"No," said the girl, after a moment's pause. "I won't leave you.""What 's that?" cried Mrs. Jakes and put a quick frightened hand upon her arm. "Listen! Who is it?"Steps, undisguised and clear, passed from the grass to the stone steps of the house and ascended, crossed the stoep and were lost to hearing in the doorway.The two women waited, breathless. It sprang to Margaret's mind that the lantern must have shown her clearly to Kamis, where he waited in the darkness, and he must have seen the climax of her efforts and her handkerchief at her lips, and gone forthwith to the study for the drugs which would put an end to the matter."Look," whispered Mrs. Jakes. "Some one is striking matches—in the study."The window brightened and darkened again and then lit with a steady glow; the invader had found a candle. Mrs. Jakes dropped Margaret's arm."I must see who it is," she said. "Walking into people's houses like this."Margaret held her back; she was starting forthwith to bring the majesty of her presence to bear on the unknown and possibly dangerous intruder. Mrs. Jakes had a house as well as a husband and could die at need for either."No, don't go," said Margaret. "I know who it is. It's all right, if only you won't be—well, silly about it.""Who is it, then?" demanded Mrs. Jakes.Margaret felt feeble and unequal to the position. Her chest was painful, she was cold, and now there was about to be a delicate affair with Mrs. Jakes. She could have laughed at the growing complexity of things, but had the wit not to."It 's a doctor," she said; "a real London doctor. He was passing when you left me to get the lantern, and I wouldn't let him stay because I thought you 'd be annoyed. He 's gone into the house to—""Does he know?" whispered Mrs. Jakes, feverishly, thrusting close to her. "Does he know—about this?" Her downward-pointing finger indicated the slumbers of Dr. Jakes. "Say, can't you—does he know?""He 'd seen him," said Margaret. "I expect he loosened the collar—you know. He wanted to help but I wouldn't let him.""Is he a friend of yours?" asked Mrs. Jakes again, still in the same agitated whisper."Yes," answered Margaret. "He is. It 's all right, really, if only you 'll be sensible and not make a fuss. He 'll help us and then he 'll go away and he 'll say nothing. You did n't think I 'd do anything to hurt you, did you? Are n't we friends?"Mrs. Jakes stood silent; she asked no questions as to how a London doctor, a friend of Margaret's, chanced to be walking upon the Karoo at night."Well," she said at last, with a long sigh; "perhaps we might have needed some help, in any case."That was all she said, till the footsteps came again across the stoep and down the steps, more deliberately this time, as though something were being carried with precaution. Then they were noiseless for a minute or more on the grass, and at last the figure of Kamis came into the further edge of the lighted circle."I had to do it," he said, before either of them could speak, and showed the graduated glass in his hand. "I saw you with your handkerchief."Margaret, with an instinct of apprehension, looked at Mrs. Jakes. At the first dim view of him, she had roused herself from her dejection, and put on her prim, social face to meet the London doctor effectively. Her little meaningless smile was bent for him; she would make a blameless and uneventful drawing-room of the August night and guard it against unseemly dramatics.He turned from Margaret towards her and came further into the lamp-light, and she had a clear view of the black face and sorrowful, foolish negro features. She uttered a gasp that was like a low cry and stood aghast, staring."Madam," began Kamis.She shivered. "A Kafir," she said. "The doctor will never forgive us." And then, wheeling upon Margaret, "And I 'll never forgive you. You said we were friends—and this is what you do to me.""Mrs. Jakes," implored Margaret. "You must be sensible. It 's all right, really. This gentleman—""This gentleman," Mrs. Jakes uttered a passionate spurt of laughter. "Do you mean this nigger? Gentleman, you call it? A London doctor? A friend of yours? A friend. Ha, ha!" She spun round again towards Kamis, waiting with the glass in his hand, the liquid in which shone greenish to the lamp. "Voetzaak!" she ordered, shrilly. "Hamba wena—ch'che. Skellum. Injah. Voetzaak!"Kamis stood his ground. He cast a look at Margaret, past Mrs. Jakes, and spoke to her."Will she let me give him this?" he asked. "Tell her I am a doctor and this will bring him to very quickly. And then I 'll go away at once and never say a word about it.""Don't you dare touch him," menaced Mrs. Jakes. "A filthy Kafir—I should think so, indeed."Kamis went on in the same steady tone. "If she won't you must go in at once and send for another doctor to-morrow. This man ought to be reported.""You dare," cried Mrs. Jakes. "You 'd report him—a Kafir." She edged closer to the prostrate body of Dr. Jakes and stood beside it like a beast-mother at bay. "I 'll have you locked up—walking into my husband's study like that.""Mrs. Jakes." Margaret tried once more. "Please listen. If you 'll only let the doctor have this drink, he 'll be able to walk. If you don't, he 'll have to stay here. I am your friend; I got up when you came to me and I said I wouldn't leave you even when I hurt my chest. Doesn't that prove that I am? I wouldn't do you any harm or shame you before other people for anything. What will Dr. Jakes say if he finds out that you let me stay here pleading when I ought to be in bed? He 's a doctor himself and he 'll be awfully annoyed—after telling me I should get well, too. Aren't you going to give him a chance—and me?"Mrs. Jakes merely glared stonily."Come," said Margaret. "Won't you?"Kamis uttered a smothered exclamation. "I won't wait," he said. "I 'll count ten, slowly. Then Miss Harding must go in and I go away.""Oh, don't begin that sort of thing," cried Margaret. "Mrs. Jakes is going to be sensible. Aren't you?"There was no reply, only the stony and hostile stare of the little woman facing them and the gray image of disgrace."One," counted Kamis clearly. "Two. Three."He counted with the stolid regularity of a clock; he made as though to overturn the glass and waste its contents in the dust as soon as he should have reached ten. "Ten," he uttered, but held it safely still. "Well?"Mrs. Jakes did not move for some moments. Then she sighed and, still without speaking, moved away from the slumbering doctor. She walked a dozen paces from the road and stood with her back to them.With quick skilful movements, Kamis lifted the unconscious man's head to the crook of his arm and the rim of the glass clicked on his teeth. Margaret walked after Mrs. Jakes."Come," she said gently. "I don't misunderstand. You trusted me or you would n't have waked me. Everything will be all right soon and then you 'll forgive me.""I won't—never."Mrs. Jakes would not face her. She stood looking into the blackness, tense with enmity."Well, I hope you will," said Margaret.They heard grunts from the doctor and then quavering speech and one rich oath, and a noise of spitting. The Kafir approached them noiselessly from behind and paused at Margaret's side."That's done the trick," he said; "and he doesn't even know who gave him the draft. You 'll go in now?""Yes," said Margaret. "Youhavebeen good, though."Mrs. Jakes had returned to her husband; they were for the moment alone."I didn't mean to force your hand," he whispered. "But I had to. A doctor has duties."She gave him her hand. "There was something I wanted to tell you, but there 's no time to explain now. Did you know you were wanted by the police?""Bless you, yes." He smiled with a white flash of teeth. "Were you going to warn me? How kind! And now, in you go, and good night."Dr. Jakes was sitting up, spitting with vigor and astonishment. He had taken a heroic dose of hair-raising restoratives on the head of a poisonous amount of whisky, and his palate was a moldering ruin. But the clearness of his faculties left nothing to be desired."Who 's that?" he demanded at sight of Margaret. "Miss Harding. How do you come to be out here at this time?""You should time your fits more decently, doctor," answered Margaret coolly.Mrs. Jakes hastened to explain more acceptably. "I was frightened, Eustace. You looked so bad—and these fits are terrible. So I asked Miss Harding if she wouldn't come and help me.""A patient," said the doctor. He turned over and rose stiffly to his feet, dust-stained all over. He stood before her awkwardly."I am unfortunate," he said. "You are in my care and this is what happens. It is my misfortune—and my fault. You 'll go back to bed now, Miss Harding, please.""Sure there 's nothing more you want?" inquired Margaret."At once, please," he repeated. "In the morning—but go at once now."On the stoep she paused to listen to them following after her and heard a portion of Mrs. Jakes' excuses to her husband."You looked so dreadful, Eustace, and I was frightened. And then, you 're so heavy, and I suppose I was tired, and to-night I couldn't quite manage by myself, dear."Margaret passed in at the door in order to cough unheard, that nothing might be added to the tale of Mrs. Jakes' delinquencies.CHAPTER IX"And what have we here?" said the stranger loudly. "What have we here, now?"Paul, sitting cross-legged in his old place under the wall of the dam, with a piece of clay between his fingers, looked round with a start. The stranger had come up behind him, treading unheard in his burst and broken shoes upon the soft dust, and now stood leaning upon a stick and smiling down upon him with a kind of desperate jauntiness. His attitude and manner, with their parody of urbane ease, had for the moment power to hide the miserable shabbiness of his clothes, which were not so much broken and worn as decayed; it was decay rather than hardship which marked the whole figure of the man. Only the face, clean-shaven save for a new crop of bristles, had some quality of mobility and temper, and the eyes with which he looked at Paul were wary and hard."Oh, nothing," said Paul, uneasily, covering his clay with one hand. "Who are you?"The stranger eyed him for some moments longer with the shrewdness of one accustomed to read his fortune in other men's faces, and while he did so the smile remained fixed on his own as though he had forgotten to take it off."Who am I!" he exclaimed. "My boy, it 'd take a long time to tell you. But there 's one thing that perhaps you can see for yourself—I 'm a gentleman."Paul considered this information deliberately."Are you?" he said."I 'm dusty," admitted the other; "dusty both inside and out. And I 'm travelin' on foot—without luggage. So much I admit; I 've met with misfortunes. But there 's one thing the devil himself can't take away from me, and that 's the grand old name of gentleman. An' now, my lad, to business; you live at that farm there?""Yes," replied Paul. This tramp had points at which he differed from other tramps, and Paul stared at him thoughtfully."So far, so good," said the stranger. "Question number two: does it run to a meal for a gentleman on his travels, an' a bed of sorts? Answer me that. I don't mean a meal with a shilling to pay at the end of it, because—to give it you straight—I 'm out of shillings for the present. Now, speak up.""If you go up there, they 'll give you something to eat, and you can sleep somewhere," said Paul, a little puzzled by the unusual rhetoric.The stranger nodded approvingly. "It's all right, then?" he said. "Good—go up one. But say! Ain't you going there yourself pretty soon?""Presently," said Paul."Then, if it 's all the same to you," said the stranger, "I 'll wait and go up with you. Nothing like being introduced by a member," he added, as he lowered himself stiffly to a seat among the rank grass under the wall. "Gives a feller standing, don't it?"He took off his limp hat and let himself fall back against the slope of the wall, grunting with appreciation of the relief after a day's tramp in the sun. His rather full body and thin legs, ending in a pair of ruinous shoes that let his toes be seen, lay along the grass like an obscene corpse, and above them his feeble, sophisticated face leered at Paul as though to invite him to become its confidant."You go on with what you 're doing," urged the stranger. "Don't let me hinder you. Makin' marbles, were you—or what?""No," said Paul. He hesitated, for an idea had come to him while he watched the stranger. "But—but if you 'll do something for me, I 'll give you a shilling.""Eh?" The other rolled a dull eye on him. "It isn't murder, is it? I should want one-and-six for that. I never take less."Paul flushed. "I don't know what you mean," he said. "I only want you to keep still like that while I—while I make a model of you. You said you had n't got any shillings just now.""Did I say that?" inquired the stranger. "Well, well! However, chuck us over your shilling and I 'll