Wild Honey Part 1

Wild Honey.

by Cynthia Stockley.

CHAPTER ONE.

WILD HONEY--PART I.

It was a six-mule mail-coach that b.u.mped and banged along the rough highroad to Buluwayo, and Vivienne Carlton anathematised the fate that condemned her to travel by it. Cordially she detested the cheerful garrulity of certain of her fellow-pa.s.sengers, quoting to herself Louis Vance's satirical _mot: "A_ pessimist is a person who has to live with optimists." Gladly would she have slain the optimists with whom she was so tightly packed in the hooded body of the cart--for the term "coach"

was merely a polite fiction: the affair was neither more nor less than a two-seated Cape cart, with the hood thrown back so that the mules might find the pulling easier and the pa.s.sengers be more effectively grilled.

Two pa.s.sengers shared the front seat with the driver. Miss Carlton was wedged in the back seat between a perspiring Cape Colonial and a tall lithe man with a deeply tanned complexion and careless light grey eyes, who was as taciturn as herself. No one looking at her sitting there so composedly, closely veiled and gloved, violet eyes quietly fixed on the horizon, her tall khaki-clad figure preserving in spite of its contiguity with strangers an air of dainty aloofness, would have guessed her frame of mind. Her companions had her marked down as an English girl whose beauty and breeding warranted her to put on as much "side" as she liked, and in this they were not very far from the truth. They were also certain that she was the daughter of a lord, and wondered how she came to be travelling alone. The Colonial and the man who came from Kimberley admired her madly without daring to address a word to her; the showy blonde who was going up to be a barmaid in Salisbury, would have given the necklace of diamonds she wore for its safety under her cotton blouse, to possess that aloof manner and gift of remaining silent without being offensive. Only the third man with his careless glance that took in every point of the changing scene of bush, and tree, and kop, had any notion of what was going on behind the composed lovely face of the girl next to him. And the reason he knew was that though he looked like a pirate or a Klondike miner, or anything that was reckless and disreputable he was really of the same world as herself, and could very well guess how the discomfort and hateful intimacy of coach-travelling outraged her. But even he was far from guessing at the hopeless fury, and bitter disdain of her surroundings and the world in general that was rankling in the heart so close to him that he could almost feel its beating.

Vivienne Carlton's hand was against all men as she believed all women's to be against her; but she had learned to conceal the fact well. Not by brandishing her scorn and detestation of it could she hope to get back her own from a world that had treated her badly. Two years of struggling for a living in the ranks of journalism had taught her nothing if it had not taught her this!

Ah! what a two years! Instead of enjoying the brilliant peace of the land about her, she was thinking of them now, turning her eyes inward to memories that were poisoning her life. Two years of outward kow-towing to those who had once kow-towed to her, of being cut and ignored by people who when she was heiress to great estates and an ancient name would have petted and fawned upon her, had not the natural haughtiness of her nature rebuffed them. They remembered those rebuffs when the tide of her family's prosperity turned, and the great law case that had dragged on wearily for many months came to an end with the verdict that disinherited her father and gave to an Australian cad all that Vivienne had been taught from her birth to consider irrefragably hers. Well had her haughtiness been remembered against her in that hour! It seemed as though all fashionable society had been poised expectant, stones and javelins in hand, waiting for the fall of the house of Giffard-Carlton.

