Chapter Nineteen.

Chapter Nineteen.What a Goad Performed.“A word fitly spoken is like apples of silver in baskets of gold.”A few days after our marriage Maurice went into town, and came back to Water-lily Farm with a brief but interesting statement.“We shall not be leaving Mashonaland. When I made you some such promise I had not reckoned with my dear uncle Alexander. It appears that he objects to my going away from Africa.”I regarded him steadfastly for a while, trying to read between the lines of this announcement.“What has made him change his mind about helping you into the Consular service, Maurice?” I asked, not without a shade of irony I must confess, for any one less adapted than Maurice to a profession in which high principles, tact, and good manners are essential qualifications it would have been hard to find, even in Africa, where budding diplomats do not grow on every bush.“He hasn’t changed his mind. I have changed mine about asking him, that’s all. I know it would be no good, anyway.”He got into the verandah hammock, which was also his bed, propped himself comfortably against a cushion, and lit a cigarette.From my deck-chair I stared blankly at the surrounding horizon. To say that I wasagacéeis to say nothing. Even in the face of his recently revealed duplicity I was unprepared for this cool jettisoning of the most solemn part of our compact. It left me breathless. I said at last:“What is there to prevent you from leaving Africa without your uncle’s consent? You are not an infant—”“No; I wish I were. Life would be considerably simpler. But the fact is, my uncle is so kind as to pay me five hundred a year to stay out of England, and the country he specifies as my residence, being a nice long way off from him, is Africa. The moment I quit he’ll stop payment, and I shall have nothing to live on but my lordly salary of twenty quid a month.”What sinister meaning lurked in so strange an arrangement I shrank from asking, but I had an instinct to combat it—an instinct that was roused in me twenty times a day as my husband’s character unfolded itself, and I saw upon what ignoble props and bolsters his life was arranged; how slack were his moral muscles; how low his code of honour. Sometimes, when I realised these things, and that my lot was irrevocably cast for life companionship with a man who so deliberately outraged my ideals of what a man should be, and what life should mean, I felt like a trapped creature, and my instinct was to turn in bitter rage and rend the trap with teeth and nails. But what good in that? And what good in all my fine resolutions if they so quickly dissolved in the face of disaster? I smothered down indignation and disdain, and used a gentleness with him that, knowing my own proud ardent heart, surprised myself. With burning cheeks I might presently have been heard pleading with him to throw off the five-hundred-pound yoke, and strike out on his own account.“Surely the freedom of your soul is worth more than five hundred a year!” I cried. “You detest your uncle, why take his money under such an ignominious condition? Fling his money into his teeth and take your life into your own hands. Africa is not the only country on the map. There are still Europe, Asia, America, and Australia. Let us go to Canada and start a farm, open a shop, run a hotel—anything, anywhere. I will help you at whatever you put your hand to, Maurice, and I don’t care how poor we are. Only let us be honourable, and let us go away from Africa.”And all the time my blood was leaping and my heart quivering at the thought of staying on in this land, behind whose silent hills and dense bush the fate of Anthony Kinsella still was hidden. To all my eloquence he puffed at his cigarette and returned a cool stare.“Jack up five hundred a year and go and look for a chance living in some new country where I don’t know the ropes? Not much, my dear girl! I know my own limitations, thanks, and how likely I’d be to make my fortune or even a bare living in Canada or anywhere else.”“What of the noble career you were to carve out for yourself,” I flung at him, hoping that scorn might achieve what pleading and reasoning failed to do. But that stone broke no bones. He merely laughed and flung one back at me with a man’s sure aim.“Why should I bother about a career, since I am never to have any children to pass my glories on to?”That sealed my lips from further retort. I sat still and stared silently at the passionate blue of the skies, and the radiant sunlit plain. What was the use of struggling against the witch who had me in her toils and never meant to let me go?“If she loves you, she will keep you, whether you will or no!” Anthony had prophesied on just such a blue-and-gold day, when life went sweetly with us. Well, if this was love, it was a strong, austere passion, hard to distinguish from hate. Under its fierce cold caress I could truly cry with the words of the Hindoo woman to her faithless lord:“Hadst thou not called it Love—I had called it a drawn sword!”A little way off a native boy, whom I had noticed about the place the last day or two, was sitting in the sunshine, with his back against a hut. He wore a brick-red blanket sewn with large blue beads, swathed round him rather gracefully, and a necklace of some wild beasts’ teeth about his neck. He was better looking than the average kaffir—nose less flat, and lips less protruding; with a dreamy, moody air about him, and in his big dark eyes. He had a tiny kaffir instrument in his hands, upon which he was making a soft, sad, monotonous sound.Tom—brr—torn—brr—tom-tom-tom—Sometimes he would give a look, in which there seemed to be some significant wistfulness, towards the verandah where we sat.“Yes, I’ve got a nice little soft billet in the Mounted Police,” pursued Maurice serenely. “The powers that be thought it a pity for a happily married man like me, with an adoring wife, to have to be so much away from home as an N.C. must be, so they laid their heads together to see what they could do for you and me. The result is the offer of a sub-inspectorship in the Police, my service in the N.C. Department to count towards seniority. They’ve given me the camp at Mgatweli.”Afterwards I learnt, as one learns everything in Rhodesia if one lives long enough, that the whole affair had been arranged weeks before, upon Maurice announcing the news of his approaching marriage. He had accepted the appointment quite a month before he told me anything about it.But I soon learned that I must take falseness and double-dealing for granted.Judy, too, was proving faithless to her promise. She had written to say that she had decided to take Dickie with her to Europe, where she was going to spend her honeymoon.I rose wearily to go inside and find out what arrangements were being made for lunch, when I noticed that the boy with the music had left off playing. He put his piano in his hair and came up to the verandah. His eyes were fixed wistfully upon Maurice, who was apparently composing himself to sleep. In the Mashona tongue he made a soft little request:“Neega meena e’tambo Inkos.”My husband very quickly opened his eyes.“Get out, you scoundrel, or I’ll give you a kicking instead. And don’t let me see you hanging round here any longer.” He added something. Some added threat in the vernacular made the boy walk away. But he did not leave the farm. I found out later that he was Makupi, the boy whose charm Maurice would not give up, keeping it out of sheer deviltry and malice, just because the boy wanted it so frightfully. When we left Water-lily Farm Makupi left also, and a few days after our arrival at our new home I saw his brick-red blanket again, and heard the thrumming of the little melancholy piano. Often he would come to Maurice and repeat his gentle request:“Neega meena e’tambo Inkos” (give me my charm, master). And when refused with menaces would walk uncomplainingly away.Mgatweli was a little gathering of houses and huts, a church, and two hotels—the habitations of three hundred souls. The town nestled in the hollow of a plain, with low, wooded kopjes brooding round it.Our home consisted of five huts: a dining-room lined with white limbo, a drawing-room lined with red, two bedrooms, and a kitchen. They had been lived in before, and left in a ragged and disreputable condition. There was grass growing on my bedroom floor, and the ants had devoured most of the drawing-room wall drapery. However, the place was undeniably picturesque.The huts were built in a wide ring round a compound full of bush and big trees, and the whole camp was pitched half-way up the slope of the biggest kop.We were about a mile away from the town, and between us and it stretched an emblazoned sea—an extravagant, brilliantchamps Élyséeof terrible colour.In the first mushroom uprising of the town the little hospital had stood where now our huts were built, and a young nurse, receiving a packet of zinia seed from home, had, in the innocence of her heart, planted it at the doors of the hospital, to cheer the patients, she said; but in time it had frightened the patients.Any one who knows anything about zinias need not be told that they want nothing more than a shower and some sunny days to bloom gaily, and thereafter fling their seed in turn to the four winds. That is what Nurse Agnes’s zinias had done, and now between the camp and the town billowed an iridescent ocean of colour. And such colour! Atrocious blues and reds and terra-cottas and pinks and magentas, all cheek by jowl, and head to head. Perky little stiff-stalked wretches, blazing wickedly in the sun. I detested them. The natural flowers of Africa never clash with each other, or the skies, or the changing scarlets and ambers of the veldt. But these malapert immigrants sinned against all laws and canons of colour. They struck the eye a thousand blows a minute. They disturbed the splendour of the skies. There was no peace in the distant hills because of them.Close beside us was the police camp: a bevy of huts built round a large open space, with the stumps of chopped-down trees for occasional seats. A sergeant and ten troopers came and went on the zinia-lined road, patrolling the neighbouring kraals and visiting the town. From our hut doors we could see the men busy with their horses at morning and evening “stables,” and on Sunday nights they usually chanted Barrack-room Ballads round their fires to hymn tunes played on a concertina. They were an ill-kempt, casual, careless lot of men, but fine looking fellows and all of them well-born ne’er-do-wells. The only one among them who had no claim by birth to the title of gentleman was Locke, the smart and spruce sergeant in charge of them under Maurice.Life with Maurice Stair was too lively and active a misery to be truthfully described as dreary. It was more difficult than climbing theDent blanchewith bare and broken feet, or wandering waterless in the burning desert; for there was no glorious peak in sight up the steep and rugged path, nor any oases to rest by in the weary desert, nor any hope of “Death, the tardy friend” overtaking one’s faltering footsteps. I was too young and strong to hope for death, even while I felt that youth was being left far behind in the shadow of happier days, and age crouched somewhere in the tangled thorny wild in front. And always, always, the terrible regret for the passing of days that held nothing in them! Empty days—empty nights! Life was not meant to be passed thus, and life was passing!“The wine of life was falling drop by drop;The leaves of life were fading one by one!”Maurice spent little of his time at the police camp. His duties as commanding officer did not oppress him. He rarely went near his men. The sergeant came to the house with all papers and reports, and Maurice conducted the affairs of the Government in his bedroom, often from his bed, for which he had a fondness.As Public Prosecutor he was obliged to go over to the court-house every morning at ten, but it was usually nearer eleven when he rode away, looking like a modern Galahad on his white horse. There is no doubt he was a very handsome fellow.His duties at the court-house did not keep him long, there being little more to do than to produce certain Mashonas who had been brought in by the troopers for refusing to pay the hut-tax (ten shillings a year) and thereafter to be sentenced to a month’s labour at Government work. Sometimes there was a cattle-stealer to face his crimes, or a breaker of his brother’s skull in some kraal revel. Whatsoever the cases they did not detain Maurice long. He soon came riding gallantly back through the zinias, to the hours of idleness that his soul loved. He would fling off his uniform, get into a pair of shrunken flannel trousers, and in his shirt sleeves and a pair of atrocious black leather slippers spend the rest of the daypottering. He was the most successful potterer I ever met. Sauntering from one hut to the other, he was never far from his own. He may or may not have believed that I did not know the reason for this; but I must have been deaf and blind and lacking in all my seven senses not to know of the case after case of whiskey that was carried to his hut and consumed there in solitude. Yet he still kept up the pose of being a man who did not drink, and when I had the tantalus filled with spirits and placed openly in the dining-room he looked at me with surprise, and asked me whether I realised that whiskey was five pounds a case!He had the art of wasting time brought to a fine point. He could sit for hours polishing some part of his saddlery (that it was his batman’s business to attend to), or spend the afternoon piercing fresh holes in a strap he never intended to use, piercing them beautifully, with the care of a diamond cutter at the most delicate work, polishing them afterwards with sand-paper. He loved polishing as few housemaids do. The matter of getting a rhino-hidesjambokebony black would happily occupy him for many days, or cleaning a pipe that he never smoked—anything that was futile and foolish and useless and that some one else could have done better!He also liked to make little pottering things with carpenters’ tools. After studying for the army he had, it appeared, taken a course at one of the big technical training colleges in London, and had there chosen to learn carpentering. No doubt I am snobbish, but I could never quite understand what a gentleman wanted with a knowledge of carpentering. Probably Maurice took it up to avoid being obliged to study something that would make a demand on his brain. He was always very careful not to overstrain his brain in any way. However, the result of this special branch of instruction was that he could make nice little boxes that would not quite close, and wooden pegs that wouldn’t stay in thedaggawalls, and other things that no one had any earthly use for.Once, it is true, he made a beautiful little tea-table, a thing we much required, for furniture was still almost unobtainable in the wilds as we were, and the drawing-room was but scantily furnished. But when the table was finished he spoilt it by painting it a diabolical pink that made it get up and smite in the eye everything in the room, including the walls which were lined with scarlet twill. The thing was impossible. The colour of a stuffed wolfs tongue! But do you think he would change it? No. He would have it no other colour, and he forced it through the drawing-room door, tearing the limbo and smashing up pots of ferns, and planting it in the middle of the room, left it there whether I liked it or not. I dispensed tea from it to my visitors and let them gauge my taste by it if they liked. What did it matter?When all his possessions had been picked over and polished and he could for the moment find nothing sufficiently futile to do, he would get a pack of cards and play patience, or amuse himself with a chess-board. He never touched a book or a pen, or took the slightest interest in the profession into which he had been pitch-forked over the heads of betterwarn, by a Government whose kindly idea at that time was to do well by the men who had first come into the country. He appeared to have no use whatever for his head: but his long, womanish, restless hands were everlastingly occupied.His favourite seat was a packing case under a big thorn tree—not too far from his bedroom door; and there day after day he murdered time.If he had possessed the easy-going, warm-hearted, beauty-loving Bohemian temperament that usually accompanies a lazy nature, much could have been forgiven him. A gipsy’s heart and a poet’s dreams would have gone very far towards compensating to me, at least, for idleness and incompetence. But Maurice had no more poetry in him than a packing-case. And if his soul had ever given birth to dreams he had long since drowned them in whiskey. So far from being easy-going he was extremely cantankerous to every one under him. The servants detested him, and his men only tolerated him because he left them to their own devices. As for loving beauty; he never raised his eyes to the hills except to curse them for cutting him off from civilisation. He infinitely preferred to see his own cigarette smoke than to watch the pansy-coloured shadows flocking across the plains at eventide. A sunset left him cold; he never saw a dawn.If any one thinks I sat down meekly to this life, and to this man they gravely err. I am not of the meek of the earth. Irish-Americans rarely are. Moreover, a meek woman in the household of Maurice Stair would have been extremely out of place. He would have calmly proceeded to wipe his boots on her.I was consumed with shame for this man. I looked upon him as a cheat; and I knew the humiliation and shame of a woman whose husband was defrauding his employers. I had been long enough in the country to know how hard therealmen, who had ideals, worked for the country and for themselves. I knew that there were a hundred things Maurice could have done to improve his men, the camp, and the general state of affairs. But he preferred to let Sergeant Locke earn his salary for him, while he sat under a thorn tree and polished a strap; and I, his wife, shared the salary!At first, having learnt something of his arrogant, stubborn nature, I tried to beguile him from his ways with soft and even flattering words. I painted to him, with a daring impressionist hand, the future that ought to be his, clothing it in mists of scarlet and gold.