Chapter Five.A Suspicious Trek.Marian, startled by the terrified shriek of her companion, followed the latter’s gaze, and the object that met her own produced a qualm of repulsion mingled with involuntary alarm.They had reached a secluded corner of the garden where the sunshine fell in a network of light through the overshadowing foliage of a group of tall fig-trees, which cast quite a semi-gloom in contrast to the glare without. On one side was a thick pomegranate hedge. The cause of Violet’s terror became unpleasantly manifest in the shape of a hideous black head rearing itself up from the ground. It was followed by the gliding sinuous body of a huge snake.Shriek after shriek arose from Violet’s lips.“It’s coming straight at us!” she screamed, and mastering an impulse to faint, she turned and fled from the spot as hard as she could run.It certainly was coming straight at them, and that with a velocity and determination abnormal to its kind. Another peculiarity was that it came on in a straight, smooth glide, without a writhe, without even a wrathful hiss. In fact, the reptile’s behaviour, to anybody but a brace of badly frightened women, was singular to a degree.“It’s only a rinkhaals,” cried Marian, bravely standing her ground. “Lend me your Sunshade, Violet.”But the latter was already a hundred yards off, where, half ashamed of her panic, half secure in the distance she had covered, she turned to see what would happen. Suddenly a sound of suppressed laughter reached Marian’s ears. It seemed to come from the pomegranate hedge. Simultaneously the snake came to an abrupt standstill, and lay motionless.Any misgivings Marian may have felt vanished on the instant. She knew that laugh, and recognising it became alive to something which in her not unnatural alarm had escaped her before. The snake was as dead as a pickled herring, and there was a noose of thin twine round its neck.“Chris! How can you?” she cried. “You have nearly frightened Violet to death!”“Have I?” laughed Christopher Selwood, emerging from his hiding-place. “No, no! That won’t do. Why, wasn’t it Miss Avory who was sticking out the other day that no snake in this country could scare her? Ho, ho, ho!”The speaker was a well-built, good-looking man of middle age, with a heavy brown beard, just beginning to show a streak of grey here and there, and keen, fun-loving eyes. His face was tanned and burnt, likewise his hands, which latter were rough and horny through much hard manual labour. He was dressed in cord trousers and a flannel shirt, and carried his jacket under his arm.“Ho, ho, ho!” he roared again! picking up the dead snake by its late motive power—the twine to wit. “Where’s the young lady who isn’t afraid of snakes?”“Really, Chris, what a great schoolboy you are!” said his sister. “If I were Violet, I should never forgive you. You had no business to frighten her like that!”“No, you hadn’t,” said Violet, who now came up. “But I’ll forgive you, Mr Selwood, because—I’ll be even with you yet.”“Hallo! That’s a rum sort of forgiveness. Well, Miss Avory, I won’t grumble; you shall work your wicked will, how, when, and where you please.”“Ugh! What a hideous thing!” said Violet, contemplating the dead reptile with a shudder, “But—joking apart—they can’t be very plentiful, can they? Ever since I’ve been here I’ve only seen one, and it was dead.”“There’s a proverb here, Miss Avory,” said Selwood, with a twinkle in his eye, “that if you come across one snake, you are dead certain to run against at least two more in the course of the day. So be careful.”“Nonsense, Violet. Don’t believe a word of it,” said Marian. “Chris, you ought to be ashamed of yourself. Where did you get that rinkhaals from?”“This end wall of the land. He was coiled up, basking in the sun. Saw him before he saw me—slunk round t’other side of the wall, and dropped a stone bang on the top of him. Like to have the skin to hang up in your bedroom, Miss Avory?”“Ugh! No, I wouldn’t. But wait a bit, Mr Selwood. You’ll live to wish you hadn’t played me this trick yet,” retorted Violet, mischievously.Selwood laughed again.“Hallo! What’s all this?” he exclaimed, as the lowing of cattle, mingled with the bleating of sheep and goats, together with a considerable cloud of pungent dust, announced the arrival of a trek of some sort.They had reached the garden-gate and emerged close to the group of huts forming the quarters of the native farm servants. Before and around these were about twenty head of cattle, old and young, and quite a considerable number of sheep and goats, upon all of which Selwood’s experienced eye fell with no approving gaze.Two Kafirs, arrayed in red blankets and tattered trousers, stepped forward.“’Ndaag, Baas—’ndaag, missis!” (Abbreviation of “Good day”) began one of the two, a tall, unprepossessing looking fellow, with one eye and pock-marked countenance; and speaking in Boer Dutch, he asked leave to rest his stock for a few hours.Selwood ran his eye down the greasy, red-clay-smeared document (Kafirs travelling within the Cape Colony are compelled by law to provide themselves with passes), which set forth that Muntiwa and Booi—Hlambi Kafirs—were authorised to remove so many head of cattle and so many sheep and goats to Siwani’s location in Kaffraria, travelling by such and such a road. It went on to enumerate particulars of the stock, the various earmarks, and sundry other details, and seemed perfectly in order. A glance or two having sufficed to effect a comparison between the said particulars and the animals themselves, Selwood replied—“I can’t let you stop here, Muntiwa. Your sheep are the most infernally scabby lot I ever saw in my life, and I don’t half like the look of your cattle. See there,” he went on, pointing to a particularly dejected-looking cow, whose miserable aspect and filmy eye denoted anything but rude health; “that looks uncommonly like a case of red-water. So you must trek on. I can’t have my stock infected.”“Whau! Siya qoka!” (“Ah, you lie!”) cried the Kafir, savagely, advancing within a couple of yards of Selwood, his kerries shaking in his grasp with his suppressed rage. “There is nothing the matter with the cattle, and you know it. We shall rest here whether you like it or not.”Things began to look pretty serious. Christopher Selwood was as good a man as most men of his age and training. But the Kafir, too, was of powerful build, and was evidently a turbulent, quarrelsome fellow; and an ugly customer all round. Moreover, he had a mate, rendering the odds two to one. Then Selwood was handicapped by the two girls, but for whose presence he would instantly have knocked the insolent native down. Yet for all these disadvantages he was not the sort of man to stand any nonsense; least of all from a native.“Go indoors. I’ll be with you in a minute,” he said to the girls, by way of clearing the decks for action.Violet, looking alarmed, made a step to obey. But Marian did not stir, and there was a dangerous gleam in her blue eyes. It was possible that in the event of a collision the Kafirs might not have found the odds so overwhelmingly in their favour as they expected.“Look here,” he went on: “if there’s any moreindabayou’ll find yourself in thetronkto-night at Fort Lamport. Do you imagine for a moment I’m going to be bossed by a couple of Kafirs, and on my own place, too? You must be mad! Now, trek at once!”The spokesman of the two, stung by the other’s calmness, came closer, shaking his kerries unpleasantly near Selwood’s nose. But the latter never moved.The other native said something in a low, quick, warning tone. It was effective. Both Kafirs turned, and, walking away, began collecting their stock, aided by their women and children, who, laden with mats and cooking-pots, and other household gear, had, up till now, been squatting in the background.“Hey,umlúngu!” (White man) cried the one-eyed savage, turning to fire a parting shot, “we shall meet one of these days. Take care of yourself!” he added, with significant irony.“Ha! ha! So we shall, my friend. But it will be in the magistrate’s court. Bad hats both of them,” he added, turning to the girls. “Queer that they should own all that stock. But the pass was all right. Yet there are such things as forged passes. By Jove! I’ve a good mind to send over and warn the Mounted Police. Not worth the trouble, though. I’ll just ride down after dinner and make sure that they are clear off the place. Impudent dog, that wall-eyed chap. If you two hadn’t been there I’d have given him the best hammering he ever had in his life, or he’d have given me one.”With which remark the speaker characteristically dismissed the affair from his mind altogether.“I’ve had a letter from Renshaw,” said Mrs Selwood, as they sat down to dinner.“A letter!” cried Violet, suddenly interested. “Why, it isn’t post-day! How did you get it?”“Theunis Bezuidenhout brought it out from Fort Lamport. He says the drought up there is something fearful—”“Who? Theunis Bezuidenhout?” struck in Christopher.”—Something fearful,” went on his wife, clean ignoring this flippant remark. “There isn’t a blade of grass left on the place, and hardly a drop of water. All the sheep and goats have died except about five hundred.”“Poor chap!” said Selwood. “What an unlucky dog he is! He’d better have cleared out of that dried-up Bushmanland place long ago, even if he had to give it away for a song. Well, he’ll have to now, anyhow. Write and ask him to come down here when he does, Hilda. He might hit on something about here to suit him.”“Oh yes, mamma—do!” exclaimed Effie, aged twelve, with whom Renshaw was a prime favourite.“But that isn’t all,” continued Mrs Selwood. “The poor fellow has been ill—fearfully ill—believes he would have died, but for a stranger who turned up quite unexpectedly, but just in the nick of time, and nursed him through it. It was a return of his old fever.”“By Jove!” said Christopher, “that up-country fever is the very mischief once you get it on you. But, Hilda, write and tell him to come down here sharp—whether he leaves his few goats or not. They’re bound to die anyhow. This air will set him up on his legs again in no time—and meanwhile he can be looking around. Tell him to bring his friend too. By the way, what’s the other man’s name?”“He doesn’t say—only that he’s a man from England. I’ll write this very evening,” she answered.Violet Avory’s prettily expressed concern was but the foreground to an instinctive inward conjecture as to what the stranger would be like. Poor Renshaw’s illness was not an event to move her much, and poor Renshaw himself faded into background beside the possibilities opening out before her in the advent of a stranger—a stranger from England too. Truth to tell, she was becoming a trifle bored. The incense of male adoration, as essential to her as the very breath of life, had not floated much in her direction of late; for the Umtirara range, though scenically and climatically a comparative Eden, was yet to all purposes, as far as she was concerned, an Adamless one. A stranger—lately from England! There was something delightfully exciting in the potentialities here opening out.“Tell him he must come, Hilda!” said Marian, with, for her, a strange eagerness. “Poor—poor Renshaw! He’ll never shake off that horrible fever up there in such an awful drought-stricken desert. Tell him he must come, and come at once!”And yet of these two it was for her who was moved to excitement over the possible arrival of a stranger, that the absent man would have given his very life—blindly, as with regard to the treasure for which he had been so blindly and so often seeking—hitherto in vain.
Marian, startled by the terrified shriek of her companion, followed the latter’s gaze, and the object that met her own produced a qualm of repulsion mingled with involuntary alarm.
They had reached a secluded corner of the garden where the sunshine fell in a network of light through the overshadowing foliage of a group of tall fig-trees, which cast quite a semi-gloom in contrast to the glare without. On one side was a thick pomegranate hedge. The cause of Violet’s terror became unpleasantly manifest in the shape of a hideous black head rearing itself up from the ground. It was followed by the gliding sinuous body of a huge snake.
Shriek after shriek arose from Violet’s lips.
“It’s coming straight at us!” she screamed, and mastering an impulse to faint, she turned and fled from the spot as hard as she could run.
It certainly was coming straight at them, and that with a velocity and determination abnormal to its kind. Another peculiarity was that it came on in a straight, smooth glide, without a writhe, without even a wrathful hiss. In fact, the reptile’s behaviour, to anybody but a brace of badly frightened women, was singular to a degree.
“It’s only a rinkhaals,” cried Marian, bravely standing her ground. “Lend me your Sunshade, Violet.”
But the latter was already a hundred yards off, where, half ashamed of her panic, half secure in the distance she had covered, she turned to see what would happen. Suddenly a sound of suppressed laughter reached Marian’s ears. It seemed to come from the pomegranate hedge. Simultaneously the snake came to an abrupt standstill, and lay motionless.
Any misgivings Marian may have felt vanished on the instant. She knew that laugh, and recognising it became alive to something which in her not unnatural alarm had escaped her before. The snake was as dead as a pickled herring, and there was a noose of thin twine round its neck.
“Chris! How can you?” she cried. “You have nearly frightened Violet to death!”
