Blue Aloes Part 12

"Oh, don't we?" said the latter emphatically. "You should just see the pile of men that came in to lunch here today--just to have a look at her. The story of her glory has gone forth. She came over to our table and asked if we minded if she sat with us, and then she wound her lovely manners all around mother so that mum thinks she's a dream and an angel. But _I_ don't cotton to her much, Gay--and I can feel she doesn't like me, either, though she was as sweet as honey. My dear, she will n.o.bble all our men--I feel it in my bones."

"Let her," said Gay listlessly.

"She even has old Lundi Druro crumpled up--what do you think of _that_?" Gay's charming face turned to a mask. "That gives you an idea of her power," continued Beryl dolorously, "if she can keep Lundi Druro amused. She is sitting in the lounge with him now. They've been there ever since lunch, and he was to have gone out to his mine early this morning."

Gay jumped up from her chair.

"Are you coming for that ride or not, Berlie? I'm sick of scorching indoors." There were, indeed, two spots of flame in her cheeks.

"Oh, Gay, I can't; I am too G. I. for anything." "G. I." is Rhodesian for "gone in," a common condition for both men and women and things in that sprightly land of nicknames and nick-phrases.

"I'm off, then," said Gay hurriedly.

"Wait a minute--I'll come down with you!" said Beryl, and, rushing to the mirror over the mantel, began to pat her pretty _cendre_ hair flat to her head, in unconscious imitation of Mrs. Hading's coiffure.

The two girls went downstairs together. Beryl's arm thrust through her friend's. Gay's horse stood at the side entrance, facing the staircase. She instinctively quickened her pace as they reached the lounge door, but, before she could pa.s.s, it opened, and Mrs. Hallett came out.

"Oh, I was just coming to look for you girls. Mrs. Scott is in from Umvuma, Gay, and dying to see you."

Gay gave an inward groan. Mrs. Scott was an old friend of her dead mother's, and about the only woman in the world for whom the girl would have entered the lounge at that moment. As it was, she followed Beryl's mother swiftfoot through the swing door, very upright and smart in her glossy tan riding-boots, knee-breeches, and graceful long coat of soft tan linen. In the matter of riding-kit, Gay always went nap.

A ball or day gown she might wear until it fell off her back, but when it came to habits, she considered nothing too good or too recent for her.

For a moment, Marice Hading looked away from the man who sat opposite, amusing her with apt and cynical reflections on life in Rhodesia, and shot a soft, dark glance at the straight back of the girl in riding-kit. Her cleverly appraising eye took in, with the instantaneousness of photography, every detail of Gay's get-up, and her brain acknowledged that she had seldom seen a better one either in Central Park or Rotten Row. But no expression of any such opinion showed in her weary, disdainful eyes or found its way to her lips, for in the art of using language to conceal her thoughts, Marice Hading had few rivals. What she said to Druro, whose glance had also wandered that way, was:

"One cannot help noticing what a hard-riding, healthy-looking crowd the women of this country are."

The words sounded like a simple, frank statement; but somehow they robbed Gay of some of the perfection of her young and charming ensemble, and made her one of a crowd in which her distinction was lost. Druro felt this vaguely without being able to tell exactly how it happened. He knew nothing of the subtleties of a woman's mind. He had thought that Gay looked rather splendidly young and sweet, and, because of it, a fresh pang shot through him at the remembrance of her scornful dismissal of him the night before. But, with Mrs. Hading's words, the impression pa.s.sed, and he got a quick vision of Gay as just an ordinary girl who had been extremely rude to him. This helped him to meet with equanimity the calm, clear glance she sent through him.

"Don't you know the little riding girl?" asked Mrs. Hading softly, but something in Druro's surprised expression made her cover the question with a faintly admiring remark: "She's quite good-looking, I think.

Who is she?"