“Grind away at your profession,” I invoked him, “and show them you’re too good for this little hole. Have your men in such a state of efficiency that the fame of them will reach Buluwayo. Improve the camp. Get after the kaffirs and make them work at this place so hard that the next time the C.O. is here he will cast an envious eye on it for one of his pets, and you’ll be moved on somewhere else. Having shown your stamina they won’t dare to push you in the background again. They’llhaveto give you something better.”I descended deep into flattery, and though to my own ears it sounded uncommonly like irony, he took it well. But afterwards he smiled at me, the patient smile of the great.“What’s the good, my dear girl? You don’t know this country. You can work the flesh off your bones and nobody will thank you for it. You will never get ahead of the Company’s pets.”The old cry of the idle and incompetent, whether in art, trade, or the professions—the uselessness of striving against injustice and favouritism!“I consider that they have distinctly petted you, Maurice. Show them that they did well, and you’ll get more petting.”“I suppose you would like me to be like Popper in Salisbury—always after the men to see if they’ve got their putties on straight, and whether they’re taking Epsom salts and saying their prayers regularly.”“Oh, Maurice, you know very well that is not what I mean.”“I don’t think you know what you mean. You are talking through your hat, my dear girl, of things you know absolutely nothing about.”“Perhaps so,” I admitted with a humility that was far from being natural to me. “But I am only making suggestions. I can’t bear to see you wasting your life. There are such a lot of things you could do in this country, and make a big future out of. If you could get inside the inscrutable native mind, for instance, you who know so much about the natives already. Why not become an authority on them, a master of the native tongue as no other man in this country is? Dear Maurice, I want to see you start carving that career you told me about.”(I never let him off that!) But he was entirely undisturbed.“You talk like a book, my dear girl,” he affably responded. “But I’d rather carve a stick. Less trouble. Go and get into the native mind yourself if you think it such a mighty interesting place. And further, I wish you’d remember that I warned you on our wedding day that I would not have you interfering with my affairs. I knew well enough you’d start this blither about ambition. I must ask you once and for all to mind your own business.”“Itismy business,” I said. “How dared you ask me to take a name you did not mean to do something with?”This was no gentle answer to turn away wrath, as I very well knew. But there were moments, and this was one of them, when my spirit rebelled against the embargo of submission I had laid upon it. I saw at last that guileful persuasion was useless. I might as well have tried to beguile awildebeestefrom the veldt, or a crocodile from thegreenslime of the Pungwe River, as this man from the paths of sloth. But there was still the goad left.“Oh, Alexander the Great! Do you remember what he said to the soldier he found sleeping at his post? ‘Either honour your name, sir, or change it!’”“Oh! Bah! What do women know of honour. Let me alone, for God’s sake.”But I would not let him alone. Even when his retorts were coarse and insulting, I persisted. It burned me like an acid to bear the name of this neglecter of his duties: this skulker behind a bush while other men did his work. I made clear to him that any woman with a backbone detests the type of man who potters about the house driving in nails instead of getting out after the big things of life. I gave him no rest under his thorn tree.I jeered at his wooden boxes, and made mock of the slovenly troopers who passed upon the road below our camp. I jibed at his beloved shrunken white flannels, and let him know I found him no object of beauty in the black bath-slippers. I scarified him, and inflicted many a scar on my own pride in the process; and apparently he remained invulnerable. But sometimes I saw a little colour creep into his sallow cheek, and knew that an arrow had gone home. Until at last one day he turned on me raging:“Good God! a man had better have married a flaming sword than you! I might as well try to sleep with vitriol trickling over me!”At that I rejoiced: if an emotion of mingled despair and savage triumph could be described as joy. And thereafter I gave him no quarter. More than ever I bit into him like a steel blade and flickered round him like a flame.That was the beginning of a new era. And if sometimes the last state of these persons seemed worse than the first—I flamed and flickered on.One thing was certain; anything was better than stagnation in a swamp; so I made the swamp as untenantable as if it were infested with asps.However, departure from the swamp meant departure also from tranquillity. With the mists of idleness and the green slime of sloth, peace also disappeared. It is true that Sergeant Locke came no more to the house with the reports; no longer paid the men and harangued them vainly for their sins; nor rode any more to the court-house to play deputy P.P. while his superior officer lay in bed; nor performed any more of the duties of that same superior officer. That was so much to the good. But for amendment Maurice took toll of me at home, retaliating with the malice of a small-minded woman, interfering in the affairs of the house, grumbling at the food, abusing the cook, and insulting me. Nothing pleased him. Though he was much more at the camp and court than he had ever been he also seemed to have more time to be at home, to fall upon the cook and kick the house boys, with the result that no sooner had I trained one servant to do his duties unsuperintended, than he ran away, and I had to begin the thankless task over again.My husband was a bad person to keep house for at any time. One of those men who tells every one he doesn’t care what he eats so long as it is food; and then raises the roof if he has cold mutton daintily served with a salad for lunch, after having had it for dinner the night before.“Damn it! is this goat going to last for ever?” he would cry outraged. “It must have been a blazing horse. Did you buy the whole four quarters in the name of God?”My mornings were taken up with trying to manufacture new dishes, and teaching Mango, the cook, to manage the sparse material at his disposal, so that the result might spell variety in themenu.I discovered that turning out charming suppers in a Paris studio was a very different matter to keeping house in a land where goat and “bully” were the foundations of life; fresh fruit and fish unheard-of things; and vegetables luxuries that had to be fetched on horseback from a coolie river-garden several miles away, and pleaded and bartered for at that.Chickens, of which it took about half-a-dozen to make a meal, had also to be fetched from kaffir kraals, and eggs had to be ridden after (and sometimes run away from afterwards).I found, as many a weary woman has found before me, that housekeeping is the most thankless, heart-breaking, soul-racking business in the world to those who have not been trained to it from their youth upwards. But I had to stick to my job. Maurice having been driven forth from his swamp into the wilds had come back with at least two of the qualities of the king of beasts: an enormous appetite, and a tendency to roar the house down. My plain duty was to appease him, and pray for further lion-like attributes to develop.In a small way we were obliged to entertain. Maurice’s official position demanded as much, though it was an obligation he was very willing to shirk, preferring a quiet, swamp-like evening in his hut to the trouble of dressing for dinner and being polite to people for a few hours. But my plans for his redemption did not include any evenings off, and I asked the necessary people to dine whether he liked it or not. He had many ways of revenging himself on me for this. Sometimes he would absent himself at the last moment, leaving me to make what excuse I was able to the guests for the non-appearance of the host whom they had probably seen lounging in his hut door smoking, as they came up the road. At other times after I had made elaborate excuses he would appear in his white flannel trousers and shirt sleeves, and without any apology take his seat at the head of the table where his guests sat arrayed in the immaculate evening dress that people buried in the wilds love to assume, cherishing the custom of dressing for dinner as a symbol that they are not yet of the beasts of the field, though obliged to congregate with them. What these people thought of a host in dirty flannels facing a hostess decked in a Paris gown,décolletée et très chic(for if I could not alter my gowns with the skill of acouturièrethey at least still bore thecachetof Paris) I cannot say. But Rhodesians are a gay-hearted people and would always prefer to believe that you mean to amuse rather than insult them, and so, as a flowing brook passes over a jagged rock, the incident would be passed over and covered up with ripples.As for me, I learned in time to manage my cheeks as well as my gowns, so that they no longer burned at suchcontretemps.My method was not to apologise in words for my husband’s behaviour, but by delicate implication to let it be understood that I considered such vagaries perfectly permissible in a genius—or a fool. They may have been in doubt (as I meant them to be) as to which of the two I considered him. But Mauriceknew; and his was the cheek to burn.When he insulted his guests over cards later in the evening I pursued the same tactics. I do not profess that I at any time played therôleof a gentle and propitiating houri. As I have before remarked, such a person would have been thrown away on Maurice, and very bad for him. A man with a dog whip would have been much more to the point.The art of winning or losing with equanimity at cards was not one which his ancestors had bequeathed to him. If he lost sixpence he also lost his temper. If he won he became jaunty and facetious and tried to make others lose their tempers by jeers at their poor play. When things went very wrong with his game he thought nothing of taking advantage of being in his own house to jibe a man about his income or his debts or any private matter he might happen to have cognisance of.Once after squabbling outrageously with a man over his losses early in the evening, and winning from him later, he at the end of the game ostentatiously tore up the man’s I.O.U. saying calmly:“That’s all right old man! I know you can’t afford to lose it.”The man turned a bright green, and everybody in the room commenced to talk vivaciously about the weather. But Maurice smiled the triumphant smile of the man who has scored.It was upon such occasions that I positively detested him. When I saw a man who for the sake of decency had been calm under affliction all the evening, smiling the set smile of a gargoyle, when only the presence of women prevented him from getting up and hitting Maurice in the eye (as I certainly should have done in his place); when I saw such a man swallow some flagrant final insult with an effort that made him turn pale, I too turned pale, and tasted aloes. When in my bedroom at the end of the evening, while they were putting on their wraps, I found myself mechanically muttering inventions to women as pale as myself about my husband’s touch of fever—stroke of sun—overwork—strain, anything that was not too utterly futile a reason for outrageous behaviour; the taste of life was bitter in my mouth, and I knew shame that burned to the bone.Those were the nights when I could have torn out my tongue for making vows before God to Maurice Stair; when my soul was blotted with hatred; when I drove the knives of scorn and contempt into myself for desecrating my life, and my father’s name by such an alliance.On such nights I dared not open my lips to Maurice. I feared myself too much. Locked in my hut I would spend hours watching with dry eyes the spectacle of pride writhing in the dust. Or kneeling before the tortured body of Christ crucified, but not daring to lift my face to him, nor to the lovely face of that stately Madonna Bouguereau painted with hands upraised and great eyes full of sorrow for the fate of women; no prayer would come to my bitten lips, nor tears to my scorched eyes; but the cry of the desolate and the despairing was in my heart.“Oh, Mother of Consolation!... Help of the Afflicted... ora pro nobis!”Often when dawn, that scarlet witch, with golden fingers came tapping on the canvas windows I would still be kneeling there, stiff-limbed, my shoulders chilled to stone above my gown. And after a little while I would open my door and go out into the sweet wild morning. Strange that sometimes it almost seemed as if the pagan witch had more healing in her golden hands than the Mother of Sorrows herself; for standing there gazing at her rising from the mists of the hills like a goddess from the incense on her altars, I would feel at last the frozen tears thawing in my heart and surging to my weary-lidded eyes.There were other hours when battles of a different kind were to be faced, not with myself but Maurice. Thrusting himself violently into my hut he would revoke all promises and trample compacts under foot, making demands of me that seemed to fill and darken the room with shame: transforming me into a pillar of ice that could utter no word but one—a word that fell like a little cold icicle into space, re-forming again upon my benumbed lips to fall and fall again. “No—no—no—no—no—no.”There was such a night that ended at dawn with an unspeakable struggle—scorching kisses on my bare shoulders, and a blow across his lips that left blood upon my clenched fist.Ah! those were dark days! Desperate, soul-deforming nights!There was another night when after bitter taunts had been hurled like poisoned arrows round the room, he tore the bed-clothes and pillows from my bed and the gowns and hangings from the walls and flung them in heaps and tatters into the rain-sodden yard. When the boys came in the morning to their work they picked everything up, cleaned and dried them as best they could, and with calm, inscrutable faces replaced them in my room.After such incidents came intervals of days and weeks in which we never opened lips to each other. I moved about his house like a ghost, passing from hut to hut, arranging his meals, ordering his household, but speaking him no word, or if I did getting none in return. When we rode together, because it had become a set habit to mount our horses at a certain hour every afternoon, we never addressed each other except in the presence of other people who might chance to join us in our ride.One day when we sat at table and I crossed myself for grace, as I had always been accustomed to do, he found a new jibe to throw at me.“It makes me sick to see you sitting there tapping at yourself like an Irish peasant!”Swiftly I found words to requite him for this new outrage. Until then he had at least left my faith untainted by his touch.“Oh, Maurice!” I said. “If you were only an Irish peasant I would wash your feet and dry them with my hair.”I spoke very softly, but my words brought two little streaks of red into his cheeks, as though I had flicked them there with a whip. God forgive me, I had developed a cruel tongue; I was no Angel in the house: only a sorely driven woman. And it was true that I would have poured out gifts at his feet if he had only been an Irish peasant with any of the nobility of some of the natures that come to birth in that sad land of beauty. If only he had possessed some of the lovely Irish traits that draw love as the sun draws the dew—generosity, a few ideals, a sweet thing or two about his heart, a little room in it for dreams and beauty!If even his sins had beenbigsins I should have felt some hope. Had everything he did been of the same calibre as his coming to table in his dirty flannels, offensive and discourteous as that action was, I could have forgiven much. There is hope for the boldly offensive man who does not care a button whose feelings he hurts, or who sees his sins. Such men usually have the force of character to do big, bold, fine things also to offset their offences, and such men never fail to bring women to their banner; for women, above all things, love in a man the quality ofbigness.But a man who lies and is a coward! who drinks whiskey in his room, and afterwards eats cloves! who pats animals in public, and viciously kicks them in private! whose wretched puling sins are afraid to stand on their own legs and assert themselves as sins—hiding behind doors, skulking in the darkness!Oh! there were days when, as we rode together over the short golden grass, I wished my horse would throw me and break my neck—and did not pray at night for forgiveness for that sinful wish. In the terrible season of drought that had fallen, the source of prayer was beginning to dry up and fail.In a letter from Judy, which came from Australia this passage occurred:“I hear that thepetit sobriquetRhodesians have for you since you went to Mgatweli is ‘Ghostie’ Stair. They tell me you are as gay and witty as ever, and seem to be extremely happy in your marriage, but have become as white and spectral as a ghost. Doesn’t the place agree with you? Dickie is flourishing, and I have got a splendid German governess for him. John is a perfect Pet.”