“Have I?” laughed Christopher Selwood, emerging from his hiding-place. “No, no! That won’t do. Why, wasn’t it Miss Avory who was sticking out the other day that no snake in this country could scare her? Ho, ho, ho!”
The speaker was a well-built, good-looking man of middle age, with a heavy brown beard, just beginning to show a streak of grey here and there, and keen, fun-loving eyes. His face was tanned and burnt, likewise his hands, which latter were rough and horny through much hard manual labour. He was dressed in cord trousers and a flannel shirt, and carried his jacket under his arm.
“Ho, ho, ho!” he roared again! picking up the dead snake by its late motive power—the twine to wit. “Where’s the young lady who isn’t afraid of snakes?”
“Really, Chris, what a great schoolboy you are!” said his sister. “If I were Violet, I should never forgive you. You had no business to frighten her like that!”
“No, you hadn’t,” said Violet, who now came up. “But I’ll forgive you, Mr Selwood, because—I’ll be even with you yet.”
“Hallo! That’s a rum sort of forgiveness. Well, Miss Avory, I won’t grumble; you shall work your wicked will, how, when, and where you please.”
“Ugh! What a hideous thing!” said Violet, contemplating the dead reptile with a shudder, “But—joking apart—they can’t be very plentiful, can they? Ever since I’ve been here I’ve only seen one, and it was dead.”
“There’s a proverb here, Miss Avory,” said Selwood, with a twinkle in his eye, “that if you come across one snake, you are dead certain to run against at least two more in the course of the day. So be careful.”
“Nonsense, Violet. Don’t believe a word of it,” said Marian. “Chris, you ought to be ashamed of yourself. Where did you get that rinkhaals from?”
“This end wall of the land. He was coiled up, basking in the sun. Saw him before he saw me—slunk round t’other side of the wall, and dropped a stone bang on the top of him. Like to have the skin to hang up in your bedroom, Miss Avory?”
“Ugh! No, I wouldn’t. But wait a bit, Mr Selwood. You’ll live to wish you hadn’t played me this trick yet,” retorted Violet, mischievously.
Selwood laughed again.
“Hallo! What’s all this?” he exclaimed, as the lowing of cattle, mingled with the bleating of sheep and goats, together with a considerable cloud of pungent dust, announced the arrival of a trek of some sort.
They had reached the garden-gate and emerged close to the group of huts forming the quarters of the native farm servants. Before and around these were about twenty head of cattle, old and young, and quite a considerable number of sheep and goats, upon all of which Selwood’s experienced eye fell with no approving gaze.
Two Kafirs, arrayed in red blankets and tattered trousers, stepped forward.
“’Ndaag, Baas—’ndaag, missis!” (Abbreviation of “Good day”) began one of the two, a tall, unprepossessing looking fellow, with one eye and pock-marked countenance; and speaking in Boer Dutch, he asked leave to rest his stock for a few hours.
Selwood ran his eye down the greasy, red-clay-smeared document (Kafirs travelling within the Cape Colony are compelled by law to provide themselves with passes), which set forth that Muntiwa and Booi—Hlambi Kafirs—were authorised to remove so many head of cattle and so many sheep and goats to Siwani’s location in Kaffraria, travelling by such and such a road. It went on to enumerate particulars of the stock, the various earmarks, and sundry other details, and seemed perfectly in order. A glance or two having sufficed to effect a comparison between the said particulars and the animals themselves, Selwood replied—
“I can’t let you stop here, Muntiwa. Your sheep are the most infernally scabby lot I ever saw in my life, and I don’t half like the look of your cattle. See there,” he went on, pointing to a particularly dejected-looking cow, whose miserable aspect and filmy eye denoted anything but rude health; “that looks uncommonly like a case of red-water. So you must trek on. I can’t have my stock infected.”
“Whau! Siya qoka!” (“Ah, you lie!”) cried the Kafir, savagely, advancing within a couple of yards of Selwood, his kerries shaking in his grasp with his suppressed rage. “There is nothing the matter with the cattle, and you know it. We shall rest here whether you like it or not.”
Things began to look pretty serious. Christopher Selwood was as good a man as most men of his age and training. But the Kafir, too, was of powerful build, and was evidently a turbulent, quarrelsome fellow; and an ugly customer all round. Moreover, he had a mate, rendering the odds two to one. Then Selwood was handicapped by the two girls, but for whose presence he would instantly have knocked the insolent native down. Yet for all these disadvantages he was not the sort of man to stand any nonsense; least of all from a native.
“Go indoors. I’ll be with you in a minute,” he said to the girls, by way of clearing the decks for action.
Violet, looking alarmed, made a step to obey. But Marian did not stir, and there was a dangerous gleam in her blue eyes. It was possible that in the event of a collision the Kafirs might not have found the odds so overwhelmingly in their favour as they expected.
“Look here,” he went on: “if there’s any moreindabayou’ll find yourself in thetronkto-night at Fort Lamport. Do you imagine for a moment I’m going to be bossed by a couple of Kafirs, and on my own place, too? You must be mad! Now, trek at once!”
The spokesman of the two, stung by the other’s calmness, came closer, shaking his kerries unpleasantly near Selwood’s nose. But the latter never moved.
The other native said something in a low, quick, warning tone. It was effective. Both Kafirs turned, and, walking away, began collecting their stock, aided by their women and children, who, laden with mats and cooking-pots, and other household gear, had, up till now, been squatting in the background.
“Hey,umlúngu!” (White man) cried the one-eyed savage, turning to fire a parting shot, “we shall meet one of these days. Take care of yourself!” he added, with significant irony.
“Ha! ha! So we shall, my friend. But it will be in the magistrate’s court. Bad hats both of them,” he added, turning to the girls. “Queer that they should own all that stock. But the pass was all right. Yet there are such things as forged passes. By Jove! I’ve a good mind to send over and warn the Mounted Police. Not worth the trouble, though. I’ll just ride down after dinner and make sure that they are clear off the place. Impudent dog, that wall-eyed chap. If you two hadn’t been there I’d have given him the best hammering he ever had in his life, or he’d have given me one.”
With which remark the speaker characteristically dismissed the affair from his mind altogether.
“I’ve had a letter from Renshaw,” said Mrs Selwood, as they sat down to dinner.
“A letter!” cried Violet, suddenly interested. “Why, it isn’t post-day! How did you get it?”
“Theunis Bezuidenhout brought it out from Fort Lamport. He says the drought up there is something fearful—”
“Who? Theunis Bezuidenhout?” struck in Christopher.
”—Something fearful,” went on his wife, clean ignoring this flippant remark. “There isn’t a blade of grass left on the place, and hardly a drop of water. All the sheep and goats have died except about five hundred.”
“Poor chap!” said Selwood. “What an unlucky dog he is! He’d better have cleared out of that dried-up Bushmanland place long ago, even if he had to give it away for a song. Well, he’ll have to now, anyhow. Write and ask him to come down here when he does, Hilda. He might hit on something about here to suit him.”
“Oh yes, mamma—do!” exclaimed Effie, aged twelve, with whom Renshaw was a prime favourite.
“But that isn’t all,” continued Mrs Selwood. “The poor fellow has been ill—fearfully ill—believes he would have died, but for a stranger who turned up quite unexpectedly, but just in the nick of time, and nursed him through it. It was a return of his old fever.”
“By Jove!” said Christopher, “that up-country fever is the very mischief once you get it on you. But, Hilda, write and tell him to come down here sharp—whether he leaves his few goats or not. They’re bound to die anyhow. This air will set him up on his legs again in no time—and meanwhile he can be looking around. Tell him to bring his friend too. By the way, what’s the other man’s name?”
“He doesn’t say—only that he’s a man from England. I’ll write this very evening,” she answered.
Violet Avory’s prettily expressed concern was but the foreground to an instinctive inward conjecture as to what the stranger would be like. Poor Renshaw’s illness was not an event to move her much, and poor Renshaw himself faded into background beside the possibilities opening out before her in the advent of a stranger—a stranger from England too. Truth to tell, she was becoming a trifle bored. The incense of male adoration, as essential to her as the very breath of life, had not floated much in her direction of late; for the Umtirara range, though scenically and climatically a comparative Eden, was yet to all purposes, as far as she was concerned, an Adamless one. A stranger—lately from England! There was something delightfully exciting in the potentialities here opening out.
“Tell him he must come, Hilda!” said Marian, with, for her, a strange eagerness. “Poor—poor Renshaw! He’ll never shake off that horrible fever up there in such an awful drought-stricken desert. Tell him he must come, and come at once!”
And yet of these two it was for her who was moved to excitement over the possible arrival of a stranger, that the absent man would have given his very life—blindly, as with regard to the treasure for which he had been so blindly and so often seeking—hitherto in vain.
