The Outspan Part 13

"Yes, and the mud."

He settled himself in the bunk again with a grunt, and murmured in a tone of indignant contempt:

"Mud, sez he, mud! An' me shiftin' granite boulders for soft rock, an shtruck solid formation a fut from surface, an' getting two an' six a cubic fer the lot! Mud, faith! An' not enough water this three miles to the Crocodile to make spit for an ant, barrin' what I can tap from the Figaro Battery pipe! An' mud, sez he? Holy Fly! Mud, be Gawd!"

It died away in a sleepy grunt, and Ca.s.sidy was off I groped about for a blanket, and, rolling back into the meal-sack stretcher, forgot all about mad Irishmen, sick horses, and earnest bulldogs.

One always experiences a curious sensation on seeing by daylight that which one has only known in the dark. Persons do for years a certain journey or voyage, always starting and always arriving at regular hours.

One day something happens which necessitates their pa.s.sing in daylight the places formerly pa.s.sed at night. On such occasions even the most matter-of-fact must marvel at the wanton freaks of their imaginations.

The real thing seems so inconceivably wrong after what the mind had pictured. The appearance of a room, the outside of a house, are ludicrously, hopelessly at variance with what one had thought they should be. But it is, if possible, worse when the subject is a person.

I have many times travelled with men at night by coach, on horseback, on foot, and in a waggon; have chatted sociably and exchanged all manner of friendly turns; have slept at the same wayside hotel, and in the morning found myself unable, until he spoke, to pick out of any two the one with whom I had spent hours the night before.

In the case of Ca.s.sidy the difference was appalling.

I awoke in such light as might leak through the gra.s.s hut; which was very little for light, but not bad for leakage.

The boy brought breakfast--coffee, bread, and cold venison, which suited me well--and I was turning my thoughts to the matter of a fresh horse for my homeward journey when I met the eye of one of my friends of the previous night. I say the eye, because I don't count the one in the black patch--I couldn't see it. But when Dan O'Connell stood in the doorway and allowed his one bloodshot, pink-rimmed eye to rest thoughtfully on me, it fairly fixed me. I used to recall his bandy legs and undershot jaw long afterwards whenever I thought of Ca.s.sidy's Cutting; but it was only when the luminous eye uprose before me that I used unconsciously to twitch about and draw my legs up as I did the morning I saw him in the flesh. Ca.s.sidy _was_ a surprise; O'Connell wasn't. His appearance was only the cold chill of proof following a horrible conviction. I was much relieved when the boy cleared Dan out of the doorway with a bare-toed kick in the ribs and a vigorous "Ow!

Foosack!" I admired the boy for that, and even envied him.

Through the open doorway I saw a white man walking briskly towards the hut, and I stepped out to meet him. He was a man of medium height, but there was something in his walk and figure that arrested attention. I am sure I have never seen in any man such lithe, active movement and perfect symmetry. A close-fitting vest and a pair of white flannel trousers were what he wore. I remember that because, somehow, I always recall that first view in the morning light--the springy walk, the bare muscular arms, the curve of the chest, and the poise of the head, as the face was turned from me.

If I could tell this story without saying another word about his appearance, I would stop right here. I would greatly prefer to do so, but it is not possible. I hope no one will feel exactly as I felt when this man turned his face to me. It serves no good purpose to give revolting details, so I will only say that the man was disfigured--most horribly so.

I cannot recall what was said or done during the few minutes that pa.s.sed after we met, but there are some impressions seared into my brain as with red-hot irons; there are some recollections which even now make me feel faint and dazed, and some which make me burn with shame. I take shame--bitter, burning shame--that I failed to grasp his outstretched hand, and that I let him read in my face the horror that seized me. It is one of those pitiful things that the longest lifetime is not long enough to let a man forget. Surging across this comes the vivid recollection of my conviction that this man was Ca.s.sidy. The first instant my glance lighted on him I felt what I can only call a sort of joyous conviction that it was he. I felt, in fact, that I recognised him. No doubt it seems odd, illogical, contradictory, even impossible, that, strong as the gratifying conviction was, the other, when he turned his face to me, was a thousand times stronger. It ought to have been a reversal of the first conviction. It wasn't. It was a smashing, terrible corroboration. It crushed me with a sense of personal affliction. It never germinated a doubt.

I had to stay all that day with him, and he was most gentle and courteous; most kindly and considerate. Every act heaped coals of fire on my ill-conditioned head. G.o.d knows I tried my best, but I could hardly look in his face, and I could not control my physical repugnance.