“A word fitly spoken is like apples of silver in baskets of gold.”

“A word fitly spoken is like apples of silver in baskets of gold.”

A few days after our marriage Maurice went into town, and came back to Water-lily Farm with a brief but interesting statement.

“We shall not be leaving Mashonaland. When I made you some such promise I had not reckoned with my dear uncle Alexander. It appears that he objects to my going away from Africa.”

I regarded him steadfastly for a while, trying to read between the lines of this announcement.

“What has made him change his mind about helping you into the Consular service, Maurice?” I asked, not without a shade of irony I must confess, for any one less adapted than Maurice to a profession in which high principles, tact, and good manners are essential qualifications it would have been hard to find, even in Africa, where budding diplomats do not grow on every bush.

“He hasn’t changed his mind. I have changed mine about asking him, that’s all. I know it would be no good, anyway.”

He got into the verandah hammock, which was also his bed, propped himself comfortably against a cushion, and lit a cigarette.

From my deck-chair I stared blankly at the surrounding horizon. To say that I wasagacéeis to say nothing. Even in the face of his recently revealed duplicity I was unprepared for this cool jettisoning of the most solemn part of our compact. It left me breathless. I said at last:

“What is there to prevent you from leaving Africa without your uncle’s consent? You are not an infant—”

“No; I wish I were. Life would be considerably simpler. But the fact is, my uncle is so kind as to pay me five hundred a year to stay out of England, and the country he specifies as my residence, being a nice long way off from him, is Africa. The moment I quit he’ll stop payment, and I shall have nothing to live on but my lordly salary of twenty quid a month.”

What sinister meaning lurked in so strange an arrangement I shrank from asking, but I had an instinct to combat it—an instinct that was roused in me twenty times a day as my husband’s character unfolded itself, and I saw upon what ignoble props and bolsters his life was arranged; how slack were his moral muscles; how low his code of honour. Sometimes, when I realised these things, and that my lot was irrevocably cast for life companionship with a man who so deliberately outraged my ideals of what a man should be, and what life should mean, I felt like a trapped creature, and my instinct was to turn in bitter rage and rend the trap with teeth and nails. But what good in that? And what good in all my fine resolutions if they so quickly dissolved in the face of disaster? I smothered down indignation and disdain, and used a gentleness with him that, knowing my own proud ardent heart, surprised myself. With burning cheeks I might presently have been heard pleading with him to throw off the five-hundred-pound yoke, and strike out on his own account.

“Surely the freedom of your soul is worth more than five hundred a year!” I cried. “You detest your uncle, why take his money under such an ignominious condition? Fling his money into his teeth and take your life into your own hands. Africa is not the only country on the map. There are still Europe, Asia, America, and Australia. Let us go to Canada and start a farm, open a shop, run a hotel—anything, anywhere. I will help you at whatever you put your hand to, Maurice, and I don’t care how poor we are. Only let us be honourable, and let us go away from Africa.”

And all the time my blood was leaping and my heart quivering at the thought of staying on in this land, behind whose silent hills and dense bush the fate of Anthony Kinsella still was hidden. To all my eloquence he puffed at his cigarette and returned a cool stare.

“Jack up five hundred a year and go and look for a chance living in some new country where I don’t know the ropes? Not much, my dear girl! I know my own limitations, thanks, and how likely I’d be to make my fortune or even a bare living in Canada or anywhere else.”

“What of the noble career you were to carve out for yourself,” I flung at him, hoping that scorn might achieve what pleading and reasoning failed to do. But that stone broke no bones. He merely laughed and flung one back at me with a man’s sure aim.

“Why should I bother about a career, since I am never to have any children to pass my glories on to?”

That sealed my lips from further retort. I sat still and stared silently at the passionate blue of the skies, and the radiant sunlit plain. What was the use of struggling against the witch who had me in her toils and never meant to let me go?

“If she loves you, she will keep you, whether you will or no!” Anthony had prophesied on just such a blue-and-gold day, when life went sweetly with us. Well, if this was love, it was a strong, austere passion, hard to distinguish from hate. Under its fierce cold caress I could truly cry with the words of the Hindoo woman to her faithless lord:

“Hadst thou not called it Love—I had called it a drawn sword!”

“Hadst thou not called it Love—I had called it a drawn sword!”

A little way off a native boy, whom I had noticed about the place the last day or two, was sitting in the sunshine, with his back against a hut. He wore a brick-red blanket sewn with large blue beads, swathed round him rather gracefully, and a necklace of some wild beasts’ teeth about his neck. He was better looking than the average kaffir—nose less flat, and lips less protruding; with a dreamy, moody air about him, and in his big dark eyes. He had a tiny kaffir instrument in his hands, upon which he was making a soft, sad, monotonous sound.

Tom—brr—torn—brr—tom-tom-tom—

Sometimes he would give a look, in which there seemed to be some significant wistfulness, towards the verandah where we sat.

“Yes, I’ve got a nice little soft billet in the Mounted Police,” pursued Maurice serenely. “The powers that be thought it a pity for a happily married man like me, with an adoring wife, to have to be so much away from home as an N.C. must be, so they laid their heads together to see what they could do for you and me. The result is the offer of a sub-inspectorship in the Police, my service in the N.C. Department to count towards seniority. They’ve given me the camp at Mgatweli.”

Afterwards I learnt, as one learns everything in Rhodesia if one lives long enough, that the whole affair had been arranged weeks before, upon Maurice announcing the news of his approaching marriage. He had accepted the appointment quite a month before he told me anything about it.

But I soon learned that I must take falseness and double-dealing for granted.

Judy, too, was proving faithless to her promise. She had written to say that she had decided to take Dickie with her to Europe, where she was going to spend her honeymoon.

I rose wearily to go inside and find out what arrangements were being made for lunch, when I noticed that the boy with the music had left off playing. He put his piano in his hair and came up to the verandah. His eyes were fixed wistfully upon Maurice, who was apparently composing himself to sleep. In the Mashona tongue he made a soft little request:

“Neega meena e’tambo Inkos.”

My husband very quickly opened his eyes.

“Get out, you scoundrel, or I’ll give you a kicking instead. And don’t let me see you hanging round here any longer.” He added something. Some added threat in the vernacular made the boy walk away. But he did not leave the farm. I found out later that he was Makupi, the boy whose charm Maurice would not give up, keeping it out of sheer deviltry and malice, just because the boy wanted it so frightfully. When we left Water-lily Farm Makupi left also, and a few days after our arrival at our new home I saw his brick-red blanket again, and heard the thrumming of the little melancholy piano. Often he would come to Maurice and repeat his gentle request:

“Neega meena e’tambo Inkos” (give me my charm, master). And when refused with menaces would walk uncomplainingly away.

