Grit Lawless Part 21

"It's rather a big check we've come upon," he resumed, after a momentary pause. "I'm sadly in need of a.s.sistance... That's why I have come to you."

She opened her eyes wide in astonishment.

"You never supposed that I might a.s.sist you?" she said.

"I am hoping you will," he answered... "in a way in which only you can.

I want you--if you will be so kind--to furnish me with Mr Lawless'

present address. He ought to be here, on the spot."

She sat very still for a while, looking beyond him out through the window.

"Isn't one broken head and one life sufficient?" she asked presently in a low, strangely controlled, unemotional voice. "It seems to me that your view of things is out of proportion, Colonel Grey, when you can sacrifice the lives of men for a packet of scandalous letters."

"That means," he said, "that you decline to give me the information?"

"I have not the information to give," she answered with dignity.--"I should certainly not give it, if I had. ... My one fear is that Mr Lawless will hear of this affair and return."

"I could wish I shared your belief," he replied. "But I fancy you may ease your mind on that score... And there is less danger in this than you imagine... the dog that bites is chained."

He eyed her narrowly as he referred thus to Van Bleit's arrest; but he could make nothing of the calm, unchanging face, the quiet eyes that looked steadily back into his.

"You hate that man," she said slowly. "You will--hang him, if you can."

He sat forward and peered at her queerly from under his bent brows. He had half expected when he went there that evening that she would make an appeal to his clemency on behalf of the man against whom he would appear as princ.i.p.al witness. That she did not, spoke well for her pride and self-control. Such courage and restraint moved him to admiration. She hid her feelings magnificently, he decided, ignorant of how little she had to conceal.

"You think so," he said, rising, and standing, hat in hand, in front of her, preparatory to taking his leave after his fruitless errand. "I should have thought you might have perceived that until I have got possession of the letters I have nothing to gain by his death. Denzil has the packet in his keeping, I believe. If I can get hold of it before the case comes on, Van Bleit shall account for the life he has taken."

"And that is your reason for coming to me for the address?" she observed.

"That," he answered bluntly, "is my reason. I want Grit Lawless for the job."

CHAPTER FOURTEEN.

In a lonely shanty on the veld, twenty good miles from the nearest town.

Lawless took up his quarters with the woman in whose society he had left Cape Town. The shanty was of corrugated iron lined with planks, and consisted of two small bedrooms and a living-room, divided from one another by matchboard part.i.tions. There were primitive out-buildings that had served a former occupier for stables, and a disused mud hut stood in a sort of blank isolation some quarter of a mile distant.

Behind the hut on steeply shelving ground was densely wooded cover, the only sign of shade in the whole picture. The hut had been used by natives apparently quite recently. The wooden blocks, curved to fit the neck, that serve the black man for pillow, stood on the ground. These blocks were joined together by a wooden chain, as is the marital custom of the land. Beside them was a worn and dirty blanket, and a calabash and mealie stamper lay against the wall close to the doorless opening.

This primitive native home, with its rude implements and poor accommodation, was seemingly deserted. Probably the coloured occupants, having no lawful possession of the place, had fled precipitately at the coming of strangers who might question their right to be there, and were doubtless watching at no great distance until the white man should depart, as he always departed after the briefest of sojourns in that lonely spot. That they would return eventually was certain; no native, save under compulsion, vacates a place and leaves his blanket behind.

Lawless and his companion settled into their temporary home and proceeded to do for themselves. The woman set the house to rights, while Lawless stabled the horses he had hired from the town, and went out to gather wood to make a fire. When he had collected a sufficient quant.i.ty, he returned to the house, piled the logs upon the hearth, and set light to them. They had brought provisions with them, and he filled a new tin kettle from his water-bag and set it on the flames. The woman emerged from the bedroom while he knelt upon the hearth, and stood in the doorway watching him with a light of admiration in her eyes.

"Say, baas, there are no sheets to the beds," she drawled,--"nor blankets."

He was intent on his occupation, and did not look round.

"d.a.m.n it!" he muttered. "I never thought of that... Of course not...

We'll have to sleep in our clothes."

"Been jumped, I expect," she said.

"Very likely. What an a.s.s I was not to come better prepared."

"Oh! what does it matter?" she returned. "We've both roughed it before.

It's a picnic. Get up, Grit. The cooking's my department. You unpack the food stuff. I tumbled on a gridiron under one of the beds. It's a bit rusty, but I'll clean it in the flame; then we'll cook some of those chops you bought. I'm hungry."