Chapter Six.Relapse.The sun was at least four hours high when the stranger awoke.His night of watching coming upon the exhaustion and fatigue of his long and arduous journey of the previous day had gradually overpowered him, and towards dawn he had sunk into a series of dozes, troubled and uneasy; for the events of the night kept chasing each other in wild medley through his slumbers, assuming every form of weird and exaggerated monstrosity, till at last he had subsided into a heavy, dreamless sleep.Now, however, he awoke with a start. The sick man’s eyes were wide open, and were fixed upon him with an inquiring and puzzled expression. He felt horribly guilty beneath their searching gaze—horribly mean—in fact, he felt himself to be something next door to a thief.Facts can assume a very cold and impartial aspect when they confront us at our waking hour. Maurice Sellon felt strongly akin to a thief.He had stolen his host’s secret—nay, more—he had robbed him of actual property. And it was beyond his power to make restitution, for he himself had been arbitrarily deprived of such power; and at the recollection of that ghostly, mysterious claw snatching the document from him in the dead midnight, he shuddered inwardly. The whole business smacked of witchcraft, and something abominably uncanny. He could not account for it, any more than he could account for the fact that he, Maurice Sellon, had crept on tiptoe to the bedside of the man who lay at his mercy—ill and helpless—and had there and then robbed him like a common thief.All this time the two had been staring at each other, one from his sick-bed, the other from his armchair. Sellon was the first to break the silence.“Well, old chap, how do you feel now?” he said, striving to throw into his tone a bluff heartiness he was far from feeling. “Had a bad night of it, I’m afraid?”“Yes, I have rather,” said Renshaw, slowly. “But—when did you come? Have they looked after your horse?” And with the instinctive hospitality characteristic of his class, he made a move as though to rise and personally look to the supplying of the stranger’s wants.“Don’t move. Don’t think of moving, I beg!” cried the latter, putting out his hand as if to arrest the attempt. “The fact is, I arrived last evening, and found you—er—well, not quite the thing; so I just thought I’d sit here in case you might want anything during the night.”“How very good of you! I must have had a touch of my old enemy—up-country fever. I picked it up years ago in the Lembombo Mountains, through staying on there too late at the end of a winter hunting trip, and the worse of that sort of infernal business is that you are always liable to a return of it. Yes, I remember now. I did feel most uncommonly queer yesterday. And then you arrived and took care of me? It is more than probable you have saved my life, for I need hardly tell you that to be taken ill in a place like this is apt to turn out no joke.”“Well, you were in a baddish way, certainly,” interrupted the other, rather hurriedly. “And now, look here. I’m not much of a doctor, but I seem to have a pretty strong notion that when a fellow’s feverish the best thing he can do is to keep as quiet as possible. Which, done into plain English, means that you’ve talked quite enough, and you’d better turn over and try to go to sleep again.”“I believe you’re right,” said Renshaw, for he was beginning to feel bad again. “But first of all oblige me by going to the door and shouting ‘Dirk!’”Sellon complied, and, in obedience to the call, the old goatherd came trotting up. A grin of satisfaction puckered up his parchment visage as he saw his master so much better and able to talk rationally again.“Dirk,” said the latter, when the Koranna’s cheery congratulations were exhausted, “you keep the goats near, round the house to-day, so as to be within call—it wouldn’t make much difference if they stayed in the kraal for all the poor brutes find to eat in the veldt—however, I suppose they find something. What have you done with the stranger Baas’ horse?”“He’s in the stable, Baas.”“All right. See that he’s well fed—luckily we have plenty of mealies. And there are a few bundles of oat-hay left. Let him have them, Dirk.”“Ja, Baas. That shall be done.”“And tell Kaatje to see that the stranger Baas has everything he wants—as far as the resources of the establishment will permit,” added Renshaw in English, turning to his guest with a rueful smile. “I’ve been telling old Dirk to see that you have everything you want, so be sure you keep him up to the mark, and see that you get it. He can grind out a few words of English, and his wife a few more, so you’ll be able to make them understand. And now, if you’ll excuse me, I think I’ll lie quiet a little, for I’m feeling most confoundedly played out.”“My dear fellow—certainly, certainly. I think you’ve been talking far too much already,” answered Sellon, effusively. “It’s awfully good of you to think about me, but don’t bother yourself on my account.”His unfamiliarity with the Boer dialect—the habitual medium of speech between Cape colonists and natives—had left him necessarily ignorant of his host’s solicitude on his behalf, as conveyed in the foregoing instructions. Renshaw Fanning, lying there miserably ill, had no thought—uttered no word—on behalf of his own interests during those directions to his servant. All his anxiety was for the comfort and well-being of the stranger within his gates. It was only a part of that unselfishness which was characteristic of the man—which had become, in fact, second nature.Presently he turned again to Sellon.“I beg a thousand pardons,” he said. “How very thoughtless of me, but it never seems to have occurred to me all this time that you may have business of your own to attend to. If that is the case, even at the risk of appearing inhospitable, I beg you will not delay your journey here on my account. I shall be on my legs again in a day or two—one thing about this complaint, its attacks though sharp are frequently short—and apart from necessity it must be very tedious for you to feel yourself tied down in a rough and comfortless place such as this.”“My dear fellow, don’t you bother yourself about me,” replied the other, decisively. “I’m going to see you through it before I move on. When a fellow’s ill in an out-of-the-way hole like this he wants a ‘man and a brother’ about him; and I’m going to stick to you like a leech until you’re yourself again. So don’t jaw any more, there’s a good chap, but just snooze off right away.”In announcing this resolution the speaker was fully alive to what he had undertaken. It was the outcome of no mere passing impulse of generosity. And really, to make up one’s mind deliberately to dwell for an indefinite period in a very rough and uncomfortable tenement, in the midst of a burnt-up starving wilderness, destitute not only of the ordinary comforts of life, but almost of anything fit to eat or drink—this, too, alone with a perfect stranger in for a possibly long bout of severe fever—is something of an act of self-sacrifice, which we hope, virtuous reader, you will remember to set off against the man’s other failings and derelictions.If circumstances had rendered Maurice Sellon a bit of a scamp—if a further combination of the same might conceivably render him a still greater one—yet he was, according to the definition of those who knew him, “not half a bad fellow in the main.” His resolution to see his newly found acquaintance through what would certainly prove a tedious if not a dangerous illness, was purely a generous one, dashed by no selfish motive. A subsequent idea, which flashed upon him like an inspiration, that even if the precious document relating to the mysterious treasure were lost beyond recovery, his newly made friend was almost sure to know its contents by heart, and might be brought to share the knowledge with him, was entirely an afterthought, and this we desire to emphasise. To slightly tamper with the proverb, “Wantof money is the root of all evil,” and Maurice Sellon, in common with many worthier persons, stood sorely and habitually in need of that essential article.But scamp or no scamp, his presence there was a very fortunate thing for his fever-stricken host. By nightfall poor Renshaw had a relapse; and for three days he lay, alternatively shivering and burning—intermittently raving withal in all the horrors of acute delirium. Then the presence of a strong, cheery, resourceful fellow-countryman was almost as that of a very angel of succour; and even then nothing but a fine constitution, hardened by a life of activity and abstemiousness, availed to snatch the patient from the jaws of Death himself.
The sun was at least four hours high when the stranger awoke.
His night of watching coming upon the exhaustion and fatigue of his long and arduous journey of the previous day had gradually overpowered him, and towards dawn he had sunk into a series of dozes, troubled and uneasy; for the events of the night kept chasing each other in wild medley through his slumbers, assuming every form of weird and exaggerated monstrosity, till at last he had subsided into a heavy, dreamless sleep.
Now, however, he awoke with a start. The sick man’s eyes were wide open, and were fixed upon him with an inquiring and puzzled expression. He felt horribly guilty beneath their searching gaze—horribly mean—in fact, he felt himself to be something next door to a thief.
Facts can assume a very cold and impartial aspect when they confront us at our waking hour. Maurice Sellon felt strongly akin to a thief.
He had stolen his host’s secret—nay, more—he had robbed him of actual property. And it was beyond his power to make restitution, for he himself had been arbitrarily deprived of such power; and at the recollection of that ghostly, mysterious claw snatching the document from him in the dead midnight, he shuddered inwardly. The whole business smacked of witchcraft, and something abominably uncanny. He could not account for it, any more than he could account for the fact that he, Maurice Sellon, had crept on tiptoe to the bedside of the man who lay at his mercy—ill and helpless—and had there and then robbed him like a common thief.
All this time the two had been staring at each other, one from his sick-bed, the other from his armchair. Sellon was the first to break the silence.
“Well, old chap, how do you feel now?” he said, striving to throw into his tone a bluff heartiness he was far from feeling. “Had a bad night of it, I’m afraid?”
“Yes, I have rather,” said Renshaw, slowly. “But—when did you come? Have they looked after your horse?” And with the instinctive hospitality characteristic of his class, he made a move as though to rise and personally look to the supplying of the stranger’s wants.
“Don’t move. Don’t think of moving, I beg!” cried the latter, putting out his hand as if to arrest the attempt. “The fact is, I arrived last evening, and found you—er—well, not quite the thing; so I just thought I’d sit here in case you might want anything during the night.”
“How very good of you! I must have had a touch of my old enemy—up-country fever. I picked it up years ago in the Lembombo Mountains, through staying on there too late at the end of a winter hunting trip, and the worse of that sort of infernal business is that you are always liable to a return of it. Yes, I remember now. I did feel most uncommonly queer yesterday. And then you arrived and took care of me? It is more than probable you have saved my life, for I need hardly tell you that to be taken ill in a place like this is apt to turn out no joke.”
“Well, you were in a baddish way, certainly,” interrupted the other, rather hurriedly. “And now, look here. I’m not much of a doctor, but I seem to have a pretty strong notion that when a fellow’s feverish the best thing he can do is to keep as quiet as possible. Which, done into plain English, means that you’ve talked quite enough, and you’d better turn over and try to go to sleep again.”
“I believe you’re right,” said Renshaw, for he was beginning to feel bad again. “But first of all oblige me by going to the door and shouting ‘Dirk!’”
Sellon complied, and, in obedience to the call, the old goatherd came trotting up. A grin of satisfaction puckered up his parchment visage as he saw his master so much better and able to talk rationally again.
“Dirk,” said the latter, when the Koranna’s cheery congratulations were exhausted, “you keep the goats near, round the house to-day, so as to be within call—it wouldn’t make much difference if they stayed in the kraal for all the poor brutes find to eat in the veldt—however, I suppose they find something. What have you done with the stranger Baas’ horse?”
“He’s in the stable, Baas.”
“All right. See that he’s well fed—luckily we have plenty of mealies. And there are a few bundles of oat-hay left. Let him have them, Dirk.”
“Ja, Baas. That shall be done.”
“And tell Kaatje to see that the stranger Baas has everything he wants—as far as the resources of the establishment will permit,” added Renshaw in English, turning to his guest with a rueful smile. “I’ve been telling old Dirk to see that you have everything you want, so be sure you keep him up to the mark, and see that you get it. He can grind out a few words of English, and his wife a few more, so you’ll be able to make them understand. And now, if you’ll excuse me, I think I’ll lie quiet a little, for I’m feeling most confoundedly played out.”
“My dear fellow—certainly, certainly. I think you’ve been talking far too much already,” answered Sellon, effusively. “It’s awfully good of you to think about me, but don’t bother yourself on my account.”
His unfamiliarity with the Boer dialect—the habitual medium of speech between Cape colonists and natives—had left him necessarily ignorant of his host’s solicitude on his behalf, as conveyed in the foregoing instructions. Renshaw Fanning, lying there miserably ill, had no thought—uttered no word—on behalf of his own interests during those directions to his servant. All his anxiety was for the comfort and well-being of the stranger within his gates. It was only a part of that unselfishness which was characteristic of the man—which had become, in fact, second nature.
Presently he turned again to Sellon.
“I beg a thousand pardons,” he said. “How very thoughtless of me, but it never seems to have occurred to me all this time that you may have business of your own to attend to. If that is the case, even at the risk of appearing inhospitable, I beg you will not delay your journey here on my account. I shall be on my legs again in a day or two—one thing about this complaint, its attacks though sharp are frequently short—and apart from necessity it must be very tedious for you to feel yourself tied down in a rough and comfortless place such as this.”
“My dear fellow, don’t you bother yourself about me,” replied the other, decisively. “I’m going to see you through it before I move on. When a fellow’s ill in an out-of-the-way hole like this he wants a ‘man and a brother’ about him; and I’m going to stick to you like a leech until you’re yourself again. So don’t jaw any more, there’s a good chap, but just snooze off right away.”
In announcing this resolution the speaker was fully alive to what he had undertaken. It was the outcome of no mere passing impulse of generosity. And really, to make up one’s mind deliberately to dwell for an indefinite period in a very rough and uncomfortable tenement, in the midst of a burnt-up starving wilderness, destitute not only of the ordinary comforts of life, but almost of anything fit to eat or drink—this, too, alone with a perfect stranger in for a possibly long bout of severe fever—is something of an act of self-sacrifice, which we hope, virtuous reader, you will remember to set off against the man’s other failings and derelictions.
If circumstances had rendered Maurice Sellon a bit of a scamp—if a further combination of the same might conceivably render him a still greater one—yet he was, according to the definition of those who knew him, “not half a bad fellow in the main.” His resolution to see his newly found acquaintance through what would certainly prove a tedious if not a dangerous illness, was purely a generous one, dashed by no selfish motive. A subsequent idea, which flashed upon him like an inspiration, that even if the precious document relating to the mysterious treasure were lost beyond recovery, his newly made friend was almost sure to know its contents by heart, and might be brought to share the knowledge with him, was entirely an afterthought, and this we desire to emphasise. To slightly tamper with the proverb, “Wantof money is the root of all evil,” and Maurice Sellon, in common with many worthier persons, stood sorely and habitually in need of that essential article.
But scamp or no scamp, his presence there was a very fortunate thing for his fever-stricken host. By nightfall poor Renshaw had a relapse; and for three days he lay, alternatively shivering and burning—intermittently raving withal in all the horrors of acute delirium. Then the presence of a strong, cheery, resourceful fellow-countryman was almost as that of a very angel of succour; and even then nothing but a fine constitution, hardened by a life of activity and abstemiousness, availed to snatch the patient from the jaws of Death himself.
