The Shadow of the Past Part 23

"I prefer," Matheson answered brusquely, "to leave Miss Krige's name out of this. I didn't, as a matter of fact, come here to discuss this ugly business, but merely to explain my reasons for not fulfilling my undertaking, and to return your advance, minus my travelling expenses.

That," he said, rising and placing a note on the desk, "finishes everything between us."

"As you will, of course." Holman made a gesture with his shoulders.

"It seems useless for me to say anything. I don't attempt explanations twice. You have taken an outrageous tone and closed every door upon a possible understanding."

"I understand as much as is necessary," Matheson replied. "I'm on watch now. If any ill results follow upon your mischievous activities you can regard me as an enemy. I'll track you down, and fix the thing on you."

Holman rang the bell at his elbow sharply.

"I really can't waste time while you talk nonsense," he said. "Your abuse of me is absurd. If it were less ridiculous I should resent it more effectively."

He turned back to the desk as the door opened to admit the clerk, and, speaking over his shoulder, curtly directed the astonished youth to show the visitor out Matheson, when he emerged from the winding intricacies of the airless pa.s.sage into the sunlight, had a feeling that he had not so much closed that episode as broken an insincere friendship and started an open feud.

CHAPTER TWENTY ONE.

The meeting with Holman and the latter's reference to the girl of the beach brought Matheson's memory with a swing back to Brenda and his promise to her. In all these weeks he had not thought of her twice, nor looked at the address she had given him at his request. He took it out when he got back to his rooms, and considered the wisdom of writing to her in a calm, detached way, and with a view to possible developments.

Finally he decided that he would write, and did so, asking for news of her. He despatched his letter, and waited in a state of curious uncertainty for her reply. When the reply did not come this uncertainty as to the real state of his wishes yielded to a very genuine disappointment. It was no longer a matter of indifference to him; he wanted to hear from her, wanted her friendship.

Some months later, after he was back in Cape Town, his own letter was returned to him through the post office, with the unsatisfactory information pencilled upon it. "Gone away, address not known." He had waited too long; it was not possible now to get into touch with her.

He was sorry for this. He found himself wondering why she had left Mrs Graham, where she had gone. He worried about her. It was not easy to put his anxiety into words, but he had a feeling, strengthened possibly by the fact that she had left no address behind, that the loss of her former post was in the nature of a disaster. It couldn't, he reflected uneasily, be consequent on that moonlight walk... She had so feared being late, and he had displayed impatience at having to hasten.

Perhaps after all she had been late... It was beastly unjust that a little thing like that should have such disproportionate results. He wondered why women didn't combine and insist upon fairer conditions.

Even a companion should be privileged to count certain hours of the day her own.

And then for a time he forgot Brenda again in the interests of his work, and the distraction of new friendships made under the auspices of Macfarlane, an engineering acquaintance resident in Cape Town. There was a man from Port Elizabeth, named Aplin, whom he met first at the docks and with whom he became rather intimate. Aplin was round visiting his people; and there were two pretty cousins whom he took about who evinced a quite flattering interest in Matheson, and invited him to tennis and tea, and met him on occasions by agreement in town in the middle of the morning for ices and coffee. They were merry, high-spirited, Colonial girls, who brought just that bright touch of femininity into his life which he needed at the moment, an easy encouraging friendliness that was not intimate enough in character to set throbbing the pain of the recent hurt, but was sufficiently appreciative and compet.i.tive to be agreeable. These girls were not in the least intellectual, but they had plenty of small talk and were pleasant to look at. Matheson enjoyed going to the house. It was somewhere, to go out of working hours, where he could feel sure of a welcome and of being amused.

At no period of the acquaintance did he entertain any deeper sentiment than that of friendship for either of them; but they both took a kind of proprietary interest in him and let him see it. At the same time they showed a similar interest in Aplin, and one or two men who frequented their tennis court. They were quite frankly matrimonial in intention.

Their limited and rather commonplace lives shaped them for the one inevitable destiny, failing which there was no resource, no visible outlet.

"You go out there a good deal," Macfarlane warned him one Sat.u.r.day, meeting him on the tram for Rondebosch with a racquet under his arm.

"You'll be engaged before you know where you are." He laughed, a jolly good-natured laugh. "They tried to catch me at one time. It's Rosie you had better be careful of."

When Matheson reached the house and entered the garden he saw Rosie in the path, stooping over a flower-border. He had met her like this before and believed the encounter accidental, but Macfarlane's words, coming back to him, illumined his understanding. Rosie turned with a little start and straightened herself and came towards him. She looked quite pretty and entirely unconscious, and she held some blue flower in her hand the name of which he did not know.

"How nice!" she said. "I didn't guess it was you when I heard the gate.

I was picking flowers."

She held the sample one up to him as evidence of her occupation.

"You shall wear it in your b.u.t.tonhole. It matches your eyes."

He stood while she pinned it in for him, and found some difficulty in keeping the amus.e.m.e.nt out of the eyes which matched with her flower.