see what I can do for you."He made a show of biting the coin and subjecting it to other tests of its goodness while the boy looked on anxiously. Paul was relieved when at last he pocketed it and lay back again."I 'll get rid of it somehow," he said. "It's very well made. And now, am I to look pleasant, or what?""Don't look at all," directed Paul. "Just be like—like you are. You can go to sleep if you like.""I never sleep on an empty stomach," replied the stranger, arranging himself in an attitude of comfort."Is this all right for you? Fire away, then, Mike Angelo. Can I talk while you 're at it?""If you want to," answered Paul. The clay which he had been shaping was another head, and now he kneaded it out of shape between his hands and rounded it rudely for a sketch of the face before him. The Kafir, Kamis, had bidden him refrain from his attempts to do mass and detail at once, to form the features and the expression together; but Paul knew he had little time before him and meant to make the most of it. The tramp had his hands joined behind his head and his eyes half-closed; he offered to the boy the spectacle of a man beaten to the very ground and content to take his ease there."D'you do much of this kind of thing?" asked the tramp, when some silent minutes had passed."Yes," said Paul, "a lot.""Nothing like it, is there?" asked the other. He spoke lazily, absorbed in his comfort. "We 've all got our game, every bally one of us. Mine was actin'.""Acting?" Paul paused in his busy fingering to look up. "Were you an actor?"The actors he knew looked out of frames in his mother's little parlor, intense, well-fed, with an inhuman brilliance of attire."Even me," replied the tramp equably. He did not move from his posture nor uncover his drowsy eyes; the swollen lids, in which the veins stood out in purple, did not move, but his voice took a rounder and more conscious tone as he went on: "And there was a time, my boy, when actin' meant me and I meant actin'. In '87, I was playing in 'The Demon Doctor,' and drawing my seven quid a week—you believe me. Talk of art—why! I 've had letters from Irving that 'd make you open your eyes.""I 've heard about Irving," said Paul, glancing back and fore from his clay to the curiously pouched mouth of his recumbent model."Fancy," exclaimed the tramp softly. "But it was a great game, a great game. Sometimes, even now, I sort of miss it. And the funny thing is—it is n't the grub and the girls and the cash in my breeches pocket that I miss so much. It 's the bally work. It 's the work, my boy." He seemed to wonder torpidly at himself, and for some seconds he continued to repeat, as though in amazement: "It 's the work." He went on: "Seems as if once an actor, always an actor, don't it? A feller 's got talent in him and he 's got to empty it out, or ache. Some sing, some write, some paint; you prod clay about; but I 'm an actor. Time was, I could act a gas meter, if it was the part, and that 's my trouble to this day."He ceased; he had delivered himself without once looking up or reflecting the matter of his speech by a change of expression. For all the part his body or his features had in his words, it might have been a dead man speaking. Paul worked on steadily, giving small thought to anything but the shape that came into being under his hands. His standard of experience was slight; he knew too little of men and their vicissitudes to picture to himself the processes by which the face he strove to reproduce sketchily could have been shaped to its cast of sorrowful pretense; he only felt, cloudily and without knowledge, that it signaled a strange and unlovely fate.His knack served him well on that evening, and besides, there was not an elusive remembrance of form to be courted, but the living original before him. The tramp seemed to sleep; and swiftly, with merciless assurance, the salient thing about him came into existence between Paul's hands. Long before the light failed or the gourd-drum at the farmhouse door commenced its rhythmic call, the thing was done—a mere sketch, with the thumb-prints not even smoothed away, but stamped none the less with the pitiless print of life."Done it?" inquired the tramp, rousing as Paul uncrossed his legs and prepared to put the clay away. "Let 's have a look?""It wants to be made smooth," explained Paul, as he passed it to him. "And it's soft, of course, so don't squeeze it.""I won't squeeze it," the tramp assured him and took it. He gazed at it doubtfully, letting it lie on his knee. "Oho!" he said."It's only a quick thing," said Paul. "There was n't time to do it properly.""Wasn't there?" said the tramp, without looking up. "It 's like me, is it? Damn you, why don't you say it and have done with it?""Why," cried Paul bewildered, and coloring furiously. "What's the matter? Itislike you. I modeled it from you just now as you were lying there.""An' paid me a shilling for it." The tramp thrust an impetuous hand into his pocket; possibly he was inspired to draw forth the coin and fling it in Paul's face. If so, he decided against it; he looked at the coin wryly and returned it to its place."Well," he said finally; "you 've got me nicely. The cue is to shy you and your bally model into the dam together—an' what about my supper? Eh? Yes, you 've got me sweetly. Here, take the thing, or I might make up my mind to go hungry for the pleasure of squashing it flat on your ugly mug.""You don't like it?" asked Paul, as he received the clay again from the tramp's hands. He did not understand; for all he knew, there were men who surprised their mothers by being born with that strange stamp upon them.The tramp gave him a slow wrathful look. "The joke 's on me," he answered. "Iknow. I look a drunk who 's been out all night; I 'm not denying it. I 've got a face that 'll get me blackballed for admission to hell. I know all that and you 've made a picture of it. But don't rub it in."Paul looked at the clay again, and although the man's offense was dawning on his understanding, he smiled at the sight of a strong thing strongly done."I didn't mean any joke," he protested."Let 's call it a joke," said the tramp. "Once when I was nearly dying of thirst up beyond Kimberly, a feller that I asked for water gave me a cup of paraffin. That was another joke. Tramps are fair game for you jokers, aren't they? Well, if that meal you spoke about wasn't a joke, too, let 's be getting up to the house.""All right," said Paul. He hesitated a minute, for he hated to part with the thing he had made. "Oh, it can go," he exclaimed, and threw the clay up over the wall. It fell into the dam above their heads with a splash."I didn't mean any joke, truly," he assured the tramp."Don't rub it in," begged the other. "We don't want to make a song about it. And anyhow, I want to try to forget it. So come on—do."They came together through the kraals and across the deserted yard to the house-door, the tramp looking about him at the apparatus of well-fed and well-roofed life with an expression of genial approval. Paul would have taken him round to the back-door, but he halted."Not bad," he commented. "Not bad at all, considering. An' this is the way in, I suppose.""We 'd better go round," suggested Paul, but the tramp turned on the doorstep and waved a nonchalant hand."Oh, this 'll do," he said, and there was nothing for Paul to do but to follow him into the little passage.The door of the parlor stood open, and within was Mrs. du Preez, flicking a duster at the furniture in a desultory fashion. The tramp paused and looked at her appraisingly."The lady of the house, no doubt," he surmised, with his terrible showy smile, before she could speak. "It 's the boy, madam; he wouldn't take no for an answer. Ihadto come home to supper with him."His greedy quick eyes were busy about the little room; they seemed to read a price-ticket on each item of its poor pretentious furniture and assess the littleness of those signed and framed photographs which inhabited it like a company of ghosts."Why," he cried suddenly, and turned from his inspection of these last to stare again at Mrs. du Preez.His plausible fluency had availed for the moment to hide the quality of his clothes and person, but now Mrs. du Preez had had time to perceive the defects of both."What d'you mean?" she demanded. "How d 'you get in here? Who are you?"The tramp was still staring at her. "It 's on the tip of my tongue," he said. "Give me a moment. Why"—with a joyous vociferation—"who 'd ha' thought it? It 's little Sinclair, as I 'm a sinnair—little Vivie Sinclair of the old brigade, stap my vitals if it ain't.""What?"The man filled the narrow door, and Paul had to stoop under his elbow to see his mother. She was leaning with both hands on the table, searching his face with eyes grown lively and apprehensive in a moment. The old name of her stage days had power to make this change in her."Who is it?" she asked."Think," begged the tramp. "Try! No use? Well—" he swept her a spacious bow, battered hat to heart, foot thrown back—"look on this picture"—he tapped his bosom—"and on that." His big creased forefinger flung out towards the photograph which had the place of honor on the crowded mantel-shelf and dragged her gaze with it."It 's not—" Mrs. du Preez glanced rapidly back and forth between the living original and the glazed, immaculate counterfeit—"it isn't—it can't be—Bailey?""It is; it can," replied the tramp categorically, and Boy Bailey, in the too, too solid flesh advanced into the room.Mrs. du Preez had a moment of motionless amaze, and then with a flushed face came in a rush around the table to meet him. They clasped hands and both laughed."Why," cried Mrs. du Preez; "if this don't—but Bailey! Where ever do you come from, an' like this? Glad to see you? Yes, I am glad; you 're the first of the old crowd that I 've seen since I—I married.""Married, eh?" The tramp tempered an over-gallant and enterprising attitude. "Then I mustn't—eh?"His face was bent towards hers and he still held her hands."No; you mustn't," spoke Paul unexpectedly, from the doorway, where he was an absorbed witness of the scene.They both turned sharply; they had forgotten the boy."Don't be silly, Paul," said his mother, rather sharply. "Mr. Bailey was only joking." But she freed her hands none the less, while Mr. Bailey bent his wary gaze upon the boy.The interruption served to bring the conversation down to a less emotional plane, and Paul sat down on a chair just within the door to watch the unawaited results of promising a meal to a chance tramp. The effect on his mother was not the least remarkable consequence. The veld threw up a lamentable man at your feet; in charity and some bewilderment you took him home to feed him, and thereupon your mother, your weary, petulant, uncertain mother, took him to her arms and became, by that unsavory contact, pink and vivacious."There 's more of you," said Mrs. du Preez, making a fresh examination of her visitor. "You 're fatter than what you were, Bailey, in those old days."Boy Bailey nodded carelessly. "Yes, my figure 's gone too," he agreed; "gone with all the rest. Friends, position, reputation—all but my spirits and my talents. I know. Ah, but those were good times, weren't they?""Too good to last," sighed Mrs. du Preez."They didn't last for me," said Boy Bailey. "When we broke down at Fereira—lemme see! That must be nearly twenty years ago, ain't it?