Chapter Seven.“Our Object is the Same.”“Do you know, Fanning, you gave me the very warmest reception hero I ever met with in my life?” said Sellon, one day, when his patient was fairly convalescent and able to talk freely.Renshaw looked puzzled.“It’s very good of you to say so,” he answered. “You know by this time what the resources of the place are—or, rather, are not. Still, you were warmly welcome, and—I can never thank you enough, Sellon, for the unselfish way in which you have stayed here doing the good Samaritan for a perfect stranger, I owe my life to you.”The other burst into a shout of laughter.“That’s not what I meant, old chap. Stop. I’ll explain. But, first of all, where are your guns?”Surprised at the question, Renshaw opened the Chest where the firearms were usually kept. It was empty.“Now, look behind that big box under the sofa,” said the other, with a laugh.This was done, and lo! there were the missing weapons, carefully rolled in sacking. Choking with laughter over the recollection, Sellon proceeded to narrate the circumstances under which he had been made a target of, as we have seen.“And I’ll tell you what it is, old man,” he concluded; “if you can make such good shooting at five hundred yards when you’re off your chump, it’s sorry I’d be to do target for you at six hundred when you’re not.”Renshaw whistled, and shook his head.“I must have been bad,” he said. “Well, you saw how bad I was. But, I say, Sellon, did I—er—talk much—talk bosh, you know? Fellows often do when they’re that way.”“Well, the fact is, you did, rather, You seemed to wander a good deal—talked a lot about ‘stones,’ and a certain ‘Valley of the Eye,’ which was going to make all out fortunes.”Renshaw started.“Did I?” he said, passing his hand over his eyes, as if to clear his recollection. Then he was silent for a while, and seemed to be thinking deeply. The other, though affecting the greatest unconcern, watched him narrowly.“Look here, Sellon,” he went on, “it isn’t in the least odd that I should have talked about that. I firmly believe in the existence of the place, though I’ve made no less than four careful attempts at finding it. It’s not so very far from here, I believe, and sooner or later I shall hit upon it.”“Well, and what then?”“What then?” repeated Renshaw, slowly. “Only that we are something near millionaires.”But for the fact that his own eyes had rested on the clue to the mystery, Sellon would have suspected that his friend’s mind was wandering still, that from long dwelling upon this one idea it was following a chimera with all the blind faith which accompanies a self-wrought delusion. Now, however, as he listened, there was an intensity of eagerness in his face, which, try as he would, he could hardly suppress.“We?” he said. “Do you want me to help you to hunt for this Golconda, then, old chap?”“I do. You have saved my life, Sellon, and you may possibly find that it was the best day’s work you ever did in yours. You shall share the knowledge that will make rich men of us. We will search for the ‘Valley’ together.”“I’m your man, Fanning. That sort of thing will suit me down to the ground. Now, look sharp and get strong on your pins again, and we’ll start.”The other smiled.“What a mercurial fellow you are, Sellon! No; that isn’t how to go to work. How, I ask you, are we going to set out expedition on foot, now? Look at that, for instance,”—pointing through the open door to the bare veldt. Shimmering in the fiery forenoon, “And it’s worse country over there than here. We must wait until the drought breaks up.”“Must we? And, meanwhile, somebody else may hit upon the place.”“Make your mind easy on that point. But for the clue I possess, it would never be found—never. Didn’t I tell you I had searched for it four times, and even with the key hadn’t managed to find it, and I’ve spent my life on the veldt, knocking about the Country on and off? But this time I believe I shall find it.”“Do you? Now, why?”“Look around. Whether the drought lasts or not, I’m practically a ruined man. Now it is time my luck turned. This will be, I repeat, the fifth search, and five is a lucky number. Like many fellows who have led a wandering and solitary life, I am a trifle superstitious in some things. This time we shall be successful.”“Well, you seem to take the thing mighty coolly,” said Sellon, refilling his pipe. “I should be for starting at once. But what do you propose doing meanwhile?”“Take my word for it, it’s a mistake to rush a thing of this sort,” answered Renshaw. “It’ll bear any amount of thinking out—the more the better.”“Well, but you seem to have given it its full share of the last, anyhow. There’s one thing, though, that you haven’t mentioned all this time. If it is a fair question, how the deuce did you come to know of the existence of the place?”“From the only man who has ever seen it. The only white man, that is.”“Oh! But—he may have been lying.”“A man doesn’t tell lies on his death-bed,” replied Renshaw. “My informant turned up here one night in a bad way. He was mortally wounded by a couple of Bushman arrows, which, I suppose you know, are steeped in the most deadly and virulent poison. The mystery is how he had managed to travel so far with it in his system, and the only explanation I can find is that the poison was stale, and therefore less operative. He died barely an hour after he got here, but not before he had left me the secret, with all necessary particulars. He had discovered it by chance, and had made three expeditions to the place, but had been obliged to give it up. There was a clan of Bushmen living in the krantzes there who seemed to watch the place as though it contained something sacred. They attacked him each time, the third with fatal effect, as I told you.”“By Jove!” cried Sellon, ruefully, his treasure-seeking ardour considerably damped by the probability of having to run the gauntlet of a flight of poisoned arrows. “And did they ever attack you?”“Once only—the attempt before last I made,” replied the other, tranquilly. “That made me think I was nearer hitting upon it than I had ever been.”“By Jove!” cried Sellon again. “That’s just about enough to choke one off the whole thing. A fellow doesn’t mind a fair and square fight, even against long odds. But when it comes to poisoned arrows, certain death coming at you in the shape of a dirty little bit of stick, that otherwise couldn’t hurt a cat—faugh! I suppose these little devils sneak up behind, and let you have it before you so much as know they’re there?”“Generally; yes. Well, you know, every prize worth winning involves a proportionate amount of risk. And there may be some about this business, it’s only fair to warn you, though, on the other hand, there may not.”“All serene, old chap. I’ll chance it.”“Right,” said Renshaw. “Now, my plan is this. It’s of no use sticking on here. I can do no good at present, or I’m afraid for some time to come. I propose that we go and look up some friends of mine who live down Kafirland way. They’ve a lovely place in the Umtirara Mountains—a perfect paradise after this inferno. We’ll go and have a good time—it’ll set me on my legs again, and enable you to see an entirely different part of the country. Afterwards, we’ll come back here, and start on our search.”“That’s not half a bad plan of yours, Fanning. But, see here! old chap. These friends of yours don’t know me. Isn’t it slightly calm my rolling in upon them unasked?”“Pooh! not at all. Chris Selwood’s the best fellow in the world—except, perhaps, his wife, I was going to say. We were boys together. If we were brothers, I couldn’t be more at home anywhere than at his place—and any friend of mine will be as welcome as a heavy rain would have been here a month ago.”“That’s a good note, anyhow. But—to come back for a minute to the ‘Valley of the Eye’—what are we going to find when we get there? You didn’t happen to mention just now.”“There are only two things to be picked up in this country—and plenty of both, if only one knew exactly where to look for them—gold and ‘stones.’ And we shan’t find gold.”“Diamonds! By Jove! Millionaires indeed—if we only find enough of them. Well, I don’t mind telling you, Fanning, that I stand uncommonly in need of something realisable—and plenty of it. At present there exists a powerful reason for that necessity. And, I say, Fanning, I believe the same thing holds good as regards yourself.”“Do you?”“Yes, when fellows get a bit off their chump, they are apt to talk. Eh, you dog? Own up, now. Who is she?”“And that’s your reason for wanting to make a pile, is it, Sellon?” said Renshaw, tranquilly.“I didn’t say so,” laughed the other. “Perhaps our object is the same, for all that.”“Perhaps it is,” was the good-humoured reply; “as you are bent on thinking so.”
“Do you know, Fanning, you gave me the very warmest reception hero I ever met with in my life?” said Sellon, one day, when his patient was fairly convalescent and able to talk freely.
Renshaw looked puzzled.
“It’s very good of you to say so,” he answered. “You know by this time what the resources of the place are—or, rather, are not. Still, you were warmly welcome, and—I can never thank you enough, Sellon, for the unselfish way in which you have stayed here doing the good Samaritan for a perfect stranger, I owe my life to you.”
The other burst into a shout of laughter.
“That’s not what I meant, old chap. Stop. I’ll explain. But, first of all, where are your guns?”
Surprised at the question, Renshaw opened the Chest where the firearms were usually kept. It was empty.
“Now, look behind that big box under the sofa,” said the other, with a laugh.
This was done, and lo! there were the missing weapons, carefully rolled in sacking. Choking with laughter over the recollection, Sellon proceeded to narrate the circumstances under which he had been made a target of, as we have seen.
“And I’ll tell you what it is, old man,” he concluded; “if you can make such good shooting at five hundred yards when you’re off your chump, it’s sorry I’d be to do target for you at six hundred when you’re not.”
Renshaw whistled, and shook his head.
“I must have been bad,” he said. “Well, you saw how bad I was. But, I say, Sellon, did I—er—talk much—talk bosh, you know? Fellows often do when they’re that way.”
“Well, the fact is, you did, rather, You seemed to wander a good deal—talked a lot about ‘stones,’ and a certain ‘Valley of the Eye,’ which was going to make all out fortunes.”
Renshaw started.
“Did I?” he said, passing his hand over his eyes, as if to clear his recollection. Then he was silent for a while, and seemed to be thinking deeply. The other, though affecting the greatest unconcern, watched him narrowly.
“Look here, Sellon,” he went on, “it isn’t in the least odd that I should have talked about that. I firmly believe in the existence of the place, though I’ve made no less than four careful attempts at finding it. It’s not so very far from here, I believe, and sooner or later I shall hit upon it.”
“Well, and what then?”
“What then?” repeated Renshaw, slowly. “Only that we are something near millionaires.”
But for the fact that his own eyes had rested on the clue to the mystery, Sellon would have suspected that his friend’s mind was wandering still, that from long dwelling upon this one idea it was following a chimera with all the blind faith which accompanies a self-wrought delusion. Now, however, as he listened, there was an intensity of eagerness in his face, which, try as he would, he could hardly suppress.
“We?” he said. “Do you want me to help you to hunt for this Golconda, then, old chap?”
“I do. You have saved my life, Sellon, and you may possibly find that it was the best day’s work you ever did in yours. You shall share the knowledge that will make rich men of us. We will search for the ‘Valley’ together.”
“I’m your man, Fanning. That sort of thing will suit me down to the ground. Now, look sharp and get strong on your pins again, and we’ll start.”
The other smiled.
“What a mercurial fellow you are, Sellon! No; that isn’t how to go to work. How, I ask you, are we going to set out expedition on foot, now? Look at that, for instance,”—pointing through the open door to the bare veldt. Shimmering in the fiery forenoon, “And it’s worse country over there than here. We must wait until the drought breaks up.”
“Must we? And, meanwhile, somebody else may hit upon the place.”
“Make your mind easy on that point. But for the clue I possess, it would never be found—never. Didn’t I tell you I had searched for it four times, and even with the key hadn’t managed to find it, and I’ve spent my life on the veldt, knocking about the Country on and off? But this time I believe I shall find it.”
“Do you? Now, why?”
“Look around. Whether the drought lasts or not, I’m practically a ruined man. Now it is time my luck turned. This will be, I repeat, the fifth search, and five is a lucky number. Like many fellows who have led a wandering and solitary life, I am a trifle superstitious in some things. This time we shall be successful.”
“Well, you seem to take the thing mighty coolly,” said Sellon, refilling his pipe. “I should be for starting at once. But what do you propose doing meanwhile?”
“Take my word for it, it’s a mistake to rush a thing of this sort,” answered Renshaw. “It’ll bear any amount of thinking out—the more the better.”
“Well, but you seem to have given it its full share of the last, anyhow. There’s one thing, though, that you haven’t mentioned all this time. If it is a fair question, how the deuce did you come to know of the existence of the place?”
“From the only man who has ever seen it. The only white man, that is.”
“Oh! But—he may have been lying.”
“A man doesn’t tell lies on his death-bed,” replied Renshaw. “My informant turned up here one night in a bad way. He was mortally wounded by a couple of Bushman arrows, which, I suppose you know, are steeped in the most deadly and virulent poison. The mystery is how he had managed to travel so far with it in his system, and the only explanation I can find is that the poison was stale, and therefore less operative. He died barely an hour after he got here, but not before he had left me the secret, with all necessary particulars. He had discovered it by chance, and had made three expeditions to the place, but had been obliged to give it up. There was a clan of Bushmen living in the krantzes there who seemed to watch the place as though it contained something sacred. They attacked him each time, the third with fatal effect, as I told you.”
“By Jove!” cried Sellon, ruefully, his treasure-seeking ardour considerably damped by the probability of having to run the gauntlet of a flight of poisoned arrows. “And did they ever attack you?”
“Once only—the attempt before last I made,” replied the other, tranquilly. “That made me think I was nearer hitting upon it than I had ever been.”
