Chapter Thirty Five.The Price of Blood.After the explanations attendant upon Christopher Selwood’s awkward discovery, relations between Violet and her entertainers became somewhat strained.Spoiled and petted ever since she could remember, bowed down to as a very goddess as she grew up in her fascinating girlhood; accustomed to the most unbounded admiration, and undivided withal, Violet Avory was now receiving almost her first check.It was all very well for her host to wonder “what the deuce she could see in the fellow,” the fact remained that her love for Maurice Sellon engrossed her whole headstrong and passionate nature, and opposition served no other purpose than to rivet her determination.To reasoning she was deaf. All appeals to her sense of self-respect rendered her sullen—but underlying this sullenness lurked a dogged intensity of resolution. If ever a woman was on the road to ruin Violet Avory was that woman, and she would be lucky did she escape the final goal.The days that followed were tolerably uncomfortable for all concerned. Violet sulked. She was an adept in the art of putting on an air of outraged innocence, and managed to make everybody supremely uncomfortable accordingly. She kept to her room as much as she conveniently could, and when she did venture out she shunned Marian’s companionship, taking her solitary wanderings in secluded places. Her hostess, angered and disgusted, after one or two further attempts at reasoning with her, fell in with her mood, and left her severely to herself. But kind-hearted Chris—with whom she had always been a great favourite—persisted in declaring that she was not the one to blame in the matter—that she was rather deserving of sympathy—and he accordingly was the only one to whom she condescended to unbend.She was so sorry to be such a nuisance to everybody, she would say, putting on the most winningly plaintive air for his benefit. Had she not better go at once instead of waiting for opportunities, which might not occur for weeks? She would be quite safe, and had no fear of travelling by herself. She was only a “wet blanket” in the house, and an intolerable burden—she could see that. Everybody was so strange now—as if she had done something awful. He, Christopher, was the only one who ever gave her a kind word, or seemed to care whether she was alive or dead. And then out would come the daintiest little lace handkerchief in the world, and, of course, poor old soft-hearted Christopher felt extremely foolish—as she intended he should—and wilder than ever with the absent Sellon, which she did not intend.Then he would endeavour to reassure her and reiterate again and again that nobody blamed her, which, of course, did not impose upon her, for with the freemasonry existing among women Violet knew better; knew that she was in fact the very one whom her hostess indeed did think the most to blame. She must not hurry away from them like that, he would say. Things would come right again—it was only a temporary misunderstanding, and they would all be as jolly again together as before. And Violet in her secret heart rejoiced—for any day might bring back her lover. However great was her apparent anxiety to relieve them of her presence it would not do to be hurried away just in time to miss him. That would be too awful.Her relief at the welcome reprieve would not, however, have been so great had she been aware of a certain fact as to which she had been designedly kept in ignorance. Selwood had written to Maurice, directing the letter to the principal hotel of a town through which the treasure seekers were bound to pass on their return. He had taken steps to ensure its immediate delivery, or return to himself if not claimed within a given period, and in it she asked Sellon not to come to Sunningdale until he had had an interview with the writer—at any place he, Sellon, might choose to appoint. No, assuredly, her equanimity might have been a trifle disturbed had she known of that. So the days went by.One afternoon she was indulging in a solitary stroll, according to her recent habit. It was nearly sundown. She walked along absently, her dress sweeping the crickets in chirruping showers from the long dank herbage under the shade of the quince hedge. She crossed, the deserted garden, and gained the rough wicket-gate opening out of it on the other side. Down the narrow bridle-path, winding through the tangled brake she moved, still absently as in a dream. And she was in a dream, for it was down this path that they two had walked that first morning—ah! so long ago now.She stood upon the river bank, on the very spot where they had stood together. The great peaks soaring aloft were all golden in the slanting sunset. The shout and whistle of the Kaffir herds bringing in their flocks sounded from the sunlit hillside, mellowed by distance. Doves cooed softly in the thorn-brake—their voices mingling with the fantastic whistle of the yellow thrush and the shrill chatter of a cloud of finks flashing in and out of their hanging nests above the water. She stood thus in the radiant evening light, trying to infuse her mind with a measure of its peace.But above the voices of Nature and of evening came another sound—the dull thud of hoofs. Some one was riding up the bridle-path on the other side of the river. Heavens! Could it be—?The thought set her every pulse tingling. Nearer, nearer came the hoof strokes.The horseman emerged from the brake. Tired and travel-worn he looked, so too did his steed. The latter plunged knee-deep into the cool stream, and drank eagerly, gratefully, of the flowing waters.But the glint of the white dress on the bank opposite caught the rider’s eye. Up went his head. So too did that of the horse, jerked up suddenly by a violent wrench of the bridle. There was a prodigious splashing, stifling the horseman’s exclamation, as he plunged through the drift, and the water flew in great jets around. Then scarce had the dripping steed touched the opposite bank than the rider sprang to the ground and the waiting, expectant figure was folded tight in his arms.“Oh, Maurice, darling, it is you at last!” she murmured, clinging to him in his close embrace. And then she felt that it was good indeed to live.“Me? Rather! And ‘at last’ is about the word for it. And so my little girl has been waiting here for me ever since I went away. Confess! Hasn’t she?”“Yes.”“Of course. This was always our favourite retreat, wasn’t it? Still, I thought just the very moment I happened to arrive you would be anywhere else—with the rest of the crowd. It’s just one’s luck as a rule. But mine is better this time—rather!”“But—but—where’s Renshaw?” she asked, lifting her head, as she suddenly became alive to the other’s non-appearance. Sellon looked rather blank.“H’m—ha!—Renshaw? Well—he isn’t here—hasn’t come, anyhow.”“But—is he coming on after you?” she said, awake to the inconvenience of their first meeting being suddenly broken in upon.“M—well. The fact is, Violet darling, you don’t care about anything or anybody now we are together again? The long and the short of it is, poor Fanning has rather come to grief!”“Come to grief!” she echoed, wonderingly.“Well—yes. Fact is, I’m afraid the poor chap will never show up here again. He got hit—bowled over by those cursed Bushmen or Korannas, or whatever they were. We had to give them leg-bail, I can tell you. They pinked him with one of their poisoned arrows. He’s done for.”“Oh! Poor Renshaw!” cried Violet, in horror. “But you—you are unhurt, dearest? You have—have come back to me safe!”“Safe as a church. I got a trifle damaged too. Sprained my ankle just at the wrong time—those Bushmen devils coming on hard in our rear. Touch and go, I’ll tell you all about it by-and-bye. I shan’t tell the others about Fanning all at once—break it gradually, you know. So don’t you cut in with it.”“Poor Renshaw!” That was all. In those two words she dismissed the memory of the man but for whose unselfish heroism the lover in whose embrace she nestled so restfully, so gladsomely, would now be lying in ghastly fragments among the weird mountains of that far-away land. “Poor Renshaw!” Such was his epitaph at her lips. Truly her all-absorbing clandestine passion had exercised no improving, no softening influence upon Violet Avory—as, indeed, how should it?—for was it not the intensely selfish absorption of an intensely selfish nature! “Poor Renshaw!”And the man—he who owed his life to the other many times over, but never so much as in the last instance—what of him?Nothing! For from such a nature as his nothing was to be expected. This modern Judas, unlike his prototype, was prepared to enjoy to the full the price of blood. No compunction on that head troubled him.“Oh, Maurice. I must warn you!” cried Violet, suddenly. “Everything has come out.”He started then. A grey scared look came over his face. His conscience and his mind flew back to those grim, iron-bound deserts.“Everything?” he stammered, blankly.“Yes, dear. About ourselves, I mean. I can’t imagine how, but it has. They have been leading me such a life. Hilda has been perfectly hateful. The way in which she has treated me is absolutely scandalous. And Marian—sanctimonious sheep! Pah! I hate them all,” she broke off, her eyes flashing.“My poor darling. But how do you suppose it happened? You haven’t been leaving any letters about?”“No—no—no,” she interrupted quickly. “No, no. My belief is—she—she—has found out where I—I am—where you are—and has written to them.”His face grew dark.“That devil!” he muttered between his teeth. “That she-devil would do anything—anything.”“I want to warn you, Maurice. The only way out of the difficulty, while we are here, is for us to pretend to care nothing about each other—that the past was only a matter of a passing flirtation, and not to be taken seriously. Do you follow my plan?”“Yes; but I don’t like it.”“That can’t be helped. Do you suppose I like it? But it will not be for long. I am going away very soon—it might be any day now—home again. Then we can make up for the present hateful restraint. What is to prevent you returning by the same steamer? You will, Maurice, darling—you will—will you not?” she urged, clinging closer to him, and looking up into his eyes with a piteously hungering expression, as though fearing to read there the faintest forestalment of a negative. But her fears were groundless.“Will I? I should rather think I would. Listen, Violet. This mad expedition of poor Fanning’s has turned up trumps. I have that about me at this moment which should be worth two or three hundred thousand pounds at least. Only think of it. We have the world at our feet—a new life before us. You are, as you say, going home. But it will be to a real home!”She looked into his eyes—her gaze seemed to burn into his—her breast was heaving convulsively.They understood each other.“Do you mean it, Maurice?” she gasped. “My darling, do you really and truly mean it?”“Mean it? Of course I do. It was with no other object I went risking my life a dozen times a day in that ghastly desert. With the wealth that is ours we can afford to defy all the world—that she-devil included. And we will.”“Yes, we will.”Their lips met once more, and thus the compact was sealed. Alas—poor Violet! She had given herself over, bound, into the enemy’s hand. She had sold herself, and the price paid was the price of blood—even the blood of him who had sacrificed his own life for her sake.
After the explanations attendant upon Christopher Selwood’s awkward discovery, relations between Violet and her entertainers became somewhat strained.
Spoiled and petted ever since she could remember, bowed down to as a very goddess as she grew up in her fascinating girlhood; accustomed to the most unbounded admiration, and undivided withal, Violet Avory was now receiving almost her first check.
It was all very well for her host to wonder “what the deuce she could see in the fellow,” the fact remained that her love for Maurice Sellon engrossed her whole headstrong and passionate nature, and opposition served no other purpose than to rivet her determination.
