Grit Lawless Part 5

"True," he answered. "If a man wants to get there in Africa it don't do for him to be squeamish. You didn't earn your nickname, Grit, in being over soft."

At the mention of his nickname, Lawless looked fierce.

"d.a.m.n you!" he said irritably. "If I remember rightly I owe that to you. It sticks closer than my own. That nickname has landed me in for many a ridiculous adventure. Men seem to imagine that I'm a survival of the mediaeval desperado; and I am offered any shady undertaking that entails the slightest risk."

"They pay best, those undertakings," Van Bleit responded drily; and Lawless, regretting the speech as soon as it was made, answered indifferently:

"Very likely. But a man doesn't sweep sewers when he has his pockets lined."

He advanced towards his hotel. Van Bleit walked beside him, and together they pa.s.sed from the glare of the pavement into the shaded coolness of the vestibule.

"Come and drink to the good old times," he said,--"and to many more good times ahead."

He led the way into the lounge. When they were seated, with drinks on a table in front of them, he asked:

"What are you doing to-night? If you've nothing more amusing on hand, will you dine with me?"

"If you care to repeat the invitation on some future occasion, you will see how readily I shall respond," Van Bleit answered. "But this evening I am dining at my cousin's. I don't know if that kind of thing amuses you," he added, after a moment's reflection, "but, if it does, I am confident my cousin would be delighted to welcome a friend of mine. Get into your togs, and I'll pick you up on my way. It's at the Smythes'.

Smythe himself is a beastly prig, but my cousin is a good sort; and she gets hold of the right people, and gives one the right things to eat.

What do you say?"

"Not for me," Lawless answered. "I'm not long returned to civilisation.

I'll look on at the game for a while. You go and eat your dinner, and make yourself agreeable--I trust both the meal and the company will come up to expectation--and give me to-morrow evening."

"Good!"

Van Bleit hesitated, looked at Lawless uncertainly, looked about him, changed colour; then looked at Lawless again.

"The company for me to-night will consist of one," he jerked out in a burst of half-eager, half-reluctant confidence.

His listener smiled unsympathetically.

"The one and only She of the moment; eh?"

"Man, you wouldn't say that if you could see her," Van Bleit returned, his manner unusually earnest. "She is the most beautiful woman in the world."

"That's a tall order," Lawless replied drily. "If my memory serve me, you have happened across perfection a few times in your career."

"Never before," Van Bleit a.s.serted. "My G.o.d, Lawless--"

He broke off abruptly, and stared at the other curiously, his mouth agape.

"I had forgotten... it's the same name," he said. "Are you by any chance related to Mrs Lawless?--at present living at Rondebosch."

"We are connected by marriage," Lawless answered. He removed the cigar from his mouth and trimmed the ash deliberately. "If you want to stand high in the lady's good graces, you will be well advised not to mention my name. We do speak when accident throws us together, but I believe I state the bare truth when I say that the fact of our paths seldom crossing gives mutual satisfaction."

"Yes! In-laws don't always. .h.i.t it, of course. I never got on with my brother-in-law. I was glad when the beast died. Still, I regret the breach in this instance; the relationship might have served me, I'm going in to win. Grit. You give me your good wishes, I hope?"

"In consideration of what I have told you, I wonder what my good wishes are worth?" Lawless returned. "But I'll give you a bit of good advice.

The lady is puritanical, unpleasantly so. You will never win her favour in the character in which I have known you. Are you going in for reform?"

"I'll go in for anything," Van Bleit answered promptly; "but I'll get my own way." He leant forward and laid a hand on the other's shoulder.

"And when I've got it," he said boastfully, "there'll be other changes... We'll close all family dissensions--my friends will be my wife's. She'll soon see things from my view."

Lawless looked carelessly amused.

"Two people may use the same pair of binoculars," he remarked, "but they almost invariably alter the focus. I never attempted the absurdity of trying to make a woman see through my long-distance lens. Their horizon is generally contracted, and few see beyond that restricted line of their imagination. With your experience, Karl, I should have imagined you had long ago discovered that woman, while appearing the most pliable of substances, is as difficult to bend as wrought iron."

Van Bleit smiled unpleasantly.

"When I can't bend a thing, I break it," he answered.