“By Jove!” cried Sellon again. “That’s just about enough to choke one off the whole thing. A fellow doesn’t mind a fair and square fight, even against long odds. But when it comes to poisoned arrows, certain death coming at you in the shape of a dirty little bit of stick, that otherwise couldn’t hurt a cat—faugh! I suppose these little devils sneak up behind, and let you have it before you so much as know they’re there?”
“Generally; yes. Well, you know, every prize worth winning involves a proportionate amount of risk. And there may be some about this business, it’s only fair to warn you, though, on the other hand, there may not.”
“All serene, old chap. I’ll chance it.”
“Right,” said Renshaw. “Now, my plan is this. It’s of no use sticking on here. I can do no good at present, or I’m afraid for some time to come. I propose that we go and look up some friends of mine who live down Kafirland way. They’ve a lovely place in the Umtirara Mountains—a perfect paradise after this inferno. We’ll go and have a good time—it’ll set me on my legs again, and enable you to see an entirely different part of the country. Afterwards, we’ll come back here, and start on our search.”
“That’s not half a bad plan of yours, Fanning. But, see here! old chap. These friends of yours don’t know me. Isn’t it slightly calm my rolling in upon them unasked?”
“Pooh! not at all. Chris Selwood’s the best fellow in the world—except, perhaps, his wife, I was going to say. We were boys together. If we were brothers, I couldn’t be more at home anywhere than at his place—and any friend of mine will be as welcome as a heavy rain would have been here a month ago.”
“That’s a good note, anyhow. But—to come back for a minute to the ‘Valley of the Eye’—what are we going to find when we get there? You didn’t happen to mention just now.”
“There are only two things to be picked up in this country—and plenty of both, if only one knew exactly where to look for them—gold and ‘stones.’ And we shan’t find gold.”
“Diamonds! By Jove! Millionaires indeed—if we only find enough of them. Well, I don’t mind telling you, Fanning, that I stand uncommonly in need of something realisable—and plenty of it. At present there exists a powerful reason for that necessity. And, I say, Fanning, I believe the same thing holds good as regards yourself.”
“Do you?”
“Yes, when fellows get a bit off their chump, they are apt to talk. Eh, you dog? Own up, now. Who is she?”
“And that’s your reason for wanting to make a pile, is it, Sellon?” said Renshaw, tranquilly.
“I didn’t say so,” laughed the other. “Perhaps our object is the same, for all that.”
“Perhaps it is,” was the good-humoured reply; “as you are bent on thinking so.”
Chapter Eight.Quits.The days went by, and Renshaw steadily gained in health and strength. He was now able to walk about at will, to take short rides in the early morning, and towards sundown, carefully avoiding the heat of the day, and to begin looking after his stock again. Not that the state of the latter afforded him much encouragement, poor fellow, for each day witnessed an alarming decrease in the few hundred starving animals the drought had left him. Meanwhile, the burning, brassy heavens were without a cloud, save an occasional one springing suddenly from the horizon, as though to mock at the terrible anxiety of the dwellers in this desert waste, and as suddenly melting away, together with many an eager, unspoken hope for the longed-for rain. Not a breath of air, save now and again one of those strange whirlwinds which, heaving up bits of dried stick and dust from the baked and gasping earth, and spinning them round in its gyrating course, moves in a waterspoutlike column along the plain, to vanish into empty air as suddenly as it arose—sure sign of drought, or the continuance of the same, say the stock-growers, out of the plenitude of their experience. The veldt was studded with the shrivelled, rotting carcases of dead animals, scattered about here and there in little clumps of tens and twenties, to the advantage of clouds of great white vultures wheeling aloft ere settling down upon the plentiful repast. Even the very lizards peering forth from the cracks and crannies of the walls, or basking on the clay summit of old Kaatje’s outdoor oven, seemed gasping for air, for moisture.All this Renshaw contemplated with the recklessness of a player who has staked his last napoleon. Every day increased the unrest that was upon him, the feverish longing to get away. It was not the mere run-down feeling of one who desires a change, or the eagerness of a sensitive mind to see the last of a detested locality. There was more than this underlying it, and Maurice Sellon, watching him narrowly, though unobtrusively, noted the circumstance, shrewdly guessing, moreover, that anxiety on behalf of the mysterious Golconda was not the prevailing motive this time. But, whatever it was, Renshaw, habitually reserved, was closer than death itself.Sellon, for his part, was as anxious to get away as his host. He was thoroughly sick of his present quarters, and of the daily occupation of seeing a few more wretched Angoras pay the debt of Nature—of staring at the glassy, shimmering horizon, and wondering when it was going to rain. Thoroughly sick, too, of swarming flies and of rough food none too appetisingly displayed—of a sofa-bed, and falling asleep to the accompaniment of the ticking rustle of the tarantulas hunting their prey in the thatch overhead, and occasionally running over his ear in the night. It was all very well for Fanning. He was used to that sort of thing—Sellon was not; therefore small wonder that he should begin to get sick of it. There wasn’t even anything to shoot on the place, for the springbok had trekked in quest of more favoured regions.Sellon, however, was blessed with a mercurial temperament, as his host had remarked, and the same now stood him in good stead, for, though bored to death, he did not wax quarrelsome—the usual development of that unenviable condition. But there was one matter which, haunting his mind day and night, bade fair even to drive him into that.He was racked by an hourly dread lest his friend should discover the loss of the missing paper. Maurice Sellon was constitutionally as far from being a coward as the average Englishman, well endowed with thews, habitually is. But the consciousness that he had been guilty of a mean and dishonest action tended to demoralise his easy self-reliance. A man like Renshaw, the possessor of a secret of fabulous value, the clue to which he had cherished for years, and patiently; and at the cost of untold hardship and possible peril, had repeatedly attempted to solve, would, he reasoned, prove a desperate man when he should come to realise that his hopes were for ever shattered—a dangerous one, should he ever arrive at the conviction that he had been deliberately robbed. The idea of persuading him that he had himself insisted on destroying it during his delirium seemed the only way out of the difficulty; but that expedient now struck Sellon as a particularly thin one. Such a state of mental nervousness had he reached, that he felt sure the other would at once detect it as a lie. True, he had probably saved Fanning’s life, as the latter had himself declared. But at the moment of his terrible discovery that consideration was not likely to count for much.They were alone here together. Not a living soul had they seen during all these weeks, except the family of Korannas, who officiated as servants—both field and domestic—to the establishment. They were alone together—cut off from the outside world as thoroughly as though shut up on a desert island. What deadly, terrible penalty might not Fanning exact from the man who had so deeply injured him? He was no longer weak and tottering with illness; he had, in fact, nearly recovered his normal vigour. The more Sellon looked at the situation the less he liked it.What a fool he had been to meddle with the thing! He would have given worlds to be able to replace it. But it was gone irrevocably.At one time his suspicions had rested on the Koranna servants. But the narrow watch he had kept upon them, as also the immediate and careful search he had made around the house at the time of the occurrence, had forced him to abandon this idea. Dismissing the Satanic theory at first formed, he had hit upon another—to a dweller in Southern Africa, almost as wild and chimerical; but then it must be remembered that Sellon was not a dweller in that country—only a “raw Englishman,” in fact, as the Boers define a recent importation. That black claw which had reft the paper from his hand in the dead midnight must have belonged to some huge baboon, who, attracted by the light, had approached the open window, and having accomplished his mischievous and monkey-like manoeuvre, had decamped forthwith to his native wilds. Anyhow, the precious clue had disappeared, and in all human probability would never again be lighted on by mortal eye.Mingled with his apprehensions on the above counts, however, were the misgivings of cupidity, and there were times when he suspected Renshaw of regretting his offer. The latter, since first mentioning the subject of the treasure, had hardly reverted to it, and this reticence struck him (Sellon) in an unfavourable light, and the reason assigned for it as a mere excuse.“Take my word for it,” Renshaw had said, one day, “we had better leave the subject entirely for a little longer—till we get down country, say. You see, the long and short is, it’s an exciting one to me, and my head is by no means clear yet. It’ll be better to put it off, and there’s plenty of time.”And this answer, judging the speaker by himself, and, indeed, it is fair to say, by his knowledge of the world, struck Sellon as eminently unsatisfactory. At the risk of a rebuff, a rupture even, he had more than once adroitly tried to “draw” his host, but with so little success as to leave him ignorant as to whether the latter was sufficiently familiar with its contents as to render him independent of the document itself.Outwardly, the intercourse between the two men was pleasant and friendly enough, and though they had little to do but smoke Boer tobacco and wonder whether it would ever rain again, they had not yet exhausted their subjects of conversation, Sellon was a lively talker, and full of shrewd worldly wisdom, and the other’s natural reserve admirably fitted him for the part of a good listener. Or, on the other hand, more than one strange wild incident, evolved out of the reticent, lonely man’s own experiences, was of vivid interest to the globe-trottingviveur.Then it was that the latter came to impart snatches of his own history. He had migrated to South Africa as a pure speculation, and ready for any adventure that might come to hand—mining, treasure-seeking, a trip up country, anything that promised possible profit. He had half arranged an up-country trip, and it was while journeying to a distant township to interview the other partner in the scheme that he had lost himself, and accident had landed him so opportunely at Renshaw Fanning’s door.One night they had been thus chatting, and retired to bed, having decided to make a start, at all risks, the day after the morrow. The heat was something fearful. A dead, sultry, boding stillness reigned over everything, productive of that strange nervous depression which is wont to afflict mankind prior to an approaching convulsion of Nature. Every door and window of the house stood open, as if to keep up the fiction that there was any air to come in.“I believe there’s going to be an earthquake, at least,” said Sellon, as he turned in.“Or a big thunderstorm, only—no such luck!” answered Renshaw.It was not the night to bear the weight of a blanket, or even of a sheet, had the latter luxury been among the resources of the establishment. Sellon, after tossing uneasily for an hour, dropped off into a heavy sleep, and dreamed.He was alone in a deep, craggy gorge. Beetling rocks reared high above his head, just discernible in the gloom, for it was night. It was the “Valley of the Eye.”Yes; and there was the “Eye” itself—gleaming out of the darkness, seeming to transfix him with the cold stare of a basilisk. Somehow he felt no exaltation on having gained the place—no triumph over treasure trove. Instead of putting forth his efforts to reach the shining stone, his chief desire was to flee from the spot. But he could not—he was rooted to the ground, shivering, trembling, with a chill shrinking of mortal dread. Nearer, nearer, drew that gleaming Eye, and, lo! beside it flashed forth another. There were two—a pair of eyes. Then before them came shadowy hands holding a bow. It was drawn. It was pointed full at him. Still he could not move. The poisoned arrows. Oh, Heaven!The string twanged. With a shrill hiss the arrow sped—the poisoned arrow. A loud hiss, a deafening hiss, and, lo! the gloom of the valley was lighted up with a blinding glare, and—“Close shave that, old chap!” said a voice.The spell was broken—broken by that well-known voice. Starting up in his bed, bathed in the sweat of deadly horror, Sellon beheld a strange sight.The roomwaslighted up with a blinding glare. In the middle of it stood Renshaw Fanning, holding up a huge snake by the tail. The reptile was quite dead, its head shattered by the hard oaken table, but its hideous length was still undulating with a convulsive writhe. The glare was the result of a continuous succession of vivid lightning flashes. Just then a mighty rolling peal of thunder shook the house, making the doors and windows rattle like castanets. Then followed pitch darkness.“Strike a light, if you have any handy, but don’t come too near me in the dark,” said Renshaw. “This joker’s fangs may still be of some account, albeit he’s stone dead.”As though still dreaming, Sellon obeyed.“What the very deuce is the meaning of it all?” he said, as by the light of the candle he sat surveying the situation.“Only this—that you were as near passing on your checks as you ever will be,” was the reply, “And you may thank this thunderstorm for it that you didn’t. The thunder awoke me at once, though it didn’t you, and of course I went outside to look at the weather. Then, by the glare of a flash of lightning, I spotted this brute. He was lying bang across both your legs, with his head against the wall. The flash lasted just long enough for me to lay hold of his tail, and I knew the geography of the room well enough to whirl him up and bring his head down upon the hardest part of the table.”Sellon stared at the speaker, then at the hideous, writhing body of the reptile, without a word. He seemed stupefied.“Scott!” he burst forth at last. “Well, we are quits now, at any rate. But that’s something like a nightmare.”This, then, was the interpretation of his bloodcurdling dream. The terrible eyes, the frightful riveting spell, the shrill hiss, the poisoned arrow. He felt clean knocked out of time.“Green cobra—and a big un at that,” said Renshaw, throwing the carcase through the open house-door. “See how it was? The beggar knew a big rain was coming, and sneaked in here for shelter. It’s never altogether safe to sleep with open doors. And now, unless you can sleep through a shower-bath, it’s not much use turning in again. This old thatch will leak like a sieve after all these months of dry weather. Better have a ‘nip’ to steady your nerves.”The storm broke in all its fury; every steel-blue dazzling flash, in unintermittent sequence, lit up the darkness with more than the brightness of noonday, while the thunderclaps followed in that series of staccato crashes so appalling in their deafening suddenness to one belated in the open during these storms on the High Veldt. Then came a lull, followed by the onrushing roar of the welcome rain. In less than five minutes the dry and shrunken thatch was leaking like a shower-bath, even as its owner had predicted, and having covered up everything worth so protecting, the two men lit their pipes and sat down philosophically to wait for the morning.It came. But although the storm had long since passed on the rain continued. No mere thunder-shower this, but a steady, drenching downpour from a lowering and unbroken sky; a downpour to wet a man to the skin in five minutes. The drought had at length broken up.Too late, however. The rain, as is frequently the case under the circumstances, turned out a cold rain. Throughout that day all hands worked manfully to save the lives of the remnant of the stock—for the Angora is a frail sort of beast under adverse conditions—and as it grew bitterly cold, packing the creatures into stables, outhouses, even the Koranna huts, for warmth. In vain! The wretched animals, enfeebled by the long, terrible drought, succumbed like flies to the sudden and inclement change. Save for about two score of the hardiest among the flock, by nightfall of the following day Renshaw Fanning was left without a hoof upon the farm.