To reasoning she was deaf. All appeals to her sense of self-respect rendered her sullen—but underlying this sullenness lurked a dogged intensity of resolution. If ever a woman was on the road to ruin Violet Avory was that woman, and she would be lucky did she escape the final goal.
The days that followed were tolerably uncomfortable for all concerned. Violet sulked. She was an adept in the art of putting on an air of outraged innocence, and managed to make everybody supremely uncomfortable accordingly. She kept to her room as much as she conveniently could, and when she did venture out she shunned Marian’s companionship, taking her solitary wanderings in secluded places. Her hostess, angered and disgusted, after one or two further attempts at reasoning with her, fell in with her mood, and left her severely to herself. But kind-hearted Chris—with whom she had always been a great favourite—persisted in declaring that she was not the one to blame in the matter—that she was rather deserving of sympathy—and he accordingly was the only one to whom she condescended to unbend.
She was so sorry to be such a nuisance to everybody, she would say, putting on the most winningly plaintive air for his benefit. Had she not better go at once instead of waiting for opportunities, which might not occur for weeks? She would be quite safe, and had no fear of travelling by herself. She was only a “wet blanket” in the house, and an intolerable burden—she could see that. Everybody was so strange now—as if she had done something awful. He, Christopher, was the only one who ever gave her a kind word, or seemed to care whether she was alive or dead. And then out would come the daintiest little lace handkerchief in the world, and, of course, poor old soft-hearted Christopher felt extremely foolish—as she intended he should—and wilder than ever with the absent Sellon, which she did not intend.
Then he would endeavour to reassure her and reiterate again and again that nobody blamed her, which, of course, did not impose upon her, for with the freemasonry existing among women Violet knew better; knew that she was in fact the very one whom her hostess indeed did think the most to blame. She must not hurry away from them like that, he would say. Things would come right again—it was only a temporary misunderstanding, and they would all be as jolly again together as before. And Violet in her secret heart rejoiced—for any day might bring back her lover. However great was her apparent anxiety to relieve them of her presence it would not do to be hurried away just in time to miss him. That would be too awful.
Her relief at the welcome reprieve would not, however, have been so great had she been aware of a certain fact as to which she had been designedly kept in ignorance. Selwood had written to Maurice, directing the letter to the principal hotel of a town through which the treasure seekers were bound to pass on their return. He had taken steps to ensure its immediate delivery, or return to himself if not claimed within a given period, and in it she asked Sellon not to come to Sunningdale until he had had an interview with the writer—at any place he, Sellon, might choose to appoint. No, assuredly, her equanimity might have been a trifle disturbed had she known of that. So the days went by.
One afternoon she was indulging in a solitary stroll, according to her recent habit. It was nearly sundown. She walked along absently, her dress sweeping the crickets in chirruping showers from the long dank herbage under the shade of the quince hedge. She crossed, the deserted garden, and gained the rough wicket-gate opening out of it on the other side. Down the narrow bridle-path, winding through the tangled brake she moved, still absently as in a dream. And she was in a dream, for it was down this path that they two had walked that first morning—ah! so long ago now.
She stood upon the river bank, on the very spot where they had stood together. The great peaks soaring aloft were all golden in the slanting sunset. The shout and whistle of the Kaffir herds bringing in their flocks sounded from the sunlit hillside, mellowed by distance. Doves cooed softly in the thorn-brake—their voices mingling with the fantastic whistle of the yellow thrush and the shrill chatter of a cloud of finks flashing in and out of their hanging nests above the water. She stood thus in the radiant evening light, trying to infuse her mind with a measure of its peace.
But above the voices of Nature and of evening came another sound—the dull thud of hoofs. Some one was riding up the bridle-path on the other side of the river. Heavens! Could it be—?
The thought set her every pulse tingling. Nearer, nearer came the hoof strokes.
The horseman emerged from the brake. Tired and travel-worn he looked, so too did his steed. The latter plunged knee-deep into the cool stream, and drank eagerly, gratefully, of the flowing waters.
But the glint of the white dress on the bank opposite caught the rider’s eye. Up went his head. So too did that of the horse, jerked up suddenly by a violent wrench of the bridle. There was a prodigious splashing, stifling the horseman’s exclamation, as he plunged through the drift, and the water flew in great jets around. Then scarce had the dripping steed touched the opposite bank than the rider sprang to the ground and the waiting, expectant figure was folded tight in his arms.
“Oh, Maurice, darling, it is you at last!” she murmured, clinging to him in his close embrace. And then she felt that it was good indeed to live.
“Me? Rather! And ‘at last’ is about the word for it. And so my little girl has been waiting here for me ever since I went away. Confess! Hasn’t she?”
“Yes.”
“Of course. This was always our favourite retreat, wasn’t it? Still, I thought just the very moment I happened to arrive you would be anywhere else—with the rest of the crowd. It’s just one’s luck as a rule. But mine is better this time—rather!”
“But—but—where’s Renshaw?” she asked, lifting her head, as she suddenly became alive to the other’s non-appearance. Sellon looked rather blank.
“H’m—ha!—Renshaw? Well—he isn’t here—hasn’t come, anyhow.”
“But—is he coming on after you?” she said, awake to the inconvenience of their first meeting being suddenly broken in upon.
“M—well. The fact is, Violet darling, you don’t care about anything or anybody now we are together again? The long and the short of it is, poor Fanning has rather come to grief!”
“Come to grief!” she echoed, wonderingly.
“Well—yes. Fact is, I’m afraid the poor chap will never show up here again. He got hit—bowled over by those cursed Bushmen or Korannas, or whatever they were. We had to give them leg-bail, I can tell you. They pinked him with one of their poisoned arrows. He’s done for.”
“Oh! Poor Renshaw!” cried Violet, in horror. “But you—you are unhurt, dearest? You have—have come back to me safe!”
“Safe as a church. I got a trifle damaged too. Sprained my ankle just at the wrong time—those Bushmen devils coming on hard in our rear. Touch and go, I’ll tell you all about it by-and-bye. I shan’t tell the others about Fanning all at once—break it gradually, you know. So don’t you cut in with it.”
“Poor Renshaw!” That was all. In those two words she dismissed the memory of the man but for whose unselfish heroism the lover in whose embrace she nestled so restfully, so gladsomely, would now be lying in ghastly fragments among the weird mountains of that far-away land. “Poor Renshaw!” Such was his epitaph at her lips. Truly her all-absorbing clandestine passion had exercised no improving, no softening influence upon Violet Avory—as, indeed, how should it?—for was it not the intensely selfish absorption of an intensely selfish nature! “Poor Renshaw!”
And the man—he who owed his life to the other many times over, but never so much as in the last instance—what of him?
Nothing! For from such a nature as his nothing was to be expected. This modern Judas, unlike his prototype, was prepared to enjoy to the full the price of blood. No compunction on that head troubled him.
“Oh, Maurice. I must warn you!” cried Violet, suddenly. “Everything has come out.”
He started then. A grey scared look came over his face. His conscience and his mind flew back to those grim, iron-bound deserts.
“Everything?” he stammered, blankly.
“Yes, dear. About ourselves, I mean. I can’t imagine how, but it has. They have been leading me such a life. Hilda has been perfectly hateful. The way in which she has treated me is absolutely scandalous. And Marian—sanctimonious sheep! Pah! I hate them all,” she broke off, her eyes flashing.
“My poor darling. But how do you suppose it happened? You haven’t been leaving any letters about?”
“No—no—no,” she interrupted quickly. “No, no. My belief is—she—she—has found out where I—I am—where you are—and has written to them.”
His face grew dark.
“That devil!” he muttered between his teeth. “That she-devil would do anything—anything.”
“I want to warn you, Maurice. The only way out of the difficulty, while we are here, is for us to pretend to care nothing about each other—that the past was only a matter of a passing flirtation, and not to be taken seriously. Do you follow my plan?”
“Yes; but I don’t like it.”
“That can’t be helped. Do you suppose I like it? But it will not be for long. I am going away very soon—it might be any day now—home again. Then we can make up for the present hateful restraint. What is to prevent you returning by the same steamer? You will, Maurice, darling—you will—will you not?” she urged, clinging closer to him, and looking up into his eyes with a piteously hungering expression, as though fearing to read there the faintest forestalment of a negative. But her fears were groundless.
“Will I? I should rather think I would. Listen, Violet. This mad expedition of poor Fanning’s has turned up trumps. I have that about me at this moment which should be worth two or three hundred thousand pounds at least. Only think of it. We have the world at our feet—a new life before us. You are, as you say, going home. But it will be to a real home!”
She looked into his eyes—her gaze seemed to burn into his—her breast was heaving convulsively.
They understood each other.
“Do you mean it, Maurice?” she gasped. “My darling, do you really and truly mean it?”
“Mean it? Of course I do. It was with no other object I went risking my life a dozen times a day in that ghastly desert. With the wealth that is ours we can afford to defy all the world—that she-devil included. And we will.”
“Yes, we will.”
Their lips met once more, and thus the compact was sealed. Alas—poor Violet! She had given herself over, bound, into the enemy’s hand. She had sold herself, and the price paid was the price of blood—even the blood of him who had sacrificed his own life for her sake.