—I took my leave of Fortune. Never another glance did I get from her; not one bally squint. I did advance agent for a fortune-teller for a bit; I even came down to clerking in a store. I 've been most things a man can be in this country, except rich. And why is it? What 's stood in my way all along? What 's been my handicap that holds me back and nobbles me every time I face the starter?""Ah!" exclaimed Mrs. du Preez sympathetically."I don't need to tell you," continued Boy Bailey, "you not being one of the herd, that it 's temperament that has me all the time. I don't boast of it, but you know how it is. You remember me when I had scope; you 've seen me at the game; you can judge for yourself. A man with temperament in this country has got as much chance as a snowflake in hell. Perhaps, though, you 've found that out for yourself before now.""Don't I know it," retorted Mrs. du Preez. "Bailey, if you 'll believe me, I have n't heard that word 'temperament,' since I saw you last. Talk of scope—why you can go to the winder there and see with your eyes all the scope I 've had since I married. It 's been tough, Bailey; it 's been downright tough.""Still—" began Mr. Bailey, but paused. "We must have another talk," he substituted. "There 's a lot to hear and to tell. Do you think you could manage to put me up for a day or two? I suppose your husband wouldn't mind?""Why should he?" demanded Mrs. du Preez. "You 're the first in all these years. Still, it wouldn't be a bad idea if you was to have a change of clothes before he sees you, Bailey. It isn't me that minds, you know; so far as that goes, you 'd be welcome in anything; but—"Boy Bailey waved her excuses away. "I understand," he said. "I understand. It's these prejudices—have your own way."The resources of Christian du Preez's wardrobe were narrow, and Christian's wife was further hampered in the selection of clothes for her guest by a doubt whether, if she selected too generously, Christian might not insist on the guest stripping as soon as he set eyes on him. Her discretion revealed itself, when Mr. Bailey was dressed, in a certain sketchiness of his total effect, an indeterminate quality that was not lessened by the fact that all of the garments were too narrow and too long; and though no alteration of his original appearance could fail to improve it, there was no hiding his general character of slow decay."It 's hardly a disguise," commented Boy Bailey, as he surveyed himself when the change was made. "Disguise is n't the word that covers it, and I 'm hanged if I know what word does. But these pants are chronic.""You can roll 'em up another couple of inches," suggested Mrs. du Preez."It isn't that," complained Mr. Bailey. "If they want to cover my feet, they can. But I 'd need a waist like a wasp before the three top buttons would see reason. Damme, I feel as if I was going to break in halves. What 's that dear boy of yours grinning at?""I wasn't grinning," protested Paul. "I was only going to say that father 's coming in now."The tramp and his mother exchanged a glance of which the meaning was hidden from him, the look of allies preparing for a crucial moment. Already they were leagued to defeat the husband.Christian du Preez came with heavy footsteps along the passage from the outer door, saw that there was a stranger in the parlor and paused."Christian," said Mrs. du Preez, with a false sprightliness. "Come in; here 's a—an old friend of mine come to see us.""An old friend?"The Boer stared at the stranger standing with straddled legs before the fireplace, and recognized him forthwith. Without speaking, he made a quick comparison of the bold photograph, whose fleshy perfection had so often invited him to take stock of his own imperfections, and then met the living Boy Bailey's rigid smile with a smile of his own that had the effect of tempering the other's humor."I see," said the Boer. "What's the name?" He came forward and read from the photograph where the bold showy signature sprawled across a corner. "'Yours blithely, Boy Bailey,'" he read. "And you are Boy Bailey?""You 've got it," replied the photograph's original. "Older, my dear sir, and it may be meatier; but the same man in the main, and happy to make the acquaintance of an old friend's husband."His impudence cost him an effort in face of the Boer's stare of contemptuous amusement, a stare which comprehended, item by item, each article of his grotesque attire and came to rest, without diminishing its intensity, upon the specious, unstable countenance."Allemachtag," was the Boer's only reply, as he completed his survey."I don't think you saw Bailey, that time we were married, Christian," said Mrs. du Preez. "But he was a dear old friend of mine."Christian nodded. "You walked here?" he inquired of the guest. On the Karoo, the decent man does not travel afoot, and none of the three others who were present missed the implication of the inquiry. Mrs. du Preez colored hotly; Boy Bailey introduced his celebrated wave of the hand."I see you know what walking means," he replied. "It ain't a human occupation—is it now? What I say is—if man had been meant for avoetganger(a walker)"—he watched the effect of the Dutch word on the Boer—"he 'd have been made with four feet. Is n't that right? You bet your shirt it is.""My shirt." Christian seemed puzzled for the moment, though the phrase was one which his wife used. She watched him uneasily. "Oh, I see. Yes, you can keep that shirt you 've got on. I don't want it."Boy Bailey made him a bow. "Ah, thanks. A shirt more or less don't matter, does it?"Christian turned to Paul. "You brought him in?""Yes," answered Paul."Well, come and help me with the sacks. Your mother an' her friend wants to talk, an' we don't want to listen to them talking."Boy Bailey watched them depart."What 's he mean by that?" he asked of Mrs. du Preez."Never mind what he means," she answered. "He can't have his own way in everything. Sit down an' tell me about the others an' what happened to them after I left. There was Kitty Cassel—what did she do? Go home?"Boy Bailey pursed his lips. "No," he answered slowly. "She and I went down to Capetown together. She did n't come to any good, Kitty did n't. Ask me about some one else; I don't want to offend your ears."But Mrs. du Preez was in error in one particular: Christian had seen Boy Bailey "that time we were married," and remembered him very clearly. Those were days when he, too, lived vividly and the petty incidents and personalities of the moment wrote themselves deep on his boyish mind. As he worked at the empty sacks, telling them over by the stencils upon them, while Paul waded among them to his knees and flung them towards him, he returned in the spirit to those poignant years when a thin girl walking across a little makeshift stage could shake him to his foundations.He remembered the little town to which the commando had returned to be paid off and disbanded, a single street straggling under a rampart of a gray-green mountain, with the crude beginnings of other streets budding from it on either side, and the big brown, native location like a tuberous root at its lower end. Along its length, beetle-browed shops, with shaded stoeps and hitching-rails for horses, showed interior recesses of shade and gave an illusion of dignified prosperous commerce, and at the edge of it all there was a string of still pools, linked by a dribble of water, which went by the name of a river and nurtured along its banks gums and willows, the only trees of greater stature than a mimosa-bush that Christian had ever seen.It was a small, stagnant veld dorp, in fact, one of hundreds that are littered over the face of the Colony, and have for their districts a more than metropolitan importance. Christian knew it as a focus of life, the center of incomprehensible issues and concerns and when his corps returned to it, flavored in its single street the pungencies of life about town. The little war in the neighborhood had drawn to it the usual riff-raff of the country that follows on the heels of troops, wherever armed men are gathered together, predatory women too wise in their generation, a sample or two of the nearly extinct species of professional card-sharper, a host of the sons of Lazarus intent upon crumbs that should fall from the pay-table, and a fair collection of ordinary thieves. These gave the single street a vivacity beyond anything it had known, and the armed burgher, carrying his rifle slung on his back from mere habit, would be greeted by the name of "Piet" and invited to drink once for every ten steps he took upon it.Hither came Christian—twenty-two years of age, six-foot in his bare soles of slender thew and muscle, not yet bearded and hungry with many appetites after a campaign against Kafirs. The restless town was a bait for him.At that time, there was much in him of that solemn-eyed quality which came to be Paul's. The steely women laughed harshly as he passed them by, with all the sweetness of his youth in his still face, his lips parted, his look resting on them and beyond them to the virtues and the delicacy they had thrown off to walk the faster on their chosen road. His ears softened their laughter, his eyes redeemed their bitterness; everything was transfigured for him by the dynamic power of his mere innocence and his potent belief in his own inferiority to the splendor of all that offered itself to his vision. He saw his comrades, fine shots and hard men on the trek, lapse into drunkenness and evil communications, and it was in no way incompatible with his own ascetic cleanliness of apprehension that he excused them on the grounds of the hardships they had undergone. He could idealize even a sot puking in a gutter.It was here that he saw a stage-play for the first time in his life, sitting in a back-seat in the town hall among young shop-assistants and workmen, not a little distracted between the strange things upon the stage which he had paid to witness and the jocular detachment from them by the young men about him. The play at first was incomprehensible; the chambermaid and the footman, conversing explanatorily, with which it opened, were figures he was unable to recognize, and he could not share the impression that seemed to prevail among the characters in general that the fat, whitish heroine was beautiful. The villain, too, was murderous in such a crude fashion; not once did he make a clean job of an assassination. Christian felt himself competent to criticize, since it was only a week or so since he had pulled a trigger and risen on his elbow to see his man halt in mid-stride and pitch face forward to the earth. He was confirmed in his dissatisfaction by the demeanor of his neighbors; they, men about town, broken to the drama and its surprises, were certainly not taking the thing seriously. After a while, therefore, he made no effort to keep sight of the thread of the play; he sat in an idle content, watching the women on the stage, curious to discover what it was in each one of them that was wrong and vaguely repellent.His neighbors had no doubts about it. "There 's not a leg in the whole caboodle," one remarked. "It 's all mouth and murder, this is."Christian did not clearly understand the first phrase, but the second was plain and he smiled in agreement. He looked up to take stock of another character, a girl who made her entrance at that moment, and ceased to smile. Her share in the scene was unimportant enough, and she had but a few words to speak and nothing to do but to walk forward and back again. She was thin and girlish and carried herself well, moving with a graceful deliberation and speaking in an appealing little tinkle to which the room lent a certain ring and resonance; she accosted the villain who replied with brutality; she smiled and turned from him, made a face and passed out again. And that was all.The young man who had deplored the absence of legs nudged his neighbor to look at the tall young Boer and made a joke in a cautious whisper. His precaution was unnecessary; he might have shouted and Christian would not have heard. He was like a man stunned by a great revelation, sitting bolt upright and staring at the stage and its lighted activity with eyes dazzled by a discovery. For the first time in his life he had seen a woman, little enough to break like a stick across his knee, brave and gay at once, delicate and tender, touching him with the sense of her strength and courage while her femininity made all the male in him surge into power. Gone was his late attitude of humorous judgment, that could detach the actress from her work and assess her like a cow; the smile, the little contemptuous grimace had blown it all away. He was aghast, incapable of reducing his impression to thoughts. For a while, it did not occur to him that it would be possible to see her again. When it did, he leaned across the two playgoers who were next to him and lifted a program from the lap of the third, who gaped at him but found nothing to say."Thatmeisjie, the one in a red dress—is her name in this?" he inquired of his neighbor, and surprised him into assistance. Together they found it; the unknown was Miss Vivie Sinclair."Skinny, wasn't she?" commented the helpful neighbor sociably.But Christian was already on his feet and making his way out, and the conversational one got nothing but a slow glare for an answer across intervening heads.And yet the truth of it was, a connoisseur in girls could have matched Miss Vivie Sinclair a hundred times over, so little was there in her that was peculiar or rare. The connoisseur would have put her down without hesitation for a product of that busy manufactory which melts down the material of so many good housemaids to make it into so many bad actresses. Her sex and a grimace—these were the total of her assets, and yet she was as good a peg as another for a cloudy youth to drape with the splendors of his inexperienced fancy and glorify with the hues of his secret longings. Probably she had no very clear idea of herself in those days; she was neither happy nor sad, as a general thing; and her aspirations aimed much more definitely at the symptoms of success—frocks, bills lettered large with her name, comely young men in hot pursuit of her, gifts of jewelry—than at success itself. As she passed down the main street next morning, on her way to the telegraph office in the town hall, she offered to the slow, appraising looks from the stoeps a sketchy impression of a rather strained modernity, an effect