The Claw Part 27

"d.i.c.k!"

"Yes, every red cent! We don't have a bit of luck about the dibs, you and I. It turns out that he has only been keeping things going for the last year or so, by borrowing money on your securities; then just as things began to look too fishy, and discovery _had_ to come, he scooted with the fragments that remained--about twelve baskets full I _don't_ think, and Chancery Lane knows him no more. But wait till I get after him! Just wait till I have got things fixed up all right for Mrs Marriott, and you and Judy! I'll get after him! Not that I suppose I shall get much out of him, but still--"

The cold-blooded American who has been robbed of a dollar gleamed out of one of d.i.c.k's eyes and a red Indian raging for the scalp of his foe glared from the other.

"If he's got anything left he'll belch up all right when I get him!" he announced with the conviction of a Nemesis. Presently he regained calmness.

"You must come up and live with me and Judy," he said. "There are some catamarans of women in the world, Deirdre, and I believe you've been up against one or two, but they're not all like that. There are some jolly nice women in Salisbury, and we'll put the rest to the rightabout, and make them eat up their silly tales."

"Dear d.i.c.k," I said, "it takes a real reformed rake like you to be truly generous. But I can't come to Salisbury."

"Why not? It isn't like you to run away from the music."

"I'm not going to. But I can't leave Fort George yet."

He looked troubled and wistful, but asked me more questions. He was too much a believer it the family integrity. But after a day or two, most of which he spent with Gerry Deshon and Colonel Blow, for I was still much engaged at the hospital and had only the evenings for him, his troubled looks disappeared. Eventually, having planned with Mrs Marriott her secure future, he was ready to return to Salisbury.

"I shall have to get back, Deirdre; but you stay on here as long as you think fit, with Mrs Burney. Blow and Deshon will mind you for me; and when you're ready to come on to Salisbury send me a wire and I'll fetch you."

A morning or two later I walked up and down with him in the early dawn, before the post-office, waiting for the mails to be put into the coach that was to carry him away. A few sard-coloured stars lingered regretfully in the pale sky. Not until his foot was on the step of the coach did he say the words I wished to hear from him, but would not ask for.

"Goldie--of course I've heard everything, all about it--it seems to be a queer tangle. If it were any other fellow I'd get after him--but Kinsella is straight--as straight a man as there is in Africa. If he has let you believe he is free, then you can take my oath he is."

I could have kissed his feet for those words, and the way he spoke them--as though it was unquestionable that Anthony was still in the world. I could not speak, my heart was too full. I could only look at him gratefully through my tears. He patted me on the shoulder.

"Dear old girl, don't fret. He'll turn up." I did not have time to fret: there was too much to do. Among other things I had Mrs Marriott to pack up and send away to her English home to those who would tend and love her and bring her safely through her coming trial. Her last words to me from the coach were:

"Deirdre, I _know_ I shall have a son to take up life where poor Rupert laid it down: and I think he can do it under no finer name than Anthony."

"Thank you, dear," I cried, "and then you must come back here and give him his father's heritage. It's going to be a splendid heritage. d.i.c.k will see to that."

A week later we packed off the little woman whose husband still lay unburied at Shangani. She was taking her small fatherless tribe to her people down-country, and was then coming back to earn her living by nursing. Saba Rookwood and her husband were travelling with the same waggons. They had been married that morning, and were going away for a time to return later and start farming and mining in the Buluwayo district.

In the evening, Gerry Deshon, Colonel Blow, and I rode to their first _outspan_, about twelve miles out from the town, and had supper with them--a sad, affectionate little farewell supper, sitting round an old black kettle that was propped up by two tall stones over the red embers of the wood and _mis_ fire.

If any one had told me a few months before that I would sit at a camp-fire, my eyes blurred with tears and my heart full of regrets at parting with a dowdy, worn-faced little colonial woman who understood nothing of life as I had known it; and another who had broken the moral code and transgressed against the tenets of my religion, I should have been both deeply offended and incredulous. Even if it could have been explained to me that I should love and reverence the first woman because the great forces of life--Love and Sorrow and Death--had touched and beautified her, revealing to all her strong heart, and courage, and a lovely belief in the mercy and wisdom of G.o.d, I should yet not entirely have understood; nor that I could honour the second because I saw in her a gentle, kind, and brave spirit, sweet in humiliation, and free of malice and the small sins that devour the souls of so many women.

Africa had taught me a few things.