Chapter Thirty Six.Sellon’s Last Lie.But that he held the key to it in the shape of Violet’s communication, the reserve, not to say coldness, of his reception by the family, would have astonished Sellon not a little. Now, however, it in no wise disconcerted him; rather, it struck him in the light of a joke. He had got his cue, and meant to act up to it.So when his somewhat involuntary host asked if he would mind giving him a private interview, he replied with the jolliest laugh in the world—“Certainly, certainly, my dear fellow. Delighted, Well, Miss Effie”—as that young person ran against them in the hall—“here I am, back again to tease you, you see.”“Where’s Uncle Renshaw, Mr Sellon?” said the child.Maurice stared. The straight question—the straight look accompanying it, disconcerted him for a moment.“Renshaw! Oh, coming on,” he answered quickly, “coming on. Be here soon, I dare say.”He had made the same sort of reply to the same inquiry on the part of his host. He thought he had done with the subject. It irritated him to be called upon to repeat the same lie over and over again.“By the way, Mr Sellon,” began the latter, “did you get the letter I sent you at Maraisdorp?”“Mister Sellon!” Maurice started. Old Chris, was taking the thing seriously indeed, he thought with an inward laugh.“Not I,” he answered. “Probably for the best of all possible reasons. I didn’t come through Maraisdorp, or anywhere near it.”“Before going any further, I want you to look at this,” said Selwood, unlocking a small safe and taking out the unfortunate missive. “Wait—excuse me one moment, I want you to look attentively at the direction first.”He still held the envelope. Maurice took one glance at the address—the handwriting—and as he did so his face was not pleasant to behold.“All right. I know that calligraphy well enough. Ought to by this time. Ha, ha! So she has been favouring you with her peculiar views on things in general and me in particular. You ought to feel honoured.”“I? Favouring me?” echoed the other, in a state of amazement.“Yes—you. I suppose the communication is an interesting one.”“My dear Sellon, look at the address again,” said Christopher, handing him the envelope.“By Jove! It’s for me, after all,” looking at it again. “What a treat! Why the devil can’t the woman write legibly!” he muttered. Then aloud: “Why, it looks exactly as if it was addressed to you, Selwood.”“Ha! I am very glad indeed to hear you say that. I thought the same. You see, I’d got it mixed up among a crowd of other letters, and opened it by mistake.”“The devil you did!”“Yes. I can only tell you how sorry I am, and how I have spent life cursing my blundering asinine stupidity ever since. But there is another thing. I feel bound in honour to tell you that I didn’t become aware of the mistake until I had run my eye down the first page. You will notice there is no beginning. I turned to the signature for enlightenment; but between the first page and the signature I did not read a word.”Sellon burst into a roar of laughter—apparently over the mistake, in reality as he realised how quickly he would be in a position to turn the enemy’s flank.“My dear fellow, don’t say another word about it. The joke is an exceedingly rich one. See what comes of our names being so infernally alike. Two Sells—eh? But you don’t suppose I am going to share in your entertainment over this charming epistle? Not much. Just oblige me with a match.”“Wait, wait,” cried the other. “Better read it this time—or, at any rate, as much of it as it was my misfortune to see.”“H’m! Well, here goes,” said Maurice, jerking the letter out of the envelope as though it would burn his fingers, “Quite so,” he went on, with a bitter sneer, running his eye down the sheet. “That’s about enough of this highly entertaining document, the rest can be taken as read, like a petition to the House of Commons. That match, if you please. Thanks. I need hardly remind you, Selwood,” he went on, watching the flaming sheet curling up in the grate, “I need hardly remind you how many men there are in this world who marry the wrong woman. I dare say I needn’t remind you either that a considerable percentage of these are entrapped and defrauded into the concern by lies and deception, against which it is next to impossible for any man to guard—at all events any young man. When to this I add that there are women in this world who for sheer, gratuitous, uniform fiendishness of disposition could give the devil points and beat him at an easy canter. I think I’ve said about enough for all present purposes.”“This is an awkward and most unpleasant business,” said Selwood. “Excuse me if I feel bound to refer once more to that letter. The—er—writer makes reference by name to Miss Avory, who is a guest in my house, and a relation of my wife’s—and that, too, in a very extraordinary manner, to put it as mildly as I can.”“My dear fellow, that’s a little way of hers. I can assure you I am most awfully put out that you should have been annoyed about the business. As to the mistake, don’t give it another thought.”“How did Mrs—er—the writer—know Miss Avory was here?”This was a facer—not so much the question as the fact that the knowledge of Violet’s whereabouts on the part of the writer implied that he, Sellon, had not met her there at Sunningdale for the first time. But he hoped the other might not notice this side of it.“That’s beyond me,” he answered. “How did she know I was here? For I need hardly tell you we don’t correspond every mail exactly. I can only explain it on the score that more people know Tom Fool than T.F. knows; that there are, I suppose, people in this neighbourhood who hail from the old country, or have relations there, and the postage upon gossip is no higher than that upon business.”“You will not mind my saying that it is a pity we did not know you were a married man.”“‘Had been,’ you should have said, not ‘were.’ Not but what legally I am still tied up fast enough—chained and bound—which has this advantage, that it keeps a man from all temptation to make a fool of himself a second time in his life. Still, it doesn’t count otherwise.”“No, I suppose not,” said the other, significantly. “Perhaps it doesn’t keep a man from making a fool of other people, though.”“Now, my dear Selwood, what the very deuce are you driving at? For Heaven’s sake let us be straight and open with each other.”“Well, I mean this. It’s a most unpleasant thing to have to say to any man. But, you see, Miss Avory is our guest, and a relation as well. You must know as well as I do that your attentions to her were very—er—marked.”One of those jolly laughs which has so genuine a ring, and which Maurice knew so well when to bring in, greeted this speech.“Look here, Selwood,” he said, “I don’t want to hurt your feelings, but the fact is you don’t understand women in the least. You are quite on the wrong tack, believe me. Miss Avory doesn’t care the ghost of a straw for me, or my ‘attentions.’ You must remember that we both knew—er—the same people in England. There, you must fill in the outline. I am not at liberty to say more. But there won’t be much time to put the matter to the test, for I’ve got to leave you again to-morrow.”To Christopher Selwood’s honourable mind no doubt suggested itself as to the genuineness of this explanation. There was a frank straightforwardness about it which, with a man of his character, was bound to tell. He felt intensely relieved. But to this feeling there succeeded one of humiliation. Had he not made an inordinate fuss over the concern at the start? Had he not raised a veritable storm in a teapot, and set everybody by the ears for weeks? Had he not in his anxiety to unburden himself abdicated his own mature judgment in favour of the less reliable decision of his wife? In short, had he not made a consummate ass of himself all round? Of course he had.“By the way, Selwood, there is one thing I want to tell you about now we are together,” said Maurice, after a pause. “You and the others were asking about Fanning just now. The fact is, he is not with me, but I couldn’t say so without entering into further explanations, which would certainly have alarmed the ladies. We found our ‘Valley of the Eye’ all right, and a deuce of a job it was. Pheugh! I wouldn’t go on that jaunt again for twice the loot. The ‘Eye’ is a genuine concern, I can tell you—a splendid stone—Fanning has got it. Well, we spent the day picking up a few other stones, and just as we were clearing out we were attacked by a lot of Bushmen or Korannas, or whatever they were, and had to run. By Jove! it was touch and go. They pressed us hard until dark, and then we had to separate—to throw them off the scent, don’t you see? We agreed to meet at his place—that is, if we were to meet anywhere again in this world. Well, I had an awful time of it in those infernal mountains, dodging the niggers. I couldn’t show my nose in the daytime, and didn’t know the country well enough to make much headway at night, and I nearly starved. It took me more than a week before I could fetch the river, and get through to Fanning’s place, and when I got there he hadn’t turned up. But I found a letter which had been sent by special messenger, requiring me at Cape Town, sharp, about some infernal but important law business, and I’m on my way there now. I left a note for Fanning, telling him what to do with my share of the swag when it came to dividing, for we hadn’t had time to attend to that then, and except a few small stones he has it all on him. It’ll be something good, I guess. I dare say he’s turned up at home again long before this. He was just laughing in his sleeve at the idea of a few niggers like that thinking to run him to earth. And he seems to know that awful country like ABC. I never saw such a fellow.”“That’s bad news, Sellon, right bad news,” said the other, shaking his head. “Renshaw has been all his life at that sort of thing, so we must hope he’ll turn up all right. But—the pitcher that goes too often to the pump, you know.”“Well, I need hardly say I devoutly hope he will, for if not I shall be the loser to a very large extent, as all the swag is with him. But I somehow feel certain we shall hear from him almost directly.”We may be sure that in narrating his adventures that evening to the household at large Sellon in no wise minimised his experiences of the undertaking, or his own exploits. It is only fair to say that he really had undergone a very hard time before he had succeeded in striking the river at the drift where they had crossed; and, indeed, it was more by good luck than management that he had reached it at all. And during his narrative one listener was noting every word he said, with breathless attention. Whenever he looked up, Marian Selwood’s blue eyes were fixed upon his face. He began to feel very uncomfortable beneath that steady searching gaze.But he felt more so when, his story finished, Marian began to ply him with questions. “A regular cross-examination, confound it!” he thought. And then, by way of a diversion, he went to fetch the few diamonds which he had kept apart to show as the sole result of the expedition. These were examined with due interest.The fact of Sellon arriving alone created no suspicion in the minds of Selwood and his wife, nor yet uneasiness. Was he not a newly imported Briton—and to that extent a greenhorn? If he could find his way out and successfully dodge his pursuers, was it likely that a seasoned adventurer such as Renshaw would fare any worse? So on the latter’s account they felt but small anxiety.Not so Marian, however. A terrible suspicion had taken shape within her mind during Sellon’s narrative. “He has murdered him!” was her conclusion. “He has murdered him,” she repeated to herself during a night of sleepless agony—such as a strong concentrative nature will sometimes be called upon to undergo. But she kept her suspicions to herself—for the present, at any rate. She was helpless. What could she do? There was nothing to go upon.Then, on the morrow, Sellon took his departure, as he had announced his intention of doing, and the equanimity with which the circumstance was regarded by Violet, together with their indifferent demeanour towards each other on the previous evening, completely lulled any suspicions which might have lingered in Christopher Selwood’s mind; confirming as it did the other’s frank and straightforward explanation.For his wife had not yet told him all that had transpired between herself and Violet.
But that he held the key to it in the shape of Violet’s communication, the reserve, not to say coldness, of his reception by the family, would have astonished Sellon not a little. Now, however, it in no wise disconcerted him; rather, it struck him in the light of a joke. He had got his cue, and meant to act up to it.
So when his somewhat involuntary host asked if he would mind giving him a private interview, he replied with the jolliest laugh in the world—
“Certainly, certainly, my dear fellow. Delighted, Well, Miss Effie”—as that young person ran against them in the hall—“here I am, back again to tease you, you see.”
“Where’s Uncle Renshaw, Mr Sellon?” said the child.
Maurice stared. The straight question—the straight look accompanying it, disconcerted him for a moment.
“Renshaw! Oh, coming on,” he answered quickly, “coming on. Be here soon, I dare say.”