of deftly managed skirts and unabashed ankles which in themselves were sufficient to set Fereira thinking. It was as she emerged from the telegraph office that she came face to face with Christian."Well, where d'you think you 're comin' to?"This was her greeting as he pulled up all standing to avert a collision. Clothes to fit both his stature and his esthetic sense had not been procurable, and he had been only able to wash himself to a state of levitical cleanliness. But his youthful bigness and his obvious reverence of her served his purpose. She stood looking at him with a smile."I saw you," he said, "in the play.""Did you? What d' you think of it?""Allemachtag," he answered. "I have been thinking of it all night."To his eye, she was all she had promised to be. The fragility of her was most wonderful to him, accustomed to the honest motherly brawn of the girls of his own race. The rather aggressive perkiness of her address was the smiling courage that had thrilled and touched him. He stood staring, unable to carry the talk further.But it was for this kind of thing that Miss Vivie Sinclair had "gone on the stage," and she was not at all at a loss."I 'm going this way," she said, and in her hands, Christian was wax—willing wax. He found himself walking at her side under the eyes of the town. She waited before she spoke again till they were by the stoep of Pagan's store, where a dozen loungers became rigid and watchful as they passed."You 've heard about the smash-up?" she inquired then."Smash-up?""Our smash-up? Oh, a regular mess we 're in, the whole lot of us. You had n't heard?""No," he answered."Padden 's cleared out. He was our manager, you know, and now he 's run away with the treasury and left us high and dry. Went last night, it seems, after the show.""Left you?" repeated Christian. The old story was a new one to him and he did not understand. Miss Sinclair thought him dense, but proceeded to enlighten him in words of one syllable, as it were."That 's why I was telegraphing," she concluded. "There was a feller in Capetown I used to know; I want to strike him for my fare out of this."So she was in trouble; there was a call upon her courage, an attack on her defenselessness. Miss Sinclair, glancing sidelong at his face, saw it redden quickly and was confirmed in her hope that the "feller" in Capetown was but an alternative string to her bow."That telegram took all I 'd got but a couple of shillings," she added. "Padden had been keeping us short for a long time."The long street straggled under the sun, bare to its harsh illumination, a wide tract of parched dust hemmed between walls and roofs of gray corrugated iron. The one thing that survived that merciless ordeal of light without loss or depreciation was the girl. They halted at the door of the one-storied hotel where her room was and here again the shaded stoep was full of ears and eyes and Christian had to struggle with words to make his meaning clear to her and keep it obscure to every one else."It 'll be all right," he assured her stammeringly. "I 'll see that it 's all right. I 'll come here an' see you.""When?" she asked, and helped him with a suggestion. "This evening? There 'll be no show to-night.""This evening," he agreed.Miss Sinclair gave him her best smile, all the better for the mirth that helped it out. She was as much amused as she was relieved. As she passed the bar on her way indoors, she winked guardedly to a florid youth within who stood in an attitude of listening.If Christian had celebrated the occasion with libations in the local fashion, if he had talked about it and put his achievement to the test of words—if, even, he had been capable of thinking about it in any clear and sober manner instead of merely relishing it with every fiber of his body—the evening's interview might have resolved itself into an act of charity, involving the sacrifice of nothing more than a few sovereigns. As it was, he spent the day in germinating hopes and educating his mind to entertain them. Under the stimulating heat of his sanguine youth, they burgeoned superbly.As he walked away from the hotel, the florid youth spoke confidentially to the fat shirt-sleeved barman."Hear that?" he asked. "She'll do all right, she will. That 's where a girl 's better off than a man. Who 's the feller, d'you know?"The barman heaved himself up to look through the window, and laughed wheezily. He was a married man and adored his children, but it was his business to be knowing and worldly."It 's young Du Preez," he answered, as Christian stalked away. "One of them Boers, y'know. Got a farm out on the Karoo.""Rich?" queried the other."Not bad," said the barman. "Most of those Dutch could buy you an' me an' use us for mantel ornaments, if they had the good taste.""So—ho," exclaimed the florid youth. "But they don't carry it about with 'em, worse luck."He sighed and grew thoughtful. He was thoughtful at intervals for the rest of the morning, and by the afternoon was melancholy and uncertain of step. But he was on hand and watchful when Christian arrived.Christian was vaguely annoyed when a young man of suave countenance and an expression of deep solemnity thrust up to him at the hotel door and stood swaying and swallowing and making signs as though to command his attention."What d'you want?" he demanded."Word with you," requested the other. "Word with you."He was sufficiently unlike anything that was native to Fereira to be recognizable as an actor and Christian suffered himself to be beckoned into the bar."Shall I do it or you?" asked the other. "I shtood so many to-day, sheems to me it 's your turn. Mine 's a whisky. Now, 'bout this li'l girl upshtairs.""Eh?" Christian was startled."I 'm man of the world," the other went on, with the seriousness of the thoroughly drunken. "Know more 'bout the world then ever you knew in yer bally life. An' I don't blame you—norra bit. Now what I want shay is this: I can fix it for you if you 're good for a fiver. Jush a fiver—shave trouble and time, eh? Nice li'l girl, too. Worth it."Christian watched him lift his glass and drink. He was perplexed; these folk seemed to have a language of their own and to be incomprehensible to ordinary folk."Worth it?" he repeated. "Fixwhat?" he demanded."Nod 's good 's wink," answered the other. "Don't want to shout it. Bend your long ear down to me—tell you."They had a corner by the bar to themselves. Near the window the barman had a customer after his own heart and was repeating to him an oracular saying by his youngest daughter but two, glancing sideways while he spoke to see if Christian and the other were listening.Christian bent, and the hot breath of the other, reeking of the day's drinking, beat on his neck and the side of his head. The hoarse whisper, with its infernal suggestion, seemed to come warm from a pit of vileness within the man's body."Is that plain 'nough?"Christian stood upright again, trembling from head to foot with some cold emotion far transcending any rage he had ever felt. For some instant he could not lift his hand; he had seen the last foul depths of evil and was paralyzed. The other lifted his glass again. His movement released the Boer from the spell.He took the man by the wrist that held the glass with so deadly a deliberation that the barman missed his hostile purpose and continued to talk, leaning with his fat, mottled arms folded on the bar."What you doin', y' fool?" The cry was from the florid youth."Ah!" Christian put out his strength with a maniac fury, and the youth's hand and the glass in it were dashed back into that person's face. No hand but his own struck him, and the countenance Christian saw as a blurred white disk broke under the blow and showed red cracks. He struck again and again; the barman shouted and men came running in from outside. Christian dropped the wrist he held and turned away. Those in the doorway gave him passage. On the floor in the corner the florid youth bled and vomited.Christian knew him later as a bold and serene face in a plush photograph frame, signed across the lower right corner: "Yours blithely, Boy Bailey."How he made inquiries for the girl's room and came at last to the door of it was never a clear memory to him. But he could always recall that small austere interior of whitewash and heat-warped furniture to which he entered at her call, to find her sitting on the narrow bed. He came to her bereft of the few faculties she had left him, grave, almost stern, gripping himself by force of instinct to save himself from the outburst of emotion to which the scene in the bar had made him prone. Everything tender and protective in his nature was awake and crying out; he saw her as the victim of a sacrilegious outrage, threatened by unnamable dangers.She looked at him under the lids of her eyes, quickly alive to the change in him. It is necessary to record that she, too, had made inquiries since the morning, and learned of the farm that stood at his back to guarantee him solid."I wondered if you 'd come," she said. "That feller in Capetown has n't answered.""I said I 'd come," he replied gravely."Yes, I know. All the same, I thought—you know, when a person 's in hard luck, nothing goes right, an' a girl, when she 's in a mess, is anybody's fool. Is n't that right?"She knew her peril then; she lived open-eyed in face of it."You shall not be anybody's fool," he answered. "If anybody tries to be bad to you, I 'll kill him."He was still standing just within the closed door, no nearer to her than the size of the little chamber compelled."Won't you sit down?" she invited."Eh?" His contemplation of her seemed to absorb him and make him absent-minded. "No," he replied, when she repeated her invitation."As you like," she conceded, wondering whether after all he was going to be amenable to the treatment she proposed for him. It crossed her mind that he was thinking of getting something for his money and her silly mouth tightened. If her sex was one of her assets, her virtue—the fanatic virtue which is a matter of prejudice rather than of principle,—was one of her liabilities. She had nothing to sell him."You know," she said, "the worst of it is, none of us have n't had any salary for weeks. That's what puts us in the cart. We 're all broke. If Padden had let us have a bit, we would n't be stranded like this. And the queer thing is, Gus Padden 's the last man you 'd have picked for a wrong 'un. Fat, you know, and beaming; a sort of fatherly way, he had. He used to remind me of Santa Claus. An' now he 's thrown us down this way, and how I 'm going to get up again I can't say." She gave him one of her shrewd upward glances; "tell me," she added."I can tell you," he replied."How, then?" she asked."Marry me," said Christian. "This acting—it's no good. There 's men that is bad all around you. One of them—I broke his face like a window-glass downstairs just now—he said you was—bad, like him. And it was time to see what he was worth. Unless you can you are ach—so—so little, so weak. Marry me, mykleintjeand you shall be nobody's fool."The girl on the bed stared at him dumbly: this was what she had never expected. Salvation had come to her with both hands full of gifts. She began to laugh foolishly."Marry me," repeated Christian. "Will you?"She jumped up from her seat, still laughing and took two steps to him."Will I?" she cried. "Will a duck swim? Yes, I will; yes, yes, yes!"Christian looked at her dazed; events were sweeping him off his feet. He took one of her hands and dropped it again and turned from her abruptly. With his arm before his face he leaned against the door and burst into weeping. The girl patted him on the back soothingly."Take it easy," she said kindly. "You'll be all right, never fear.""That 's all the Port Elizabeth ones," said Paul. "How many do you make them?"Christian du Preez looked up uncertainly. "Allemachtag," he said. "I forgot to count. I was thinking.""Oh. About the tramp?""Yes. Paul, what did you bring him in for? Couldn't you see he was askellum?"Paul nodded. "Yes, I could see that. But—skellumsare hungry and tired, too, sometimes."His father smiled in a worried manner. He and Paul never talked intimately with each other, but an intimacy existed of feeling and thought. They took many of the same things for granted."Like us," he agreed. "Come on to supper, Paul."
"No," said the girl, after a moment's pause. "I won't leave you."
"What 's that?" cried Mrs. Jakes and put a quick frightened hand upon her arm. "Listen! Who is it?"
Steps, undisguised and clear, passed from the grass to the stone steps of the house and ascended, crossed the stoep and were lost to hearing in the doorway.
The two women waited, breathless. It sprang to Margaret's mind that the lantern must have shown her clearly to Kamis, where he waited in the darkness, and he must have seen the climax of her efforts and her handkerchief at her lips, and gone forthwith to the study for the drugs which would put an end to the matter.