Lawless regretted when it was too late that he had refused Van Bleit's invitation to dine at his cousin's. He might have got some amus.e.m.e.nt out of the evening, and the closer he shadowed the Dutchman the better for the success of his undertaking. He decided that in future he would avail himself of such a chance as Van Bleit's offer had promised; by his refusal he had sacrificed a move in the game. That in going to the Smythes' he would perforce meet Mrs Lawless did not weigh with him: there was as much s.p.a.ce between four walls as in the universe if one person did not desire to be brought into contact with another. And he had no intention of inflicting himself upon her. He knew her opinion of him; it was not sufficiently complimentary to cause him to seek her society. Nevertheless he experienced some curiosity to again encounter this woman whose hard purity made her so severe a judge in human affairs,--to measure weapons with her once more. There came to him sometimes in the lonely watches of the night the belief that one day, despite past failures, he would pit his strength against hers successfully. He never attempted to determine the line his conduct should take in the case of victory; it sufficed for him that the moment should fashion the event. But with the pa.s.sing years that dream of his triumph steadily receded. He had even given up the expectation of seeing her again... And now he had met her... He had spoken with her... And their sympathies were as widely divergent as ever they had been...

He got up and paced the room restlessly for some time. His thoughts worried him so that inaction became unbearable. He left the hotel, and wandered forth into the city in search of such diversion as it could provide. But his mind still worked round the recent extraordinary events, of which the interview of the afternoon had not been the least surprising; and almost insensibly his footsteps turned in the direction of the Smythes' house. For two hours he patrolled the roadway for the purpose of getting a glimpse of the face he had seen so nearly only that afternoon.

When eventually Mrs Lawless came forth she was attended by Van Bleit, who saw her into her motor, and closing the door on her, leant upon it confidentially while he made some low-toned remark to her where she sat inside in the dark. Lawless was too far off to hear their voices, but he judged fairly well from the pantomime what was taking place, and he saw by the street light the admiration in Van Bleit's face. His own face, when presently the motor pa.s.sed him, was as expressionless as a mask. The woman seated inside did not see him. She was sitting very straight and motionless. The smile had faded from the beautiful lips, and her eyes looked sad. Then the motor flashed out of sight, and the man was left standing stiffly in the shadowy roadway like a sentinel on guard.

The moon shone out suddenly through a rift in the heavy clouds, throwing the tall figure into strong relief, and revealing his face distinctly, stern and set, the scar on his cheek showing livid in the silvery light.

As though the unexpected brilliance disturbed him, he altered his rigid att.i.tude abruptly, swung round, and started to walk. He walked rapidly, unconscious of his surroundings in the turmoil of his thoughts. By a process of introspection his mind worked back continually. He regarded himself in a detached, impartial light, as if it were a stranger upon whom he looked, a stranger whose actions he was called upon to criticise and pa.s.s judgment upon. Not until that night had he ever considered his actions in a condemnatory light. Life was only a chance... Things had just happened... That had been his philosophy. And he had acted upon it until the thing happened that meant the finish of his career in the Army. He had finished himself socially shortly after that event.

His dismissal from the Service had cut him deeply, and he had bitterly resented it. He had enemies. That was what he had a.s.serted at the time, what he still believed. The other affair he treated as a midsummer-night's madness, and spoke of as such. He refused to consider it more seriously. But the midsummer-night's madness had been responsible for more than the wrecking of his career. And it was of that he was thinking chiefly as he walked along the warm, dusty road between the motionless trees that lined the pathway and cast long black distorted shadows upon the ground. He had not called it a midsummer's madness always; he had thought of it--ay, and spoken of it--once as Love. And he had believed the world well lost at the time. But that form of madness is transitory. He had come out of the sickness extraordinarily sane,--scarcely penitential, but with a proper appreciation of the truth of certain lines that came to his sobered senses unbidden, yet with an appropriateness that suggested some occult influence, probably conscience, working upon his mind:

"If a man would give all the substance of his house for love, He would be utterly despised."

In a sense, he had done that; and he had won the despite such conduct merited. He had been mad. He said it again to himself, muttering the words under his breath. Then he smiled grimly at the thought behind the words. Poor creature of circ.u.mstance! To be cured of one form of madness only to develop another!

The ever-revolving wheel of fate turned relentlessly, now bearing him, a mere puppet, upward, now downward in its revolutions. The wheel had been turning steadily downward for a long while now. He wondered whether, when it began to rise again, it would still bear him with it, or whether before that time it would have broken him utterly and left him in the uttermost depths.