Sir Gerald, her gentle, chivalrous father, had not long survived the loss of his t.i.tle and position, but Vivienne and her mother of the same spirit, proud and defiant in adversity, bore the brunt of society's malignant glee with unbowed heads, contemptuously refusing the charity of the usurper, and the humiliating favours of so-called friends. They were obliged to step down from their high places, but they did it with dignity, and might with dignity have retired into obscurity and been forgotten by society, like many another before them, but for the fact that of all her gifts the only one Vivienne could turn to account was the gift of description and charming phrase which soon gave her a place and a living in the world of journalism. And in that connection she came into constant touch with the world of society. For she had been obliged of course to begin at the very beginning, penny-a-lining reports of b.a.l.l.s and receptions, descriptions of weddings and the gowns of debutantes. It was at such work that so much that was wounding and embittering had come her way. Many a cruel insult had she been obliged to swallow for her guinea a column. Many an old score cherished by _les nouveaux riches_ against the house of Giffard-Carlton had been paid into the account of the lady journalist! And the result of it all was a nature incalculably embittered and corroded. Though she was only twenty-two, Vivienne did not feel like a girl any longer, but she still looked like a girl, and a very charming one at that. The fact was one she meant to use as a weapon in her reprisals against a world that had mishandled her. Her gift of writing was a weapon that enabled her to beat a living for herself and her mother out of life, but her beauty was a far more potent one, and she meant to use it to the hilt as a means of getting back her own from society. This work she had come out to Africa to do for the _Daily Flag_--a series of articles descriptive of the life, inhabitants, and prospects of Cecil Rhodes's country--would, she hoped, prove to be a means to a very special end. If her articles made a big hit she would not have to go back to describing ball gowns. But she did not mean to return to journalism at all if she could help it.

There were plenty of millionaires in Africa--and she had plenty to give in exchange for the millions of one of them--youth, beauty, birth, breeding, an intimate knowledge of the social world! There was only one thing he must not ask of her, and that was a heart. She might be tempted to reveal to him what she carried instead--a husk with a little brown dust in it, like a rotten nut! To cry to him as Baudelaire cried in his bitterness:

"My heart?--the beasts have eaten it!"

She had little fear of being unable to gain her end. Many men had proposed to her since she became simple Miss Carlton, but none of them had been able to offer enough in exchange for the rotten nut. The man destined to receive that precious gift must be very rich indeed, must have enough to buy back what the world had robbed her of--place, and power to put her foot on the necks of those who had humiliated her.

There were many such in Africa. Even during her short stay in Cape Town, she had met one who showed himself as heartily disposed as he was well-equipped to shoulder his side of the bargain. Only for a foolish and incomprehensible shrinking on her part at the last moment, she would now have been engaged to marry Wolfe Montague, one of Johannesberg's great financial kings.

However! She was to see him again in a month or two in Rhodesia and doubtless by that time she would be rid of all foolish prejudices. This charming coach journey was one of the things that would help her to come to a propitious decision! At the thought, she gave a little cynical laugh that made her companions stare, wondering what she found in the scenery to amuse her.

Indeed, nothing less amusing than this journey could be imagined. Day after day of weary crawling across a landscape that changed unceasingly in outline, though never in detail. Always the undulating gra.s.sy slopes dotted with bush, the eternal kopje ahead, and the eternal kopje left behind. There was something terrible about the brooding loneliness, the eloquent stillness, the great unending sameness of it all.

They had been travelling for four nights and days and must continue for a good many more yet before the end was reached--sometimes putting up for a night at a rough wayside hotel, more often just outspanning beside a mule stable during the darkest hours and sleeping as best they could in the cramped cart, with rugs and mail-bags as a common couch.

Vivienne had never imagined such physical discomfort possible, and though her body was too strong to suffer by it, her mind was sick, and her whole being revolted at the sordidness of it all. Sleeping side by side with strange men, and a common woman, wedged against them, listening to their snores! Wakening in the morning to the intimacy of their unkempt faces! Eating and drinking in their company, listening to their eternal talk!

Thank Heaven! to-night at least was to be spent at a hotel. Even the others who were seasoned coach-travellers congratulated themselves on that fact, not so much because there would be beds to sleep in, as because an obvious storm was brewing. The sunlight had gone suddenly, and black clouds, lined with pallid green, were grouping in the west, taking the form of a great monster with brooding wings. Now and then a quiver of lightning pa.s.sed across the sky, and a large drop of rain splashed down into the coach.