I had come out to her stiff with the arrogance of youth and well-being, of pride that has never been a.s.sailed by suffering and disgrace; of rect.i.tude that has been untried by temptation; full of the disdainful virtue of one who has known only the bright, beflowered paths of life, and been well hedged and guarded from all that hurts and defiles. But she had opened eyes in my soul that had been blind before, and had shown me lives seared with pain and sin and scorched with the fires of pa.s.sion that were yet beautiful; of men who could fight down the beasts of temptation and conquer the devils of vice; of men who could forget self-interest to hold out a helping hand to the weak and the stumbling; of men who could die in lone, silent places so that others might live in safety and security; of women who could offer their all for the public good, and lose it with a smile on their lips.

These were things I had read of and heard of and dreamed of perhaps.

But in this fierce, sad land they happened. Africa had shown them to me happening in all their naked terror and beauty. In Europe I had known pictures, and sculpture, add music, in all their finished and accepted beauty. But here I had found the very elements of Art--deeds to inspire sculpture, and all the tragedy that a violin in the hands of a master tries to tell.

Riding home between the two men, along the dusty road, silver fretted now under the glancing stars and a moon that hung in the heavens like a great luminous pearl, I realised how changed I was, and how changed was life for me. I think then for the first time it dawned upon me that the claw of Africa was already deep in my heart, but that the throe it caused was not all of pain.

When we got back to the town we found that some waggons we had met on our way out had come in. They were drawn up in the front of one of the shops, and left standing there for the night, but a little of the unloading had been begun, and on one side of the road lay three enormous packing cases. We reined in for a moment to look at them, and read the address painted on each in large black letters. Afterwards we gazed at each other and exchanged sad ironical smiles. Mrs Marriott's _trousseau_ had arrived!

I think it was just three weeks afterwards that I heard of d.i.c.k's death.

The news came as an absolute shock to me, for I had not even known that he was ill. It appeared that he had been suffering from fever ever since his return from Fort George, but he had not allowed Judy, to tell me because he thought it would add to my worries, also he hoped from day to day to have better news to send. Instead, weakened by his wounds and the privations undergone at the front, he suddenly got rapidly worse, and almost before they realised in what desperate case he was, pa.s.sed quietly out one morning at dawn. When I heard, it was too late even to see his face before they buried him, for the dead do not tarry long with us in Africa, and I could not have reached Salisbury in less than three or four days.

While I was still quivering under the blow, and as though it were not enough, they came to tell me that Maurice Stair had come home--_alone_.

Walking like a woman in a dream I went to the hut where he was resting, and heard the story he had to tell.

After much searching and enquiry among the Matabele who had come in to lay down their arms, but were all averse to telling what part they had taken in the past fighting, or to confess the solitary deeds of horror many of them had committed, he had at last found certain natives willing to lead him to other natives still away in the bush who had knowledge of the disappearance of Anthony Kinsella. By inference, implication, and insinuation--anything but direct information, for fear they should be accused of complicity--these boys had told what they knew of the affair--which was too much!

They said that after Britton had escaped to fetch help from the main column, Anthony had gone on fighting, shooting with his revolver when his rifle ammunition had given out, and attacking the natives with such violence that all had fallen except one, who, wounded in the legs had crawled to the bush, and from there had watched. He reported that Anthony Kinsella had been hit on the head by one of the last bullets, and seemed to have gone mad afterwards for he suddenly threw down his revolver and leaving the body of Vincent (supposed by the natives to be dead) had walked away into the bush, _laughing and singing_! Afterwards some more natives had come up, and the wounded man had shewn them the direction Kinsella had taken. They had followed his spoor, and come upon him in the bush, unarmed--

Maurice Stair paused there, and turned his face away.

"You must tell me all," I said calmly and waited.

"They were ten to one--they killed him by the stream where he was lying--they left nothing by which we could identify him--but the natives took us without hesitation to the spot where the bones lay. We buried them and put up a rough cross."

It seemed to me then as if my last hold to life was broken: as if the last rock to cling to in a cruel, storm-racked sea had crumbled suddenly away, and I went down for awhile under the waves of that sea; it washed over my head and submerged me.

