Pink Gods and Blue Demons Part 3

The racing car was at the door--a keen-nosed silvery affair, with no seats, only flat cushions of sleek grey silk. They had to climb over the sides and sit cheek by jowl on the floor, and there was a great sheaf of scarlet roses for Loree's lap. It is no use denying that these charming attentions touch women deeply. Only stupid men underrate the magic influence of gifts, especially the fragrant gift of flowers.

Those roses scented all the afternoon.

Quelch had the art of communicating himself without words. Loree was acutely aware of his insolent pride in her beauty as they drove through the streets. Men possess a curious degree this scratch-brant delight in the l.u.s.t of the eye and pride of life. In Africa, perhaps they indulge it more than in most places. Climate may have something to do with it, but it is a dull affair to be a plain woman there, and to be a pretty one singularly intoxicating. There was something barbaric in the warm, bold satisfaction of Quelch's eyes as they rested on her. She had the sense once more of living life to the full, and that old dream of hers of driving triumphant through the streets of Rome seemed curiously fulfilled. It was not strange to hear him say, very low:

"Don't you feel that we have been together before somewhere?"

She did not answer, only smiled. A blue ripple of her gown resting on his grey-clad knee acted like an electric current between them.

The Rhodes Memorial stands a little way out of the town--a rather enchanted-looking Asian Temple, built of sandstone from the Matoppo Hills. They climbed its steep stairs and stood gazing from marble-pillared openings at a great vista of empty veld and a far line of hills. The Boers occupied those hills during the siege, and peppered Kimberley with fifteen hundred sh.e.l.ls from their Long Tom, being blithely answered by Long Cecil, the big gun made in the De Beers workshops. Quelch recounted the tragic fate of Labran, the maker of this gun, who was killed by the second response from Long Tom.

Afterward, he fell into silence. It was Loree who talked lightly and incessantly. She had become aware of the danger of silence. When you are loitering on the perilous precipices, where the fire-flowers blow, words are little ropes and holds by which you keep your footing. But Quelch smiled like a man who has his feet on firm ground, and enfolded her always with his bold yet subtle glance.

She was vaguely thankful for the presence of a man reading on a bench, and when Quelch wanted to drive her out into the empty veld, which the sinking sun had flooded with blood-red light, she resisted the adventure, murmuring that she must return and write a letter to catch the night post for Rhodesia.

His face darkened at the words. Pat Temple had never been mentioned between them, but Loree felt no doubt that he knew where her husband was and all about him. One of the first things you learn in Africa is that every one knows your private affairs nearly as well as you do yourself.

So the drive into the veld was renounced, but home was reached only by a route both long and obvious. Loree missed the post for Rhodesia by just ten minutes. There was time for nothing before dinner except a few moments' secret genuflection at the shrine of a rose-pink idol. And after dinner-time flew past in the same astonishing fashion of the previous evening. Mrs Cork's headache had evidently persisted, for she did not appear, and they neither missed nor mourned her. Instead of sitting in the verandah, where the rest of the world was liable to note the silence that now held between them, they walked in the garden among the wet roses and languorously scented night-flowers. Playing with danger is fascinating anywhere, but in Africa the _mise en scene_ is always specially arranged for this pastime.

Next morning, by the early post there was news from Pat. He had been down with a touch of malaria, and the Wingates were looking after him.

Ethel Wingate was a remote cousin and her husband an old school-friend.

They had not much money, Pat wrote, but it was wonderful to see their happiness. They had been married ten years and never parted a day, weathering storms and sunshine together.

"It has made me think a bit (the letter ran) and realise that while one is busy hustling about the earth, piling up a fortune for the future, one may be missing something more important in the present. What do you think, darling mine?"

Loree was disturbed by the question, as a happy dreamer might be disturbed by a shout in the ear. She had closed the door of her thinking mind for the time being, and did not wish to open it, for fear of what was crouching there--a little drab-faced thing called conscience. She desired no communication with that thing, nor with her soul, which was a soul obsessed. The best way to forget Pat's query was to get out the little idol that lay in her bosom, and lose herself in its sparkling loveliness. But, somehow, it did not look quite so beautiful as before. Its l.u.s.tre seemed dimmed. Its fires had paled a little. This annoyed her. She felt as if she were being cheated in the value of something for which she had paid a heavy price.

Discontent seized her, and she went down to lunch feverishly anxious for any excitement that would revive the delicious spell under which she had lain for forty-eight hours and which now appeared to be dying off.

Quelch was sitting in the hall, gossiping idly with Mrs Cork and watching the staircase. His habit of lunching at the club, for reasons of his own not far to seek, had been renounced. If ever a man took a woman into his arms with his eyes, he did it as Loree came toward him.

The excitement she sought was supplied. Hot colour surged in her cheek and glowed to her hair.