He had made the same sort of reply to the same inquiry on the part of his host. He thought he had done with the subject. It irritated him to be called upon to repeat the same lie over and over again.
“By the way, Mr Sellon,” began the latter, “did you get the letter I sent you at Maraisdorp?”
“Mister Sellon!” Maurice started. Old Chris, was taking the thing seriously indeed, he thought with an inward laugh.
“Not I,” he answered. “Probably for the best of all possible reasons. I didn’t come through Maraisdorp, or anywhere near it.”
“Before going any further, I want you to look at this,” said Selwood, unlocking a small safe and taking out the unfortunate missive. “Wait—excuse me one moment, I want you to look attentively at the direction first.”
He still held the envelope. Maurice took one glance at the address—the handwriting—and as he did so his face was not pleasant to behold.
“All right. I know that calligraphy well enough. Ought to by this time. Ha, ha! So she has been favouring you with her peculiar views on things in general and me in particular. You ought to feel honoured.”
“I? Favouring me?” echoed the other, in a state of amazement.
“Yes—you. I suppose the communication is an interesting one.”
“My dear Sellon, look at the address again,” said Christopher, handing him the envelope.
“By Jove! It’s for me, after all,” looking at it again. “What a treat! Why the devil can’t the woman write legibly!” he muttered. Then aloud: “Why, it looks exactly as if it was addressed to you, Selwood.”
“Ha! I am very glad indeed to hear you say that. I thought the same. You see, I’d got it mixed up among a crowd of other letters, and opened it by mistake.”
“The devil you did!”
“Yes. I can only tell you how sorry I am, and how I have spent life cursing my blundering asinine stupidity ever since. But there is another thing. I feel bound in honour to tell you that I didn’t become aware of the mistake until I had run my eye down the first page. You will notice there is no beginning. I turned to the signature for enlightenment; but between the first page and the signature I did not read a word.”
Sellon burst into a roar of laughter—apparently over the mistake, in reality as he realised how quickly he would be in a position to turn the enemy’s flank.
“My dear fellow, don’t say another word about it. The joke is an exceedingly rich one. See what comes of our names being so infernally alike. Two Sells—eh? But you don’t suppose I am going to share in your entertainment over this charming epistle? Not much. Just oblige me with a match.”
“Wait, wait,” cried the other. “Better read it this time—or, at any rate, as much of it as it was my misfortune to see.”
“H’m! Well, here goes,” said Maurice, jerking the letter out of the envelope as though it would burn his fingers, “Quite so,” he went on, with a bitter sneer, running his eye down the sheet. “That’s about enough of this highly entertaining document, the rest can be taken as read, like a petition to the House of Commons. That match, if you please. Thanks. I need hardly remind you, Selwood,” he went on, watching the flaming sheet curling up in the grate, “I need hardly remind you how many men there are in this world who marry the wrong woman. I dare say I needn’t remind you either that a considerable percentage of these are entrapped and defrauded into the concern by lies and deception, against which it is next to impossible for any man to guard—at all events any young man. When to this I add that there are women in this world who for sheer, gratuitous, uniform fiendishness of disposition could give the devil points and beat him at an easy canter. I think I’ve said about enough for all present purposes.”
“This is an awkward and most unpleasant business,” said Selwood. “Excuse me if I feel bound to refer once more to that letter. The—er—writer makes reference by name to Miss Avory, who is a guest in my house, and a relation of my wife’s—and that, too, in a very extraordinary manner, to put it as mildly as I can.”
“My dear fellow, that’s a little way of hers. I can assure you I am most awfully put out that you should have been annoyed about the business. As to the mistake, don’t give it another thought.”
“How did Mrs—er—the writer—know Miss Avory was here?”
This was a facer—not so much the question as the fact that the knowledge of Violet’s whereabouts on the part of the writer implied that he, Sellon, had not met her there at Sunningdale for the first time. But he hoped the other might not notice this side of it.
“That’s beyond me,” he answered. “How did she know I was here? For I need hardly tell you we don’t correspond every mail exactly. I can only explain it on the score that more people know Tom Fool than T.F. knows; that there are, I suppose, people in this neighbourhood who hail from the old country, or have relations there, and the postage upon gossip is no higher than that upon business.”
“You will not mind my saying that it is a pity we did not know you were a married man.”
“‘Had been,’ you should have said, not ‘were.’ Not but what legally I am still tied up fast enough—chained and bound—which has this advantage, that it keeps a man from all temptation to make a fool of himself a second time in his life. Still, it doesn’t count otherwise.”
“No, I suppose not,” said the other, significantly. “Perhaps it doesn’t keep a man from making a fool of other people, though.”
“Now, my dear Selwood, what the very deuce are you driving at? For Heaven’s sake let us be straight and open with each other.”
“Well, I mean this. It’s a most unpleasant thing to have to say to any man. But, you see, Miss Avory is our guest, and a relation as well. You must know as well as I do that your attentions to her were very—er—marked.”
One of those jolly laughs which has so genuine a ring, and which Maurice knew so well when to bring in, greeted this speech.
“Look here, Selwood,” he said, “I don’t want to hurt your feelings, but the fact is you don’t understand women in the least. You are quite on the wrong tack, believe me. Miss Avory doesn’t care the ghost of a straw for me, or my ‘attentions.’ You must remember that we both knew—er—the same people in England. There, you must fill in the outline. I am not at liberty to say more. But there won’t be much time to put the matter to the test, for I’ve got to leave you again to-morrow.”
To Christopher Selwood’s honourable mind no doubt suggested itself as to the genuineness of this explanation. There was a frank straightforwardness about it which, with a man of his character, was bound to tell. He felt intensely relieved. But to this feeling there succeeded one of humiliation. Had he not made an inordinate fuss over the concern at the start? Had he not raised a veritable storm in a teapot, and set everybody by the ears for weeks? Had he not in his anxiety to unburden himself abdicated his own mature judgment in favour of the less reliable decision of his wife? In short, had he not made a consummate ass of himself all round? Of course he had.
“By the way, Selwood, there is one thing I want to tell you about now we are together,” said Maurice, after a pause. “You and the others were asking about Fanning just now. The fact is, he is not with me, but I couldn’t say so without entering into further explanations, which would certainly have alarmed the ladies. We found our ‘Valley of the Eye’ all right, and a deuce of a job it was. Pheugh! I wouldn’t go on that jaunt again for twice the loot. The ‘Eye’ is a genuine concern, I can tell you—a splendid stone—Fanning has got it. Well, we spent the day picking up a few other stones, and just as we were clearing out we were attacked by a lot of Bushmen or Korannas, or whatever they were, and had to run. By Jove! it was touch and go. They pressed us hard until dark, and then we had to separate—to throw them off the scent, don’t you see? We agreed to meet at his place—that is, if we were to meet anywhere again in this world. Well, I had an awful time of it in those infernal mountains, dodging the niggers. I couldn’t show my nose in the daytime, and didn’t know the country well enough to make much headway at night, and I nearly starved. It took me more than a week before I could fetch the river, and get through to Fanning’s place, and when I got there he hadn’t turned up. But I found a letter which had been sent by special messenger, requiring me at Cape Town, sharp, about some infernal but important law business, and I’m on my way there now. I left a note for Fanning, telling him what to do with my share of the swag when it came to dividing, for we hadn’t had time to attend to that then, and except a few small stones he has it all on him. It’ll be something good, I guess. I dare say he’s turned up at home again long before this. He was just laughing in his sleeve at the idea of a few niggers like that thinking to run him to earth. And he seems to know that awful country like ABC. I never saw such a fellow.”
“That’s bad news, Sellon, right bad news,” said the other, shaking his head. “Renshaw has been all his life at that sort of thing, so we must hope he’ll turn up all right. But—the pitcher that goes too often to the pump, you know.”
“Well, I need hardly say I devoutly hope he will, for if not I shall be the loser to a very large extent, as all the swag is with him. But I somehow feel certain we shall hear from him almost directly.”
We may be sure that in narrating his adventures that evening to the household at large Sellon in no wise minimised his experiences of the undertaking, or his own exploits. It is only fair to say that he really had undergone a very hard time before he had succeeded in striking the river at the drift where they had crossed; and, indeed, it was more by good luck than management that he had reached it at all. And during his narrative one listener was noting every word he said, with breathless attention. Whenever he looked up, Marian Selwood’s blue eyes were fixed upon his face. He began to feel very uncomfortable beneath that steady searching gaze.
But he felt more so when, his story finished, Marian began to ply him with questions. “A regular cross-examination, confound it!” he thought. And then, by way of a diversion, he went to fetch the few diamonds which he had kept apart to show as the sole result of the expedition. These were examined with due interest.
The fact of Sellon arriving alone created no suspicion in the minds of Selwood and his wife, nor yet uneasiness. Was he not a newly imported Briton—and to that extent a greenhorn? If he could find his way out and successfully dodge his pursuers, was it likely that a seasoned adventurer such as Renshaw would fare any worse? So on the latter’s account they felt but small anxiety.
Not so Marian, however. A terrible suspicion had taken shape within her mind during Sellon’s narrative. “He has murdered him!” was her conclusion. “He has murdered him,” she repeated to herself during a night of sleepless agony—such as a strong concentrative nature will sometimes be called upon to undergo. But she kept her suspicions to herself—for the present, at any rate. She was helpless. What could she do? There was nothing to go upon.
Then, on the morrow, Sellon took his departure, as he had announced his intention of doing, and the equanimity with which the circumstance was regarded by Violet, together with their indifferent demeanour towards each other on the previous evening, completely lulled any suspicions which might have lingered in Christopher Selwood’s mind; confirming as it did the other’s frank and straightforward explanation.
For his wife had not yet told him all that had transpired between herself and Violet.