The days went by, and Renshaw steadily gained in health and strength. He was now able to walk about at will, to take short rides in the early morning, and towards sundown, carefully avoiding the heat of the day, and to begin looking after his stock again. Not that the state of the latter afforded him much encouragement, poor fellow, for each day witnessed an alarming decrease in the few hundred starving animals the drought had left him. Meanwhile, the burning, brassy heavens were without a cloud, save an occasional one springing suddenly from the horizon, as though to mock at the terrible anxiety of the dwellers in this desert waste, and as suddenly melting away, together with many an eager, unspoken hope for the longed-for rain. Not a breath of air, save now and again one of those strange whirlwinds which, heaving up bits of dried stick and dust from the baked and gasping earth, and spinning them round in its gyrating course, moves in a waterspoutlike column along the plain, to vanish into empty air as suddenly as it arose—sure sign of drought, or the continuance of the same, say the stock-growers, out of the plenitude of their experience. The veldt was studded with the shrivelled, rotting carcases of dead animals, scattered about here and there in little clumps of tens and twenties, to the advantage of clouds of great white vultures wheeling aloft ere settling down upon the plentiful repast. Even the very lizards peering forth from the cracks and crannies of the walls, or basking on the clay summit of old Kaatje’s outdoor oven, seemed gasping for air, for moisture.
All this Renshaw contemplated with the recklessness of a player who has staked his last napoleon. Every day increased the unrest that was upon him, the feverish longing to get away. It was not the mere run-down feeling of one who desires a change, or the eagerness of a sensitive mind to see the last of a detested locality. There was more than this underlying it, and Maurice Sellon, watching him narrowly, though unobtrusively, noted the circumstance, shrewdly guessing, moreover, that anxiety on behalf of the mysterious Golconda was not the prevailing motive this time. But, whatever it was, Renshaw, habitually reserved, was closer than death itself.
Sellon, for his part, was as anxious to get away as his host. He was thoroughly sick of his present quarters, and of the daily occupation of seeing a few more wretched Angoras pay the debt of Nature—of staring at the glassy, shimmering horizon, and wondering when it was going to rain. Thoroughly sick, too, of swarming flies and of rough food none too appetisingly displayed—of a sofa-bed, and falling asleep to the accompaniment of the ticking rustle of the tarantulas hunting their prey in the thatch overhead, and occasionally running over his ear in the night. It was all very well for Fanning. He was used to that sort of thing—Sellon was not; therefore small wonder that he should begin to get sick of it. There wasn’t even anything to shoot on the place, for the springbok had trekked in quest of more favoured regions.
Sellon, however, was blessed with a mercurial temperament, as his host had remarked, and the same now stood him in good stead, for, though bored to death, he did not wax quarrelsome—the usual development of that unenviable condition. But there was one matter which, haunting his mind day and night, bade fair even to drive him into that.
He was racked by an hourly dread lest his friend should discover the loss of the missing paper. Maurice Sellon was constitutionally as far from being a coward as the average Englishman, well endowed with thews, habitually is. But the consciousness that he had been guilty of a mean and dishonest action tended to demoralise his easy self-reliance. A man like Renshaw, the possessor of a secret of fabulous value, the clue to which he had cherished for years, and patiently; and at the cost of untold hardship and possible peril, had repeatedly attempted to solve, would, he reasoned, prove a desperate man when he should come to realise that his hopes were for ever shattered—a dangerous one, should he ever arrive at the conviction that he had been deliberately robbed. The idea of persuading him that he had himself insisted on destroying it during his delirium seemed the only way out of the difficulty; but that expedient now struck Sellon as a particularly thin one. Such a state of mental nervousness had he reached, that he felt sure the other would at once detect it as a lie. True, he had probably saved Fanning’s life, as the latter had himself declared. But at the moment of his terrible discovery that consideration was not likely to count for much.
They were alone here together. Not a living soul had they seen during all these weeks, except the family of Korannas, who officiated as servants—both field and domestic—to the establishment. They were alone together—cut off from the outside world as thoroughly as though shut up on a desert island. What deadly, terrible penalty might not Fanning exact from the man who had so deeply injured him? He was no longer weak and tottering with illness; he had, in fact, nearly recovered his normal vigour. The more Sellon looked at the situation the less he liked it.
What a fool he had been to meddle with the thing! He would have given worlds to be able to replace it. But it was gone irrevocably.
At one time his suspicions had rested on the Koranna servants. But the narrow watch he had kept upon them, as also the immediate and careful search he had made around the house at the time of the occurrence, had forced him to abandon this idea. Dismissing the Satanic theory at first formed, he had hit upon another—to a dweller in Southern Africa, almost as wild and chimerical; but then it must be remembered that Sellon was not a dweller in that country—only a “raw Englishman,” in fact, as the Boers define a recent importation. That black claw which had reft the paper from his hand in the dead midnight must have belonged to some huge baboon, who, attracted by the light, had approached the open window, and having accomplished his mischievous and monkey-like manoeuvre, had decamped forthwith to his native wilds. Anyhow, the precious clue had disappeared, and in all human probability would never again be lighted on by mortal eye.
Mingled with his apprehensions on the above counts, however, were the misgivings of cupidity, and there were times when he suspected Renshaw of regretting his offer. The latter, since first mentioning the subject of the treasure, had hardly reverted to it, and this reticence struck him (Sellon) in an unfavourable light, and the reason assigned for it as a mere excuse.
“Take my word for it,” Renshaw had said, one day, “we had better leave the subject entirely for a little longer—till we get down country, say. You see, the long and short is, it’s an exciting one to me, and my head is by no means clear yet. It’ll be better to put it off, and there’s plenty of time.”
And this answer, judging the speaker by himself, and, indeed, it is fair to say, by his knowledge of the world, struck Sellon as eminently unsatisfactory. At the risk of a rebuff, a rupture even, he had more than once adroitly tried to “draw” his host, but with so little success as to leave him ignorant as to whether the latter was sufficiently familiar with its contents as to render him independent of the document itself.
Outwardly, the intercourse between the two men was pleasant and friendly enough, and though they had little to do but smoke Boer tobacco and wonder whether it would ever rain again, they had not yet exhausted their subjects of conversation, Sellon was a lively talker, and full of shrewd worldly wisdom, and the other’s natural reserve admirably fitted him for the part of a good listener. Or, on the other hand, more than one strange wild incident, evolved out of the reticent, lonely man’s own experiences, was of vivid interest to the globe-trottingviveur.
Then it was that the latter came to impart snatches of his own history. He had migrated to South Africa as a pure speculation, and ready for any adventure that might come to hand—mining, treasure-seeking, a trip up country, anything that promised possible profit. He had half arranged an up-country trip, and it was while journeying to a distant township to interview the other partner in the scheme that he had lost himself, and accident had landed him so opportunely at Renshaw Fanning’s door.
One night they had been thus chatting, and retired to bed, having decided to make a start, at all risks, the day after the morrow. The heat was something fearful. A dead, sultry, boding stillness reigned over everything, productive of that strange nervous depression which is wont to afflict mankind prior to an approaching convulsion of Nature. Every door and window of the house stood open, as if to keep up the fiction that there was any air to come in.
“I believe there’s going to be an earthquake, at least,” said Sellon, as he turned in.
“Or a big thunderstorm, only—no such luck!” answered Renshaw.
It was not the night to bear the weight of a blanket, or even of a sheet, had the latter luxury been among the resources of the establishment. Sellon, after tossing uneasily for an hour, dropped off into a heavy sleep, and dreamed.
He was alone in a deep, craggy gorge. Beetling rocks reared high above his head, just discernible in the gloom, for it was night. It was the “Valley of the Eye.”
Yes; and there was the “Eye” itself—gleaming out of the darkness, seeming to transfix him with the cold stare of a basilisk. Somehow he felt no exaltation on having gained the place—no triumph over treasure trove. Instead of putting forth his efforts to reach the shining stone, his chief desire was to flee from the spot. But he could not—he was rooted to the ground, shivering, trembling, with a chill shrinking of mortal dread. Nearer, nearer, drew that gleaming Eye, and, lo! beside it flashed forth another. There were two—a pair of eyes. Then before them came shadowy hands holding a bow. It was drawn. It was pointed full at him. Still he could not move. The poisoned arrows. Oh, Heaven!
The string twanged. With a shrill hiss the arrow sped—the poisoned arrow. A loud hiss, a deafening hiss, and, lo! the gloom of the valley was lighted up with a blinding glare, and—
“Close shave that, old chap!” said a voice.
The spell was broken—broken by that well-known voice. Starting up in his bed, bathed in the sweat of deadly horror, Sellon beheld a strange sight.
The roomwaslighted up with a blinding glare. In the middle of it stood Renshaw Fanning, holding up a huge snake by the tail. The reptile was quite dead, its head shattered by the hard oaken table, but its hideous length was still undulating with a convulsive writhe. The glare was the result of a continuous succession of vivid lightning flashes. Just then a mighty rolling peal of thunder shook the house, making the doors and windows rattle like castanets. Then followed pitch darkness.
“Strike a light, if you have any handy, but don’t come too near me in the dark,” said Renshaw. “This joker’s fangs may still be of some account, albeit he’s stone dead.”
As though still dreaming, Sellon obeyed.
“What the very deuce is the meaning of it all?” he said, as by the light of the candle he sat surveying the situation.
“Only this—that you were as near passing on your checks as you ever will be,” was the reply, “And you may thank this thunderstorm for it that you didn’t. The thunder awoke me at once, though it didn’t you, and of course I went outside to look at the weather. Then, by the glare of a flash of lightning, I spotted this brute. He was lying bang across both your legs, with his head against the wall. The flash lasted just long enough for me to lay hold of his tail, and I knew the geography of the room well enough to whirl him up and bring his head down upon the hardest part of the table.”