Valeria Cork's cynical eye computed the situation, and she smiled somewhat dryly behind her cigarette. She was looking better, but still proclaimed her inability for dissipation of any kind, and refused Quelch's invitation to the theatre that night. He had a box for _The Gay Lord Quex_. Loree hesitated to accept alone. But they both seemed to think it surprisingly simple of her to suppose that there were any conventions of outrage in South Africa, also that, as a married woman, she did not do as she pleased. Put on her pride in this manner of course she decided to go. Something fluttered like a frightened bird behind that door of her mind (or heart, or soul) which she had so carefully closed. It might have been the little drab-faced conscience.

However, a fascinating champagne c.o.c.ktail drugged it into silence, and they enjoyed a merry lunch together.

The afternoon was spent about as busily as the lilies of the field spend their afternoons. She rested a good deal, shook out her best gown for the evening, tried a new way of doing her hair, and brooded over the diamond in an effort to recapture the first fine early magic of possession. In this she was not altogether successful, but, at any rate, she managed to obliterate from her memory Pat's query and the general wistfulness of his letter. That, at least, was something accomplished, something done to earn a night's amus.e.m.e.nt.

Certainly the lilies of the field could not have been fairer than she, descending at eight "clothed in white samite, mystic, wonderful," and wearing Pat's rope of three hundred and sixty-five pearls. The only colour about her was her radiant hair, but hiding under her heart a little pink G.o.d soiled and sparkled in secret.

She looked _ravissante_. No wonder every man in the hotel found a good and proper reason for being in the hall while Quelch put on her wraps and conducted her to the car. Many a glance of admiration came her way, mingled with undisguised envy of her companion. Afterward, some grinned with joy at the prospect of the indomitable Quelch riding to a fall; some derided the absent husband, and some pitied the woman. But the two in the car recked nothing. Quelch's philosophy was that if you are strong enough, will pay high enough, and play a waiting game skilfully enough, you can get most things for yourself, even unto your heart's desire. Loree's experience of waiting games and players who compute the value of every gambit was absolutely nil, and her philosophy, such as it was, took no account of the disintegrating influences of climate, flattery, sparkling things, and the pits that vanity digs for the feet.

She was entirely occupied with being beautiful and desirable and admired of all men, especially the one at her side. It seemed as if the earth was for her and the fulness thereof. It is a delusion many women have while walking on the edge of the ravine where the fire-flowers blow.

If Quelch's methods had been less fine, she might have been safer.

Because he was so very quiet and gentle, refraining even from touching her hand, she inclined to believe herself very wise and secure. Yet, in the closed and silent car, there was a certain breathlessness. Once she had a sensation of drowning in the scent of roses. Arrival at the theatre was almost like a rescue.

Surrounded by people and lights and noise, she became very brilliant and gay. Her remarks sparkled like the jewels on the white shoulders of the women in the audience. All eyes were turned to the lovely red-haired girl alone in a box with Quelch. She got more attention than Pinero's play. But on the return drive she was less sure of herself. Quelch's eyes, as he had watched and listened to her all the evening, made her afraid, and the intimate silence of the car was a fresh plunge into the sea of roses that had power to suffocate. Her gaiety became a little forced. She sat apart in her corner as if attempting to isolate herself. In her companion, there was no departure from the gentleness he always used; but half-way home, in his tender, velvety voice, he asked a question:

"Do you remember saying there were other women like you in the world?"

"Of course." She essayed to laugh lightly, but the silence that followed had nothing rea.s.suring in it. The car drew up at the hotel entrance before he spoke again.

"If I thought there was another, I would seek her day and night, and never rest until she was in my arms--_mine_!"

The chauffeur opened the door. Quelch helped her to descend, and they entered the dim hall. Without meeting his glance, she bade him good night and pa.s.sed swiftly upstairs, well aware that he remained standing there, following her with his eyes. Breathlessly she closed and locked the door upon herself. But she could not shut out the agitation of her veins or the wild beating of her heart. Fright had come into the room with her. The thing had gone too far--grown too big for the manipulation of the little hands she had thought so clever. She sat staring at them, and at the white reflection of herself in the gla.s.s.

Flirtation had overswept the neat confines laid down by her, and come washing over in a big wave that had nearly overwhelmed her. This would never do. She must get back to where she was before, on the safe and una.s.sailable rock where she had always dwelt as Pat Temple's wife. It was incomprehensible that she had ever lost her footing from that rock, and she could not quite remember how or when it had occurred. Somehow, the little pink idol was mysteriously connected with the event. It occurred to her now to calm her troubled musings by a sight of it.

Gazing into its deep-pink fire-lit heart, her agitation pa.s.sed; at last she rose and began to take off her gown. But in the middle of undressing, her movements and her glance became fixed. On a small writing-table at the foot of her bed something was glittering with the emerald eyes of a hundred serpents. For a moment she stood rigid, then flew to it, as a foolish bird flies to the snare. All the stars in heaven seemed to have come down to lie there linked together by a silvery thread.