"Look," whispered Mrs. Jakes. "Some one is striking matches—in the study."
The window brightened and darkened again and then lit with a steady glow; the invader had found a candle. Mrs. Jakes dropped Margaret's arm.
"I must see who it is," she said. "Walking into people's houses like this."
Margaret held her back; she was starting forthwith to bring the majesty of her presence to bear on the unknown and possibly dangerous intruder. Mrs. Jakes had a house as well as a husband and could die at need for either.
"No, don't go," said Margaret. "I know who it is. It's all right, if only you won't be—well, silly about it."
"Who is it, then?" demanded Mrs. Jakes.
Margaret felt feeble and unequal to the position. Her chest was painful, she was cold, and now there was about to be a delicate affair with Mrs. Jakes. She could have laughed at the growing complexity of things, but had the wit not to.
"It 's a doctor," she said; "a real London doctor. He was passing when you left me to get the lantern, and I wouldn't let him stay because I thought you 'd be annoyed. He 's gone into the house to—"
"Does he know?" whispered Mrs. Jakes, feverishly, thrusting close to her. "Does he know—about this?" Her downward-pointing finger indicated the slumbers of Dr. Jakes. "Say, can't you—does he know?"
"He 'd seen him," said Margaret. "I expect he loosened the collar—you know. He wanted to help but I wouldn't let him."
"Is he a friend of yours?" asked Mrs. Jakes again, still in the same agitated whisper.
"Yes," answered Margaret. "He is. It 's all right, really, if only you 'll be sensible and not make a fuss. He 'll help us and then he 'll go away and he 'll say nothing. You did n't think I 'd do anything to hurt you, did you? Are n't we friends?"
Mrs. Jakes stood silent; she asked no questions as to how a London doctor, a friend of Margaret's, chanced to be walking upon the Karoo at night.
"Well," she said at last, with a long sigh; "perhaps we might have needed some help, in any case."
That was all she said, till the footsteps came again across the stoep and down the steps, more deliberately this time, as though something were being carried with precaution. Then they were noiseless for a minute or more on the grass, and at last the figure of Kamis came into the further edge of the lighted circle.
"I had to do it," he said, before either of them could speak, and showed the graduated glass in his hand. "I saw you with your handkerchief."
Margaret, with an instinct of apprehension, looked at Mrs. Jakes. At the first dim view of him, she had roused herself from her dejection, and put on her prim, social face to meet the London doctor effectively. Her little meaningless smile was bent for him; she would make a blameless and uneventful drawing-room of the August night and guard it against unseemly dramatics.
He turned from Margaret towards her and came further into the lamp-light, and she had a clear view of the black face and sorrowful, foolish negro features. She uttered a gasp that was like a low cry and stood aghast, staring.
"Madam," began Kamis.
She shivered. "A Kafir," she said. "The doctor will never forgive us." And then, wheeling upon Margaret, "And I 'll never forgive you. You said we were friends—and this is what you do to me."
"Mrs. Jakes," implored Margaret. "You must be sensible. It 's all right, really. This gentleman—"
"This gentleman," Mrs. Jakes uttered a passionate spurt of laughter. "Do you mean this nigger? Gentleman, you call it? A London doctor? A friend of yours? A friend. Ha, ha!" She spun round again towards Kamis, waiting with the glass in his hand, the liquid in which shone greenish to the lamp. "Voetzaak!" she ordered, shrilly. "Hamba wena—ch'che. Skellum. Injah. Voetzaak!"
Kamis stood his ground. He cast a look at Margaret, past Mrs. Jakes, and spoke to her.
"Will she let me give him this?" he asked. "Tell her I am a doctor and this will bring him to very quickly. And then I 'll go away at once and never say a word about it."
"Don't you dare touch him," menaced Mrs. Jakes. "A filthy Kafir—I should think so, indeed."
Kamis went on in the same steady tone. "If she won't you must go in at once and send for another doctor to-morrow. This man ought to be reported."
"You dare," cried Mrs. Jakes. "You 'd report him—a Kafir." She edged closer to the prostrate body of Dr. Jakes and stood beside it like a beast-mother at bay. "I 'll have you locked up—walking into my husband's study like that."
"Mrs. Jakes." Margaret tried once more. "Please listen. If you 'll only let the doctor have this drink, he 'll be able to walk. If you don't, he 'll have to stay here. I am your friend; I got up when you came to me and I said I wouldn't leave you even when I hurt my chest. Doesn't that prove that I am? I wouldn't do you any harm or shame you before other people for anything. What will Dr. Jakes say if he finds out that you let me stay here pleading when I ought to be in bed? He 's a doctor himself and he 'll be awfully annoyed—after telling me I should get well, too. Aren't you going to give him a chance—and me?"
Mrs. Jakes merely glared stonily.
"Come," said Margaret. "Won't you?"
Kamis uttered a smothered exclamation. "I won't wait," he said. "I 'll count ten, slowly. Then Miss Harding must go in and I go away."
"Oh, don't begin that sort of thing," cried Margaret. "Mrs. Jakes is going to be sensible. Aren't you?"
There was no reply, only the stony and hostile stare of the little woman facing them and the gray image of disgrace.
"One," counted Kamis clearly. "Two. Three."
He counted with the stolid regularity of a clock; he made as though to overturn the glass and waste its contents in the dust as soon as he should have reached ten. "Ten," he uttered, but held it safely still. "Well?"
Mrs. Jakes did not move for some moments. Then she sighed and, still without speaking, moved away from the slumbering doctor. She walked a dozen paces from the road and stood with her back to them.
With quick skilful movements, Kamis lifted the unconscious man's head to the crook of his arm and the rim of the glass clicked on his teeth. Margaret walked after Mrs. Jakes.
"Come," she said gently. "I don't misunderstand. You trusted me or you would n't have waked me. Everything will be all right soon and then you 'll forgive me."
"I won't—never."
Mrs. Jakes would not face her. She stood looking into the blackness, tense with enmity.
"Well, I hope you will," said Margaret.
They heard grunts from the doctor and then quavering speech and one rich oath, and a noise of spitting. The Kafir approached them noiselessly from behind and paused at Margaret's side.
"That's done the trick," he said; "and he doesn't even know who gave him the draft. You 'll go in now?"
"Yes," said Margaret. "Youhavebeen good, though."
Mrs. Jakes had returned to her husband; they were for the moment alone.
"I didn't mean to force your hand," he whispered. "But I had to. A doctor has duties."
She gave him her hand. "There was something I wanted to tell you, but there 's no time to explain now. Did you know you were wanted by the police?"
"Bless you, yes." He smiled with a white flash of teeth. "Were you going to warn me? How kind! And now, in you go, and good night."
Dr. Jakes was sitting up, spitting with vigor and astonishment. He had taken a heroic dose of hair-raising restoratives on the head of a poisonous amount of whisky, and his palate was a moldering ruin. But the clearness of his faculties left nothing to be desired.
"Who 's that?" he demanded at sight of Margaret. "Miss Harding. How do you come to be out here at this time?"
"You should time your fits more decently, doctor," answered Margaret coolly.
Mrs. Jakes hastened to explain more acceptably. "I was frightened, Eustace. You looked so bad—and these fits are terrible. So I asked Miss Harding if she wouldn't come and help me."
"A patient," said the doctor. He turned over and rose stiffly to his feet, dust-stained all over. He stood before her awkwardly.
"I am unfortunate," he said. "You are in my care and this is what happens. It is my misfortune—and my fault. You 'll go back to bed now, Miss Harding, please."
"Sure there 's nothing more you want?" inquired Margaret.
"At once, please," he repeated. "In the morning—but go at once now."
On the stoep she paused to listen to them following after her and heard a portion of Mrs. Jakes' excuses to her husband.
"You looked so dreadful, Eustace, and I was frightened. And then, you 're so heavy, and I suppose I was tired, and to-night I couldn't quite manage by myself, dear."
Margaret passed in at the door in order to cough unheard, that nothing might be added to the tale of Mrs. Jakes' delinquencies.
CHAPTER IX
"And what have we here?" said the stranger loudly. "What have we here, now?"
Paul, sitting cross-legged in his old place under the wall of the dam, with a piece of clay between his fingers, looked round with a start. The stranger had come up behind him, treading unheard in his burst and broken shoes upon the soft dust, and now stood leaning upon a stick and smiling down upon him with a kind of desperate jauntiness. His attitude and manner, with their parody of urbane ease, had for the moment power to hide the miserable shabbiness of his clothes, which were not so much broken and worn as decayed; it was decay rather than hardship which marked the whole figure of the man. Only the face, clean-shaven save for a new crop of bristles, had some quality of mobility and temper, and the eyes with which he looked at Paul were wary and hard.
"Oh, nothing," said Paul, uneasily, covering his clay with one hand. "Who are you?"
The stranger eyed him for some moments longer with the shrewdness of one accustomed to read his fortune in other men's faces, and while he did so the smile remained fixed on his own as though he had forgotten to take it off.
"Who am I!" he exclaimed. "My boy, it 'd take a long time to tell you. But there 's one thing that perhaps you can see for yourself—I 'm a gentleman."
Paul considered this information deliberately.
"Are you?" he said.
"I 'm dusty," admitted the other; "dusty both inside and out. And I 'm travelin' on foot—without luggage. So much I admit; I 've met with misfortunes. But there 's one thing the devil himself can't take away from me, and that 's the grand old name of gentleman. An' now, my lad, to business; you live at that farm there?"
"Yes," replied Paul. This tramp had points at which he differed from other tramps, and Paul stared at him thoughtfully.
"So far, so good," said the stranger. "Question number two: does it run to a meal for a gentleman on his travels, an' a bed of sorts? Answer me that. I don't mean a meal with a shilling to pay at the end of it, because—to give it you straight—I 'm out of shillings for the present. Now, speak up."
"If you go up there, they 'll give you something to eat, and you can sleep somewhere," said Paul, a little puzzled by the unusual rhetoric.
The stranger nodded approvingly. "It's all right, then?" he said. "Good—go up one. But say! Ain't you going there yourself pretty soon?"
"Presently," said Paul.
"Then, if it 's all the same to you," said the stranger, "I 'll wait and go up with you. Nothing like being introduced by a member," he added, as he lowered himself stiffly to a seat among the rank grass under the wall. "Gives a feller standing, don't it?"
He took off his limp hat and let himself fall back against the slope of the wall, grunting with appreciation of the relief after a day's tramp in the sun. His rather full body and thin legs, ending in a pair of ruinous shoes that let his toes be seen, lay along the grass like an obscene corpse, and above them his feeble, sophisticated face leered at Paul as though to invite him to become its confidant.
"You go on with what you 're doing," urged the stranger. "Don't let me hinder you. Makin' marbles, were you—or what?"
"No," said Paul. He hesitated, for an idea had come to him while he watched the stranger. "But—but if you 'll do something for me, I 'll give you a shilling."