Sellon stared at the speaker, then at the hideous, writhing body of the reptile, without a word. He seemed stupefied.
“Scott!” he burst forth at last. “Well, we are quits now, at any rate. But that’s something like a nightmare.”
This, then, was the interpretation of his bloodcurdling dream. The terrible eyes, the frightful riveting spell, the shrill hiss, the poisoned arrow. He felt clean knocked out of time.
“Green cobra—and a big un at that,” said Renshaw, throwing the carcase through the open house-door. “See how it was? The beggar knew a big rain was coming, and sneaked in here for shelter. It’s never altogether safe to sleep with open doors. And now, unless you can sleep through a shower-bath, it’s not much use turning in again. This old thatch will leak like a sieve after all these months of dry weather. Better have a ‘nip’ to steady your nerves.”
The storm broke in all its fury; every steel-blue dazzling flash, in unintermittent sequence, lit up the darkness with more than the brightness of noonday, while the thunderclaps followed in that series of staccato crashes so appalling in their deafening suddenness to one belated in the open during these storms on the High Veldt. Then came a lull, followed by the onrushing roar of the welcome rain. In less than five minutes the dry and shrunken thatch was leaking like a shower-bath, even as its owner had predicted, and having covered up everything worth so protecting, the two men lit their pipes and sat down philosophically to wait for the morning.
It came. But although the storm had long since passed on the rain continued. No mere thunder-shower this, but a steady, drenching downpour from a lowering and unbroken sky; a downpour to wet a man to the skin in five minutes. The drought had at length broken up.
Too late, however. The rain, as is frequently the case under the circumstances, turned out a cold rain. Throughout that day all hands worked manfully to save the lives of the remnant of the stock—for the Angora is a frail sort of beast under adverse conditions—and as it grew bitterly cold, packing the creatures into stables, outhouses, even the Koranna huts, for warmth. In vain! The wretched animals, enfeebled by the long, terrible drought, succumbed like flies to the sudden and inclement change. Save for about two score of the hardiest among the flock, by nightfall of the following day Renshaw Fanning was left without a hoof upon the farm.
Chapter Nine.Two “Sells.”“Heard anything of Renshaw?” said Christopher Selwood, coming in hot and tired from his work, for a cup of tea late in the afternoon.“Not a word,” answered his wife, looking up from the last of a batch of letters that had just come in with the weekly post. “Why—you don’t think—?” she began, alarmed at the grave look which had come over her husband’s face.“Well, I don’t know,” he replied. “I hope there’s nothing seriously wrong. How long is it since you wrote?”“More than a fortnight now.”“Ah, well. I dare say it’s all right. Now I think of it, they’ve had big rains up that end of the country. Big rains mean big floods, and big floods mean all the drifts impassable. The post carts may have been delayed for days.”“You think that’s it?” she said anxiously.“Why, yes. At first, I own, I felt a bit of a scare. You see, the poor chap was desperately ill when he wrote—though, to be sure, he must have got over the worst even then—and I’ve been feeling a little anxious about him of late. Well, he’ll come when he can, and bring his friend with him, I hope. It’ll liven the girls up, too. Miss Avory must be getting properly tired of having no one to flirt with.”The soft afternoon air floated in through the open windows in balmy puffs, bringing with it a scent of flowers, of delicate jessamine twined round the pillars of thestoep, of rich roses now bursting into full bloom. A long-waisted hornet rocketed to and fro just beneath the ceiling, knocking his apparently idiotic head against the same, and the twittering of finks darting in and out of their pendulous nests above the dam in all their habitual fussiness, mingled with the melodious whistle of spreuws holding contraband revel among the fast-ripening figs in the garden.For a few minutes Mrs Selwood plied her sewing-machine in silence, then—“Talking of Violet, Chris, did it never occur to you that she had flung her net over poor Renshaw?”“Flung her net—Renshaw! No, by Jove, it never did! Why, he’s the most sober-going old chap in the world. Confound it, he must be past that sort of thing—if he ever went in for it. Why, he’s only two or three years my junior.”“And what if he is?” was the reply of calm superiority. “He needn’t be Methuselah for all that. And then remember the hard, struggling, solitary life his has been. He’s just the man to fall over head and ears in love at middle age.”“Pho! Not he! What matchmakers women are. Bryant and May are nothing to them. But, I say, Hilda, supposing it is as you say, why shouldn’t he go in and win, eh?”“Do you think Violet is the sort of girl to go and end her days in a wattle-and-daub shanty away in the wilds of Bushmanland? Come now. Do you think for a moment she’s that sort?”“N-o. Perhaps not. But there’s no reason why she should. Renshaw might find some farm to suit him somewhere else—down here, for instance. I don’t see why it shouldn’t be done. He’s a fellow who thoroughly understands things, and would get along first-rate at whatever he turned to. If he’s come into low water up there it’s more the fault of that infernal country than his own, I’ll bet fifty pounds. No, I don’t at all see why he shouldn’t go in and win, and, by Jove, he shall.”“Who’s the matchmaker now?” retorted his wife with a smile of conscious superiority. “But there are several things to be got over. First of all, I believe he must be in very low water; in fact, pretty well at the end of his tether. That drought can’t have left him much to the good. And I am tolerably certain Violet has nothing—at least, nothing to speak of.”“Well, that might be got over—living’s cheap enough,—and here we never get any downright bad seasons.”“Then there’s the difference in their creeds.”“Pho! That doesn’t count for much in these parts, where there’s precious little opportunity of running any creed in particular.”“No, unfortunately; but there ought to be,” replied Woman, the born devotee. “But the most fatal obstacle of all you seem to overlook. It usually takes two to make a bargain.”“What! Do you mean to say she wouldn’t have him? Well, that’s another story, of course. But Renshaw’s an uncommonly fine follow all round—and she might do worse.”“That I won’t attempt to deny. But I’m afraid the impression left upon my mind is that she doesn’t care twopence about him.”“Only making a fool of him, eh?”“I won’t say that. Violet is a girl who has been accustomed to a great deal of admiration, and has an extremely fascinating manner. It is quite possible that poor Renshaw may have walked into the trap with his eyes open.”“Not he. He isn’t such an ass. She must have been trying to make a fool of him,” growled Selwood, with whom Violet Avory was, nevertheless, a prime favourite. “Just like you women! You’re all alike, every one of you.”His wife vouchsafed no reply, and the whirr of the sewing machine went blithely on. Soon the silence was broken by an unmistakable snore. The slumbrous warmth of the afternoon had told upon Selwood. His head had fallen back, his pipe had slipped on to the floor. He was fast asleep.An hour went by. It was getting nearly time to go to the kraals and count in the sheep. Still he snored steadily on. His wife, drowsy with the continual whirr of the sewing machine, felt more than half inclined to follow his example.Suddenly there was a sound of wheels on the grassy plot outside the front garden, then a voice exclaiming in dubious tone—“Here’s a take in. I believe they’re all away from home.”The voice proceeded from one of the two occupants of a very travel-worn buggy standing at the gate.“No, they’re not!” cried Mrs Selwood, to whom that voice was well known. “Come—wake up, Chris. Here is Renshaw himself!”“Eh—what! I believe I’ve been asleep!” cried Selwood, starting up—“Renshaw—is it! Hallo, old chap. This is first-rate,” he added, rushing out. And the two men’s hands wore locked in a close grip. “Allamaghtag! But you are looking pulled down—isn’t he, Hilda?—though not quite so much as I should have expected. How are you, sir? We are delighted to see you,” he went on as Renshaw duly introduced his friend.(“Allamaghtag!” “Almighty!” A common ejaculation among the Boers. It and similar colloquialisms are almost equally frequent among their colonial brethren.)Then Marian appeared—her sweet face lighting up with a glow of glad welcome for which many a man might have given his right hand—and then the children, who had been amusing themselves diversely after the manner of their kind, anywhere outside and around the house, came crowding noisily and gleefully around “Uncle Renshaw,” as they had always been in the habit of calling him. To the lonely man, fresh from his rough and comfortless sick-bed, this was indeed a home-coming—a welcome to stir the heart. Yet that organ was susceptible of a dire sinking as its owner missed one face from the group,—realised in one quick, eager glance that the presence he sought was not there.Violet’s room was at the back of the house, consequently she had heard but faintly the sounds attendant on the arrival of the visitors. She instinctively guessed at the identity of the latter, but it was clean contrary to Violet Avory’s creed to hurry herself on account of any man. So having sacrificed a few moments of curiosity to this principle, and, needless to say, taken the indispensable look at herself in the glass, she issued leisurely forth.Now, as she did so, Selwood was ushering in his stranger guest—was, in fact, at that moment standing back to allow the latter to enter before him. Thus they met face to face.Then was her self-possession tried in such wise as no member of that household had yet witnessed. She halted suddenly, her face deadly white. A quick ejaculation escaped the stranger’s lips.It died as quickly, and his half-outstretched hand dropped to his side in obedience to her warning glance; for her confusion was but a momentary flash. It entirely escaped Selwood, who was walking behind his guest, the broad shoulders and fine stature of the latter acting as an opportune screen, and all the others were still outside.“Miss Avory,” introduced honest Chris, becoming aware of her presence. “Mr—er—I really beg your pardon, but I’m afraid I didn’t quite catch your name just now—and Renshaw didn’t happen to mention it in his letter?”“Sellon,” supplied the other.“By Jove! We hold half our names in common. We are both ‘Sells,’ but there we branch off—ho—ho! Sellon and Selwood, both ‘Sells,’” repeated Chris, who was fond of a joke.An unimportant, not to say trivial remark. But like many such, it was destined in the fulness of time to be brought back pretty vividly to the memory of its originator and his hearers.Violet acknowledged the introduction with a queenly sort of bow, and turning preceded them into the sitting-room.“Where’s Mr Fanning?” she asked, rising almost as soon as she was seated. “I must go and say ‘How do you do?’ to him.”Sellon muttered an oath to himself as she slipped from the room, not loud enough to be heard by his host, however, who proceeded to ply him with questions as to his journey—and brandy-and-water.Meanwhile Violet, in pursuance of her expressed intent, was greeting the other arrival with a pretty cordiality that was perfection itself, and when she tuned her voice to the requisite minor key as she asked all manner of questions and expressed all manner of sympathy with regard to his late illness, and whether he ought to have undertaken such a long journey so soon, and if he had takengreatcare of himself during the same, the effect on her victim was such a reaction from his first feeling of dismay at her non-appearance that he could have thrown up his hat and hoorayed aloud. Whereby we fear it is only too obvious that friend Renshaw was as big a fool as the general run of his fellow-men.“Well, and what do you think of this country, Mr Sellon?” came the inevitable query, as they were gathered together after the first fuss and flurry of greeting.“I think various things, Mrs Selwood,” was the ready reply. “Parts of it are lovely, and parts of it are grand, and one gets a fine opportunity of seeing it all during a fortnight’s journey behind three horses. But other parts, on the other hand, and notably the latitudes inhabited by friend Fanning here, reminded me forcibly of the Yankee’s reply to the same question.”“And what was that?”“Why, he was travelling in that awful Karroo during a drought, and somebody asked him what he thought of the country, ‘What do I think of your country?’ says he. ‘See here, stranger, if I owned a section of your country I guess I’d enclose that section well around, and send out for a paint-pot and paint it green.’”This tickled Selwood amazingly, and he burst into a roar.“Well, that wouldn’t hold good of our part,” he said when he had recovered.“Oh no, no,” assented the stranger, hurriedly. “Let me clear myself of that charge of heresy without delay. Words are inadequate to describe the beauties of the road as soon as we got into these mountains. I’m serious, mind.”“Well, we must contrive to show you more of them,” said his hostess. “Are you fond of shooting, Mr Sellon?”“He just is,” put in Renshaw. “He kept us in game all along the road, and in chronic hot water with all the Dutchmen whose places we passed, by knocking over springboks under their very windows without so much as a ‘by your leave.’”“Well, it’s better to be the shooter than the shootee, eh, Fanning? But that joke’ll keep,” laughed Sellon, significantly.“We can show you plenty of fun in that line here,” said Christopher. “The mountains are swarming with rhybok, and there are any amount of partridges and quail. Plenty of bushbucks, too, in the kloofs, and guinea-fowl. Hallo, by Jove! it’s time to go and count in,” he added, jumping up from his chair.Then the three men started off to do the regulation evening round of the kraals, while the ladies went their ways, either to give a supervising eye to the preparation of supper, or to while away an idle half-hour prior to that comfortable repast.“Well, Violet, and what do you think of the stranger?” said Marian, when they were left to themselves.“Oh, I think him rather a joke. Likely to turn out very good fun, I should say,” was the careless reply.“Sure to, if you take him in hand, you abominable girl. But I’ve a sort of idea the ‘fun’ will be all on one side. I suppose you think you can reduce him to utter and insane subjection in less than a week.”For response Violet only smiled. But the smile seemed to convey more plainly than words the conviction that she rather thought she could.