Chapter Thirty Seven.From the Dark River’s Brink.It was a weird picture. The grey rocks jutting forth into the evening stillness; the spotted, creeping beast, gathering itself together for its deadly spring; the man, weakened, helpless, lying there at its mercy. Even then, so strange are the fantasies that cross the human brain at the most critical moments—even then, with a kind of grim humour it flashed upon Renshaw Fanning how thoroughly the positions were reversed. Many a time had the spotted pard fallen a victim to his sure aim; now it had devolved upon one of the feline race to give him his death stroke.With bared fangs and snarling throat, the brute once more gathered itself to spring. But instead of hurling itself upon the prey before it, it uttered a yell of pain and whisking half round seemed to be snapping at its own side. Its tail lashed convulsively, and a frightful roar escaped from its furry chest. There was a faint twanging sound beneath, and again something struck it, this time fair in the eye. Snarling hideously the great beast reared itself up against the cliff, beating the air wildly with its formidable paws. Then its mighty bulk swayed, toppled over, and fell crashing to the ground beneath.Thoroughly roused now, Renshaw peered cautiously over the ledge. But what he saw opened his eyes to the fact that this opportune, this unlooked-for deliverance, was more apparent than real. In escaping from one peril he had only fallen into another.The huge cat was rolling and writhing in the throes of death. Its slayer, an under-sized, shrivelled barbarian, was approaching it cautiously—a naked Koranna, armed with bow and arrows and spear. But cautiously as Renshaw had peeped forth the keen glance of the savage had seen him. Their eyes had met.He lay still, thinking over this last, this desperate chance. He was unarmed—practically that is—for although he had a knife it was not likely the enemy would come to such close quarters as to admit of its use. The latter with his bow and arrows would have him at the most perfect disadvantage. He could climb up to the ledge and finish him off at his leisure.For some minutes Renshaw lay still as death. Not a sound broke the silence, not a voice, not a footfall. Perhaps, after all, he had been mistaken, and the Koranna had not seen him. Or, more likely, the savage had started off to call up his companions, who probably were not far distant. Was it worth while utilising his chances so far as to make one more effort to save his life, to strive to gain some other place of concealment before the whole horde came up?But just then a sound reached his ear—a faint, stealthy rasping. The Koranna was already climbing up to the ledge.The mysterious shuffling continued. A stone, loosened by the climber, fell clattering down the rocks. Then there was silence once more—and—A wrinkled, parchment-hued countenance reared itself up, peering round the elbow of the cliff. The yellow eyes stared with a wild beast-like gleam, the black wool and protruding ears looking fiend-like in the falling darkness. His hour had come. Momentarily he expected to receive the fatal shaft.But it came not. After the head followed the squat, ungainly body, standing upright upon the ledge, the sinewy, ape-like hand grasping its primitive, but fatal, armament—the bow and arrows and the spear. But the bow was not bent, no arrow was fitted to the string.“Allamaghtaag! Myn lieve Baas!” (“Almighty! My dear master!”)Renshaw sat upright and stared at the speaker, and well he might. Was he dreaming? The old familiar Dutch colloquialism—the voice!The squalid, forbidding-looking savage advanced, his puckered face transformed with concern. Renshaw stared, and stared again. And then he recognised the familiar, if unprepossessing lineaments of his defaulting retainer—old Dirk.The old Koranna rushed forward and knelt down at his master’s side, pouring forth a voluble torrent of questions in the Boer dialect. How had he come there? Where was he wounded? Who had dared to attack him? Thoseschelm Bosjesmenschen(Rascally Bushmen)! He would declare war against the whole race of them. He would shoot them all. And so on, and so on. But amid all his chatter the faithful old fellow, having discovered where the wound was, had promptly ripped off Renshaw’s boot.Yes, there it was—the poisoned puncture of the Bushman arrow—livid and swollen. For a moment Dirk contemplated it. Then he bent down and examined it more attentively, probing it gingerly with his finger. The result seemed to satisfy him.“Nay, what, Baasje (Literally, ‘little master.’ A term of endearment), you will not die this time. The thick leather of the boot has taken off nearly all the poison, and all the running you have had since has done the rest. Still, it was a near thing—a near thing.’Maghtaag!—if the arrow had pierced you anywhere but through the boot you would have been a dead man long since. Not this time—not this time.”“And the tiger, Dirk?” said Renshaw, with a faint smile. “You are indeed a mighty hunter.” For he remembered how often he had chaffed the old Koranna on his much vaunted prowess as a hunter, little thinking in what stead it should eventually stand himself.“The tiger? Ja Baas. I will just go down and take off his skin before it gets pitch dark. Lie you here and sleep. You are quite safe now, Baas—quite safe. You will not die this time—’Maghtaag, no!”So poor Renshaw sank back in a profound slumber, for he was thoroughly exhausted. And all through the hours of darkness, while the wild denizens of the waste bayed and howled among the grim and lonely mountains, the little weazened old yellow man crouched there watching beside him on that rocky ledge, so faithfully, so lovingly. His comrade—the white man—his friend and equal—had deserted him—had left him alone in that desert waste to die, and this runaway servant of his—the degraded and heathen savage—clung to him in his extremity, watched by his side ready to defend him if necessary at the cost of his own life.
It was a weird picture. The grey rocks jutting forth into the evening stillness; the spotted, creeping beast, gathering itself together for its deadly spring; the man, weakened, helpless, lying there at its mercy. Even then, so strange are the fantasies that cross the human brain at the most critical moments—even then, with a kind of grim humour it flashed upon Renshaw Fanning how thoroughly the positions were reversed. Many a time had the spotted pard fallen a victim to his sure aim; now it had devolved upon one of the feline race to give him his death stroke.
With bared fangs and snarling throat, the brute once more gathered itself to spring. But instead of hurling itself upon the prey before it, it uttered a yell of pain and whisking half round seemed to be snapping at its own side. Its tail lashed convulsively, and a frightful roar escaped from its furry chest. There was a faint twanging sound beneath, and again something struck it, this time fair in the eye. Snarling hideously the great beast reared itself up against the cliff, beating the air wildly with its formidable paws. Then its mighty bulk swayed, toppled over, and fell crashing to the ground beneath.
Thoroughly roused now, Renshaw peered cautiously over the ledge. But what he saw opened his eyes to the fact that this opportune, this unlooked-for deliverance, was more apparent than real. In escaping from one peril he had only fallen into another.
The huge cat was rolling and writhing in the throes of death. Its slayer, an under-sized, shrivelled barbarian, was approaching it cautiously—a naked Koranna, armed with bow and arrows and spear. But cautiously as Renshaw had peeped forth the keen glance of the savage had seen him. Their eyes had met.
He lay still, thinking over this last, this desperate chance. He was unarmed—practically that is—for although he had a knife it was not likely the enemy would come to such close quarters as to admit of its use. The latter with his bow and arrows would have him at the most perfect disadvantage. He could climb up to the ledge and finish him off at his leisure.
For some minutes Renshaw lay still as death. Not a sound broke the silence, not a voice, not a footfall. Perhaps, after all, he had been mistaken, and the Koranna had not seen him. Or, more likely, the savage had started off to call up his companions, who probably were not far distant. Was it worth while utilising his chances so far as to make one more effort to save his life, to strive to gain some other place of concealment before the whole horde came up?
But just then a sound reached his ear—a faint, stealthy rasping. The Koranna was already climbing up to the ledge.
The mysterious shuffling continued. A stone, loosened by the climber, fell clattering down the rocks. Then there was silence once more—and—
A wrinkled, parchment-hued countenance reared itself up, peering round the elbow of the cliff. The yellow eyes stared with a wild beast-like gleam, the black wool and protruding ears looking fiend-like in the falling darkness. His hour had come. Momentarily he expected to receive the fatal shaft.
But it came not. After the head followed the squat, ungainly body, standing upright upon the ledge, the sinewy, ape-like hand grasping its primitive, but fatal, armament—the bow and arrows and the spear. But the bow was not bent, no arrow was fitted to the string.
“Allamaghtaag! Myn lieve Baas!” (“Almighty! My dear master!”)
Renshaw sat upright and stared at the speaker, and well he might. Was he dreaming? The old familiar Dutch colloquialism—the voice!
The squalid, forbidding-looking savage advanced, his puckered face transformed with concern. Renshaw stared, and stared again. And then he recognised the familiar, if unprepossessing lineaments of his defaulting retainer—old Dirk.
The old Koranna rushed forward and knelt down at his master’s side, pouring forth a voluble torrent of questions in the Boer dialect. How had he come there? Where was he wounded? Who had dared to attack him? Thoseschelm Bosjesmenschen(Rascally Bushmen)! He would declare war against the whole race of them. He would shoot them all. And so on, and so on. But amid all his chatter the faithful old fellow, having discovered where the wound was, had promptly ripped off Renshaw’s boot.
Yes, there it was—the poisoned puncture of the Bushman arrow—livid and swollen. For a moment Dirk contemplated it. Then he bent down and examined it more attentively, probing it gingerly with his finger. The result seemed to satisfy him.
“Nay, what, Baasje (Literally, ‘little master.’ A term of endearment), you will not die this time. The thick leather of the boot has taken off nearly all the poison, and all the running you have had since has done the rest. Still, it was a near thing—a near thing.’Maghtaag!—if the arrow had pierced you anywhere but through the boot you would have been a dead man long since. Not this time—not this time.”
“And the tiger, Dirk?” said Renshaw, with a faint smile. “You are indeed a mighty hunter.” For he remembered how often he had chaffed the old Koranna on his much vaunted prowess as a hunter, little thinking in what stead it should eventually stand himself.
“The tiger? Ja Baas. I will just go down and take off his skin before it gets pitch dark. Lie you here and sleep. You are quite safe now, Baas—quite safe. You will not die this time—’Maghtaag, no!”
So poor Renshaw sank back in a profound slumber, for he was thoroughly exhausted. And all through the hours of darkness, while the wild denizens of the waste bayed and howled among the grim and lonely mountains, the little weazened old yellow man crouched there watching beside him on that rocky ledge, so faithfully, so lovingly. His comrade—the white man—his friend and equal—had deserted him—had left him alone in that desert waste to die, and this runaway servant of his—the degraded and heathen savage—clung to him in his extremity, watched by his side ready to defend him if necessary at the cost of his own life.