I schooled myself to speak, and even to look, without betraying my thoughts, but I could not eat with him. I could not sit opposite a face half of which was gone; I could not use the plate, the cup, the fork, that he had used. I pleaded illness, and feigned it; but by night-time I was ill enough to need no feigning.

It was common enough for anyone benighted on those unhealthy flats to pay the penalty with a dose of fever. I got fever, and no one seemed surprised; but for the life of me I cannot even now help attaching some significance to the fact that I was certainly not ill before the scene at the hut door.

I lay in that gra.s.s hut for a week or more, some of the time delirious-- all the time panting with fever and shivering with ague; tossing wakefully and gasping for air; complaining of everything, unutterably miserable and despondent; hating the sight of food, shrinking from each act of kindness, scowling at the sound of a voice. My case was not worse than hundreds of others. I mention these things only to make clear what I mean when I say that never at any moment during that time did I awake or want anything but Ca.s.sidy was there to tend me. His was the care, the watchfulness, the gentleness, of a good woman. Can one say more?

It is odd that during that time I only saw him as he ought to have been--as I am sure at one time he had been--a man whose countenance matched his character. It is not so odd, perhaps, that as I recovered and became rational the feeling of repulsion did not return, only an infinite pity for a hardly-stricken fellow-creature whose physical endowments and whose prospects must have been far above the average, and whose affliction was proportionately great.

When I left there was one feeling that was stronger than simple grat.i.tude to him. It was thankfulness that something had occurred to prevent me from leaving with only horror and repulsion. I was thankful for the sickness that left me richer by a heart full of pity and--I think the right word is--reverence!

My lines were laid in other places than Ca.s.sidy's, and as months pa.s.sed by without my either seeing or hearing of him, I might, for aught I know, have forgotten him, or come to recall him only as one recalls, after lapse of years, some curious experience. This _might_ have happened, I say; but it didn't. Mainly because of a conversation which revived my keenest interest in him.

Several of us had walked out to dine and spend the evening at the Chaunceys', and as we sat on the stoep smoking and chatting, the ladies being with us, the conversation turned on a concert or entertainment of some kind which was being got up for the relief of some distressed families in the place. Somebody hazarded the opinion that the "distressed family" business was being somewhat overdone, and that there was no evidence of it as far as he had been able to see.

The remark was unfortunate, for Mrs Chauncey happened to be one of the promoters of the charity. She--good little woman!--had her young matron's soul full of sympathy still; her store had not been plundered by impostors, and she vehemently defended her project. She did more; she carried war and rout into the enemy's quarters and surmised that men, young men, whose lives are divided between money-making and pleasure-seeking, are not the best judges of what those who keep their troubles to themselves may have to endure.

"When you," (the young men) "are settling differences on shares or cards, or having your occasional splits--or whatever else you do all day long--there are women and children aching for one good meal, shrinking back for want of ordinary clothing, languishing and dropping for want of a man's arm to fend and support them."

Jack Chauncey--good chap!--must have thought this from his wife just a wee bit spirited, for, after a pause, he gently drew a herring across the trail.

"By--the--by, dear," he asked thoughtfully, "what became of that good-looking young widow who came here with her kid and looked so jolly miserable? By Gad! her face has been haunting me ever since. Did you manage anything for her?"

"You mean Mrs Mallandane. She would not take anything. She wanted to work; to earn, not to beg, she said. I have managed to get her some needlework, but, oh, so little, poor thing! And the pay is too dreadful! Now, there is a case in point. A widow, absolutely penniless, with a child of four or five to support. A woman of education and breeding, without a friend in the world, apparently; shunned by everyone--by some on account of her poverty, by others for her good looks and reserve. She certainly is difficult to approach. I have been to her now four times, and it was only on the last occasion that she thawed enough to tell me anything of herself. She has lived for years on what she believed to be the proceeds of her husband's estate. Until within the last few months she was under this impression.

But something happened which made her suspicious, and she found out that the income left by her husband was pure fiction, and that what she had been living on was an allowance from the only real friend she or her husband ever had--the man who was her husband's partner when he died."

"Does she say that her husband is dead?" asked Carter, the unfortunate "young man" who had before provoked Mrs Chauncey's ire.

Carter was very young, and I could see that he had no _arriere pensee_ in asking that question. He did not mean to be impertinent. But I could also see that Mrs Chauncey did not take that view. Her little iced reply finished poor Carter.

"I said that she was a widow, Mr Carter, and I do not care to make another's misfortunes the subject of an argument."