On rounding a kopje, they came suddenly upon Palapye, the native village where the night was to be spent. It was the kraal of Khama, king of the Bechuana tribe--hundreds of straw thatched huts sprawling up a hill and across the plain!

Vivienne, since she left Pretoria, had seen many such "hotels" as the one by which the coach now drew up: a square wattle-and-daub affair with a number of smaller huts scattered around it. Painfully she clambered down, and with the others followed the worn woman who kept the place to one of these small huts which were the guest rooms. For once there were enough to go round, and no one was obliged to share. That was something to be thankful for in an odious world!

After she had washed some of the dust from her face and hands and removed a great deal more from her dark curly hair, which she wore boy-fashion--short, and parted on one side--Vivienne went and sat by her hut door to get a little air. The storm had not yet broken, and with the thermometer at anything over a hundred, the heat was almost unbearable. Immediately, she became aware of another woman, sitting in the doorway of a hut opposite--a stone-still woman, whose face, shadowed by a dark print sunbonnet was pallid as a bone, with sunken eyes staring absorbedly before her into nothingness. In the listless hands hanging over her knees, she held a child's little torn shabby straw hat.

After one glance, Vivienne in spite of the heat felt a shiver creep over her, and presently in the silence, knowledge came to her that she was in the presence of tragedy. Something terrible was going on behind those fixed, absorbed eyes, some sorrow too deep for words was brooding with bowed head in the mind of that silent watcher. The girl felt the heart quiver in her breast--that heart she supposed the beasts had eaten! And she longed to put out a hand or speak a word of comfort to the woman.

But she had lost the habit of saying sympathetic things and it is one that cannot be regained in a moment. The best she could do was to quietly withdraw from the presence of grief, and stay in the back of her hut until the hotel-woman came to call her for dinner.

In the square hut, the other pa.s.sengers were gathered round the usual meal: goat chops, potatoes, a steaming dish of green mealies boiled on the cob. Vivienne took her place with her habitual aloof composure, paying little attention to the general conversation until a question addressed by the barmaid to the hotel-keeper roused her interest.

"In the name of goodness, what's wrong with that woman I saw sitting inside one of the huts?"

The hotel-keeper made a hopeless gesture with her shoulders.

"_Ach_! Don't ask me, it's too awful! Her _kindt_ is lost in the bush."

"My G.o.d!" said the Kimberley man abruptly, and his mealie cob fell into his plate.

"Yes," continued the woman. "Only three and a half years old, and one minute playing round the waggon in the sight of her pa and ma, and the next minute... _gone_! That was four days ago, and they never seen her since." She added in a low voice, "Nor never will!"

"But what happened?" stammered Vivienne startled out of her reserve.

"Goodness knows, Miss... She just wandered out of sight behind a bush, I suppose, and then--all bushes look alike! You can get lost in three minutes on the veld. Just think of that _arme kind_ tumbling along, falling, and sobbing, and wondering why her ma didn't come. And they hunting like mad things for her! The father's gone cracked as a Hottentot, and still goes on hunting; but _she_ can't stand on her feet any more, and they brought her in here to-day for me to mind."

Vivienne thought it the most appalling thing she had ever heard. Her soul was sick within her. She could eat nothing. She would have left the hut, but the storm had broken with a roar and a flash, and outside the rain was swishing down. She was obliged to sit still and hear more of this story which paralysed her with terror and pity. A love of little children is a very inconvenient possession for a woman who means to beat the world at its own heartless game!

"They found the kid's hat next day, more than twenty miles from where they lost her. Think of it! A child of that age wandering twenty miles!"

"She ran of course," said the light-eyed man briefly. "They always run."

"Or perhaps... you never know... a Hon--"

"Oh, _don't_!" Vivienne cried out suddenly, and put her hand over her eyes. The others stared at her moodily, and the subject dropped. But presently the Kimberley man asked the Colonial if he had ever heard of the fellow who was lost from the Pioneer Column?