"Eh?" The other rolled a dull eye on him. "It isn't murder, is it? I should want one-and-six for that. I never take less."
Paul flushed. "I don't know what you mean," he said. "I only want you to keep still like that while I—while I make a model of you. You said you had n't got any shillings just now."
"Did I say that?" inquired the stranger. "Well, well! However, chuck us over your shilling and I 'll see what I can do for you."
He made a show of biting the coin and subjecting it to other tests of its goodness while the boy looked on anxiously. Paul was relieved when at last he pocketed it and lay back again.
"I 'll get rid of it somehow," he said. "It's very well made. And now, am I to look pleasant, or what?"
"Don't look at all," directed Paul. "Just be like—like you are. You can go to sleep if you like."
"I never sleep on an empty stomach," replied the stranger, arranging himself in an attitude of comfort.
"Is this all right for you? Fire away, then, Mike Angelo. Can I talk while you 're at it?"
"If you want to," answered Paul. The clay which he had been shaping was another head, and now he kneaded it out of shape between his hands and rounded it rudely for a sketch of the face before him. The Kafir, Kamis, had bidden him refrain from his attempts to do mass and detail at once, to form the features and the expression together; but Paul knew he had little time before him and meant to make the most of it. The tramp had his hands joined behind his head and his eyes half-closed; he offered to the boy the spectacle of a man beaten to the very ground and content to take his ease there.
"D'you do much of this kind of thing?" asked the tramp, when some silent minutes had passed.
"Yes," said Paul, "a lot."
"Nothing like it, is there?" asked the other. He spoke lazily, absorbed in his comfort. "We 've all got our game, every bally one of us. Mine was actin'."
"Acting?" Paul paused in his busy fingering to look up. "Were you an actor?"
The actors he knew looked out of frames in his mother's little parlor, intense, well-fed, with an inhuman brilliance of attire.
"Even me," replied the tramp equably. He did not move from his posture nor uncover his drowsy eyes; the swollen lids, in which the veins stood out in purple, did not move, but his voice took a rounder and more conscious tone as he went on: "And there was a time, my boy, when actin' meant me and I meant actin'. In '87, I was playing in 'The Demon Doctor,' and drawing my seven quid a week—you believe me. Talk of art—why! I 've had letters from Irving that 'd make you open your eyes."
"I 've heard about Irving," said Paul, glancing back and fore from his clay to the curiously pouched mouth of his recumbent model.
"Fancy," exclaimed the tramp softly. "But it was a great game, a great game. Sometimes, even now, I sort of miss it. And the funny thing is—it is n't the grub and the girls and the cash in my breeches pocket that I miss so much. It 's the bally work. It 's the work, my boy." He seemed to wonder torpidly at himself, and for some seconds he continued to repeat, as though in amazement: "It 's the work." He went on: "Seems as if once an actor, always an actor, don't it? A feller 's got talent in him and he 's got to empty it out, or ache. Some sing, some write, some paint; you prod clay about; but I 'm an actor. Time was, I could act a gas meter, if it was the part, and that 's my trouble to this day."
He ceased; he had delivered himself without once looking up or reflecting the matter of his speech by a change of expression. For all the part his body or his features had in his words, it might have been a dead man speaking. Paul worked on steadily, giving small thought to anything but the shape that came into being under his hands. His standard of experience was slight; he knew too little of men and their vicissitudes to picture to himself the processes by which the face he strove to reproduce sketchily could have been shaped to its cast of sorrowful pretense; he only felt, cloudily and without knowledge, that it signaled a strange and unlovely fate.
His knack served him well on that evening, and besides, there was not an elusive remembrance of form to be courted, but the living original before him. The tramp seemed to sleep; and swiftly, with merciless assurance, the salient thing about him came into existence between Paul's hands. Long before the light failed or the gourd-drum at the farmhouse door commenced its rhythmic call, the thing was done—a mere sketch, with the thumb-prints not even smoothed away, but stamped none the less with the pitiless print of life.
"Done it?" inquired the tramp, rousing as Paul uncrossed his legs and prepared to put the clay away. "Let 's have a look?"
"It wants to be made smooth," explained Paul, as he passed it to him. "And it's soft, of course, so don't squeeze it."
"I won't squeeze it," the tramp assured him and took it. He gazed at it doubtfully, letting it lie on his knee. "Oho!" he said.
"It's only a quick thing," said Paul. "There was n't time to do it properly."
"Wasn't there?" said the tramp, without looking up. "It 's like me, is it? Damn you, why don't you say it and have done with it?"
"Why," cried Paul bewildered, and coloring furiously. "What's the matter? Itislike you. I modeled it from you just now as you were lying there."
"An' paid me a shilling for it." The tramp thrust an impetuous hand into his pocket; possibly he was inspired to draw forth the coin and fling it in Paul's face. If so, he decided against it; he looked at the coin wryly and returned it to its place.
"Well," he said finally; "you 've got me nicely. The cue is to shy you and your bally model into the dam together—an' what about my supper? Eh? Yes, you 've got me sweetly. Here, take the thing, or I might make up my mind to go hungry for the pleasure of squashing it flat on your ugly mug."
"You don't like it?" asked Paul, as he received the clay again from the tramp's hands. He did not understand; for all he knew, there were men who surprised their mothers by being born with that strange stamp upon them.
The tramp gave him a slow wrathful look. "The joke 's on me," he answered. "Iknow. I look a drunk who 's been out all night; I 'm not denying it. I 've got a face that 'll get me blackballed for admission to hell. I know all that and you 've made a picture of it. But don't rub it in."
Paul looked at the clay again, and although the man's offense was dawning on his understanding, he smiled at the sight of a strong thing strongly done.
"I didn't mean any joke," he protested.
"Let 's call it a joke," said the tramp. "Once when I was nearly dying of thirst up beyond Kimberly, a feller that I asked for water gave me a cup of paraffin. That was another joke. Tramps are fair game for you jokers, aren't they? Well, if that meal you spoke about wasn't a joke, too, let 's be getting up to the house."
"All right," said Paul. He hesitated a minute, for he hated to part with the thing he had made. "Oh, it can go," he exclaimed, and threw the clay up over the wall. It fell into the dam above their heads with a splash.
"I didn't mean any joke, truly," he assured the tramp.
"Don't rub it in," begged the other. "We don't want to make a song about it. And anyhow, I want to try to forget it. So come on—do."
They came together through the kraals and across the deserted yard to the house-door, the tramp looking about him at the apparatus of well-fed and well-roofed life with an expression of genial approval. Paul would have taken him round to the back-door, but he halted.
"Not bad," he commented. "Not bad at all, considering. An' this is the way in, I suppose."
"We 'd better go round," suggested Paul, but the tramp turned on the doorstep and waved a nonchalant hand.
"Oh, this 'll do," he said, and there was nothing for Paul to do but to follow him into the little passage.
The door of the parlor stood open, and within was Mrs. du Preez, flicking a duster at the furniture in a desultory fashion. The tramp paused and looked at her appraisingly.
"The lady of the house, no doubt," he surmised, with his terrible showy smile, before she could speak. "It 's the boy, madam; he wouldn't take no for an answer. Ihadto come home to supper with him."
His greedy quick eyes were busy about the little room; they seemed to read a price-ticket on each item of its poor pretentious furniture and assess the littleness of those signed and framed photographs which inhabited it like a company of ghosts.
"Why," he cried suddenly, and turned from his inspection of these last to stare again at Mrs. du Preez.
His plausible fluency had availed for the moment to hide the quality of his clothes and person, but now Mrs. du Preez had had time to perceive the defects of both.
"What d'you mean?" she demanded. "How d 'you get in here? Who are you?"
The tramp was still staring at her. "It 's on the tip of my tongue," he said. "Give me a moment. Why"—with a joyous vociferation—"who 'd ha' thought it? It 's little Sinclair, as I 'm a sinnair—little Vivie Sinclair of the old brigade, stap my vitals if it ain't."
"What?"
The man filled the narrow door, and Paul had to stoop under his elbow to see his mother. She was leaning with both hands on the table, searching his face with eyes grown lively and apprehensive in a moment. The old name of her stage days had power to make this change in her.
"Who is it?" she asked.
"Think," begged the tramp. "Try! No use? Well—" he swept her a spacious bow, battered hat to heart, foot thrown back—"look on this picture"—he tapped his bosom—"and on that." His big creased forefinger flung out towards the photograph which had the place of honor on the crowded mantel-shelf and dragged her gaze with it.
"It 's not—" Mrs. du Preez glanced rapidly back and forth between the living original and the glazed, immaculate counterfeit—"it isn't—it can't be—Bailey?"
"It is; it can," replied the tramp categorically, and Boy Bailey, in the too, too solid flesh advanced into the room.
Mrs. du Preez had a moment of motionless amaze, and then with a flushed face came in a rush around the table to meet him. They clasped hands and both laughed.
"Why," cried Mrs. du Preez; "if this don't—but Bailey! Where ever do you come from, an' like this? Glad to see you? Yes, I am glad; you 're the first of the old crowd that I 've seen since I—I married."
"Married, eh?" The tramp tempered an over-gallant and enterprising attitude. "Then I mustn't—eh?"
His face was bent towards hers and he still held her hands.
"No; you mustn't," spoke Paul unexpectedly, from the doorway, where he was an absorbed witness of the scene.
They both turned sharply; they had forgotten the boy.
"Don't be silly, Paul," said his mother, rather sharply. "Mr. Bailey was only joking." But she freed her hands none the less, while Mr. Bailey bent his wary gaze upon the boy.
The interruption served to bring the conversation down to a less emotional plane, and Paul sat down on a chair just within the door to watch the unawaited results of promising a meal to a chance tramp. The effect on his mother was not the least remarkable consequence. The veld threw up a lamentable man at your feet; in charity and some bewilderment you took him home to feed him, and thereupon your mother, your weary, petulant, uncertain mother, took him to her arms and became, by that unsavory contact, pink and vivacious.
"There 's more of you," said Mrs. du Preez, making a fresh examination of her visitor. "You 're fatter than what you were, Bailey, in those old days."
Boy Bailey nodded carelessly. "Yes, my figure 's gone too," he agreed; "gone with all the rest. Friends, position, reputation—all but my spirits and my talents. I know. Ah, but those were good times, weren't they?"
"Too good to last," sighed Mrs. du Preez.
"They didn't last for me," said Boy Bailey. "When we broke down at Fereira—lemme see! That must be nearly twenty years ago, ain't it?—I took my leave of Fortune. Never another glance did I get from her; not one bally squint. I did advance agent for a fortune-teller for a bit; I even came down to clerking in a store. I 've been most things a man can be in this country, except rich. And why is it? What 's stood in my way all along? What 's been my handicap that holds me back and nobbles me every time I face the starter?"
"Ah!" exclaimed Mrs. du Preez sympathetically.
"I don't need to tell you," continued Boy Bailey, "you not being one of the herd, that it 's temperament that has me all the time. I don't boast of it, but you know how it is. You remember me when I had scope; you 've seen me at the game; you can judge for yourself. A man with temperament in this country has got as much chance as a snowflake in hell. Perhaps, though, you 've found that out for yourself before now."