For three months I lay at the door of death, craving entry into the place that held all I loved. But Africa had not done with me. She dragged me back from the dark, healed my sick body with her sunshine, and cooled my fevers with her sparkling air. She even after a time began to lull my mind with a peace it had never known before. In strange moments a kind of exquisitely bitter contentment possessed me at having paid with the last drop of my heart's blood the price she exacts from the children of civilisation who come walking with careless feet in her wild secret places. Mocking and gay I had come to the cave of the witch, and now she clawed me to her and held me tight in her bosom with the hands of my dead. And not _my_ dead only: the hands of all those men with whom I had laughed in the moonlight and afterwards waved to, in farewell--they held me too, though they were hands no longer but pale bones on the brown earth; they held me fast like the hands of dead brothers and I could never leave the land where they lay. With the strange prophetic knowledge that sometimes comes to one when the body is weakened by illness, but the spirit's vision become wonderfully clear, I knew at last that I could never leave this cruel land that had robbed me of those I loved and given me instead a bitter peace and a strange contentment in her wild, barren beauty.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN.

PART TWO--WHAT AUSTRALIAN GOLD ACHIEVED.

"Life has always poppies in her hands."

"Salisbury lies behind that big brown hill," said Judy, "about an hour's drive from here." She was perched with a certain daintiness upon Dirk Mackenzie's water _fykie_, sipping a cup of coffee, her back crepe draperies spread round her on the scrubby gra.s.s. Mrs Shand and I, very sunburnt, wearing print bonnets and our oldest skirts, sat of the ground sharing a striped kaffir blanket with several dozen small brown ants, who were busy collecting the crumbs left from breakfast and hurrying off with them to a neighbouring ant-heap. The ox waggon in which we had taken a fortnight to travel from Fort George was loaded so high with packing cases and Mrs Shand's furniture that it cast quite a large patch of shade, in which we sat as in some cool black pool while the rest of the world, including the dashing Cape cart in which Judy had just arrived, sweltered in blinding sunshine.

Dirk Mackenzie our transport driver, a big, bearded, Natal man, stood smoking in his shirt sleeves talking to Mr Courtfield, the man who lad driven Judy out, and Maurice Stair in riding-kit with his legs twisted, holding his elbow in one hand and a cigarette in the other, stared reflectively at a group of kaffir boys who at a little distance off were squatting round their three-legged pot of mealie-meal pap.

I looked from them to the big brown hill that hid Salisbury, the road of red-brown dust that led there, the dazzling blue of the morning sky, and back again to the _chic_ and pretty widow sitting upon the _fykie_ with her crepe skirts spread so daintily about her.

Her grey eyes were sparkling, there was pink in her cheeks, and _poudre de riz_ upon her nose; her blond hair, charmingly arranged, shone softly, and a tiny fair curl lay in the centre of her forehead just under the white crepe peak of her little widow's bonnet. Quite the most fascinating widow I had ever seen! I had thought of her all the way up as the languid, _pa.s.se_ little woman who left me at Fort George, and had longed to reach her and comfort her as best I might. But any one appearing less in need of comfort than this fresh, smart lady it would be hard to find. She looked as if she had stepped straight out of Jays's. All her languor and weariness of life had disappeared. She seemed to have gone back to the days of her youth before she married d.i.c.k. There was the same pretty, appealing look in her eyes, the same clinging, helpless manner, mingled now with an alluring little air of sadness. As for the small white hand that held her coffee cup, nothing could have been daintier, more eager and alive looking. Certainly a very different Judy to the one I had last seen in Fort George! I suppose I ought to have been glad, but I was not. My heart, with astounding contrariety, yearned after the other little languid, untidy, almost unkempt Judy, as one longs in sorrow for the old scenes and surroundings of happier, dearer days.

"Our cart has had a smash-up, but Mr Courtfield lent me his to come and fetch you, Deirdre," she was saying, "and would insist on driving me himself. Wasn't it sweet of him? I find that men are so extraordinarily kind to me in my trouble." Her sad little air deepened, and my heart stirred to her for the first time. Perhaps after all under that elegant crepe frock she was just a lonely little miserable creature!

"Of course they would be," I said. "Any one would be kind to you, Judy; and all men loved d.i.c.k."

"Every one in this country is kind, don't you think?" ventured Mrs Shand.

"Oh, _every_ one? I'm sure I couldn't say," said Judy, and looked away over Mrs Shand's head in a way that made that little woman realise that after all she was only a mere Fort George frump; a faint red colour stole into her sunburnt face.

"Will you get ready, Deirdre?" continued my sister-in-law. "We ought not to keep Mr Courtfield's horses waiting in the sun."

"I don't think I care to leave Mrs Shand alone, Judy. I would rather stay and come in with the waggon to-night. Couldn't I do that?"

She was full of remonstrances for this plan, and Mrs Shand would have none of it either, saying that a boy had been sent into town for her husband, and that she expected him out at any moment to stay the day with her.