"Ya!" said the Colonial. "Seen him often in Buluwayo. He's got a queer look in his eye and I don't wonder. Forty days before he found the Column again--long after they had given him up. And he could never tell a thing he did in those forty days."

"They never can. A fellow I knew in the B.B.P. got lost out from Tuli one time. And when they found him again, all his front teeth were gone.

He couldn't remember how it happened. But of course it was lying on the ground gnawing roots did it."

The barmaid leaned on her elbows, eagerly interested; but Vivienne, white-lipped, listened because she must.

"The great thing is not to lose your head," said the Kimberley man, pleasantly conversational. "I've known lots of fellows who've been lost, and they all agree that the first instinct when you realise you're lost is to start running. Just run and run till you drop. Then the madness gets you, and you begin to tear off your clothes and pitch them in every direction as you run. Nearly every fellow ever found after being lost is stark naked--begging your pardon, Miss," he added as his eye fell upon Vivienne. She took no notice. The rain had stopped, and she fled before she should hear more horrors.

But that night she could not sleep for thinking of the lost little child, and its desolate mother. The storm commenced again, and raged round the hut. Lightning streaked through the canvas windows and rain lashed the earth. She was still wide-eyed on a tear-wet pillow when the hotel-keeper banged the door to say that the coach would start in twenty minutes.

The first thing she noticed as they clambered to their places was that the light-eyed man was missing. She was far too distant to make any remark, but the others with a kind of road-fellowship that surprised her refused to let the coach start until some explanation was forthcoming.

The driver, a ferocious looking half-caste, scowled at them.

"_Ach_! He's gone off on some business of his own if you want to know... and coming on by de next coach. _Now_ will you stop wasting de Company's time and let me drive my mules?"

So on they went through the fresh dawn. The rain-washed land gave up a delicious perfume of drenched leaves and growing things, and a scent of mimosa blew like a caress against the cheeks of the weary travellers.

The sky was a bride in shroudy veils of pale pink that warmed to rose, until the great spiked sun shot up from behind the horizon, and took her in a glittering embrace. Then brazen day was on them once more.

They slept in the coach that night, and got little ease of it. All were thankful enough when next mid-day found them outspanned for an hour or two beside a mule stable. The driver made a fire, and the pa.s.sengers unpacked their baskets. Vivienne was sick to death of tinned food, but glad to accept a cup of tea made in the kettle. Afterwards she strolled away to an open pool not far off, while the others s.n.a.t.c.hed the chance of an hour's sleep in the shadow of the stable.

The little pool or "pan" of water lay glittering in the sunshine and she sat beside it under a tree shaped like a candelabra with great scarlet and yellow flowers rising in flames from its branches. She was too careful of her complexion to attempt to wash in such torrid heat, but she did not mind her hands getting slightly sunburnt for the pleasure of laving them in the tepid water. Presently a charming little creature of the squirrel tribe came out of a bush and looked at her with bright eyes. She took a pellet of chocolate from inside her camera case and held it out invitingly, but the tiny creature backed a little, then sat up on its hind legs and c.o.c.ked its head at her. She took out her camera and tried to snap it, but it ran again just at the critical moment. The same thing happened two or three times, until she got a good picture.

Then she tried once more to beguile it with the chocolate. But whenever she got close, it bounded away. At last, she gave up, and was suddenly astonished to find how far she had come from her pool. Glittering there through the trees it appeared to be quite a quarter of a mile away. Yet that seemed scarcely possible.

"How silly of me!" she murmured. "This is just the way people get lost I expect," and at the thought she noticed a distinct inclination in her feet to hurry, but did not permit them any such foolishness.

"Don't be silly," she repeated to herself. "What are you afraid of?

There is the pool straight in front of you, and as soon as you reach it you will see the coach."

So she forced herself to walk calmly, and all the time she marvelled at the distance she had come just in those few little short runs after the squirrel. And when she got to the pool there was no sign of the coach!