"Don't I know it," retorted Mrs. du Preez. "Bailey, if you 'll believe me, I have n't heard that word 'temperament,' since I saw you last. Talk of scope—why you can go to the winder there and see with your eyes all the scope I 've had since I married. It 's been tough, Bailey; it 's been downright tough."
"Still—" began Mr. Bailey, but paused. "We must have another talk," he substituted. "There 's a lot to hear and to tell. Do you think you could manage to put me up for a day or two? I suppose your husband wouldn't mind?"
"Why should he?" demanded Mrs. du Preez. "You 're the first in all these years. Still, it wouldn't be a bad idea if you was to have a change of clothes before he sees you, Bailey. It isn't me that minds, you know; so far as that goes, you 'd be welcome in anything; but—"
Boy Bailey waved her excuses away. "I understand," he said. "I understand. It's these prejudices—have your own way."
The resources of Christian du Preez's wardrobe were narrow, and Christian's wife was further hampered in the selection of clothes for her guest by a doubt whether, if she selected too generously, Christian might not insist on the guest stripping as soon as he set eyes on him. Her discretion revealed itself, when Mr. Bailey was dressed, in a certain sketchiness of his total effect, an indeterminate quality that was not lessened by the fact that all of the garments were too narrow and too long; and though no alteration of his original appearance could fail to improve it, there was no hiding his general character of slow decay.
"It 's hardly a disguise," commented Boy Bailey, as he surveyed himself when the change was made. "Disguise is n't the word that covers it, and I 'm hanged if I know what word does. But these pants are chronic."
"You can roll 'em up another couple of inches," suggested Mrs. du Preez.
"It isn't that," complained Mr. Bailey. "If they want to cover my feet, they can. But I 'd need a waist like a wasp before the three top buttons would see reason. Damme, I feel as if I was going to break in halves. What 's that dear boy of yours grinning at?"
"I wasn't grinning," protested Paul. "I was only going to say that father 's coming in now."
The tramp and his mother exchanged a glance of which the meaning was hidden from him, the look of allies preparing for a crucial moment. Already they were leagued to defeat the husband.
Christian du Preez came with heavy footsteps along the passage from the outer door, saw that there was a stranger in the parlor and paused.
"Christian," said Mrs. du Preez, with a false sprightliness. "Come in; here 's a—an old friend of mine come to see us."
"An old friend?"
The Boer stared at the stranger standing with straddled legs before the fireplace, and recognized him forthwith. Without speaking, he made a quick comparison of the bold photograph, whose fleshy perfection had so often invited him to take stock of his own imperfections, and then met the living Boy Bailey's rigid smile with a smile of his own that had the effect of tempering the other's humor.
"I see," said the Boer. "What's the name?" He came forward and read from the photograph where the bold showy signature sprawled across a corner. "'Yours blithely, Boy Bailey,'" he read. "And you are Boy Bailey?"
"You 've got it," replied the photograph's original. "Older, my dear sir, and it may be meatier; but the same man in the main, and happy to make the acquaintance of an old friend's husband."
His impudence cost him an effort in face of the Boer's stare of contemptuous amusement, a stare which comprehended, item by item, each article of his grotesque attire and came to rest, without diminishing its intensity, upon the specious, unstable countenance.
"Allemachtag," was the Boer's only reply, as he completed his survey.
"I don't think you saw Bailey, that time we were married, Christian," said Mrs. du Preez. "But he was a dear old friend of mine."
Christian nodded. "You walked here?" he inquired of the guest. On the Karoo, the decent man does not travel afoot, and none of the three others who were present missed the implication of the inquiry. Mrs. du Preez colored hotly; Boy Bailey introduced his celebrated wave of the hand.
"I see you know what walking means," he replied. "It ain't a human occupation—is it now? What I say is—if man had been meant for avoetganger(a walker)"—he watched the effect of the Dutch word on the Boer—"he 'd have been made with four feet. Is n't that right? You bet your shirt it is."
"My shirt." Christian seemed puzzled for the moment, though the phrase was one which his wife used. She watched him uneasily. "Oh, I see. Yes, you can keep that shirt you 've got on. I don't want it."
Boy Bailey made him a bow. "Ah, thanks. A shirt more or less don't matter, does it?"
Christian turned to Paul. "You brought him in?"
"Yes," answered Paul.
"Well, come and help me with the sacks. Your mother an' her friend wants to talk, an' we don't want to listen to them talking."
Boy Bailey watched them depart.
"What 's he mean by that?" he asked of Mrs. du Preez.
"Never mind what he means," she answered. "He can't have his own way in everything. Sit down an' tell me about the others an' what happened to them after I left. There was Kitty Cassel—what did she do? Go home?"
Boy Bailey pursed his lips. "No," he answered slowly. "She and I went down to Capetown together. She did n't come to any good, Kitty did n't. Ask me about some one else; I don't want to offend your ears."
But Mrs. du Preez was in error in one particular: Christian had seen Boy Bailey "that time we were married," and remembered him very clearly. Those were days when he, too, lived vividly and the petty incidents and personalities of the moment wrote themselves deep on his boyish mind. As he worked at the empty sacks, telling them over by the stencils upon them, while Paul waded among them to his knees and flung them towards him, he returned in the spirit to those poignant years when a thin girl walking across a little makeshift stage could shake him to his foundations.
He remembered the little town to which the commando had returned to be paid off and disbanded, a single street straggling under a rampart of a gray-green mountain, with the crude beginnings of other streets budding from it on either side, and the big brown, native location like a tuberous root at its lower end. Along its length, beetle-browed shops, with shaded stoeps and hitching-rails for horses, showed interior recesses of shade and gave an illusion of dignified prosperous commerce, and at the edge of it all there was a string of still pools, linked by a dribble of water, which went by the name of a river and nurtured along its banks gums and willows, the only trees of greater stature than a mimosa-bush that Christian had ever seen.
It was a small, stagnant veld dorp, in fact, one of hundreds that are littered over the face of the Colony, and have for their districts a more than metropolitan importance. Christian knew it as a focus of life, the center of incomprehensible issues and concerns and when his corps returned to it, flavored in its single street the pungencies of life about town. The little war in the neighborhood had drawn to it the usual riff-raff of the country that follows on the heels of troops, wherever armed men are gathered together, predatory women too wise in their generation, a sample or two of the nearly extinct species of professional card-sharper, a host of the sons of Lazarus intent upon crumbs that should fall from the pay-table, and a fair collection of ordinary thieves. These gave the single street a vivacity beyond anything it had known, and the armed burgher, carrying his rifle slung on his back from mere habit, would be greeted by the name of "Piet" and invited to drink once for every ten steps he took upon it.
Hither came Christian—twenty-two years of age, six-foot in his bare soles of slender thew and muscle, not yet bearded and hungry with many appetites after a campaign against Kafirs. The restless town was a bait for him.
At that time, there was much in him of that solemn-eyed quality which came to be Paul's. The steely women laughed harshly as he passed them by, with all the sweetness of his youth in his still face, his lips parted, his look resting on them and beyond them to the virtues and the delicacy they had thrown off to walk the faster on their chosen road. His ears softened their laughter, his eyes redeemed their bitterness; everything was transfigured for him by the dynamic power of his mere innocence and his potent belief in his own inferiority to the splendor of all that offered itself to his vision. He saw his comrades, fine shots and hard men on the trek, lapse into drunkenness and evil communications, and it was in no way incompatible with his own ascetic cleanliness of apprehension that he excused them on the grounds of the hardships they had undergone. He could idealize even a sot puking in a gutter.
It was here that he saw a stage-play for the first time in his life, sitting in a back-seat in the town hall among young shop-assistants and workmen, not a little distracted between the strange things upon the stage which he had paid to witness and the jocular detachment from them by the young men about him. The play at first was incomprehensible; the chambermaid and the footman, conversing explanatorily, with which it opened, were figures he was unable to recognize, and he could not share the impression that seemed to prevail among the characters in general that the fat, whitish heroine was beautiful. The villain, too, was murderous in such a crude fashion; not once did he make a clean job of an assassination. Christian felt himself competent to criticize, since it was only a week or so since he had pulled a trigger and risen on his elbow to see his man halt in mid-stride and pitch face forward to the earth. He was confirmed in his dissatisfaction by the demeanor of his neighbors; they, men about town, broken to the drama and its surprises, were certainly not taking the thing seriously. After a while, therefore, he made no effort to keep sight of the thread of the play; he sat in an idle content, watching the women on the stage, curious to discover what it was in each one of them that was wrong and vaguely repellent.
His neighbors had no doubts about it. "There 's not a leg in the whole caboodle," one remarked. "It 's all mouth and murder, this is."
Christian did not clearly understand the first phrase, but the second was plain and he smiled in agreement. He looked up to take stock of another character, a girl who made her entrance at that moment, and ceased to smile. Her share in the scene was unimportant enough, and she had but a few words to speak and nothing to do but to walk forward and back again. She was thin and girlish and carried herself well, moving with a graceful deliberation and speaking in an appealing little tinkle to which the room lent a certain ring and resonance; she accosted the villain who replied with brutality; she smiled and turned from him, made a face and passed out again. And that was all.
The young man who had deplored the absence of legs nudged his neighbor to look at the tall young Boer and made a joke in a cautious whisper. His precaution was unnecessary; he might have shouted and Christian would not have heard. He was like a man stunned by a great revelation, sitting bolt upright and staring at the stage and its lighted activity with eyes dazzled by a discovery. For the first time in his life he had seen a woman, little enough to break like a stick across his knee, brave and gay at once, delicate and tender, touching him with the sense of her strength and courage while her femininity made all the male in him surge into power. Gone was his late attitude of humorous judgment, that could detach the actress from her work and assess her like a cow; the smile, the little contemptuous grimace had blown it all away. He was aghast, incapable of reducing his impression to thoughts. For a while, it did not occur to him that it would be possible to see her again. When it did, he leaned across the two playgoers who were next to him and lifted a program from the lap of the third, who gaped at him but found nothing to say.
"Thatmeisjie, the one in a red dress—is her name in this?" he inquired of his neighbor, and surprised him into assistance. Together they found it; the unknown was Miss Vivie Sinclair.
"Skinny, wasn't she?" commented the helpful neighbor sociably.
But Christian was already on his feet and making his way out, and the conversational one got nothing but a slow glare for an answer across intervening heads.