Chapter Thirty Eight.“Eheu!”The homeward-bound mail steamer had hauled out from the Cape Town docks, and lay moored to the jetty. In less than an hour she would cast loose and start upon her voyage to Old England.The funnel of theSiberianshone like a newly blacked boot, as did her plated sides, glistening with a coating of fresh paint. Her scuttles flashed like eyes in the sun, and the gleam of her polished brasswork was such as to cause semi-blindness for five minutes after you looked at it. The white pennon of the Union Steamship Company with its red Saint Andrew’s cross fluttered at one tapering masthead; at the other the blue peter.On board of her all was wild confusion. Her decks were crowded with passengers and their friends seeing them off, the latter outnumbering the former six to one; with hawkers of curios and hawkers of books; with quay porters and stewards bringing on and receiving passengers’ luggage; with innumerable hat-boxes, and wraps, and hold-alls, and other loose gear; with squalling and rampageous children; with flurried and excited females rushing hither and thither, and getting into everybody’s way while besieging every soul—from the chief officer to the cook’s boy—with frantic inquiries. The Babel of tongues was deafening, and over and above all the harassing rattle of the donkey engine lowering luggage into the hold. And to swell the clamouring crowd, an endless procession of cabs, driven by broad-hatted Malays, came dashing up to the jetty—laden with passengers and band-boxes and bananas and other truck of nondescript character.Moving among the throng upon the ship’s decks vere two ladies—one elderly, plethoric, matronly; the other young, vivacious, tastefully attired, and in short a very beautiful girl. Many a male glance was cast at her, accompanied by an aspiration—spoken or unspoken—that she was going to sail, and was not one of the “seeing-off” contingent.“Don’t you think, Violet,” said the elder lady, “we’d better go down to your cabin now? They’ll have taken your luggage there by this time.”“Not yet, Mrs Aldridge. I can still see my brown portmanteau among that heap for the hold. I want to see it go down myself, and be sure of it. Besides, there must be some more of my things under that pile of boxes.”“What a fine ship that New Zealand boat is!” said the old lady, looking at a large steamer anchored out in the bay and surrounded by a swarm of tiny craft, depleted or added to by a continuous string of boats between it and the shore. She, too, was flying the blue peter.“Isn’t she!” acquiesced Violet. “She’s theRangatira, and is nearly a thousand tons larger than theSiberian. I wonder if she’ll be the first to start. Ah! there goes my portmanteau. Now I think we may go below.”The crowd in the saloon was not less dense than that on the decks, certainly not less noisy. Champagne corks were popping in all directions. Every table, every lounge was crowded. Stewards were skurrying hither and thither with their trays of bottles and glasses, steering their way with marvellous dexterity among the people, harassed by a chorus of orders, expostulations, objurgations from expectant or disappointed passengers. Groups were making merry, and pledging each other in foaming bumpers, the “seeing-off” contingent in particular making special play with the sparkling “gooseberry,” all chattering, talking, laughing. The din was deafening, but the two ladies managed to thread their way through it at last.“Well, it’s quiet here, at any rate,” said Violet, as they gained her cabin, of which by favour she was to enjoy the sole possession. “Quiet, but not cool—ugh!” for the scuttle being shut, that peculiar close odour which seems inseparable from all ship cabins, and is in its insufferable fugginess suggestive of seasickness, struck them in full blast.“I’m glad I’m not going with you,” said Mrs Aldridge. “I never could stand the sea. I declare I’m beginning to feel queer already.”“Oh no. All imagination,” said Violet, gaily, flinging open the scuttle.“And now, dear,” went on the old lady, “I suppose we haven’t many minutes more together. I needn’t tell you how glad I have been to have had you with me, and Chris. Selwood will like to know that I saw you off, bright and cheerful.”Violet kissed her heartily. A strange compunction came over the girl. The old lady had been very kind to her during her brief stay. Mrs Aldridge was a relation of Selwood’s, and to her care Violet had been consigned for the few days during which theSiberianshould be lying in Cape Town docks. Upon which good ship Selwood had safely conveyed her, having, at considerable inconvenience to himself, escorted her to Port Elizabeth, and seen the last of her safe on board.“Oh, where is my brown hold-all?” cried Violet, suddenly looking round. “It contains all my wraps—sunshade—everything. Dear Mrs Aldridge, do wait here and mount guard over my things while I go up and find it. The stewards are so careless. Besides, they might put some one else in the cabin, and then it wouldn’t be so easy to get them out.”As Violet gained the deck, the short sharp strokes of the ship’s bell rang out its warning summons. The “seeing-off” contingent must prepare to go ashore, unless it would risk an involuntary voyage. Mrs Aldridge, naturally prone to flurry, sitting there among Violet’s boxes and bundles, started at the sound.“Oh dear! I shall be carried to sea!” she ejaculated, piteously. “Why doesn’t she come?”Minutes slipped by, and still Violet did not appear. Again rang out the sharp imperative strokes of the bell.“I must go and look for her,” cried the old lady, starting up with that intent. Peering wildly around she reached the deck. Still no sign of Violet.Two great red conveyances, each drawn by four horses, came clattering up the jetty. They were the mail carts. With lightning swiftness their contents were transferred to the deck and to the hold. The captain, resplendent in buttons and gold lace, was on the bridge. The steam-pipe was roaring as though impatient of further restraint. Already the passing to and fro between the steamer and the jetty had about ceased.“Violet—Violet! Oh, where can she be?” cried the old lady, in a perfect agony of mind.Ah, she might have gone back to the cabin. She would go and see. Turning, she was hastening to carry out that idea when again the brazen clang of the bell, this time startling in its peremptory note, caused her to stop short.“Now, marm—if you’re not going with us it’s time to leave,” said a gruff voice at her side. “Quick, please, she’s a-moving already,” and half thrusting, half lifting the bewildered old lady, the burly quartermaster transferred her to the gangway plank, which no sooner had she crossed than it was withdrawn.The great steamer slid gently from her moorings, a crowd following her to the end of the jetty, hooraying violently, waving handkerchiefs, bawling out parting fragments of chaff and snatches of songs, and amid all this champagne-bred enthusiasm, its blaring clamour drowning the real grief of the sorrowing few, the propeller of the good shipSiberianthrobbed faster and faster, as she swung steadily into her courseen routefor the Old Country.Left there upon the jetty, hardly knowing whether she stood on her head or not, poor old Mrs Aldridge was quite overcome. What had become of Violet? Could any harm have happened to the girl? Could she have fallen overboard unseen? No, that could hardly be. They must have missed each other in the crowd and confusion. That was it. Still the thought that she had not taken a last and more affectionate farewell filled the good old lady with profound regret. Well, standing there would not mend matters. She must get home.And as she turned to leave the jetty, the warning notes of the shore bell on board the New Zealand steamer came floating across the bay.Through the creaming surges of Table Bay theRangatirais speeding on her southward course. The loom of the mountainous coast has faded into night, and now the dark velvety vault above is ablaze with mysterious stars, crowding the zenith, hanging literally in patches of sheeny gold rather than twinkling with the feeble and scattered glimmer of more chilly latitudes. There is a damp, sensuous richness in the atmosphere, just tempered by the keen whiff of the salt sea.The prow of the mighty vessel cleaves up a rushing lustrous wave on either side, and streaming afar in her wake lies a broad band of milky phosphorescent whiteness, striving to rival the very heavens in the starry atoms gleaming in its depths. The tall, tapering masts reel wildly against the spangled sky, and the harsh clang of the labouring engines make weird harmony with the thunderous throb of the propeller as the great ship drives in her power before the chasing billows.On the hurricane deck, under the lee of one of the boats swung inward and resting on chocks, leaning over the taffrail, stand two figures—one tall, powerful, masculine—wrapped in a long ulster, the other lithe, graceful, feminine—cloaked and hooded, for, if the atmosphere contains no chill, it holds a dampness which bids fair to do duty for the same. Surely that oval face, those delicate, regular features can belong to no other than Violet Avory. No need to identify her companion.“You did that well, Violet,” Sellon was saying. “The idea of that old party sitting there mounting guard over your wraps on board the wrong ship is a reminiscence that’ll set me up in laughter for the rest of my life.”“Poor old Mrs Aldridge,” said Violet, with a touch of compunction. “I’m afraid she won’t get over it in a hurry—and she’s a good old thing. But it’s all Hilda Selwood’s fault. She shouldn’t have set her relations on to ‘police’ me.” And the speaker’s tone became hard and defiant.“Ha, ha! It wasn’t in them to upset our little programme, though. When old Selwood put you on board theSiberianat Fort Elizabeth, he reckoned it was all safe then. So it was, as far as he was concerned. He’s a good chap, though, is Selwood, and I wouldn’t willingly plant such a sell upon him if I could help it, but I couldn’t. It’s ever a case of two ‘sells’ as between him and me, to distort his old joke. It was nearly a third one, though, Violet, for I was beginning to make up my mind you were never coming. In another minute I should have gone ashore again when I saw your cab tearing along like mad. As it was, we only fetched theRangatiraby the skin of our teeth, and a royal honorarium to the boatmen.”“Ah, Maurice, I have got you now—and you are mine. Are you not, darling?”“It looks uncommonly like it.”“For life?”“For that identical period. So now, cheer up, my Violet. The world is a mere football at the feet of those who have the means to exploit it, and we have. That wretched little foggy England isn’t the whole world.”The great steamship went shearing on through the midnight sea, heaving to the Atlantic surge, as she stood upon her course. But the other vessel swiftly speeding northward—soon would she arrive with a forestalment in a measure—in the unaccountable non-appearance of one of her passengers—of the terrible news which must eventually be broken to Violet’s mother.But whereas Violet’s own will was the sole principle which had been allowed to govern her life from the day of her birth, it must be admitted, sorrowfully, that her mother was now only reaping what she had sown.
The homeward-bound mail steamer had hauled out from the Cape Town docks, and lay moored to the jetty. In less than an hour she would cast loose and start upon her voyage to Old England.
The funnel of theSiberianshone like a newly blacked boot, as did her plated sides, glistening with a coating of fresh paint. Her scuttles flashed like eyes in the sun, and the gleam of her polished brasswork was such as to cause semi-blindness for five minutes after you looked at it. The white pennon of the Union Steamship Company with its red Saint Andrew’s cross fluttered at one tapering masthead; at the other the blue peter.