He was hungry also, and he fell to with appet.i.te, the roughness of the fare notwithstanding, when she placed the fizzling chops on a tin plate and brought them to the table. He cleared a s.p.a.ce for them, and cut a chunk of bread from the loaf for himself and another for her, while she made the tea. Then they sat down to the first meal in their new quarters.

It was a silent meal. They were too hungry to talk, and both were tired after a long day in the saddle. It was more than three weeks since they had left Cape Town. They had stayed at different places, until, hearing of the shanty from a man in Stellenbosch, who was anxious to let it, and who told wonderful fairy-tales of the sport to be enjoyed in the neighbourhood. Lawless had decided to take it, and having paid the first month's rent in advance, bought provisions and hired horses and set out with his companion to take possession of what the owner described as a comfortably furnished shooting-box. Comfort is largely a matter of comparison. Lawless had roughed it often, had fared worse, and been worse housed; but his new surroundings depressed him. It was probably the contrast between them and the recent comfort he had enjoyed that forced home the sordidness of the present life.

When they had supped he dragged his chair nearer the doorway and sat smoking, while the woman cleared away the remains of their meal. She joined him when she had finished her task, drawing up a chair opposite to his on the other side of the opening. Then she took a packet of cigarette-papers and tobacco from her pocket, and rolled herself a cigarette.

"You are dull, dear boy," she remarked, as she caught the box of matches which Lawless tossed her in silence. "You are a man of action, and the solitudes are not to your taste. This life is the silly sort of mistake made by most honeymooners."

Lawless looked across at her, a queer expression in his eyes. In the dim light, which mercifully concealed the thickness of the paint upon her face, she was really strikingly handsome. She looked younger than she appeared in the daytime.

"You ought always to sit in the twilight," he said with brutal frankness.

She laughed good-naturedly.

"If you pay me compliments like that, Hughie, you'll make me vain," she said.

She drew at her cigarette, inhaling the smoke and discharging it through her nostrils. He watched her with an odd feeling of disgust. The bond between them was peculiar. The affection was without doubt stronger on her side than on his. But he ungrudgingly admitted she made a man a capital chum; and since throwing in his lot with hers he was keenly alive to the fact that many men envied him his possession. It had been a source of much annoyance to him, and of great gratification to Tottie, that she had been the object of offensive admiration at every place they visited. She had declared that it was because he was jealous that he determined to bury her in the wilds of the veld.

"You are the type of man who would be capable of murdering a woman, Grit," she said.

"There you are mistaken," he had answered. "If a woman once washed her hands of me, I should simply have done with her."

"One can't turn one's back on an incident so as to forget it altogether," she had objected.

"For the matter of that," he had returned, "a man can't command memory, but he can so put a thing out of mind that it ceases to disturb him."

"Then, if ever I chance to elope with Van Bleit," Tottie had flung at him audaciously, "I shall have the satisfaction of knowing my memory is relegated to the ashbin..."

They sat on until the light failed and darkness settled upon the veld, closing about them stealthily, and shutting out the immensity of the endless stretch of treeless waste that was all that could be seen from the house, a wide expanse of undulating veld held in the blue hollow of the sky. The darkness crept closer. It shut out the face of each from the other's view. A small red glow marked where Tottie still held a cigarette between her painted lips, and a larger duller glow shone from the bowl of Lawless' pipe.

"The moon will be up in a short while," he said abruptly, and the words, quietly as he had spoken, snapped the silence almost violently, as a voice raised above a whisper in a death-chamber might do. "Shall we stay and see it rise?"

"Yes, if you like."

She flung the end of her cigarette out into the darkness, and watched it where it lay like a somewhat fiery glow-worm until it smouldered out.

And then slowly the darkness began less to roll away than to disclose itself. Black objects stood out dimly from the shade, and the line of the horizon defined itself and almost imperceptibly, so gradual was the change, grew lighter. Tones of colour appeared in the picture; the black melted into purple, so rich and deep as to seem more dense than the sombre shade it superseded. And then abruptly the scene brightened.

A soft yellow glow appeared in the sky, and the inverted curve of a blood-red moon showed above the horizon.

Lawless stood up, and knocking the ash from his pipe, leant with his shoulder pressed against the framework of the door, and watched the rising of the moon in silence until, like a thing released from restraining bonds, new-dipped in the life-blood of departed day, it shot up into the sky. He was not aware how long he remained thus, he was not aware that his companion had risen also and stood beside him, until he felt the touch of a hand upon his shoulder.

"Grit, it's cold," a voice said, rousing him from his meditations.--"And we haven't any bedclothes."

He turned his head slowly and surveyed her by the increasing light of the moon. Then he pushed her inside and shut the door.