay at last withdrew her face into the shadows where he could no longer see it clearly.

"I suppose you think that disappointing a girl and making her lose a dance is nothing," she said quietly.

"You misjudge me. If I had thought about it at all, it would never have happened. But the whole thing went clean out of my mind until it was too late to dress and get down here in time. Do you think I would _purposely_ miss such a keen pleasure as it is to dance with you--and the honour of having your first waltz given me?"

She did not answer, but slowly her anger began to fade.

"I came down here as hard as I could belt, as soon as I remembered."