"The daughter of an old friend of mine--a Colonel Liscannon," said Druro, speaking in a low voice and rapidly. He would have preferred not to discuss Gay at all, but his natural generosity impelled him to accord her such dignity and place as belonged to her and not to leave her where Mrs. Hading's words seemed to place her--just the other side of some fine, invisible line.

"Ah, one of the early pioneers? They were all by way of being captains and colonels, weren't they?" murmured Marice Hading, still weaving fine, invisible threads.

Druro frowned slightly. "Colonel Liscannon is an old service-man----"

"May I beg for one of those delicious cigarettes you were smoking after lunch?" she said languidly. "And do tell where to get some like them.

I find it so difficult to get anything at all smokable up here, except from your clubs."

Thus, Colonel Liscannon and his daughter were gracefully consigned to the limbo of subjects not sufficiently interesting to hold the attention of Mrs. Hading. If she could not, by reason of Druro's natural chivalry, put Gay just over the wrong side of some subtle social line she had drawn, she could, at least, thrust her out of the conversation altogether and out of Druro's mind. This was always a pastime she found fascinating--pushing someone out of a man's mind and taking the empty place herself--and one at which long practice had made her nearly perfect. So it is not astonishing that she succeeded so well with Druro that, when Gay left her friends and slipped out to her waiting horse, he did not even notice her going. He was busy trying to persuade Mrs. Hading to come for a spin around the w.a.n.kelo kopje in his car, and he was not unsuccessful. Only, they went further than the kopje. About six miles out they got a glimpse of a solitary rider ahead, going like the wind. A cloud of soft, ashen dust rising from under the horse's heels floated back and settled like the gentle dew from heaven upon the car and its occupants. Druro was on the point of slackening speed, but Mrs. Hading's pencilled brows met in a line above her eyes, and one of her little white teeth showed in her underlip.

"Get past her, please," she said coldly. "I object to other people's dust."

Druro was about to object in his turn, though, for a moment, he philandered with the delightful thought of getting even with Gay by covering her with dust and petrol fumes. Unfortunately, his gallant resistance to this pleasant temptation would never be known, for Gay suddenly and unexpectedly wheeled to the left and put her horse's head to the veld. The swift wheeling movement, with its attendant extra scuffling of dust, sent a further graceful contribution of fine dirt on to the occupants of the car. It would have been difficult to accuse Gay of doing it on purpose, however, for she appeared blandly unconscious of the neighbourhood of fellow beings. She gave a little flick of her whip, and away she went over a great burnt-out patch of veld, leaving the long, white, dusty road to those who had no choice but to take it.

Mrs. Hading did not love Gay Liscannon any better for her score, but she would have disliked her in any case. Because she was no longer young herself, youth drove at her heart like a poisoned dagger. One of the few keen pleasures she had left in life was to bare her foils to the attack of some inexperienced girl, to match her wit and art and beauty against a fresh cheek and ingenuous heart, and prove to the world that victory was still to her. But when she had done it, victory was dust in her palm and bitter in her mouth as dead-sea apples. For she knew that the wolf of middle age was at her door.

Marice Hading was one of those unhappy women who have drained to the dregs every cup of pleasure they can wrench from life and fled from the healing cup of pain. Now, with the chilly and uncompromising hand of forty clutching at her, pain was always with her--not enn.o.bling, chastening pain, but the pain of those who, having been overfull, must henceforth go empty.

Small wonder that, weary-eyed and dry-souled, she roamed the earth in feverish search of solace and refreshment. Her husband, a generous, affectionate man, condemned by her selfishness to a waste of arid years empty of wife-love or children, had died of overwork, dyspepsia, and general dissatisfaction some eight years before, leaving his widow with an income of two thousand pounds a year, a sum she found all too small for her requirements.

In her fashion, she had been in love several times during her widowhood, but never sufficiently so to surrender her liberty. Horror of child-bearing and a pa.s.sion for the care and cultivation of her own beauty were further reasons for not succ.u.mbing to the temptation to take another man slave in marriage. She had contented herself with holding the hearts of the men who loved her in her hands and squeezing them dry of every drop of devotion and self-sacrifice they could generate.

