Blue Aloes Part 24

Harlenden had not called at Tiptree House since the night when, after the Chilvers' dinner-party, he had requested an interview with Mrs.

Ozanne and been asked to wait until a more propitious moment. Indeed, the latter, with mind full of foreboding and sorrow for her stricken child, had almost forgotten that he had ever made such a request. But Rosanne had not forgotten. And Rosanne knew why her lover stayed away from Tiptree House. He had made his reason sufficiently clear in a letter she had received the morning after their last meeting in the veranda. The terse sentences of that letter were like himself--cold and quiet without, but with the burn of hidden fires beneath the surface.

"Until you are prepared to let the world know how things are with us, I shall not come again. And another thing, Rosanne: I love you. Your kiss is on my lips, and no other woman's lips shall ever efface its exquisite memory You love me, too, I think. But do you love me more than certain other things? If not, and if you cannot be the Rosanne I wish you to be, caring only for such things as are worthy of your beauty and my pride, this love of ours can never come to its perfection but will have to be rooted out and crushed as a useless, hopeless thing. When you see this as I do, send for me. I shall not be long in coming."

Curiously enigmatic words if read by any but the eyes for which they were intended. But Rosanne knew what they meant, and read them with her teeth dug into her lip and cheeks pale as a bone. The first time she read them she burst into a furious, ringing laugh, and crushing the letter into a ball, flung it into the waste-paper basket and went out.

That was the afternoon on which she renewed her friendship with Everard Satchwell. But when she came home she sought the waste-paper basket, and taking out the letter, uncrumpled it and read it again. Thereafter she read it many times. Sometimes she went to bed with it crushed to her breast. But she never answered it. Instead, she wrote to Everard Satchwell and completed the work, already begun, of beguiling him back into her life just as he was beginning to hope he could do without her.

One day, when she was out riding with him, they met Harlenden riding alone. He had a moody, lonely look that wrenched at her heart for a moment until she saw the civilly indifferent smile with which he returned her half-appealing glance and Satchwell's cheery greeting. As their eyes met, his were so empty of what she knew they could contain for her that her heart turned cold in her breast. For the first time, the well-bred impa.s.sivity of his face irked and infuriated her. She doubted, almost hated him. She could have struck him with her riding-whip because he gave no sign of the hurt she had dealt him, but, instead, her face grew almost as smilingly masklike as his own; only when she got home, within the refuge of her bedroom walls, did it change and become distorted with pain and rage, its beauty marred and blotted out with tears.

That he should ride coolly by and give no sign, while _her_ heart ached as if a knife were in it, while she drained to the dregs the cup of lonely love! That was bitter. But bitterer still the knowledge that within herself lay the reason of their separation, as well as the power to end it. She could bring him back this very hour if she wished, was her thought. Yet, could she? Were not those other bonds that held her soul in slavery stronger than herself--stronger (as he had suggested in his letter) than her love for Denis Harlenden?

Miserably, her face lifeless and pale as the face of one who has lain among the ashes of renouncement and repentance, she rose from the bed where she had flung herself weeping, and creeping to an old-fashioned oak bureau of heavy make, sat down before it and began to unlock its many drawers and take therefrom a number of little jewel-cases. One by one she opened these and spread before her the radiant, sparkling things they contained with their myriad points of light and dancing colour. She ran the things through her fingers and bathed her hands in them like water. Then she curved her palms into a cup and held them filled to the brim with such a sparkling draught as only a G.o.d could drink--a draught with fire and ice in it, blood and crystal water, purity and evil. The roses of life and the blue flowers of death were all intermingled and reflected in that magic draught of frozen fire and liquid crystal. As the girl gazed into it, colour came back to her pale face, and her eyes caught and returned the flashing beams of light. It almost seemed as if she and the stones, able to communicate, were exchanging the signals of some secret code.

One jewel was more beautiful than all the rest, the lovely, flexible chain of stones she had been holding to her breast that night when Harlenden surprised her coming from the garden into the veranda--the thing he had shaken from her hand into her lap as if it had been a toad. She remembered Harlenden, now, as she gazed into the iridescent shapes of light, seeming to see in their brilliant, shallow depths worlds of romance that every-day life knew not of. At last she caught the thing up and kissed it burningly, then pressed it against her heart as if it possessed some quality of spikenard to ease the pain she still felt aching there. The sound of the dinner-gong shook her from her strange dreams, and hastily, yet with a sort of lingering regret, she began to gather up the jewels and lay them once more into their downy nests of white velvet. Her fingers caressed and her eyes embraced every single stone as she laid it away.

"I must get some more," she murmured feverishly to herself; "I must get some more--soon!"

She had forgotten Denis Harlenden now. Her lips took on a hungry, arid line, and her eyes were suddenly hard and more brilliant than the stones she handled. The l.u.s.t of diamonds, which is one of the greatest and most terrible of all the l.u.s.ts, had got her in its scorpion-claws and was squeezing love from her heart and beauty from her soul.

"Rosanne, your sister is worse," her mother said, at dinner. They had reached dessert, but these were the first words that had pa.s.sed between them. Rosanne's shoulders moved with the suggestion of a shrug.

"I think she gives way," she remarked coldly. "She could shake off that illness with the exercise of a little self-control."

"It is easy to talk like that when you are not the sufferer, dear. You forget that her whole heart is wrapped up in d.i.c.k. I believe that if he dies, she will--." The mother's words ended in something very like a sob. She looked utterly worn out and wretched. Her eyes wistfully searched Rosanne's, but the latter's mood appeared to be one of complete _sang-froid_.