It was a chain of diamonds, flexible and long as her chain of pearls and of a loveliness and brilliancy indescribable. Tenderly, adoringly, she gathered it up. It ran like fire and water through her fingers, flashing laughing, winking. When she held it altogether in her two palms, it was as though the sun had set in a pool of crystal dew. When it slipped down over her red-brown hair to her throat and shoulders and the shadow of her bosom, her beauty seemed enhanced to unearthliness.

She gave a long sigh, and something went fluttering out of her. It might have been the little pale-faced conscience. Perhaps it was her soul taking wing. Whatever it was, she neither recked nor reasoned.

The work begun by the rose-red idol had been accomplished by the chain of stars. She was lost.

CHAPTER TWO.

The sea hath its pearls, But none more rare Than the soul of a woman Sweet and fair.

I found that in a book, darling mine, and it made me think of you. All pearls make me think of you, with their lovely inner light shining and glowing through the faint pink bodies of them.

It is your birthday to-day, and I cannot be with you or get you anything here that you would care for. So I am sending you a fifty-pound note.

Buy yourself a pearl. Or anything you like. There should be some good jewellers in Kimberley. And send me a pound of Hankey's, like an angel.

Can't get any here, and haven't had a decent smoke for a week--

Thus Pat Temple, writing to his wife from some far spot on the borders of the Congo. She lay reading the letter among her pillows, and drinking her morning tea. Quotations and tag-ends of verses were not unusual in Pat's letters. He may not have been what is called a deeply read man. His favourite books were _The Tower of London_, _Marcus Aurelius_, Buffon, _Pickwick Papers_, Grimm's _Fairy Tales_, and _The Cloister and the Hearth_. Life kept him too busy to make many new friends in the book line, but his mind had a way of seizing on to phrases and verses, and he never forgot anything he had once read that dealt with woman's purity or men's chivalry. Not that he quoted to the world. It was only in letters to his wife that these things sometimes slipped out from the deeps of his heart and mingled themselves with demands for his favourite brands of tobacco.

But his little verse this morning did not please Loree. A frown curled her brows. She knew she was not like a pearl. Neither did she want one. She was sick of pearls. They said nothing to her. Only the radiant fire of diamonds could charm her heart and ravish her imagination. She drew her treasures from beneath the pillow and kissed them. For two days and three nights she had owned them now, worn them hidden under her gowns, felt their soft sc.r.a.pe and rustle of them against her skin, drowned her senses in the secret joy of their possession. She was like a creature living under a spell that grew more and more potent every hour. The doors of her heart were closed against every other feeling and emotion. Her mind refused to remember anything she did not want to remember, and her conscience gave her no further trouble. It was either dead or fled.

She never asked herself where the diamonds had come from. It was the last thing she wished to know. Enough that they were hers by nine points of the law, and that no living soul had given sign or signal of knowing of their existence. The only fear she felt was that some one might steal them from her, ravish them from her grasp as suddenly and mysteriously as they had come. The peril of Quelch and his burning glances paled before that awful prospect. Besides, she had regained confidence in her power to keep him in hand. Having so far contrived to avoid being alone with him since the night of the theatre, she meant to continue to do so.

The morning after she had found the necklace, she feigned illness and stayed in bed all day. Before one o'clock, Quelch had heard of her indisposition and roses began to arrive. The room was almost filled with them--bales of colour, dew, and perfume. Mrs Cork, who walked in on the heels of a maid with a tray, said that they scented the whole hotel and made it smell like the rose garden of Persia.

Morning a thousand roses brings, you say?

Yes; but where blows the rose of yesterday?

she misquoted drily, standing by the bedside. Loree mentally and uncharitably applied the last phrase to her visitor, though in her own roselike beauty, as yet untouched by time, she could have afforded to be generous. But she was cross with Mrs Cork, and wanted her to go away.

She knew of more alluring occupations than listening to that lady's arid remarks. But Valeria had after all something interesting to propound.

"You know the Duke of Carrington is out here, don't you, with the d.u.c.h.ess and their daughter Princess Evelyn?"

"Yes. They're up in Rhodesia now. My husband met them at a reception in Buluwayo."

"Well, they're pa.s.sing through Kimberley in three days' time, and as they are anxious to see the diamonds and the diamond magnates and their wives are anxious to see _them_, a ball is to be given in the Royal honour. So every one will be pleased, let us hope."

"But how exciting!" cried Loree ignoring the irony that tinged all Mrs Cork's remarks. "When is it to be, and where?"

"In three nights' time, here at the Belgrove. The Club will be too small to hold the crush. The invitations are being rushed out, as of course it's rather sudden and impromptu. I can get you one if you care to come."

"I'd simply love it. I've always wanted to see Princess Evelyn. They say she's perfectly lovely."

"All right. I'll arrange about it then."