But the harvest of hearts was giving out, and the wolf was at the door.

She had had very bad luck in the last year or two. The hearts that had come her way were as selfish as her own, and knew how to slip elusively from greedy little hands, without yielding too much. For a long time it had seemed to her that the world had become bankrupt of big, generous-giving hearts, and that there were no more little games of life worth playing. Now, suddenly and unexpectedly, she happened upon w.a.n.kelo, a green spot in the desert. Here were girls to act as counters in the game she loved to play, and here, too, unless she were grievously mistaken, was a man who had the best of sport to offer.

With the hunter's sure instinct for the prey, she recognized unerringly the big, generous qualities of Druro's nature. Here was a heart that could be made to suffer and to give. Besides, he was extremely good-looking. She felt a kind of hopeful certainty that he could offer her jaded heart something new in the way of emotions.

In consideration of these things, she decided to pitch her tent for a while in w.a.n.kelo. Selukine could wait. Her projected visit there was, in any case, only one of speculation and curiosity. She had heard of the place as being thick with small gold mines closed down for want of capital, and it had occurred to her that the possibility of finding a gold mine cheaply, and a capitalist for nothing at all, was quite on the cards. Besides, discreet inquiry, or, rather, discreet listening to the frank discussion of other people's affairs, which is one of the features of Rhodesian life, had elicited the happy information that Druro was on the way to becoming a very wealthy man. The Leopard reef, report said, was making bigger and richer at every blast, and the expectation was that it would be the richest thing in the way of mines that Rhodesia had yet known. Luck, like nature, has her darlings.

The Leopard mine was Druro's own property and the darling of his heart, next to his dog Toby. He had taken forty thousand pounds sterling from it in one year and spent it in another. That was the time he stayed away a whole year among the lamp-posts, "forgot" to get married, and came back without a bean. He declared there were plenty more forty thousands to be got out of the Leopard, and perhaps there were, but, unfortunately, during his absence the reef had been lost. As he was the only man who believed it would ever be found again, he had encountered some difficulty in getting together sufficient capital to restart the mine, for, of course, it had been shut down on the loss of the reef. But, on the strength of his personality, he had succeeded where most men would have failed. After many months, operations were in full swing. It was said that the mine was panning three ounces over a width of four-six, and a strike of a thousand feet proved, with the reef at the bottom of the shaft, richer and stronger than ever. But Druro himself gave away little information on the subject, beyond admitting sometimes in the bitters-time before dinner at the club, that the mine was looking all right. Rumour did the rest.

For a few days after Mrs. Hading's arrival, Lundi Druro disappeared from every-day life in w.a.n.kelo. It was a way he had of doing, and everyone who sought him at such times would find him at the Leopard in pants embroidered with great holes burned into them by cyanide and acids, a disreputable shirt without any b.u.t.tons or collar, and face and hands blackened beyond recognition with the machine-oil and grime inseparable from a large mining plant. He always did his own a.s.saying, taking both time and trouble over it. It must certainly be admitted that, if he knew how to play when he played, he also worked some when he worked.

During this time, Mrs. Hading was busy in many ways, but chiefly in winding her lovely manners about people whom she decided would be useful to her, and prosecuting a further acquaintance with Beryl Hallett and Gay Liscannon. It was quite unavoidable that she and Gay should meet, however averse they might be to one another, and each accepted the fact with an outward calm that gave no indication of inward fires. Mrs. Hading was charming to Gay, as was her invariable practice while searching for c.h.i.n.ks in the opponent's armour. Her hands blessed, even while her fingers were busy feeling for the soft spots in the victim's skull. Gay, on her side, was pleasant, polite, and interested, while guarding her heart behind a barrier as fine as a shirt of steel mail. For, though of a frank and generous disposition, she was not a fool, and life had taught her a few things about the att.i.tude of mind of most pretty unattached women toward young girls in the same case.