Mgatweli was a little gathering of houses and huts, a church, and two hotels—the habitations of three hundred souls. The town nestled in the hollow of a plain, with low, wooded kopjes brooding round it.

Our home consisted of five huts: a dining-room lined with white limbo, a drawing-room lined with red, two bedrooms, and a kitchen. They had been lived in before, and left in a ragged and disreputable condition. There was grass growing on my bedroom floor, and the ants had devoured most of the drawing-room wall drapery. However, the place was undeniably picturesque.

The huts were built in a wide ring round a compound full of bush and big trees, and the whole camp was pitched half-way up the slope of the biggest kop.

We were about a mile away from the town, and between us and it stretched an emblazoned sea—an extravagant, brilliantchamps Élyséeof terrible colour.

In the first mushroom uprising of the town the little hospital had stood where now our huts were built, and a young nurse, receiving a packet of zinia seed from home, had, in the innocence of her heart, planted it at the doors of the hospital, to cheer the patients, she said; but in time it had frightened the patients.

Any one who knows anything about zinias need not be told that they want nothing more than a shower and some sunny days to bloom gaily, and thereafter fling their seed in turn to the four winds. That is what Nurse Agnes’s zinias had done, and now between the camp and the town billowed an iridescent ocean of colour. And such colour! Atrocious blues and reds and terra-cottas and pinks and magentas, all cheek by jowl, and head to head. Perky little stiff-stalked wretches, blazing wickedly in the sun. I detested them. The natural flowers of Africa never clash with each other, or the skies, or the changing scarlets and ambers of the veldt. But these malapert immigrants sinned against all laws and canons of colour. They struck the eye a thousand blows a minute. They disturbed the splendour of the skies. There was no peace in the distant hills because of them.

Close beside us was the police camp: a bevy of huts built round a large open space, with the stumps of chopped-down trees for occasional seats. A sergeant and ten troopers came and went on the zinia-lined road, patrolling the neighbouring kraals and visiting the town. From our hut doors we could see the men busy with their horses at morning and evening “stables,” and on Sunday nights they usually chanted Barrack-room Ballads round their fires to hymn tunes played on a concertina. They were an ill-kempt, casual, careless lot of men, but fine looking fellows and all of them well-born ne’er-do-wells. The only one among them who had no claim by birth to the title of gentleman was Locke, the smart and spruce sergeant in charge of them under Maurice.

Life with Maurice Stair was too lively and active a misery to be truthfully described as dreary. It was more difficult than climbing theDent blanchewith bare and broken feet, or wandering waterless in the burning desert; for there was no glorious peak in sight up the steep and rugged path, nor any oases to rest by in the weary desert, nor any hope of “Death, the tardy friend” overtaking one’s faltering footsteps. I was too young and strong to hope for death, even while I felt that youth was being left far behind in the shadow of happier days, and age crouched somewhere in the tangled thorny wild in front. And always, always, the terrible regret for the passing of days that held nothing in them! Empty days—empty nights! Life was not meant to be passed thus, and life was passing!

“The wine of life was falling drop by drop;The leaves of life were fading one by one!”

“The wine of life was falling drop by drop;The leaves of life were fading one by one!”

Maurice spent little of his time at the police camp. His duties as commanding officer did not oppress him. He rarely went near his men. The sergeant came to the house with all papers and reports, and Maurice conducted the affairs of the Government in his bedroom, often from his bed, for which he had a fondness.

As Public Prosecutor he was obliged to go over to the court-house every morning at ten, but it was usually nearer eleven when he rode away, looking like a modern Galahad on his white horse. There is no doubt he was a very handsome fellow.

His duties at the court-house did not keep him long, there being little more to do than to produce certain Mashonas who had been brought in by the troopers for refusing to pay the hut-tax (ten shillings a year) and thereafter to be sentenced to a month’s labour at Government work. Sometimes there was a cattle-stealer to face his crimes, or a breaker of his brother’s skull in some kraal revel. Whatsoever the cases they did not detain Maurice long. He soon came riding gallantly back through the zinias, to the hours of idleness that his soul loved. He would fling off his uniform, get into a pair of shrunken flannel trousers, and in his shirt sleeves and a pair of atrocious black leather slippers spend the rest of the daypottering. He was the most successful potterer I ever met. Sauntering from one hut to the other, he was never far from his own. He may or may not have believed that I did not know the reason for this; but I must have been deaf and blind and lacking in all my seven senses not to know of the case after case of whiskey that was carried to his hut and consumed there in solitude. Yet he still kept up the pose of being a man who did not drink, and when I had the tantalus filled with spirits and placed openly in the dining-room he looked at me with surprise, and asked me whether I realised that whiskey was five pounds a case!

He had the art of wasting time brought to a fine point. He could sit for hours polishing some part of his saddlery (that it was his batman’s business to attend to), or spend the afternoon piercing fresh holes in a strap he never intended to use, piercing them beautifully, with the care of a diamond cutter at the most delicate work, polishing them afterwards with sand-paper. He loved polishing as few housemaids do. The matter of getting a rhino-hidesjambokebony black would happily occupy him for many days, or cleaning a pipe that he never smoked—anything that was futile and foolish and useless and that some one else could have done better!

He also liked to make little pottering things with carpenters’ tools. After studying for the army he had, it appeared, taken a course at one of the big technical training colleges in London, and had there chosen to learn carpentering. No doubt I am snobbish, but I could never quite understand what a gentleman wanted with a knowledge of carpentering. Probably Maurice took it up to avoid being obliged to study something that would make a demand on his brain. He was always very careful not to overstrain his brain in any way. However, the result of this special branch of instruction was that he could make nice little boxes that would not quite close, and wooden pegs that wouldn’t stay in thedaggawalls, and other things that no one had any earthly use for.

Once, it is true, he made a beautiful little tea-table, a thing we much required, for furniture was still almost unobtainable in the wilds as we were, and the drawing-room was but scantily furnished. But when the table was finished he spoilt it by painting it a diabolical pink that made it get up and smite in the eye everything in the room, including the walls which were lined with scarlet twill. The thing was impossible. The colour of a stuffed wolfs tongue! But do you think he would change it? No. He would have it no other colour, and he forced it through the drawing-room door, tearing the limbo and smashing up pots of ferns, and planting it in the middle of the room, left it there whether I liked it or not. I dispensed tea from it to my visitors and let them gauge my taste by it if they liked. What did it matter?

When all his possessions had been picked over and polished and he could for the moment find nothing sufficiently futile to do, he would get a pack of cards and play patience, or amuse himself with a chess-board. He never touched a book or a pen, or took the slightest interest in the profession into which he had been pitch-forked over the heads of betterwarn, by a Government whose kindly idea at that time was to do well by the men who had first come into the country. He appeared to have no use whatever for his head: but his long, womanish, restless hands were everlastingly occupied.

His favourite seat was a packing case under a big thorn tree—not too far from his bedroom door; and there day after day he murdered time.

If he had possessed the easy-going, warm-hearted, beauty-loving Bohemian temperament that usually accompanies a lazy nature, much could have been forgiven him. A gipsy’s heart and a poet’s dreams would have gone very far towards compensating to me, at least, for idleness and incompetence. But Maurice had no more poetry in him than a packing-case. And if his soul had ever given birth to dreams he had long since drowned them in whiskey. So far from being easy-going he was extremely cantankerous to every one under him. The servants detested him, and his men only tolerated him because he left them to their own devices. As for loving beauty; he never raised his eyes to the hills except to curse them for cutting him off from civilisation. He infinitely preferred to see his own cigarette smoke than to watch the pansy-coloured shadows flocking across the plains at eventide. A sunset left him cold; he never saw a dawn.

If any one thinks I sat down meekly to this life, and to this man they gravely err. I am not of the meek of the earth. Irish-Americans rarely are. Moreover, a meek woman in the household of Maurice Stair would have been extremely out of place. He would have calmly proceeded to wipe his boots on her.

I was consumed with shame for this man. I looked upon him as a cheat; and I knew the humiliation and shame of a woman whose husband was defrauding his employers. I had been long enough in the country to know how hard therealmen, who had ideals, worked for the country and for themselves. I knew that there were a hundred things Maurice could have done to improve his men, the camp, and the general state of affairs. But he preferred to let Sergeant Locke earn his salary for him, while he sat under a thorn tree and polished a strap; and I, his wife, shared the salary!

At first, having learnt something of his arrogant, stubborn nature, I tried to beguile him from his ways with soft and even flattering words. I painted to him, with a daring impressionist hand, the future that ought to be his, clothing it in mists of scarlet and gold.

“Grind away at your profession,” I invoked him, “and show them you’re too good for this little hole. Have your men in such a state of efficiency that the fame of them will reach Buluwayo. Improve the camp. Get after the kaffirs and make them work at this place so hard that the next time the C.O. is here he will cast an envious eye on it for one of his pets, and you’ll be moved on somewhere else. Having shown your stamina they won’t dare to push you in the background again. They’llhaveto give you something better.”

I descended deep into flattery, and though to my own ears it sounded uncommonly like irony, he took it well. But afterwards he smiled at me, the patient smile of the great.

“What’s the good, my dear girl? You don’t know this country. You can work the flesh off your bones and nobody will thank you for it. You will never get ahead of the Company’s pets.”

The old cry of the idle and incompetent, whether in art, trade, or the professions—the uselessness of striving against injustice and favouritism!

“I consider that they have distinctly petted you, Maurice. Show them that they did well, and you’ll get more petting.”

“I suppose you would like me to be like Popper in Salisbury—always after the men to see if they’ve got their putties on straight, and whether they’re taking Epsom salts and saying their prayers regularly.”

“Oh, Maurice, you know very well that is not what I mean.”

“I don’t think you know what you mean. You are talking through your hat, my dear girl, of things you know absolutely nothing about.”

“Perhaps so,” I admitted with a humility that was far from being natural to me. “But I am only making suggestions. I can’t bear to see you wasting your life. There are such a lot of things you could do in this country, and make a big future out of. If you could get inside the inscrutable native mind, for instance, you who know so much about the natives already. Why not become an authority on them, a master of the native tongue as no other man in this country is? Dear Maurice, I want to see you start carving that career you told me about.”

(I never let him off that!) But he was entirely undisturbed.

“You talk like a book, my dear girl,” he affably responded. “But I’d rather carve a stick. Less trouble. Go and get into the native mind yourself if you think it such a mighty interesting place. And further, I wish you’d remember that I warned you on our wedding day that I would not have you interfering with my affairs. I knew well enough you’d start this blither about ambition. I must ask you once and for all to mind your own business.”

“Itismy business,” I said. “How dared you ask me to take a name you did not mean to do something with?”

This was no gentle answer to turn away wrath, as I very well knew. But there were moments, and this was one of them, when my spirit rebelled against the embargo of submission I had laid upon it. I saw at last that guileful persuasion was useless. I might as well have tried to beguile awildebeestefrom the veldt, or a crocodile from thegreenslime of the Pungwe River, as this man from the paths of sloth. But there was still the goad left.

“Oh, Alexander the Great! Do you remember what he said to the soldier he found sleeping at his post? ‘Either honour your name, sir, or change it!’”

“Oh! Bah! What do women know of honour. Let me alone, for God’s sake.”

But I would not let him alone. Even when his retorts were coarse and insulting, I persisted. It burned me like an acid to bear the name of this neglecter of his duties: this skulker behind a bush while other men did his work. I made clear to him that any woman with a backbone detests the type of man who potters about the house driving in nails instead of getting out after the big things of life. I gave him no rest under his thorn tree.