“Heard anything of Renshaw?” said Christopher Selwood, coming in hot and tired from his work, for a cup of tea late in the afternoon.
“Not a word,” answered his wife, looking up from the last of a batch of letters that had just come in with the weekly post. “Why—you don’t think—?” she began, alarmed at the grave look which had come over her husband’s face.
“Well, I don’t know,” he replied. “I hope there’s nothing seriously wrong. How long is it since you wrote?”
“More than a fortnight now.”
“Ah, well. I dare say it’s all right. Now I think of it, they’ve had big rains up that end of the country. Big rains mean big floods, and big floods mean all the drifts impassable. The post carts may have been delayed for days.”
“You think that’s it?” she said anxiously.
“Why, yes. At first, I own, I felt a bit of a scare. You see, the poor chap was desperately ill when he wrote—though, to be sure, he must have got over the worst even then—and I’ve been feeling a little anxious about him of late. Well, he’ll come when he can, and bring his friend with him, I hope. It’ll liven the girls up, too. Miss Avory must be getting properly tired of having no one to flirt with.”
The soft afternoon air floated in through the open windows in balmy puffs, bringing with it a scent of flowers, of delicate jessamine twined round the pillars of thestoep, of rich roses now bursting into full bloom. A long-waisted hornet rocketed to and fro just beneath the ceiling, knocking his apparently idiotic head against the same, and the twittering of finks darting in and out of their pendulous nests above the dam in all their habitual fussiness, mingled with the melodious whistle of spreuws holding contraband revel among the fast-ripening figs in the garden.
For a few minutes Mrs Selwood plied her sewing-machine in silence, then—
“Talking of Violet, Chris, did it never occur to you that she had flung her net over poor Renshaw?”
“Flung her net—Renshaw! No, by Jove, it never did! Why, he’s the most sober-going old chap in the world. Confound it, he must be past that sort of thing—if he ever went in for it. Why, he’s only two or three years my junior.”
“And what if he is?” was the reply of calm superiority. “He needn’t be Methuselah for all that. And then remember the hard, struggling, solitary life his has been. He’s just the man to fall over head and ears in love at middle age.”
“Pho! Not he! What matchmakers women are. Bryant and May are nothing to them. But, I say, Hilda, supposing it is as you say, why shouldn’t he go in and win, eh?”
“Do you think Violet is the sort of girl to go and end her days in a wattle-and-daub shanty away in the wilds of Bushmanland? Come now. Do you think for a moment she’s that sort?”
“N-o. Perhaps not. But there’s no reason why she should. Renshaw might find some farm to suit him somewhere else—down here, for instance. I don’t see why it shouldn’t be done. He’s a fellow who thoroughly understands things, and would get along first-rate at whatever he turned to. If he’s come into low water up there it’s more the fault of that infernal country than his own, I’ll bet fifty pounds. No, I don’t at all see why he shouldn’t go in and win, and, by Jove, he shall.”
“Who’s the matchmaker now?” retorted his wife with a smile of conscious superiority. “But there are several things to be got over. First of all, I believe he must be in very low water; in fact, pretty well at the end of his tether. That drought can’t have left him much to the good. And I am tolerably certain Violet has nothing—at least, nothing to speak of.”
“Well, that might be got over—living’s cheap enough,—and here we never get any downright bad seasons.”
“Then there’s the difference in their creeds.”
“Pho! That doesn’t count for much in these parts, where there’s precious little opportunity of running any creed in particular.”
“No, unfortunately; but there ought to be,” replied Woman, the born devotee. “But the most fatal obstacle of all you seem to overlook. It usually takes two to make a bargain.”
“What! Do you mean to say she wouldn’t have him? Well, that’s another story, of course. But Renshaw’s an uncommonly fine follow all round—and she might do worse.”
“That I won’t attempt to deny. But I’m afraid the impression left upon my mind is that she doesn’t care twopence about him.”
“Only making a fool of him, eh?”
“I won’t say that. Violet is a girl who has been accustomed to a great deal of admiration, and has an extremely fascinating manner. It is quite possible that poor Renshaw may have walked into the trap with his eyes open.”
“Not he. He isn’t such an ass. She must have been trying to make a fool of him,” growled Selwood, with whom Violet Avory was, nevertheless, a prime favourite. “Just like you women! You’re all alike, every one of you.”
His wife vouchsafed no reply, and the whirr of the sewing machine went blithely on. Soon the silence was broken by an unmistakable snore. The slumbrous warmth of the afternoon had told upon Selwood. His head had fallen back, his pipe had slipped on to the floor. He was fast asleep.
An hour went by. It was getting nearly time to go to the kraals and count in the sheep. Still he snored steadily on. His wife, drowsy with the continual whirr of the sewing machine, felt more than half inclined to follow his example.
Suddenly there was a sound of wheels on the grassy plot outside the front garden, then a voice exclaiming in dubious tone—
“Here’s a take in. I believe they’re all away from home.”
The voice proceeded from one of the two occupants of a very travel-worn buggy standing at the gate.
“No, they’re not!” cried Mrs Selwood, to whom that voice was well known. “Come—wake up, Chris. Here is Renshaw himself!”
“Eh—what! I believe I’ve been asleep!” cried Selwood, starting up—“Renshaw—is it! Hallo, old chap. This is first-rate,” he added, rushing out. And the two men’s hands wore locked in a close grip. “Allamaghtag! But you are looking pulled down—isn’t he, Hilda?—though not quite so much as I should have expected. How are you, sir? We are delighted to see you,” he went on as Renshaw duly introduced his friend.
(“Allamaghtag!” “Almighty!” A common ejaculation among the Boers. It and similar colloquialisms are almost equally frequent among their colonial brethren.)
Then Marian appeared—her sweet face lighting up with a glow of glad welcome for which many a man might have given his right hand—and then the children, who had been amusing themselves diversely after the manner of their kind, anywhere outside and around the house, came crowding noisily and gleefully around “Uncle Renshaw,” as they had always been in the habit of calling him. To the lonely man, fresh from his rough and comfortless sick-bed, this was indeed a home-coming—a welcome to stir the heart. Yet that organ was susceptible of a dire sinking as its owner missed one face from the group,—realised in one quick, eager glance that the presence he sought was not there.
Violet’s room was at the back of the house, consequently she had heard but faintly the sounds attendant on the arrival of the visitors. She instinctively guessed at the identity of the latter, but it was clean contrary to Violet Avory’s creed to hurry herself on account of any man. So having sacrificed a few moments of curiosity to this principle, and, needless to say, taken the indispensable look at herself in the glass, she issued leisurely forth.
Now, as she did so, Selwood was ushering in his stranger guest—was, in fact, at that moment standing back to allow the latter to enter before him. Thus they met face to face.
Then was her self-possession tried in such wise as no member of that household had yet witnessed. She halted suddenly, her face deadly white. A quick ejaculation escaped the stranger’s lips.
It died as quickly, and his half-outstretched hand dropped to his side in obedience to her warning glance; for her confusion was but a momentary flash. It entirely escaped Selwood, who was walking behind his guest, the broad shoulders and fine stature of the latter acting as an opportune screen, and all the others were still outside.
“Miss Avory,” introduced honest Chris, becoming aware of her presence. “Mr—er—I really beg your pardon, but I’m afraid I didn’t quite catch your name just now—and Renshaw didn’t happen to mention it in his letter?”
“Sellon,” supplied the other.
“By Jove! We hold half our names in common. We are both ‘Sells,’ but there we branch off—ho—ho! Sellon and Selwood, both ‘Sells,’” repeated Chris, who was fond of a joke.
An unimportant, not to say trivial remark. But like many such, it was destined in the fulness of time to be brought back pretty vividly to the memory of its originator and his hearers.
Violet acknowledged the introduction with a queenly sort of bow, and turning preceded them into the sitting-room.
“Where’s Mr Fanning?” she asked, rising almost as soon as she was seated. “I must go and say ‘How do you do?’ to him.”
Sellon muttered an oath to himself as she slipped from the room, not loud enough to be heard by his host, however, who proceeded to ply him with questions as to his journey—and brandy-and-water.
Meanwhile Violet, in pursuance of her expressed intent, was greeting the other arrival with a pretty cordiality that was perfection itself, and when she tuned her voice to the requisite minor key as she asked all manner of questions and expressed all manner of sympathy with regard to his late illness, and whether he ought to have undertaken such a long journey so soon, and if he had takengreatcare of himself during the same, the effect on her victim was such a reaction from his first feeling of dismay at her non-appearance that he could have thrown up his hat and hoorayed aloud. Whereby we fear it is only too obvious that friend Renshaw was as big a fool as the general run of his fellow-men.
“Well, and what do you think of this country, Mr Sellon?” came the inevitable query, as they were gathered together after the first fuss and flurry of greeting.
“I think various things, Mrs Selwood,” was the ready reply. “Parts of it are lovely, and parts of it are grand, and one gets a fine opportunity of seeing it all during a fortnight’s journey behind three horses. But other parts, on the other hand, and notably the latitudes inhabited by friend Fanning here, reminded me forcibly of the Yankee’s reply to the same question.”
“And what was that?”
“Why, he was travelling in that awful Karroo during a drought, and somebody asked him what he thought of the country, ‘What do I think of your country?’ says he. ‘See here, stranger, if I owned a section of your country I guess I’d enclose that section well around, and send out for a paint-pot and paint it green.’”
This tickled Selwood amazingly, and he burst into a roar.
“Well, that wouldn’t hold good of our part,” he said when he had recovered.
“Oh no, no,” assented the stranger, hurriedly. “Let me clear myself of that charge of heresy without delay. Words are inadequate to describe the beauties of the road as soon as we got into these mountains. I’m serious, mind.”
“Well, we must contrive to show you more of them,” said his hostess. “Are you fond of shooting, Mr Sellon?”
“He just is,” put in Renshaw. “He kept us in game all along the road, and in chronic hot water with all the Dutchmen whose places we passed, by knocking over springboks under their very windows without so much as a ‘by your leave.’”
“Well, it’s better to be the shooter than the shootee, eh, Fanning? But that joke’ll keep,” laughed Sellon, significantly.
“We can show you plenty of fun in that line here,” said Christopher. “The mountains are swarming with rhybok, and there are any amount of partridges and quail. Plenty of bushbucks, too, in the kloofs, and guinea-fowl. Hallo, by Jove! it’s time to go and count in,” he added, jumping up from his chair.
Then the three men started off to do the regulation evening round of the kraals, while the ladies went their ways, either to give a supervising eye to the preparation of supper, or to while away an idle half-hour prior to that comfortable repast.
“Well, Violet, and what do you think of the stranger?” said Marian, when they were left to themselves.
“Oh, I think him rather a joke. Likely to turn out very good fun, I should say,” was the careless reply.
“Sure to, if you take him in hand, you abominable girl. But I’ve a sort of idea the ‘fun’ will be all on one side. I suppose you think you can reduce him to utter and insane subjection in less than a week.”
For response Violet only smiled. But the smile seemed to convey more plainly than words the conviction that she rather thought she could.