I felt sorry for Carter, he was such an a.s.s; and I believe the other two fellows pitied him also; so we did not refer to the subject as we walked home together in the moonlight. That, however, did not suit Carter.

After awhile he gave an uncomfortable laugh, and said:

"The little woman was rather down on me to-night about the charity show.

I rather put my foot in it, I think."

"Think!" said Lawton (one of our party), with heavy contempt. "Think!

I wonder you claim to be able to think! I never in my life saw anyone make such a blighted idiot of himself!"

"Dash it all, man! give me a chance. The 'distressed family' allusion was unlucky, I admit; but I hadn't the faintest intention of returning to the subject when I asked about the husband. Man alive! Why, the nerve of the Mallandane woman fairly knocked the breath out of me. The cheek of her cramming poor Mrs Chauncey with yarns of her husband's death and estate, when everyone knows that he isn't dead at all; that she gave him the slip, and went off with the 'only friend'--his partner!

A man with half his face eaten away by disease. I've seen the fellow at the house myself Old Larkin, of the Bank, knew them in Kimberley.

They were claim-holders and contractors there and used to bank with him.

The firm was Ca.s.sidy and Mallandane. I only wonder she continues to call herself Mallandane. It's a formality she might as well have dispensed with."

I knew Carter to be a gossipy young devil, so I held my peace about Ca.s.sidy; but it was with an effort. My impulse was to give Carter the lie direct, but I remembered Mrs Chauncey's last words and refrained.

We walked along in silence, and after a while Carter stopped in the road opposite a small house, the door of which stood partly open. There were voices outside, and as Carter said, "Hush! listen!" we stopped instinctively, and my heart sank as I recognised a voice that said "Good-night." I moved on hastily, disgusted at being trapped into eavesdropping, and Carter laughed.

"That's the only friend! There's no mistaking _that_. But I wonder why he's coming away," said the youth, with unmistakable and insinuating emphasis on the last words.

No one answered his self-satisfied cackling. I was listening to the brisk walk behind us. I would have known it in a million. Closer and closer it came; his sleeve brushed mine as he stepped lightly past. I let him go, and I don't know why. But I felt like a whipped cur for doing it.

It seemed to me that I must heretofore have been living in extraordinary ignorance of what was going on round about me in a small place; for, as though it only needed the start, from the first mention of this story by Carter I was always hearing it, or a similar one, or one half corroborating it.

I made an effort to see Ca.s.sidy the first thing next morning, but he had left his hotel--presumably having gone out to the works again. After a day or two had pa.s.sed I felt glad that I had not met him--glad because I felt sure that he would have noticed that there was something wrong. He would instinctively have detected the cordiality and confidence which were controlled by an effort of will, and were not--as they should have been, and as they did again become--spontaneous and real.

This worried me exceedingly and I turned it over and over again to get at the truth, and eventually it came to this. I knew that they were right as to the cause of his disfigurement; it was impossible to look at him and not accept it. I had no high moral prejudices about this. I only pitied him the more. But I did not believe a word of the rest of the story. All presumption and a heap of circ.u.mstances were against me, but I am glad to say that, but for the first hesitation, I never, never doubted him.

It may have been a week or two after this that I met Mrs Chauncey in camp one afternoon. I had not seen her since the evening already referred to, and, as it was an off afternoon, I asked leave to join her in her walk home.

We wandered on slowly through the outskirts of the camp, along the most direct road to the Chaunceys' house. Since I had heard and seen what I had that evening my interest in Mrs Mallandane had increased. I never pa.s.sed the house without looking. I claim--even to myself--that it was real interest and not curiosity that prompted me. Once or twice I had seen the figure in simple black, but not sufficiently clearly to have known the face again. Her figure I don't think I should have mistaken; it was rather striking. There was also a little girl who used to sit under a mimosa-tree studying her lessons or doing sums on a slate. She and I became friends. I was drawn to the youngster because, when pa.s.sing one day, I took the unwarrantable liberty of looking over her shoulder to see what the sum was. After a decent pause, during which I might have taken the hint, she turned up at me a very serious little face lighted by large blue eyes, and lisped slowly:

"I don't like people to thtand behind, becauth I fordet my thums."

I laughingly patted the little head, and went on; but after this I always stopped to chaff my little friend about her "thums," and I generally brought an offering of some sort--sweets, cake, or fruit.

Thinking of the house and its people as we walked along, I was not sorry when Mrs Chauncey asked if I would mind waiting for a minute or two while she went in to see her _protegee_ about some work secured or promised.