I jeered at his wooden boxes, and made mock of the slovenly troopers who passed upon the road below our camp. I jibed at his beloved shrunken white flannels, and let him know I found him no object of beauty in the black bath-slippers. I scarified him, and inflicted many a scar on my own pride in the process; and apparently he remained invulnerable. But sometimes I saw a little colour creep into his sallow cheek, and knew that an arrow had gone home. Until at last one day he turned on me raging:

“Good God! a man had better have married a flaming sword than you! I might as well try to sleep with vitriol trickling over me!”

At that I rejoiced: if an emotion of mingled despair and savage triumph could be described as joy. And thereafter I gave him no quarter. More than ever I bit into him like a steel blade and flickered round him like a flame.

That was the beginning of a new era. And if sometimes the last state of these persons seemed worse than the first—I flamed and flickered on.

One thing was certain; anything was better than stagnation in a swamp; so I made the swamp as untenantable as if it were infested with asps.

However, departure from the swamp meant departure also from tranquillity. With the mists of idleness and the green slime of sloth, peace also disappeared. It is true that Sergeant Locke came no more to the house with the reports; no longer paid the men and harangued them vainly for their sins; nor rode any more to the court-house to play deputy P.P. while his superior officer lay in bed; nor performed any more of the duties of that same superior officer. That was so much to the good. But for amendment Maurice took toll of me at home, retaliating with the malice of a small-minded woman, interfering in the affairs of the house, grumbling at the food, abusing the cook, and insulting me. Nothing pleased him. Though he was much more at the camp and court than he had ever been he also seemed to have more time to be at home, to fall upon the cook and kick the house boys, with the result that no sooner had I trained one servant to do his duties unsuperintended, than he ran away, and I had to begin the thankless task over again.

My husband was a bad person to keep house for at any time. One of those men who tells every one he doesn’t care what he eats so long as it is food; and then raises the roof if he has cold mutton daintily served with a salad for lunch, after having had it for dinner the night before.

“Damn it! is this goat going to last for ever?” he would cry outraged. “It must have been a blazing horse. Did you buy the whole four quarters in the name of God?”

My mornings were taken up with trying to manufacture new dishes, and teaching Mango, the cook, to manage the sparse material at his disposal, so that the result might spell variety in themenu.

I discovered that turning out charming suppers in a Paris studio was a very different matter to keeping house in a land where goat and “bully” were the foundations of life; fresh fruit and fish unheard-of things; and vegetables luxuries that had to be fetched on horseback from a coolie river-garden several miles away, and pleaded and bartered for at that.

Chickens, of which it took about half-a-dozen to make a meal, had also to be fetched from kaffir kraals, and eggs had to be ridden after (and sometimes run away from afterwards).

I found, as many a weary woman has found before me, that housekeeping is the most thankless, heart-breaking, soul-racking business in the world to those who have not been trained to it from their youth upwards. But I had to stick to my job. Maurice having been driven forth from his swamp into the wilds had come back with at least two of the qualities of the king of beasts: an enormous appetite, and a tendency to roar the house down. My plain duty was to appease him, and pray for further lion-like attributes to develop.

In a small way we were obliged to entertain. Maurice’s official position demanded as much, though it was an obligation he was very willing to shirk, preferring a quiet, swamp-like evening in his hut to the trouble of dressing for dinner and being polite to people for a few hours. But my plans for his redemption did not include any evenings off, and I asked the necessary people to dine whether he liked it or not. He had many ways of revenging himself on me for this. Sometimes he would absent himself at the last moment, leaving me to make what excuse I was able to the guests for the non-appearance of the host whom they had probably seen lounging in his hut door smoking, as they came up the road. At other times after I had made elaborate excuses he would appear in his white flannel trousers and shirt sleeves, and without any apology take his seat at the head of the table where his guests sat arrayed in the immaculate evening dress that people buried in the wilds love to assume, cherishing the custom of dressing for dinner as a symbol that they are not yet of the beasts of the field, though obliged to congregate with them. What these people thought of a host in dirty flannels facing a hostess decked in a Paris gown,décolletée et très chic(for if I could not alter my gowns with the skill of acouturièrethey at least still bore thecachetof Paris) I cannot say. But Rhodesians are a gay-hearted people and would always prefer to believe that you mean to amuse rather than insult them, and so, as a flowing brook passes over a jagged rock, the incident would be passed over and covered up with ripples.

As for me, I learned in time to manage my cheeks as well as my gowns, so that they no longer burned at suchcontretemps.

My method was not to apologise in words for my husband’s behaviour, but by delicate implication to let it be understood that I considered such vagaries perfectly permissible in a genius—or a fool. They may have been in doubt (as I meant them to be) as to which of the two I considered him. But Mauriceknew; and his was the cheek to burn.

When he insulted his guests over cards later in the evening I pursued the same tactics. I do not profess that I at any time played therôleof a gentle and propitiating houri. As I have before remarked, such a person would have been thrown away on Maurice, and very bad for him. A man with a dog whip would have been much more to the point.

The art of winning or losing with equanimity at cards was not one which his ancestors had bequeathed to him. If he lost sixpence he also lost his temper. If he won he became jaunty and facetious and tried to make others lose their tempers by jeers at their poor play. When things went very wrong with his game he thought nothing of taking advantage of being in his own house to jibe a man about his income or his debts or any private matter he might happen to have cognisance of.

Once after squabbling outrageously with a man over his losses early in the evening, and winning from him later, he at the end of the game ostentatiously tore up the man’s I.O.U. saying calmly:

“That’s all right old man! I know you can’t afford to lose it.”

The man turned a bright green, and everybody in the room commenced to talk vivaciously about the weather. But Maurice smiled the triumphant smile of the man who has scored.

It was upon such occasions that I positively detested him. When I saw a man who for the sake of decency had been calm under affliction all the evening, smiling the set smile of a gargoyle, when only the presence of women prevented him from getting up and hitting Maurice in the eye (as I certainly should have done in his place); when I saw such a man swallow some flagrant final insult with an effort that made him turn pale, I too turned pale, and tasted aloes. When in my bedroom at the end of the evening, while they were putting on their wraps, I found myself mechanically muttering inventions to women as pale as myself about my husband’s touch of fever—stroke of sun—overwork—strain, anything that was not too utterly futile a reason for outrageous behaviour; the taste of life was bitter in my mouth, and I knew shame that burned to the bone.

Those were the nights when I could have torn out my tongue for making vows before God to Maurice Stair; when my soul was blotted with hatred; when I drove the knives of scorn and contempt into myself for desecrating my life, and my father’s name by such an alliance.

On such nights I dared not open my lips to Maurice. I feared myself too much. Locked in my hut I would spend hours watching with dry eyes the spectacle of pride writhing in the dust. Or kneeling before the tortured body of Christ crucified, but not daring to lift my face to him, nor to the lovely face of that stately Madonna Bouguereau painted with hands upraised and great eyes full of sorrow for the fate of women; no prayer would come to my bitten lips, nor tears to my scorched eyes; but the cry of the desolate and the despairing was in my heart.

“Oh, Mother of Consolation!... Help of the Afflicted... ora pro nobis!”

Often when dawn, that scarlet witch, with golden fingers came tapping on the canvas windows I would still be kneeling there, stiff-limbed, my shoulders chilled to stone above my gown. And after a little while I would open my door and go out into the sweet wild morning. Strange that sometimes it almost seemed as if the pagan witch had more healing in her golden hands than the Mother of Sorrows herself; for standing there gazing at her rising from the mists of the hills like a goddess from the incense on her altars, I would feel at last the frozen tears thawing in my heart and surging to my weary-lidded eyes.

There were other hours when battles of a different kind were to be faced, not with myself but Maurice. Thrusting himself violently into my hut he would revoke all promises and trample compacts under foot, making demands of me that seemed to fill and darken the room with shame: transforming me into a pillar of ice that could utter no word but one—a word that fell like a little cold icicle into space, re-forming again upon my benumbed lips to fall and fall again. “No—no—no—no—no—no.”

There was such a night that ended at dawn with an unspeakable struggle—scorching kisses on my bare shoulders, and a blow across his lips that left blood upon my clenched fist.

Ah! those were dark days! Desperate, soul-deforming nights!

There was another night when after bitter taunts had been hurled like poisoned arrows round the room, he tore the bed-clothes and pillows from my bed and the gowns and hangings from the walls and flung them in heaps and tatters into the rain-sodden yard. When the boys came in the morning to their work they picked everything up, cleaned and dried them as best they could, and with calm, inscrutable faces replaced them in my room.

After such incidents came intervals of days and weeks in which we never opened lips to each other. I moved about his house like a ghost, passing from hut to hut, arranging his meals, ordering his household, but speaking him no word, or if I did getting none in return. When we rode together, because it had become a set habit to mount our horses at a certain hour every afternoon, we never addressed each other except in the presence of other people who might chance to join us in our ride.

One day when we sat at table and I crossed myself for grace, as I had always been accustomed to do, he found a new jibe to throw at me.

“It makes me sick to see you sitting there tapping at yourself like an Irish peasant!”

Swiftly I found words to requite him for this new outrage. Until then he had at least left my faith untainted by his touch.

“Oh, Maurice!” I said. “If you were only an Irish peasant I would wash your feet and dry them with my hair.”

I spoke very softly, but my words brought two little streaks of red into his cheeks, as though I had flicked them there with a whip. God forgive me, I had developed a cruel tongue; I was no Angel in the house: only a sorely driven woman. And it was true that I would have poured out gifts at his feet if he had only been an Irish peasant with any of the nobility of some of the natures that come to birth in that sad land of beauty. If only he had possessed some of the lovely Irish traits that draw love as the sun draws the dew—generosity, a few ideals, a sweet thing or two about his heart, a little room in it for dreams and beauty!

If even his sins had beenbigsins I should have felt some hope. Had everything he did been of the same calibre as his coming to table in his dirty flannels, offensive and discourteous as that action was, I could have forgiven much. There is hope for the boldly offensive man who does not care a button whose feelings he hurts, or who sees his sins. Such men usually have the force of character to do big, bold, fine things also to offset their offences, and such men never fail to bring women to their banner; for women, above all things, love in a man the quality ofbigness.

But a man who lies and is a coward! who drinks whiskey in his room, and afterwards eats cloves! who pats animals in public, and viciously kicks them in private! whose wretched puling sins are afraid to stand on their own legs and assert themselves as sins—hiding behind doors, skulking in the darkness!

Oh! there were days when, as we rode together over the short golden grass, I wished my horse would throw me and break my neck—and did not pray at night for forgiveness for that sinful wish. In the terrible season of drought that had fallen, the source of prayer was beginning to dry up and fail.

In a letter from Judy, which came from Australia this passage occurred:

“I hear that thepetit sobriquetRhodesians have for you since you went to Mgatweli is ‘Ghostie’ Stair. They tell me you are as gay and witty as ever, and seem to be extremely happy in your marriage, but have become as white and spectral as a ghost. Doesn’t the place agree with you? Dickie is flourishing, and I have got a splendid German governess for him. John is a perfect Pet.”