CHAPTER FIVE.

For eight years Lawless had led an adventurous life, consorting chiefly with men who, like himself, were outside the pale of society. He had earned a livelihood how he could, sometimes working for his bread with his hands, at others fairly affluent; but improvident always, giving away recklessly in his prosperous days what later he knew he would need for himself. It was during one of his poorer periods that he had happened across Simmonds, the man who had since introduced him to Colonel Grey, and so helped him towards a good thing when his fortunes chanced to be at a particularly low ebb. The tide had turned with surprising swiftness.

He found it a little difficult at first to realise this unexpected change of fortune, even more difficult to adapt himself to it.

Doubtless it was the influence of Van Bleit that eventually drew him from his misanthropic habits and plunged him, somewhat reluctantly, into the vortex of Cape Town society. The Smythes and Van Bleit introduced him everywhere. Lawless had no record at the Cape. He became known as a man of means, and it was rumoured that his family held a good position in England. The fact that he was connected by marriage with the beautiful Mrs Lawless added to his popularity; and the vague information, given by a would-be know-all, that he had once been in the Army and had left under a cloud was discredited by the civilian population. But the men in the Service, especially the man at Government House who was a relation of Mrs Lawless, remembered certain things; the years that had rolled by since Lawless' disgrace were not so many as to have put the affair so entirely out of mind that by a little hard thinking the reason of his dismissal could not be recalled. It was a reason for which few men have any sympathy. But, perhaps because it is not the custom in the Service for one man to give another away, perhaps, too, because this particular man was connected, however remotely, with the most beautiful woman in Cape Town, those who remembered the facts held their peace, and the discreditable whisper died from sheer atrophy.

A certain section of Cape Town society took Lawless up. Among men he was very popular, and the women decided that he was extraordinarily fascinating, if a trifle too reserved. He was a man with very little small talk. Where he recognised a sympathetic personality he left trivialities alone and plunged straightway into the depths. Every emotion he betrayed or called forth was of the most profound. Young girls found him irresistible, but, fortunately for them, he had no taste for anything but a matured intellect. He admired youth externally, but he avoided intercourse with it.

One exception he made in favour of a girl he first saw in a railway carriage while he was returning from Symons Bay to Cape Town in the heat of a late afternoon. The girl was travelling with her mother and sister, and Lawless would scarcely have noticed her but for the persistence of her gaze, which, without her volition, remained unwaveringly fixed upon the scar on his face. His attention was attracted towards her long before she realised that she was observed.

He saw her eyes riveted on the scar, and watched her, carelessly at first, but with increasing interest as he marked the effect of his disfigurement upon her. She stared at the long deep seam with wide, surprised eyes; then, her imaginative mind conjuring up a battle-field with all the paraphernalia of war, she pictured the moment when that swift relentless slash of the bayonet had been given and received; and he saw the big eyes darken, and an almost imperceptible shudder shake her slender frame. His own eyes twinkled humorously, and, drawn perhaps by their magnetism, the girlish gaze lifted unexpectedly and met his.

If he thought to see her betray a swift confusion, he was disappointed.

Apparently it was the most natural thing in the world that this man should be staring into her eyes, and that she should return his stare, not boldly, nor with any thought of intercourse, but with a degree of reverence such as a young girl feels for a brave man.

The rest of the journey was a duel of looks.

When he got out at the terminus, Lawless stood on the platform and waited until the girl and her party alighted. He gave no outward sign of recognition when she pa.s.sed him, lifting her eyes gravely for a moment to his face; but the inscrutable grey eyes conveyed far more of meaning than the mere raising of his hat could possibly have done, or even a furtive attempt at speech. The girl went home with her mind full of him. She made a hero of him in her thoughts. Always she pictured him in the forefront of the battle; she saw him dashing forward against great odds, to be cut down even while he led his men to victory, waving them forward over his fallen body. She invested him with all the attributes which a youthful feminine mind conceives befitting a G.o.d of war.

A few weeks later he met her at a ball. He was introduced to her at her request. He had attended the dance more to please Van Bleit than himself, and was standing, a little out of it, near the doorway when one of the committee came up to him with the announcement that he wished to introduce him to Miss Weeber.