"You always look on the worst side of things, mother," she said calmly.

"If d.i.c.k dies, and I daresay he will--cancer of the throat is nearly always fatal, I believe--Rosalie will get over it in time and marry some other man."

"Rosanne, I never thought you could be so heartless!"

"Nonsense, mother; it isn't heartlessness but common sense, and I think you ought not to encourage Rosalie by being sympathetic. A little bracing brutality is what she needs to pull her out of her misery."

Mrs. Ozanne rose, her eyes shining with anger as well as tears.

"I forbid you to speak to me of your unhappy sister unless you can speak kindly," she said, and added harshly; "I sometimes think, Rosanne, that you are either not my child or that that Malay woman bewitched and cast some evil spell over you when you were a baby."

Rosanne looked at her with musing eyes.

"I have sometimes thought so myself," she said slowly, "and that, instead of you reproaching me, it is I who have the right to reproach you for bartering me away to witchcraft rather than letting me die an innocent little child."

Sophia Ozanne's lips fell apart, and the colour died slowly out of her handsome, wholesome-looking face. She said nothing while she stood there gazing for a long minute at her daughter; but her breath came laboriously, and she held her hand over her heart as if she had received a blow there. At last, in silence, she walked heavily from the room.

Rosanne helped herself daintily to fruit salad, but when she had it on her plate she did nothing but stare at it. After a few moments she rang the bell and sent out a message to the stables that she would require the carriage for an hour.

"And tell my mother, if she asks, that I have gone to Mrs. Drummund's,"

she directed old Maria, as she went away to her room to put on a hat and wrap.

"It is pretty awful at home now," she complained to Kitty Drummund, some twenty minutes later. "The whole house is wrapped in gloom because d.i.c.k Gardner has a sore throat. One might as well live in a mausoleum."

"Dearest, it is a little more than a sore throat, isn't it? Len saw Tommy Gardner today, and he says d.i.c.k is in awful pain and can't speak.

They are sending him away to the Cape tonight, as a last hope. Doctor Raymond, there, is supposed to be wonderfully clever with affections of the throat, though I must say I don't believe it will be much good, since Stratton has condemned him."

"Oh, talk about something else, Kit, for heaven's sake!" cried Rosanne, with a sudden access of desperate irritation. "I can't bear any more d.i.c.k Gardner."

Kitty stroked the hair and bare shoulders of the girl sitting on the floor beside her.

"I know you're not really heartless, Nan, but you do sound so sometimes. I expect all this trouble at home is on your nerves a little bit. Tell me, how are your own affairs, darling? Is the engagement still going on?"

"No; the engagement is finished. I told you I never meant to marry him."

"I think you are making an awful mistake, Nan. He's the only man for you--the only man who can----"

"Can what?" asked Rosanne, with fierce moodiness. "Save my soul alive?"

"How strange! Those were the very words I was going to use, though I don't know why. They just came into my head."

"Everyone seems to be hitting the right nail on the head tonight,"

commented Rosanne dryly. "First, my mother; now, you. I wonder who'll be the third. All good things run in threes, don't they?"

Kitty knew better than to try to cope with her in that mood, so she remained silent until Rosanne rose and caught up her hat.

"Oh, don't go yet, darling! Do stay and see Len. He had to go out directly after dinner, but he promised not to be long. Fancy! They're having such excitement up at the compound. But I don't know whether I ought to tell you, though," she finished doubtfully.

"Oh, yes, do!" said Rosanne, wearily ironical. "Do tell me something that will make life seem less of an atrocious joke than it is--especially if you oughtn't to tell."

"Well, we're not supposed to breathe anything like this outside the compound walls, you know. Len told me not to mention it to a soul; but I don't expect he meant to include you, for, of course, you are all right."

"Of course!" Rosanne smiled mockingly at herself in the mirror before which she was arranging her hair preparatory to posing her hat upon it.

"Well, my dear, just think! They've discovered a Kafir boy in the compound who has been stealing thousands of pounds' worth of diamonds for months, and pa.s.sing them to someone outside. They caught him in the act this afternoon."

"How frightfully exciting!" Rosanne had put her hat on now, but was still manoeuvring to get it at exactly the correct angle over her right eye. "How did he do it?"

"He made a little tunnel from under his sleeping-bunk to the outside of the compound wall, about a yard and a half long, and through that he would push a parcel of diamonds by means of a stick with a flat piece of tin at the end of it, something like a little rake and exactly the same length as the tunnel. He always pushed a little heap of earth through first, so as to cover the diamonds up from any eyes but those of his confederate outside. When the confederate had removed the diamonds, he pushed back the earth against the tin rake, which the boy always left in place until he had another packet of diamonds ready to put through. In this way the hole was never exposed, except during the few moments, once a week, when the boy was putting in a fresh packet."

"But how awfully thrilling!" exclaimed Rosanne.

"Yes; isn't it? What they want to do now is to catch the confederate who is, of course, the real culprit, for encouraging an ignorant Kafir to steal."

"Who could it possibly be?"

"Goodness knows! Such heaps of people come inside this outer compound, tradespeople, servants with messages, and so on. But just think of it, Nan! Thousands of pounds' worth, and the Kafir boy only got ten pounds for each packet he pushed through."

"Well, what would a Kafir do with thousands of pounds, anyway?" said Rosanne, laughing irrelevantly. "I think ten pounds was quite enough."

"That's true--too much for the wretch, indeed! However, he has confessed and told everything he could to help our people to trap the other wretch. Unfortunately, that is not very much."

"No?"