Chapter Twenty.What a Vulture Told.“As I came thro’ the Desert thus it was—As I came thro’ the Desert.”For a reason that had to do with my intense love for animals I had steadfastly refused to have any pets, though I had been offered an adorable Irish terrier puppy, a tamemeerkatand a baby monkey.But one day, Major Ringe, the magistrate, a big, fair man of forty with innocent eyes, lank limbs, and a reputation in the Gunners for valour second to none, brought me a pretty little white kitten that I could not resist.It had china-blue eyes and other traces of Persian ancestry, but its chief charm was its lovely fluffy playfulness, and soft snowballiness. It seemed to me I had never had anything so sweet and wonderful in my life since the day Anthony Kinsella left me. It was like a little blue and white cloud dropped from the skies: it brought back dreams.We called it Snowie, and from the first Maurice seemed as fond of it as I, and insisted that Major Ringe had meant it for him also. I was only too willing to share it with him if he really cared, but I was always a little nervous for fear that in some sudden gust of rage he might give the little trustful thing a bang. But at other times, when I saw him fondling it with real tenderness in his eyes, I reproached myself, and a piercing thought darted into my mind.What if I am ginning against him? What if in my selfishness and pride I am wickedly unjust to him? Perhaps if he had a child to love—he would be different!Yet when I thought of a child of mine—with Maurice’s eyes and Maurice’s ways—I turned sick and faint, and I flung the thought out. But it came back and back, roosting in my mind, pecking at my heart like a little black vulture.I let him have the kitten to himself when he wanted it, and he would take it away to his room. We got into the way of keeping it in turn to spend the night with us. But it always preferred me. It would escape from him whenever it could and come scampering back across the yard to me; and he following it in a rage, would grab it up roughly, accusing me of feeding it in the night to make it like me best!The nights I had Snowie I slept well, dreaming I had a child with Anthony Kinsella’s blue eyes, nestling at my heart. I often woke crooning to it as my old Irish nurse used to croon to me:“Hush-a, Hush-a, Hush-a, m’babee.”But on the nights that I had no kitten to nestle against my throat, the little black vulture kept me company, staying with me unweariedly, plucking at my heart, asking little terrible questions to which I had no answer.“Do you think Maurice Stair also croons over dream children?—does he give them the eyes of his love?—have they little hands that fondle him?”“You have tried beguiling, and flattering, and scorn, and hate—is there nothing else left to try?”“Is a man’s soul nothing?—what of the little smouldering spark down below, under the mud and weights—is it still there?—or have you put it out?”“Who are you to keep yourself so aloof and proud?—do you think women have not sacrificed themselves before to-day—better, nobler women than you?”“Yes—but for love—for love—for love!” I cried, and wept till dawn.One night it was raining terribly when Maurice got up to leave the drawing-room and go across to his hut. Lightning was streaking between the trees, and great crashes of thunder seemed to fall bodily from the skies and explode like tons of dynamite amongst the kopjes, echoing and detonating through the land.It was Maurice’s night for the kitten, but she didn’t want to go. She tried hard to get away to me, but he tucked her into the pocket of his mackintosh, and only the top of her little fluffy face was to be seen gazing at me with appealing blue eyes.“Let her stay for a little while, Maurice,” I said, “just till the storm goes off a little. I’ll bring her over to your door later. She’s afraid of the storm.”“Nonsense: the storm won’t hurt her. Get back into my pocket, you little devil.”But the little devil only mewed the louder, and tried the harder to escape, gazing at me imploringly. I turned away with my eyes full of tears. She was so like a child asking to be left with its mother. I knew, too, that I had a wretched night before me with a black companion. I should have been glad of the little furry thing snuggling against me. But it was Maurice’s turn.“Good-night!” I said abruptly. “I shall stay here till the storm goes down. I’m afraid of the lightning in the trees.”He said good-night, and went out into the storm, his mackintosh buttoned round him, lantern in hand. I stood watching in the door, and heard him stumbling against tree trunks and swearing, until he found his hut. Then the door banged, and light gleamed through his canvas windows.Presently when the lightning was not quite so vivid, I wrapped myself up, and locking the drawing-room door beat my way across the compound to my own hut. Though the journey was only a matter of a few seconds I was wet to the skin when I arrived, and hastily throwing off my clothes slipped into bed. As I put out my light I thought I heard Snowie mewing again. I was very tired, and, contrary to my expectation, fell asleep very quickly. Perhaps the vulture was tired out too.I dreamed I saw Snowie backing away from the fangs of a wolf and crying piteously. I rushed to save her, but the wolf already had her, and was mauling the life out of her. Her screams were terrible—almost human! They woke me up. With a wet forehead I sat up in bed, listening. But I could hear nothing; only bursts of thunder, the whip of the rain on the trees, and the swish and ripple of little streams tearing down the sides of the hill. The storm had increased.After awhile I lay down again, but I could sleep no more. The cries had been so real they haunted me. I considered the matter of going over to Maurice to see if all was well with the kitten. I had never entered his hut, only looked in the door daily, to see that it was kept clean by his boy. What excuse had I to knock at his door in the middle of the night? He would probably, and with every reason, be very indignant at being waked up. Nevertheless, I presently found myself on the floor groping for my slippers and feeling for my cloak.When I opened the door a wild blast tore in, lifting my cloak to the roof, and in a moment the front of my night-gown was like a wet rag, and my body streaming with wet. It was no use attempting to take a light. I stumbled among the trees, in the thick darkness; blinding lightning flickered across my eyeballs like liquid fire, but it showed the way, and at last I reached the door I knew to be Maurice’s and battered on it. Silence!“Maurice! Maurice!”Silence again. Nothing but the flacking rain and pealing thunder. Within, all was darkness and silence; evidently Maurice was fast asleep, and Snowie too. My worry had been about nothing. How foolish to be so disturbed by a dream, I thought, as I beat my way back, and once more sought my bed. Still, I was glad I had gone and set my mind at rest.By one of those extraordinary lapses of memory that sometimes occur, I woke in the morning with no recollection of the night’s adventure. I had slept it all away. The only thought in my mind as I jumped out of bed was that if I did not make double-quick time Maurice would be at the breakfast table before me, a thing I never allowed to happen since he had taken to rising for breakfast. I flew through my dressing, and was still five minutes to the good when I ran across the yard in the morning air of a world washed, and fresh, and glittering like crystal.To my astonishment Maurice was not only at the table, but had finished his breakfast.“But why so early?” I cried in surprise.“I had a message from Ringe to say that he wants me at the court early.”As he finished speaking Mango entered to say that Sergeant Locke was outside, wanting to speak to the master. Maurice rose hastily, putting his serviette to his lips, and as he did so I saw upon the back of his right hand three long deep scratches. In an instant he had whipped his hand into his pocket. He gave me a searching glance which I noticed but vaguely, for at that moment the whole of my last night’s dream and adventure in the rain had come flashing back, brought to memory by the sight of those deep new scratches on the back of his hand. While I sat thinking I heard Sergeant Locke’s voice saying:“Major Ringe went off at four this morning, sir, with Mr Malcolm—they got news last night of a lion out at Intanga. As they rode by the camp the Major called me up to ask you to see about Masefield’s boy at the court this morning. It is the only case there is.”“All right, Locke.”Then how could Maurice have received a message from Ringe? Why had he got up so early and finished his breakfast before—What was that scratch?As these questions flashed one after the other through my mind, I sprang up and ran to the door. He was just flicking the reins on his horse’s neck for it to start. He hardly ever wore gloves, but he had a pair on this morning, and the scratch was hidden.“Maurice,” I cried out, “where is Snowie?”He turned on his horse without stopping it and regarded me with surprised eyes.“Snowie?”“Yes—my kitten?”“Why, haven’t you seen her around the place this morning? She was in the dining-room a few minutes ago.”“Oh!” I cried, and my heart nearly burst with relief. I waved to him, gladness in my smile, and ran back into the dining-room calling the kitten. “Snowie—Snowie—Snow—ie.”Later I went into the yard, and all round the huts, still calling. But she did not come running with her little tail erect and her little pink mouth open. There was no sign of her. I turned to the boys, but their faces were blank walls. No one had seen her that morning. I questioned Mango. He had not noticed her, he said. Doubtless if theInkossaid so, she must have been in the dining-room, but he had not happened to notice her.The other boys seemed to be observing me closely, but when I returned their searching gaze they dropped their mysterious dark eyes to the ground, after the manner of kaffirs. None of them had seen Snowie since the evening before, when I had crossed to the drawing-room with her on my shoulder, after dinner.Maurice came home very gay and hungry to lunch. He had easily disposed of the one case, he said; but he and Clarke, the magistrate’s clerk, had had a great morning hunting a wild-cat that had taken refuge under the courthouse, and refused to budge. It was imperative to get her as she had been after Clarke’s canaries.“At last we smoked her out,” he related, “and she came for me like a red-hot devil. If I hadn’t put up my hand she’d have had my eyes out. Look what she did to me.”He held out for my inspection the hand with the long deep scratch I had seen at the breakfast table! I stared at it speechless. He withdrew it and proceeded with his lunch. Presently he related to me several bits of news he had heard in town that morning. He was, for him, extraordinarily talkative.“And who do you think have just arrived here?—the Valettas. They’ve taken that big thatched place that Nathan, of the Royal Hotel, has just put up. Mrs Valetta is very sick—fever and complications—never been right since Fort George, Valetta says. He’s brought her here from their mine, to get some good nursing before he can take her home.”I was silent as the dead.“Valetta has struck it rich somewhere to the north of Buluwayo, and is going home to float a company as soon as his wife is well.”“Maurice, Snowie cannot be found. We have searched everywhere for her.”He put down his coffee cup.“But that is strange! I tell you she was in the room here when you came in this morning. I had just given her a piece of bacon.”I looked away from him. It was not good to watch his eyes when he was lying. It seemed to me that I saw something in them black and naked jibbering at me like a satyr.“What made her cry out last night—in your hut?—”“Last night?—in my hut? She didn’t stay with me, you know. The little brute was so ill-tempered and vixenish, and so determined not to stay, that I opened the door and threw her out about half an hour after I left you.”“Into the storm?”“Oh, the storm! Pooh! cats know how to look after themselves.Sheevidently did, for she was as lively as a cricket in here this morning. What are you worrying about, my dear girl? She’ll come sidling in when it pleases her. She’s gone off on a hunting trip like Ringe. All the cats in this country are more than half wild.”I got up and left the table, my heart like a stone: not only for my little snowbally cat with her winning ways, but for myself. At that moment I terribly hated life.“I’m going to ride out and see if Ringe got that lion,” he called after me. “Will you come?”“No!”I had planned to go ferning that afternoon to a creek near by. The ground of my grotto was all prepared for the new plants, but I could not bring myself to start. I kept wandering up the kopje side, and among the zinias. At last, as I came to the huts again, I heard the boys wrangling outside the kitchen.Mango was a Zanzibar boy and always at variance with the Mashonas. Maurice’s servant, Sixpence, a shrewd-looking fellow of about seventeen, was squatting on his haunches opposite the door, fiercely and monotonously demanding soap; some clothes lay beside him on the ground. He must go to the river and wash, he announced. But Mango replied that all the washing was done the day before yesterday, and declined to hand out soap. Coffee was backing up Sixpence, and telling him that as the master’s boy he had a right to ask for what he wanted, and get it. Makupi, who in spite of curses and blows was quite one of the domestic staff, though he never did any work, was turning over the soiled linen with his foot when I came up.“But it is not washing day, Sixpence,” I objected. He arose quickly and gathered up the things he proposed to wash, muttering imprecations on Makupi for spreading them out. He rolled them hastily, but a little too late, into a ball. I had seen what he wanted to wash—a suit of pale blue pyjamas with fresh stains of blood all over them.“The master told me I must go and wash to-day,” he repeated sullenly.“Give him soap, Mango,” I said dully and walked away. It was no use looking for Snowie any longer!For three days I did not speak to Maurice. I saw to his house and food, but I would not sit at meals with him, and I would not speak to him. He bore all with a cheerful air. I often heard him whistling. On the third day he wrote a note and sent it to my hut by Sixpence:Would I be so extremely kind and condescending as to grace his table that evening? A rather important man from Salisbury was in, and coming to dinner. Of course I was full of imaginary grievances against him (the writer) but perhaps for the sake of appearances I would be so exceedingly gracious as to forget them for an hour or two. He had not the slightest objection to my going back to my sulks afterwards.—Mine effusively, Maurice Stair.I arranged a goodmenuwith Mango, decorated the table, and was ready to receive his guest. Dinner passed as smoothly and pleasantly as a deep river may glide over dark unthinkable things.Just as the boys were putting the dessert upon the table I felt something against my skirt. I pushed back my chair and looked down. Snowie had come home.With a cry I caught her up and put her on the table before me. The next cry came from the guest.“My God!—the fiend who did that ought to be—hanged!”There was a silence that the kitten tried to break. She essayed to mew, almost as if she had something to tell; but no sound came from the broken jaws gummed together with matter and dried blood. One blue eye gazed dully round, the other was battered into her head like a crushed turquoise. Every paw but one was broken; they trailed behind her, and her body waggled strangely from an injured spine. I was afraid to take the little mangled body to my breast for fear of what fresh pain I might cause it. I thought I heard it moaning like a woman: yet its mouth did not move.“Hanging would be too good for the brute—brandy, Stair—your wife is fainting.”“No—no; milk—bring warm milk for my baby—it has Anthony’s eyes—my poor little white baby—all broken—”The moaning that did not come from Snowie filled the room.“No use giving the poor little beggar milk, Mrs Stair—it is dying—better to put it out of its misery at once—drink this brandy, will you—got any poison in the house, Stair?”“Yes.”The man took the kitten from me and went from the room, and I followed; but as I passed Maurice Stair I whispered three words at him, with terrible eyes:“Take it then!”I had suffered too much.As I entered my hut the silver travelling-clock that had come with me to Africa struck three clear notes from my dressing-table.Of all the strange hours of my life it had knelled none more desperate than this! I came in with the dew of the night on my face, dust and dead leaves hanging to my white satin gown, some little stains of blood upon the bodice, an ashen-blue flower in my hand. My nails were full of earth. I had dug a grave with my hands for Snowie, and buried her among the zinias.The hut seemed strange to me. I found myself looking round it as if I had never seen it before—or should never see it again. On the little altar theveilleuseflickered upwards to the silver crucifix; and from above, the Mother of Consolation regarded me with grave, sad eyes that made me afraid of my purpose. I turned away and opened a dispatch-box on my dressing-table, and took from it the revolver I had brought to Rhodesia.One little bullet lay snug, waiting to be sent on its message.I stared at it, pondering on the power of such a tiny thing to force open the great sealed gates of Death! So small and insignificant, yet with surer, swifter power than anything that lived or breathed to send one swiftly beyond the stars, beyond the dawn, beyond the eternal hills! I should know at last what fate was Anthony Kinsella’s—but I dared not look behind me to where theveilleusegleamed on the drooping head of Christ who died for sinners.A shadow fell across my hands as they mused upon the polished barrels, and in a moment the room seemed darker; the air grew bitter to breathe when I knew that Maurice Stair was sharing it with me. I looked in the mirror and saw his face.“What do you want—murderer?”“I want to die, Deirdre—I am not fit to live—kill me.”“There is rat poison in the house,” I said, and saw my lips curving in the bitter gleaming smile of a Medusa as he blenched and shook under my words.“My God!—you are cruel—crueller than death. It costs more to stand here and face you than to go and die like a rat in a hole. You are right, itisthe only death I am fit for—but speak to me first, Deirdre—give me one kind word—just one word.”“Words!—what do they do for you? A hundredth part of the words I have flung at you in my misery would have put manhood into a baboon, and driven arealman mad with shame—butyou!”“I know—I am a coward, a skunk, a liar, a drunkard. I will die to-night if it will please you.”“Nothing you can do will please me.”“My God.—let me tell you how it happened,—she scratched my hand trying to get away to you, and I went mad for a few moments—for a few moments I saw red—before God I did not know what I was doing—afterwards I saw her lying on the ground all battered to bits, and found the bloody boot-jack in my hand—”“Ah!”“Oh, God! don’t look at me like that—I never meant it, Deirdre—I swear I never meant it—I put her outside—she must have crept away into the bush to die.”“She lay there three days suffering the hells of hunger and thirst and wounds—too broken to crawl home—while you whistled, and lied! Maurice Stair you are an unspeakable brute. Be very sure you will answer to God for this.”I threw down my revolver, and turned on him the implacable Medusa face of the stone image in the mirror.“If you are going to die to-night, then I will not. Your presence would poison the very valley of death for me.”“You meant to die—you? Deirdre, have I brought you to such a pass? Forgive me—forgive me.” He grovelled on the floor clutching at my skirt, kissing my feet, but I thrust him away.“Forgive me—I did not mean to do it—some madness entered into me—I loved the little thing, Deirdre—I loved it—I used to lie in the dark with it against my face, and think it was a little child—your child.”Black vultures flew into the room then; the air was darkened with their wings. They filled the hut rustling and beating. They flapped about me, with cruel beaks plucking at my heart. Through the trailing of their dusky wings I saw the tortured face of the man on the floor. And across the room the great eyes of Mary accused not him, but me.“Get up, Maurice,” I said to him at last. Now that I knew that the sweet rest and peace of death were not for me a great weariness crept over my spirit. “Get up! Do not kneel to me. You make me ashamed.”“Give me another chance, Deirdre. May God curse and afflict me root and branch, if I do not change from what I am. Give me one more chance.”I held out my hand to him, while the floor swayed under my feet.“This is a deep, terrible pit—we are in—Maurice.” I stammered, hardly having strength to speak. “We must try and help each other—to climb out of it—together.”Looking past him out through the open door, into the grey weeping morning I saw a vista of long weary years.