At eleven o'clock one morning, they were all gathered round Mrs.

Hallett's tea-table--Gay, Berlie, Mrs. Hading, and several men, for 11 A.M. is the "off" hour in Rhodesia, when everyone leaves his business, if he has any, to take tea in the pleasantest society he can find. At w.a.n.kelo, most people sallied forth to the lounge of the "Falcon," the club-room of the town, where morning tea was a ceremony, almost a rite.

Someone had just remarked on the prolonged absence of Lundi Druro when his car rolled up to the door, and, a moment later he strolled in and came over to the circle of tea-drinkers, cool and peaceful in their white clothes and shady hats. Unfortunately, his dog, Toby, chose this as a suitable occasion for saying a few pleasant words to Gay's dog, Weary. In a moment chairs were being pushed out of the way; teacups and scones and b.u.t.tered toast were flying in every direction; men were tangled up with a revolving, growling ma.s.s of black and brown fur, and half a dozen feminine voices were crying pitifully:

"Oh, save Toby!" "Don't let Weary kill him!" "Poor little Toby, he has no teeth!"

Toby was not the dog Druro had fished out of the Lundi River--to that bull-terrier there had been many successors, and all had come to bad and untimely ends. Druro, indeed, had sworn that he would never acquire another dog; but Toby had sprung from none knew whence and acquired him. He was a little black, limping fellow of no breed at all, whose eyes had grown filmy from long gazing at Lundi Druro as if he were a sun-G.o.d or something that dazzled the vision. He usually carried a sacrificial offering in the shape of an enormous stone culled on his travels, and, with this in his mouth, would sit for hours, gazing at his G.o.d playing poker or otherwise engaged. The only time he relinquished this stone was when he had a fight on hand, a rather frequent occurrence, as his perpetual limp and partially chewed-off ears testified. For, though his teeth were worn away by the stone-habit, he had a soul of steel and was afraid of nothing in the dog line. Gay's dog was one of those from whom he would stand no nonsense, and they never met without attempting to settle their feud for once and all. Druro usually settled it by banging Weary on the nose until he let go, for the latter was a powerful beast, and if allowed to work his wicked way, Toby would not have had a hope. But today, for some reason known to himself, Druro had an objection to hitting Gay's dog and contented himself with wrenching Weary's jaws apart, a dangerous and not very easy feat to accomplish. Weary, however, came in for several sound kicks and cuffs from other directions, and his mistress was in by no means an angelic frame of mind by the time she had her champion safe back between her knees, held by his collar.

"Why don't you keep your wretched little mongrel at home?" she inquired bitterly of Druro.

"It's a free country," responded Lundi blandly, wiping his damp brow and Toby's b.l.o.o.d.y ear with the same handkerchief. "You should train your bully to go for dogs of his own size."

"You know Toby always starts it."

"Well, I don't say he doesn't," admitted Druro. "But he does it on principle. He's a born reformer--aren't you, Tobe? Picks a sc.r.a.p with any one he considers a disreputable, dissipated character." Toby's master smiled mockingly at Weary's mistress.

"Reformation, like charity, should begin at home," she flashed back, and the instant she had uttered the words could have bitten off her tongue. For everyone was smiling delightedly. A few quarrels and scandals give a zest to life in Rhodesia, and are always warmly welcomed. No one knew the real foundation of Gay's and Druro's misunderstanding, but it had been plain for some time that there was one.

"We were talking about getting up a picnic," said peace-loving Mrs.

Hallett. "Mrs. Hading must be shown a real Rhodesian picnic."

"I want it to be a moonlight one!" cried Berlie. "They are twice as much fun."

"Yes; but there won't be a moon for nearly a month," someone complained.

"Well, we must have a day picnic now, and a moonlight one next month.

We shall want your car, Lundi."

"You can have it any time. Where do you think of going?"

"Either to Sombwelo Forest or Selukine."