And yet the truth of it was, a connoisseur in girls could have matched Miss Vivie Sinclair a hundred times over, so little was there in her that was peculiar or rare. The connoisseur would have put her down without hesitation for a product of that busy manufactory which melts down the material of so many good housemaids to make it into so many bad actresses. Her sex and a grimace—these were the total of her assets, and yet she was as good a peg as another for a cloudy youth to drape with the splendors of his inexperienced fancy and glorify with the hues of his secret longings. Probably she had no very clear idea of herself in those days; she was neither happy nor sad, as a general thing; and her aspirations aimed much more definitely at the symptoms of success—frocks, bills lettered large with her name, comely young men in hot pursuit of her, gifts of jewelry—than at success itself. As she passed down the main street next morning, on her way to the telegraph office in the town hall, she offered to the slow, appraising looks from the stoeps a sketchy impression of a rather strained modernity, an effect of deftly managed skirts and unabashed ankles which in themselves were sufficient to set Fereira thinking. It was as she emerged from the telegraph office that she came face to face with Christian.
"Well, where d'you think you 're comin' to?"
This was her greeting as he pulled up all standing to avert a collision. Clothes to fit both his stature and his esthetic sense had not been procurable, and he had been only able to wash himself to a state of levitical cleanliness. But his youthful bigness and his obvious reverence of her served his purpose. She stood looking at him with a smile.
"I saw you," he said, "in the play."
"Did you? What d' you think of it?"
"Allemachtag," he answered. "I have been thinking of it all night."
To his eye, she was all she had promised to be. The fragility of her was most wonderful to him, accustomed to the honest motherly brawn of the girls of his own race. The rather aggressive perkiness of her address was the smiling courage that had thrilled and touched him. He stood staring, unable to carry the talk further.
But it was for this kind of thing that Miss Vivie Sinclair had "gone on the stage," and she was not at all at a loss.
"I 'm going this way," she said, and in her hands, Christian was wax—willing wax. He found himself walking at her side under the eyes of the town. She waited before she spoke again till they were by the stoep of Pagan's store, where a dozen loungers became rigid and watchful as they passed.
"You 've heard about the smash-up?" she inquired then.
"Smash-up?"
"Our smash-up? Oh, a regular mess we 're in, the whole lot of us. You had n't heard?"
"No," he answered.
"Padden 's cleared out. He was our manager, you know, and now he 's run away with the treasury and left us high and dry. Went last night, it seems, after the show."
"Left you?" repeated Christian. The old story was a new one to him and he did not understand. Miss Sinclair thought him dense, but proceeded to enlighten him in words of one syllable, as it were.
"That 's why I was telegraphing," she concluded. "There was a feller in Capetown I used to know; I want to strike him for my fare out of this."
So she was in trouble; there was a call upon her courage, an attack on her defenselessness. Miss Sinclair, glancing sidelong at his face, saw it redden quickly and was confirmed in her hope that the "feller" in Capetown was but an alternative string to her bow.
"That telegram took all I 'd got but a couple of shillings," she added. "Padden had been keeping us short for a long time."
The long street straggled under the sun, bare to its harsh illumination, a wide tract of parched dust hemmed between walls and roofs of gray corrugated iron. The one thing that survived that merciless ordeal of light without loss or depreciation was the girl. They halted at the door of the one-storied hotel where her room was and here again the shaded stoep was full of ears and eyes and Christian had to struggle with words to make his meaning clear to her and keep it obscure to every one else.
"It 'll be all right," he assured her stammeringly. "I 'll see that it 's all right. I 'll come here an' see you."
"When?" she asked, and helped him with a suggestion. "This evening? There 'll be no show to-night."
"This evening," he agreed.
Miss Sinclair gave him her best smile, all the better for the mirth that helped it out. She was as much amused as she was relieved. As she passed the bar on her way indoors, she winked guardedly to a florid youth within who stood in an attitude of listening.
If Christian had celebrated the occasion with libations in the local fashion, if he had talked about it and put his achievement to the test of words—if, even, he had been capable of thinking about it in any clear and sober manner instead of merely relishing it with every fiber of his body—the evening's interview might have resolved itself into an act of charity, involving the sacrifice of nothing more than a few sovereigns. As it was, he spent the day in germinating hopes and educating his mind to entertain them. Under the stimulating heat of his sanguine youth, they burgeoned superbly.
As he walked away from the hotel, the florid youth spoke confidentially to the fat shirt-sleeved barman.
"Hear that?" he asked. "She'll do all right, she will. That 's where a girl 's better off than a man. Who 's the feller, d'you know?"
The barman heaved himself up to look through the window, and laughed wheezily. He was a married man and adored his children, but it was his business to be knowing and worldly.
"It 's young Du Preez," he answered, as Christian stalked away. "One of them Boers, y'know. Got a farm out on the Karoo."
"Rich?" queried the other.
"Not bad," said the barman. "Most of those Dutch could buy you an' me an' use us for mantel ornaments, if they had the good taste."
"So—ho," exclaimed the florid youth. "But they don't carry it about with 'em, worse luck."
He sighed and grew thoughtful. He was thoughtful at intervals for the rest of the morning, and by the afternoon was melancholy and uncertain of step. But he was on hand and watchful when Christian arrived.
Christian was vaguely annoyed when a young man of suave countenance and an expression of deep solemnity thrust up to him at the hotel door and stood swaying and swallowing and making signs as though to command his attention.
"What d'you want?" he demanded.
"Word with you," requested the other. "Word with you."
He was sufficiently unlike anything that was native to Fereira to be recognizable as an actor and Christian suffered himself to be beckoned into the bar.
"Shall I do it or you?" asked the other. "I shtood so many to-day, sheems to me it 's your turn. Mine 's a whisky. Now, 'bout this li'l girl upshtairs."
"Eh?" Christian was startled.
"I 'm man of the world," the other went on, with the seriousness of the thoroughly drunken. "Know more 'bout the world then ever you knew in yer bally life. An' I don't blame you—norra bit. Now what I want shay is this: I can fix it for you if you 're good for a fiver. Jush a fiver—shave trouble and time, eh? Nice li'l girl, too. Worth it."
Christian watched him lift his glass and drink. He was perplexed; these folk seemed to have a language of their own and to be incomprehensible to ordinary folk.
"Worth it?" he repeated. "Fixwhat?" he demanded.
"Nod 's good 's wink," answered the other. "Don't want to shout it. Bend your long ear down to me—tell you."
They had a corner by the bar to themselves. Near the window the barman had a customer after his own heart and was repeating to him an oracular saying by his youngest daughter but two, glancing sideways while he spoke to see if Christian and the other were listening.
Christian bent, and the hot breath of the other, reeking of the day's drinking, beat on his neck and the side of his head. The hoarse whisper, with its infernal suggestion, seemed to come warm from a pit of vileness within the man's body.
"Is that plain 'nough?"
Christian stood upright again, trembling from head to foot with some cold emotion far transcending any rage he had ever felt. For some instant he could not lift his hand; he had seen the last foul depths of evil and was paralyzed. The other lifted his glass again. His movement released the Boer from the spell.
He took the man by the wrist that held the glass with so deadly a deliberation that the barman missed his hostile purpose and continued to talk, leaning with his fat, mottled arms folded on the bar.
"What you doin', y' fool?" The cry was from the florid youth.
"Ah!" Christian put out his strength with a maniac fury, and the youth's hand and the glass in it were dashed back into that person's face. No hand but his own struck him, and the countenance Christian saw as a blurred white disk broke under the blow and showed red cracks. He struck again and again; the barman shouted and men came running in from outside. Christian dropped the wrist he held and turned away. Those in the doorway gave him passage. On the floor in the corner the florid youth bled and vomited.
Christian knew him later as a bold and serene face in a plush photograph frame, signed across the lower right corner: "Yours blithely, Boy Bailey."
How he made inquiries for the girl's room and came at last to the door of it was never a clear memory to him. But he could always recall that small austere interior of whitewash and heat-warped furniture to which he entered at her call, to find her sitting on the narrow bed. He came to her bereft of the few faculties she had left him, grave, almost stern, gripping himself by force of instinct to save himself from the outburst of emotion to which the scene in the bar had made him prone. Everything tender and protective in his nature was awake and crying out; he saw her as the victim of a sacrilegious outrage, threatened by unnamable dangers.
She looked at him under the lids of her eyes, quickly alive to the change in him. It is necessary to record that she, too, had made inquiries since the morning, and learned of the farm that stood at his back to guarantee him solid.
"I wondered if you 'd come," she said. "That feller in Capetown has n't answered."
"I said I 'd come," he replied gravely.
"Yes, I know. All the same, I thought—you know, when a person 's in hard luck, nothing goes right, an' a girl, when she 's in a mess, is anybody's fool. Is n't that right?"
She knew her peril then; she lived open-eyed in face of it.
"You shall not be anybody's fool," he answered. "If anybody tries to be bad to you, I 'll kill him."
He was still standing just within the closed door, no nearer to her than the size of the little chamber compelled.
"Won't you sit down?" she invited.
"Eh?" His contemplation of her seemed to absorb him and make him absent-minded. "No," he replied, when she repeated her invitation.
"As you like," she conceded, wondering whether after all he was going to be amenable to the treatment she proposed for him. It crossed her mind that he was thinking of getting something for his money and her silly mouth tightened. If her sex was one of her assets, her virtue—the fanatic virtue which is a matter of prejudice rather than of principle,—was one of her liabilities. She had nothing to sell him.
"You know," she said, "the worst of it is, none of us have n't had any salary for weeks. That's what puts us in the cart. We 're all broke. If Padden had let us have a bit, we would n't be stranded like this. And the queer thing is, Gus Padden 's the last man you 'd have picked for a wrong 'un. Fat, you know, and beaming; a sort of fatherly way, he had. He used to remind me of Santa Claus. An' now he 's thrown us down this way, and how I 'm going to get up again I can't say." She gave him one of her shrewd upward glances; "tell me," she added.
"I can tell you," he replied.
"How, then?" she asked.
"Marry me," said Christian. "This acting—it's no good. There 's men that is bad all around you. One of them—I broke his face like a window-glass downstairs just now—he said you was—bad, like him. And it was time to see what he was worth. Unless you can you are ach—so—so little, so weak. Marry me, mykleintjeand you shall be nobody's fool."
The girl on the bed stared at him dumbly: this was what she had never expected. Salvation had come to her with both hands full of gifts. She began to laugh foolishly.
"Marry me," repeated Christian. "Will you?"
She jumped up from her seat, still laughing and took two steps to him.
"Will I?" she cried. "Will a duck swim? Yes, I will; yes, yes, yes!"
Christian looked at her dazed; events were sweeping him off his feet. He took one of her hands and dropped it again and turned from her abruptly. With his arm before his face he leaned against the door and burst into weeping. The girl patted him on the back soothingly.
"Take it easy," she said kindly. "You'll be all right, never fear."
"That 's all the Port Elizabeth ones," said Paul. "How many do you make them?"
Christian du Preez looked up uncertainly. "Allemachtag," he said. "I forgot to count. I was thinking."
"Oh. About the tramp?"
"Yes. Paul, what did you bring him in for? Couldn't you see he was askellum?"
Paul nodded. "Yes, I could see that. But—skellumsare hungry and tired, too, sometimes."
His father smiled in a worried manner. He and Paul never talked intimately with each other, but an intimacy existed of feeling and thought. They took many of the same things for granted.
"Like us," he agreed. "Come on to supper, Paul."