On board of her all was wild confusion. Her decks were crowded with passengers and their friends seeing them off, the latter outnumbering the former six to one; with hawkers of curios and hawkers of books; with quay porters and stewards bringing on and receiving passengers’ luggage; with innumerable hat-boxes, and wraps, and hold-alls, and other loose gear; with squalling and rampageous children; with flurried and excited females rushing hither and thither, and getting into everybody’s way while besieging every soul—from the chief officer to the cook’s boy—with frantic inquiries. The Babel of tongues was deafening, and over and above all the harassing rattle of the donkey engine lowering luggage into the hold. And to swell the clamouring crowd, an endless procession of cabs, driven by broad-hatted Malays, came dashing up to the jetty—laden with passengers and band-boxes and bananas and other truck of nondescript character.
Moving among the throng upon the ship’s decks vere two ladies—one elderly, plethoric, matronly; the other young, vivacious, tastefully attired, and in short a very beautiful girl. Many a male glance was cast at her, accompanied by an aspiration—spoken or unspoken—that she was going to sail, and was not one of the “seeing-off” contingent.
“Don’t you think, Violet,” said the elder lady, “we’d better go down to your cabin now? They’ll have taken your luggage there by this time.”
“Not yet, Mrs Aldridge. I can still see my brown portmanteau among that heap for the hold. I want to see it go down myself, and be sure of it. Besides, there must be some more of my things under that pile of boxes.”
“What a fine ship that New Zealand boat is!” said the old lady, looking at a large steamer anchored out in the bay and surrounded by a swarm of tiny craft, depleted or added to by a continuous string of boats between it and the shore. She, too, was flying the blue peter.
“Isn’t she!” acquiesced Violet. “She’s theRangatira, and is nearly a thousand tons larger than theSiberian. I wonder if she’ll be the first to start. Ah! there goes my portmanteau. Now I think we may go below.”
The crowd in the saloon was not less dense than that on the decks, certainly not less noisy. Champagne corks were popping in all directions. Every table, every lounge was crowded. Stewards were skurrying hither and thither with their trays of bottles and glasses, steering their way with marvellous dexterity among the people, harassed by a chorus of orders, expostulations, objurgations from expectant or disappointed passengers. Groups were making merry, and pledging each other in foaming bumpers, the “seeing-off” contingent in particular making special play with the sparkling “gooseberry,” all chattering, talking, laughing. The din was deafening, but the two ladies managed to thread their way through it at last.
“Well, it’s quiet here, at any rate,” said Violet, as they gained her cabin, of which by favour she was to enjoy the sole possession. “Quiet, but not cool—ugh!” for the scuttle being shut, that peculiar close odour which seems inseparable from all ship cabins, and is in its insufferable fugginess suggestive of seasickness, struck them in full blast.
“I’m glad I’m not going with you,” said Mrs Aldridge. “I never could stand the sea. I declare I’m beginning to feel queer already.”
“Oh no. All imagination,” said Violet, gaily, flinging open the scuttle.
“And now, dear,” went on the old lady, “I suppose we haven’t many minutes more together. I needn’t tell you how glad I have been to have had you with me, and Chris. Selwood will like to know that I saw you off, bright and cheerful.”
Violet kissed her heartily. A strange compunction came over the girl. The old lady had been very kind to her during her brief stay. Mrs Aldridge was a relation of Selwood’s, and to her care Violet had been consigned for the few days during which theSiberianshould be lying in Cape Town docks. Upon which good ship Selwood had safely conveyed her, having, at considerable inconvenience to himself, escorted her to Port Elizabeth, and seen the last of her safe on board.
“Oh, where is my brown hold-all?” cried Violet, suddenly looking round. “It contains all my wraps—sunshade—everything. Dear Mrs Aldridge, do wait here and mount guard over my things while I go up and find it. The stewards are so careless. Besides, they might put some one else in the cabin, and then it wouldn’t be so easy to get them out.”
As Violet gained the deck, the short sharp strokes of the ship’s bell rang out its warning summons. The “seeing-off” contingent must prepare to go ashore, unless it would risk an involuntary voyage. Mrs Aldridge, naturally prone to flurry, sitting there among Violet’s boxes and bundles, started at the sound.
“Oh dear! I shall be carried to sea!” she ejaculated, piteously. “Why doesn’t she come?”
Minutes slipped by, and still Violet did not appear. Again rang out the sharp imperative strokes of the bell.
“I must go and look for her,” cried the old lady, starting up with that intent. Peering wildly around she reached the deck. Still no sign of Violet.
Two great red conveyances, each drawn by four horses, came clattering up the jetty. They were the mail carts. With lightning swiftness their contents were transferred to the deck and to the hold. The captain, resplendent in buttons and gold lace, was on the bridge. The steam-pipe was roaring as though impatient of further restraint. Already the passing to and fro between the steamer and the jetty had about ceased.
“Violet—Violet! Oh, where can she be?” cried the old lady, in a perfect agony of mind.
Ah, she might have gone back to the cabin. She would go and see. Turning, she was hastening to carry out that idea when again the brazen clang of the bell, this time startling in its peremptory note, caused her to stop short.
“Now, marm—if you’re not going with us it’s time to leave,” said a gruff voice at her side. “Quick, please, she’s a-moving already,” and half thrusting, half lifting the bewildered old lady, the burly quartermaster transferred her to the gangway plank, which no sooner had she crossed than it was withdrawn.
The great steamer slid gently from her moorings, a crowd following her to the end of the jetty, hooraying violently, waving handkerchiefs, bawling out parting fragments of chaff and snatches of songs, and amid all this champagne-bred enthusiasm, its blaring clamour drowning the real grief of the sorrowing few, the propeller of the good shipSiberianthrobbed faster and faster, as she swung steadily into her courseen routefor the Old Country.
Left there upon the jetty, hardly knowing whether she stood on her head or not, poor old Mrs Aldridge was quite overcome. What had become of Violet? Could any harm have happened to the girl? Could she have fallen overboard unseen? No, that could hardly be. They must have missed each other in the crowd and confusion. That was it. Still the thought that she had not taken a last and more affectionate farewell filled the good old lady with profound regret. Well, standing there would not mend matters. She must get home.
And as she turned to leave the jetty, the warning notes of the shore bell on board the New Zealand steamer came floating across the bay.
Through the creaming surges of Table Bay theRangatirais speeding on her southward course. The loom of the mountainous coast has faded into night, and now the dark velvety vault above is ablaze with mysterious stars, crowding the zenith, hanging literally in patches of sheeny gold rather than twinkling with the feeble and scattered glimmer of more chilly latitudes. There is a damp, sensuous richness in the atmosphere, just tempered by the keen whiff of the salt sea.
The prow of the mighty vessel cleaves up a rushing lustrous wave on either side, and streaming afar in her wake lies a broad band of milky phosphorescent whiteness, striving to rival the very heavens in the starry atoms gleaming in its depths. The tall, tapering masts reel wildly against the spangled sky, and the harsh clang of the labouring engines make weird harmony with the thunderous throb of the propeller as the great ship drives in her power before the chasing billows.
On the hurricane deck, under the lee of one of the boats swung inward and resting on chocks, leaning over the taffrail, stand two figures—one tall, powerful, masculine—wrapped in a long ulster, the other lithe, graceful, feminine—cloaked and hooded, for, if the atmosphere contains no chill, it holds a dampness which bids fair to do duty for the same. Surely that oval face, those delicate, regular features can belong to no other than Violet Avory. No need to identify her companion.
“You did that well, Violet,” Sellon was saying. “The idea of that old party sitting there mounting guard over your wraps on board the wrong ship is a reminiscence that’ll set me up in laughter for the rest of my life.”
“Poor old Mrs Aldridge,” said Violet, with a touch of compunction. “I’m afraid she won’t get over it in a hurry—and she’s a good old thing. But it’s all Hilda Selwood’s fault. She shouldn’t have set her relations on to ‘police’ me.” And the speaker’s tone became hard and defiant.
“Ha, ha! It wasn’t in them to upset our little programme, though. When old Selwood put you on board theSiberianat Fort Elizabeth, he reckoned it was all safe then. So it was, as far as he was concerned. He’s a good chap, though, is Selwood, and I wouldn’t willingly plant such a sell upon him if I could help it, but I couldn’t. It’s ever a case of two ‘sells’ as between him and me, to distort his old joke. It was nearly a third one, though, Violet, for I was beginning to make up my mind you were never coming. In another minute I should have gone ashore again when I saw your cab tearing along like mad. As it was, we only fetched theRangatiraby the skin of our teeth, and a royal honorarium to the boatmen.”
“Ah, Maurice, I have got you now—and you are mine. Are you not, darling?”
“It looks uncommonly like it.”
“For life?”
“For that identical period. So now, cheer up, my Violet. The world is a mere football at the feet of those who have the means to exploit it, and we have. That wretched little foggy England isn’t the whole world.”
The great steamship went shearing on through the midnight sea, heaving to the Atlantic surge, as she stood upon her course. But the other vessel swiftly speeding northward—soon would she arrive with a forestalment in a measure—in the unaccountable non-appearance of one of her passengers—of the terrible news which must eventually be broken to Violet’s mother.
But whereas Violet’s own will was the sole principle which had been allowed to govern her life from the day of her birth, it must be admitted, sorrowfully, that her mother was now only reaping what she had sown.