“As I came thro’ the Desert thus it was—As I came thro’ the Desert.”

“As I came thro’ the Desert thus it was—As I came thro’ the Desert.”

For a reason that had to do with my intense love for animals I had steadfastly refused to have any pets, though I had been offered an adorable Irish terrier puppy, a tamemeerkatand a baby monkey.

But one day, Major Ringe, the magistrate, a big, fair man of forty with innocent eyes, lank limbs, and a reputation in the Gunners for valour second to none, brought me a pretty little white kitten that I could not resist.

It had china-blue eyes and other traces of Persian ancestry, but its chief charm was its lovely fluffy playfulness, and soft snowballiness. It seemed to me I had never had anything so sweet and wonderful in my life since the day Anthony Kinsella left me. It was like a little blue and white cloud dropped from the skies: it brought back dreams.

We called it Snowie, and from the first Maurice seemed as fond of it as I, and insisted that Major Ringe had meant it for him also. I was only too willing to share it with him if he really cared, but I was always a little nervous for fear that in some sudden gust of rage he might give the little trustful thing a bang. But at other times, when I saw him fondling it with real tenderness in his eyes, I reproached myself, and a piercing thought darted into my mind.

What if I am ginning against him? What if in my selfishness and pride I am wickedly unjust to him? Perhaps if he had a child to love—he would be different!

Yet when I thought of a child of mine—with Maurice’s eyes and Maurice’s ways—I turned sick and faint, and I flung the thought out. But it came back and back, roosting in my mind, pecking at my heart like a little black vulture.

I let him have the kitten to himself when he wanted it, and he would take it away to his room. We got into the way of keeping it in turn to spend the night with us. But it always preferred me. It would escape from him whenever it could and come scampering back across the yard to me; and he following it in a rage, would grab it up roughly, accusing me of feeding it in the night to make it like me best!

The nights I had Snowie I slept well, dreaming I had a child with Anthony Kinsella’s blue eyes, nestling at my heart. I often woke crooning to it as my old Irish nurse used to croon to me:

“Hush-a, Hush-a, Hush-a, m’babee.”

But on the nights that I had no kitten to nestle against my throat, the little black vulture kept me company, staying with me unweariedly, plucking at my heart, asking little terrible questions to which I had no answer.

“Do you think Maurice Stair also croons over dream children?—does he give them the eyes of his love?—have they little hands that fondle him?”

“You have tried beguiling, and flattering, and scorn, and hate—is there nothing else left to try?”

“Is a man’s soul nothing?—what of the little smouldering spark down below, under the mud and weights—is it still there?—or have you put it out?”

“Who are you to keep yourself so aloof and proud?—do you think women have not sacrificed themselves before to-day—better, nobler women than you?”

“Yes—but for love—for love—for love!” I cried, and wept till dawn.

One night it was raining terribly when Maurice got up to leave the drawing-room and go across to his hut. Lightning was streaking between the trees, and great crashes of thunder seemed to fall bodily from the skies and explode like tons of dynamite amongst the kopjes, echoing and detonating through the land.

It was Maurice’s night for the kitten, but she didn’t want to go. She tried hard to get away to me, but he tucked her into the pocket of his mackintosh, and only the top of her little fluffy face was to be seen gazing at me with appealing blue eyes.

“Let her stay for a little while, Maurice,” I said, “just till the storm goes off a little. I’ll bring her over to your door later. She’s afraid of the storm.”

“Nonsense: the storm won’t hurt her. Get back into my pocket, you little devil.”

But the little devil only mewed the louder, and tried the harder to escape, gazing at me imploringly. I turned away with my eyes full of tears. She was so like a child asking to be left with its mother. I knew, too, that I had a wretched night before me with a black companion. I should have been glad of the little furry thing snuggling against me. But it was Maurice’s turn.

“Good-night!” I said abruptly. “I shall stay here till the storm goes down. I’m afraid of the lightning in the trees.”

He said good-night, and went out into the storm, his mackintosh buttoned round him, lantern in hand. I stood watching in the door, and heard him stumbling against tree trunks and swearing, until he found his hut. Then the door banged, and light gleamed through his canvas windows.

Presently when the lightning was not quite so vivid, I wrapped myself up, and locking the drawing-room door beat my way across the compound to my own hut. Though the journey was only a matter of a few seconds I was wet to the skin when I arrived, and hastily throwing off my clothes slipped into bed. As I put out my light I thought I heard Snowie mewing again. I was very tired, and, contrary to my expectation, fell asleep very quickly. Perhaps the vulture was tired out too.

I dreamed I saw Snowie backing away from the fangs of a wolf and crying piteously. I rushed to save her, but the wolf already had her, and was mauling the life out of her. Her screams were terrible—almost human! They woke me up. With a wet forehead I sat up in bed, listening. But I could hear nothing; only bursts of thunder, the whip of the rain on the trees, and the swish and ripple of little streams tearing down the sides of the hill. The storm had increased.

After awhile I lay down again, but I could sleep no more. The cries had been so real they haunted me. I considered the matter of going over to Maurice to see if all was well with the kitten. I had never entered his hut, only looked in the door daily, to see that it was kept clean by his boy. What excuse had I to knock at his door in the middle of the night? He would probably, and with every reason, be very indignant at being waked up. Nevertheless, I presently found myself on the floor groping for my slippers and feeling for my cloak.

When I opened the door a wild blast tore in, lifting my cloak to the roof, and in a moment the front of my night-gown was like a wet rag, and my body streaming with wet. It was no use attempting to take a light. I stumbled among the trees, in the thick darkness; blinding lightning flickered across my eyeballs like liquid fire, but it showed the way, and at last I reached the door I knew to be Maurice’s and battered on it. Silence!

“Maurice! Maurice!”

Silence again. Nothing but the flacking rain and pealing thunder. Within, all was darkness and silence; evidently Maurice was fast asleep, and Snowie too. My worry had been about nothing. How foolish to be so disturbed by a dream, I thought, as I beat my way back, and once more sought my bed. Still, I was glad I had gone and set my mind at rest.

By one of those extraordinary lapses of memory that sometimes occur, I woke in the morning with no recollection of the night’s adventure. I had slept it all away. The only thought in my mind as I jumped out of bed was that if I did not make double-quick time Maurice would be at the breakfast table before me, a thing I never allowed to happen since he had taken to rising for breakfast. I flew through my dressing, and was still five minutes to the good when I ran across the yard in the morning air of a world washed, and fresh, and glittering like crystal.