She stepped back to admire the effect of her handiwork and flashed a coquettish glance at him, and then returned to admiring the effect.

"That's awfully kind of you," he said. "I feel tremendously smart."

"You look festive," she admitted. "Blue suits you. I'm glad I happened to be in the garden when you arrived."

There was only one obvious reply to this obvious speech. Matheson made it perfunctorily.

"It is I who have the greater reason to be glad," he said. "I don't think any one has ever given me a flower before--certainly no one else has been kind enough to pin one in my coat."

"I'm glad I'm the first," she said, and flashed another look at him, and walked on by his side. "I am not considered generous with my favours,"

she added mendaciously... "but the colour of the flower suggested you.

I like blue eyes."

Matheson laughed at that.

"I prefer brown eyes," he said, and was amused at the smiling satisfaction of the brunette face close to his shoulder.

"Well, of course," she returned, "one usually admires opposite colouring. That's only natural."

Her speech somehow set him thinking of the fairest face he had ever seen. The picture of that fair face framed in the sunlit hair, with the dark woodwork of the old room for a background, was so vividly before him that it was not surprising his attention wandered from the empty little person at his side, whose flow of frivolous chatter went on uninterruptedly, and covered while it did not disguise the fact that he had grown suddenly dull. Then May appeared unexpectedly from behind some flowering shrubs, and took charge of him and conducted him to the tennis court, where Aplin and another man were playing singles, while Mrs Aplin sat in a rustic summer-house overlooking the court, a self-effacing chaperon, beaming complacently upon the young people, with an indulgent eye lit with maternal pride for her girls. There were no other girls present. As Rosie explained, if they invited too many people they never got any play themselves.

It was all very jolly and homelike, Matheson considered. He played with both girls in turn. May lit a cigarette for him between the sets, and Mrs Aplin fussed over him during tea, and was confidential with him later in regard to her daughters' tastes and accomplishments and general amiability.

"They are such favourites with _every one_," she confided with emphatic earnestness. "A friend whose girls are not popular asked me recently the secret of my training... what plans I adopted in bringing my girls up that made them so generally liked? I told her that I had brought them up to play games." She regarded Matheson quite seriously, with a gleam of satisfaction in her eyes. "They play games... every game...

_well_. What more is required of a girl? All this nonsense about higher education... It's so unnecessary. And study is bad for the eyes; it makes girls frown; and a girl with a frown doesn't look so much studious as bad tempered. Let them play games and look nice; that's all that is requisite."

"It's the sort of idea I started out with," Matheson returned, beating his tennis boot softly with his racquet and idly watching the pipe-clay rise in little clouds. He laughed suddenly. "I don't know about looking nice, but I had a fancy for playing games. Life itself seemed a game. But it isn't. And playing games doesn't provide one with a banking account."

"Of course it's different for men. I don't advocate games for _every one_," she a.s.sured him gravely. "But girls don't need to think about banking accounts."

"Some of them must," he said.

She looked at him in surprise.

"I wasn't speaking of _that_ sort of girl; I meant my own girls," she answered in a tone that opened up all the social distances before Matheson's amazed vision.

"I think responsibility _uns.e.xes_ a woman," she added; and her bewildered listener felt that the final nail had been driven into the coffin containing the discredited remains of the girl-worker's claim to respectability.

That was the tone of the Rondebosch household; and the head of the house, whose flourishing business made this comfortable despite of everything save leisure possible to his womenkind, showed his appreciation of their views by spending as little time under his roof-tree as was compatible with his position in relation to the family.

Matheson had met Mr Aplin only once when he dined at the house.

Macfarlane called him morose, but Matheson rather liked the silent, heavy, bored-looking man whose presence his wife and daughters managed to eclipse.

"It was seeing the old man among them scared me off," Macfarlane informed him. "Any man who marries one of them can look forward to becoming like that. He's a cipher in the house. They do well to keep him in the background as a rule. But there's lots of money. If a man isn't particular in other respects... there you are."

Money undoubtedly swelled the train of the Aplin girls' admirers; but it was not a sufficiently powerful magnet to attract Matheson. As he explained one day in a burst of confidence to Macfarlane, he could not dispense altogether with brains in a life-partner.

"They are pretty," he allowed,--"and jolly nice to talk with for an afternoon, but they have no more intelligence than kittens. Imagine how fed up a man would get! And looks don't last. Though, apart from that, I'd grow weary to death of the inanity long before the looks were faded.

I want more than either of them could give from my wife."

"Well, I don't know," Macfarlane returned lazily, "that I'm so keen on matrimony. A man has a lot better time while he's single."

"That's all very well," Matheson argued; "but the world can't be run on those lines. I mean to marry. I want to have a wife and children and some stake in the country."

"You're going ahead a bit," Macfarlane laughed. "What's changed you?

You weren't keen on responsibilities at one time... You are changed, Matheson. You've changed a lot during the last few months... A girl-- eh?"