Chapter Thirty Nine.Conclusion.Three years have gone by.Now three years cover a pretty fair section of time. A good deal can be got into that space. But the hand of Time, with its changes and chances, has passed but lightly over peaceful, prosperous Sunningdale. It has, perchance, added a touch of hoar-frost to Christopher Selwood’s brown beard, but only through the harmless agency of wear and tear, as that jolly individual puts it. For the seasons have been good, the stock healthy, and crops abundant—and on the strength of such highly favourable conditions we may be sure that genial Christopher’s characteristic light-heartedness and general contentment has undergone no rebate. This can hardly be said to apply to the brace of diminutive heroes whose thirst for battle was so inconsiderately nipped in the bud on the memorable night of the attack upon the house. For now they must find outlet for their martial ardour in fistic combat with their school-fellows—or in the more risky line of trying how far they can trench upon the patience of a cane-wielding master. In a word, they are both at school; a state of life which, in common with youth in general and Colonial youth in particular, they emphatically do not prefer. The same lot has befallen Effie, and she, too, is being put through the scholastic mill, though, thanks to the greater adaptability of her sex, the process is far less distasteful to her than to those two young scapegraces, Fred and Basil. So that, save in holiday time, Sunningdale is quieter than when we saw it last? Is it? There is plenty of small fry left to create its share of clatter in the place of those absent under pedagogic discipline.One change, however, has Time in his course brought round. Marian Fanning is a bride of two months.Lucky it was that old Dirk’s ineradicable instincts had led him on the rove into his native wilds; lucky, indeed, for his master that he had to that extent played football with his trust, though inexpressibly annoying to his said master when that breach of trust was first discovered. Under the old Koranna’s able guidance it was not many days before Renshaw was at home again in safety. Nor was the experienced eye of the former at fault in deciding the wound to be no longer dangerous. Some of those wonderful remedies known only to the natives themselves soon put this beyond all doubt, and by the time Renshaw reached home he felt as strong again as ever.He had started at once for Sunningdale. With such samples of his late companion’s consummate selfishness and unparalleled treachery fresh in his mind, it was small wonder that he hardly expected ever to behold Sellon again. And his expectation was realised. That unscrupulous rascal was already on blue ocean, with the magnificent diamond, the superb “Eye” in his possession. No, it was hardly likely that he should ever see Sellon again.And he did not care to try. In the first place in disclaiming any inordinate desire for riches, Renshaw had been stating a bare fact; and whereas the diamonds in his own possession, when abandoned by his comrade to die, comprised some large and fine stones, likely to realise a considerable sum, he could afford to rest content. In the second, to the bitter disgust and contempt he felt for the man and his treachery, the news of Violet’s flight added a more than severe shock. But this on the whole was salutary—undeniably so. His idol was shattered. And then, as bit by bit the whole tissue of heartless duplicity stood fully revealed, he was forced to admit himself cured.But the process took time—time and many a bitter heartache. Saddened and disgusted, Renshaw had resolved to strike out an entirely new line. He would travel all over the world.He sailed for England, disposed of his diamonds, realising nearly seventeen thousand pounds, and even then he probably did not make the best bargain for himself. Then in pursuance of his plan he had spent the following two years on the move. England, the Continent, India, China, Japan, the United States—all were visited, and it was amid the rolling solitude of the Far West that his heart turned to the free open veldt of his native land, and among the iron-bound mountains and brassy skies of Arizona and New Mexico he could almost fancy himself once more in search of the “Valley of the Eye.”And in the cities and turmoil of civilisation so striking a personality as that of Renshaw Fanning was not likely to go unnoticed. For the man who owned that noble, refined face, bronzed with exposure, and when in repose never altogether free from a touch of saddened gravity—all manner of pitfalls were laid. Bright eyes beamed upon him, and soft voices cooed their softest. All in vain, however. His heart was seared. But eventually when the numbness of the shock did begin to wear away, it was homeward that the wanderer’s heart turned; and in place of the soiled and dethroned image there arose another; more pure, more fair, more wholesome; that of sweet Marian Selwood. And under this influence, the cycle of his wanderings completed, he dismounted before the garden gate at Sunningdale one evening, and entering the house as if he were returning home, found Marian alone. And then, almost at his first words, the latter had realised that it was good indeed to live, nor was it long before the secret of a lifetime’s love was wrested from her beautiful lips. So now Marian is a two months’ bride; making a final visit to her old home preparatory to settling down upon the flourishing farm which Renshaw has purchased within a dozen miles of Sunningdale.Sometimes he talks of making another expedition to the wonderful Valley. True, the marvellous “Eye” shines there in the moonlight no more, but the place holds other stones, and as yet he has only touched the fringe of its wealth. But Marian’s mind is made up against, and her foot is down on, any such scheme. Has not the mystic jewel proved indeed a demon’s eye to all concerned. They have enough, and life is better than inordinate wealth. Is he not content with the grisly risk he has run, so narrowly escaping with his life? And Renshaw, with a laugh, is fain to answer that he is. Yet peradventure, some day, when the quiver is full—but we must not anticipate.Not a word more has been heard of Maurice Sellon or the partner of his flight—not a word beyond the brief reassurance on the score of her bodily safety which Violet had had the grace to forward to poor old Mrs Aldridge by the last boat which left the New Zealand steamer. Not a word more is even likely to be heard of either. That “the way of the transgressors is hard” may be a good and edifying axiom for all Sunday school purposes, but it is in no wise borne out by the experiences of real life. So it is highly probable that Sellon and Violet are in some safe and withal comfortable retreat in the New World, flourishing like the green bay tree, while enjoying to the full the abundant, if treacherously gained, results of the former’s expedition in search of “The Valley of the Eye.”The End.
Three years have gone by.
Now three years cover a pretty fair section of time. A good deal can be got into that space. But the hand of Time, with its changes and chances, has passed but lightly over peaceful, prosperous Sunningdale. It has, perchance, added a touch of hoar-frost to Christopher Selwood’s brown beard, but only through the harmless agency of wear and tear, as that jolly individual puts it. For the seasons have been good, the stock healthy, and crops abundant—and on the strength of such highly favourable conditions we may be sure that genial Christopher’s characteristic light-heartedness and general contentment has undergone no rebate. This can hardly be said to apply to the brace of diminutive heroes whose thirst for battle was so inconsiderately nipped in the bud on the memorable night of the attack upon the house. For now they must find outlet for their martial ardour in fistic combat with their school-fellows—or in the more risky line of trying how far they can trench upon the patience of a cane-wielding master. In a word, they are both at school; a state of life which, in common with youth in general and Colonial youth in particular, they emphatically do not prefer. The same lot has befallen Effie, and she, too, is being put through the scholastic mill, though, thanks to the greater adaptability of her sex, the process is far less distasteful to her than to those two young scapegraces, Fred and Basil. So that, save in holiday time, Sunningdale is quieter than when we saw it last? Is it? There is plenty of small fry left to create its share of clatter in the place of those absent under pedagogic discipline.
One change, however, has Time in his course brought round. Marian Fanning is a bride of two months.
Lucky it was that old Dirk’s ineradicable instincts had led him on the rove into his native wilds; lucky, indeed, for his master that he had to that extent played football with his trust, though inexpressibly annoying to his said master when that breach of trust was first discovered. Under the old Koranna’s able guidance it was not many days before Renshaw was at home again in safety. Nor was the experienced eye of the former at fault in deciding the wound to be no longer dangerous. Some of those wonderful remedies known only to the natives themselves soon put this beyond all doubt, and by the time Renshaw reached home he felt as strong again as ever.
He had started at once for Sunningdale. With such samples of his late companion’s consummate selfishness and unparalleled treachery fresh in his mind, it was small wonder that he hardly expected ever to behold Sellon again. And his expectation was realised. That unscrupulous rascal was already on blue ocean, with the magnificent diamond, the superb “Eye” in his possession. No, it was hardly likely that he should ever see Sellon again.
And he did not care to try. In the first place in disclaiming any inordinate desire for riches, Renshaw had been stating a bare fact; and whereas the diamonds in his own possession, when abandoned by his comrade to die, comprised some large and fine stones, likely to realise a considerable sum, he could afford to rest content. In the second, to the bitter disgust and contempt he felt for the man and his treachery, the news of Violet’s flight added a more than severe shock. But this on the whole was salutary—undeniably so. His idol was shattered. And then, as bit by bit the whole tissue of heartless duplicity stood fully revealed, he was forced to admit himself cured.
But the process took time—time and many a bitter heartache. Saddened and disgusted, Renshaw had resolved to strike out an entirely new line. He would travel all over the world.
He sailed for England, disposed of his diamonds, realising nearly seventeen thousand pounds, and even then he probably did not make the best bargain for himself. Then in pursuance of his plan he had spent the following two years on the move. England, the Continent, India, China, Japan, the United States—all were visited, and it was amid the rolling solitude of the Far West that his heart turned to the free open veldt of his native land, and among the iron-bound mountains and brassy skies of Arizona and New Mexico he could almost fancy himself once more in search of the “Valley of the Eye.”
And in the cities and turmoil of civilisation so striking a personality as that of Renshaw Fanning was not likely to go unnoticed. For the man who owned that noble, refined face, bronzed with exposure, and when in repose never altogether free from a touch of saddened gravity—all manner of pitfalls were laid. Bright eyes beamed upon him, and soft voices cooed their softest. All in vain, however. His heart was seared. But eventually when the numbness of the shock did begin to wear away, it was homeward that the wanderer’s heart turned; and in place of the soiled and dethroned image there arose another; more pure, more fair, more wholesome; that of sweet Marian Selwood. And under this influence, the cycle of his wanderings completed, he dismounted before the garden gate at Sunningdale one evening, and entering the house as if he were returning home, found Marian alone. And then, almost at his first words, the latter had realised that it was good indeed to live, nor was it long before the secret of a lifetime’s love was wrested from her beautiful lips. So now Marian is a two months’ bride; making a final visit to her old home preparatory to settling down upon the flourishing farm which Renshaw has purchased within a dozen miles of Sunningdale.
Sometimes he talks of making another expedition to the wonderful Valley. True, the marvellous “Eye” shines there in the moonlight no more, but the place holds other stones, and as yet he has only touched the fringe of its wealth. But Marian’s mind is made up against, and her foot is down on, any such scheme. Has not the mystic jewel proved indeed a demon’s eye to all concerned. They have enough, and life is better than inordinate wealth. Is he not content with the grisly risk he has run, so narrowly escaping with his life? And Renshaw, with a laugh, is fain to answer that he is. Yet peradventure, some day, when the quiver is full—but we must not anticipate.
Not a word more has been heard of Maurice Sellon or the partner of his flight—not a word beyond the brief reassurance on the score of her bodily safety which Violet had had the grace to forward to poor old Mrs Aldridge by the last boat which left the New Zealand steamer. Not a word more is even likely to be heard of either. That “the way of the transgressors is hard” may be a good and edifying axiom for all Sunday school purposes, but it is in no wise borne out by the experiences of real life. So it is highly probable that Sellon and Violet are in some safe and withal comfortable retreat in the New World, flourishing like the green bay tree, while enjoying to the full the abundant, if treacherously gained, results of the former’s expedition in search of “The Valley of the Eye.”
The End.