To my astonishment Maurice was not only at the table, but had finished his breakfast.

“But why so early?” I cried in surprise.

“I had a message from Ringe to say that he wants me at the court early.”

As he finished speaking Mango entered to say that Sergeant Locke was outside, wanting to speak to the master. Maurice rose hastily, putting his serviette to his lips, and as he did so I saw upon the back of his right hand three long deep scratches. In an instant he had whipped his hand into his pocket. He gave me a searching glance which I noticed but vaguely, for at that moment the whole of my last night’s dream and adventure in the rain had come flashing back, brought to memory by the sight of those deep new scratches on the back of his hand. While I sat thinking I heard Sergeant Locke’s voice saying:

“Major Ringe went off at four this morning, sir, with Mr Malcolm—they got news last night of a lion out at Intanga. As they rode by the camp the Major called me up to ask you to see about Masefield’s boy at the court this morning. It is the only case there is.”

“All right, Locke.”

Then how could Maurice have received a message from Ringe? Why had he got up so early and finished his breakfast before—What was that scratch?

As these questions flashed one after the other through my mind, I sprang up and ran to the door. He was just flicking the reins on his horse’s neck for it to start. He hardly ever wore gloves, but he had a pair on this morning, and the scratch was hidden.

“Maurice,” I cried out, “where is Snowie?”

He turned on his horse without stopping it and regarded me with surprised eyes.

“Snowie?”

“Yes—my kitten?”

“Why, haven’t you seen her around the place this morning? She was in the dining-room a few minutes ago.”

“Oh!” I cried, and my heart nearly burst with relief. I waved to him, gladness in my smile, and ran back into the dining-room calling the kitten. “Snowie—Snowie—Snow—ie.”

Later I went into the yard, and all round the huts, still calling. But she did not come running with her little tail erect and her little pink mouth open. There was no sign of her. I turned to the boys, but their faces were blank walls. No one had seen her that morning. I questioned Mango. He had not noticed her, he said. Doubtless if theInkossaid so, she must have been in the dining-room, but he had not happened to notice her.

The other boys seemed to be observing me closely, but when I returned their searching gaze they dropped their mysterious dark eyes to the ground, after the manner of kaffirs. None of them had seen Snowie since the evening before, when I had crossed to the drawing-room with her on my shoulder, after dinner.

Maurice came home very gay and hungry to lunch. He had easily disposed of the one case, he said; but he and Clarke, the magistrate’s clerk, had had a great morning hunting a wild-cat that had taken refuge under the courthouse, and refused to budge. It was imperative to get her as she had been after Clarke’s canaries.

“At last we smoked her out,” he related, “and she came for me like a red-hot devil. If I hadn’t put up my hand she’d have had my eyes out. Look what she did to me.”

He held out for my inspection the hand with the long deep scratch I had seen at the breakfast table! I stared at it speechless. He withdrew it and proceeded with his lunch. Presently he related to me several bits of news he had heard in town that morning. He was, for him, extraordinarily talkative.

“And who do you think have just arrived here?—the Valettas. They’ve taken that big thatched place that Nathan, of the Royal Hotel, has just put up. Mrs Valetta is very sick—fever and complications—never been right since Fort George, Valetta says. He’s brought her here from their mine, to get some good nursing before he can take her home.”

I was silent as the dead.

“Valetta has struck it rich somewhere to the north of Buluwayo, and is going home to float a company as soon as his wife is well.”

“Maurice, Snowie cannot be found. We have searched everywhere for her.”

He put down his coffee cup.

“But that is strange! I tell you she was in the room here when you came in this morning. I had just given her a piece of bacon.”

I looked away from him. It was not good to watch his eyes when he was lying. It seemed to me that I saw something in them black and naked jibbering at me like a satyr.

“What made her cry out last night—in your hut?—”

“Last night?—in my hut? She didn’t stay with me, you know. The little brute was so ill-tempered and vixenish, and so determined not to stay, that I opened the door and threw her out about half an hour after I left you.”

“Into the storm?”

“Oh, the storm! Pooh! cats know how to look after themselves.Sheevidently did, for she was as lively as a cricket in here this morning. What are you worrying about, my dear girl? She’ll come sidling in when it pleases her. She’s gone off on a hunting trip like Ringe. All the cats in this country are more than half wild.”

I got up and left the table, my heart like a stone: not only for my little snowbally cat with her winning ways, but for myself. At that moment I terribly hated life.

“I’m going to ride out and see if Ringe got that lion,” he called after me. “Will you come?”

“No!”

I had planned to go ferning that afternoon to a creek near by. The ground of my grotto was all prepared for the new plants, but I could not bring myself to start. I kept wandering up the kopje side, and among the zinias. At last, as I came to the huts again, I heard the boys wrangling outside the kitchen.

Mango was a Zanzibar boy and always at variance with the Mashonas. Maurice’s servant, Sixpence, a shrewd-looking fellow of about seventeen, was squatting on his haunches opposite the door, fiercely and monotonously demanding soap; some clothes lay beside him on the ground. He must go to the river and wash, he announced. But Mango replied that all the washing was done the day before yesterday, and declined to hand out soap. Coffee was backing up Sixpence, and telling him that as the master’s boy he had a right to ask for what he wanted, and get it. Makupi, who in spite of curses and blows was quite one of the domestic staff, though he never did any work, was turning over the soiled linen with his foot when I came up.

“But it is not washing day, Sixpence,” I objected. He arose quickly and gathered up the things he proposed to wash, muttering imprecations on Makupi for spreading them out. He rolled them hastily, but a little too late, into a ball. I had seen what he wanted to wash—a suit of pale blue pyjamas with fresh stains of blood all over them.

“The master told me I must go and wash to-day,” he repeated sullenly.

“Give him soap, Mango,” I said dully and walked away. It was no use looking for Snowie any longer!

For three days I did not speak to Maurice. I saw to his house and food, but I would not sit at meals with him, and I would not speak to him. He bore all with a cheerful air. I often heard him whistling. On the third day he wrote a note and sent it to my hut by Sixpence:

Would I be so extremely kind and condescending as to grace his table that evening? A rather important man from Salisbury was in, and coming to dinner. Of course I was full of imaginary grievances against him (the writer) but perhaps for the sake of appearances I would be so exceedingly gracious as to forget them for an hour or two. He had not the slightest objection to my going back to my sulks afterwards.—Mine effusively, Maurice Stair.

I arranged a goodmenuwith Mango, decorated the table, and was ready to receive his guest. Dinner passed as smoothly and pleasantly as a deep river may glide over dark unthinkable things.

Just as the boys were putting the dessert upon the table I felt something against my skirt. I pushed back my chair and looked down. Snowie had come home.

With a cry I caught her up and put her on the table before me. The next cry came from the guest.

“My God!—the fiend who did that ought to be—hanged!”

There was a silence that the kitten tried to break. She essayed to mew, almost as if she had something to tell; but no sound came from the broken jaws gummed together with matter and dried blood. One blue eye gazed dully round, the other was battered into her head like a crushed turquoise. Every paw but one was broken; they trailed behind her, and her body waggled strangely from an injured spine. I was afraid to take the little mangled body to my breast for fear of what fresh pain I might cause it. I thought I heard it moaning like a woman: yet its mouth did not move.

“Hanging would be too good for the brute—brandy, Stair—your wife is fainting.”

“No—no; milk—bring warm milk for my baby—it has Anthony’s eyes—my poor little white baby—all broken—”

The moaning that did not come from Snowie filled the room.

“No use giving the poor little beggar milk, Mrs Stair—it is dying—better to put it out of its misery at once—drink this brandy, will you—got any poison in the house, Stair?”

“Yes.”

The man took the kitten from me and went from the room, and I followed; but as I passed Maurice Stair I whispered three words at him, with terrible eyes:

“Take it then!”

I had suffered too much.

As I entered my hut the silver travelling-clock that had come with me to Africa struck three clear notes from my dressing-table.

Of all the strange hours of my life it had knelled none more desperate than this! I came in with the dew of the night on my face, dust and dead leaves hanging to my white satin gown, some little stains of blood upon the bodice, an ashen-blue flower in my hand. My nails were full of earth. I had dug a grave with my hands for Snowie, and buried her among the zinias.

The hut seemed strange to me. I found myself looking round it as if I had never seen it before—or should never see it again. On the little altar theveilleuseflickered upwards to the silver crucifix; and from above, the Mother of Consolation regarded me with grave, sad eyes that made me afraid of my purpose. I turned away and opened a dispatch-box on my dressing-table, and took from it the revolver I had brought to Rhodesia.

One little bullet lay snug, waiting to be sent on its message.

I stared at it, pondering on the power of such a tiny thing to force open the great sealed gates of Death! So small and insignificant, yet with surer, swifter power than anything that lived or breathed to send one swiftly beyond the stars, beyond the dawn, beyond the eternal hills! I should know at last what fate was Anthony Kinsella’s—but I dared not look behind me to where theveilleusegleamed on the drooping head of Christ who died for sinners.

A shadow fell across my hands as they mused upon the polished barrels, and in a moment the room seemed darker; the air grew bitter to breathe when I knew that Maurice Stair was sharing it with me. I looked in the mirror and saw his face.

“What do you want—murderer?”

“I want to die, Deirdre—I am not fit to live—kill me.”

“There is rat poison in the house,” I said, and saw my lips curving in the bitter gleaming smile of a Medusa as he blenched and shook under my words.

“My God!—you are cruel—crueller than death. It costs more to stand here and face you than to go and die like a rat in a hole. You are right, itisthe only death I am fit for—but speak to me first, Deirdre—give me one kind word—just one word.”

“Words!—what do they do for you? A hundredth part of the words I have flung at you in my misery would have put manhood into a baboon, and driven arealman mad with shame—butyou!”

“I know—I am a coward, a skunk, a liar, a drunkard. I will die to-night if it will please you.”

“Nothing you can do will please me.”

“My God.—let me tell you how it happened,—she scratched my hand trying to get away to you, and I went mad for a few moments—for a few moments I saw red—before God I did not know what I was doing—afterwards I saw her lying on the ground all battered to bits, and found the bloody boot-jack in my hand—”

“Ah!”

“Oh, God! don’t look at me like that—I never meant it, Deirdre—I swear I never meant it—I put her outside—she must have crept away into the bush to die.”

“She lay there three days suffering the hells of hunger and thirst and wounds—too broken to crawl home—while you whistled, and lied! Maurice Stair you are an unspeakable brute. Be very sure you will answer to God for this.”

I threw down my revolver, and turned on him the implacable Medusa face of the stone image in the mirror.

“If you are going to die to-night, then I will not. Your presence would poison the very valley of death for me.”

“You meant to die—you? Deirdre, have I brought you to such a pass? Forgive me—forgive me.” He grovelled on the floor clutching at my skirt, kissing my feet, but I thrust him away.

“Forgive me—I did not mean to do it—some madness entered into me—I loved the little thing, Deirdre—I loved it—I used to lie in the dark with it against my face, and think it was a little child—your child.”

Black vultures flew into the room then; the air was darkened with their wings. They filled the hut rustling and beating. They flapped about me, with cruel beaks plucking at my heart. Through the trailing of their dusky wings I saw the tortured face of the man on the floor. And across the room the great eyes of Mary accused not him, but me.

“Get up, Maurice,” I said to him at last. Now that I knew that the sweet rest and peace of death were not for me a great weariness crept over my spirit. “Get up! Do not kneel to me. You make me ashamed.”

“Give me another chance, Deirdre. May God curse and afflict me root and branch, if I do not change from what I am. Give me one more chance.”

I held out my hand to him, while the floor swayed under my feet.

“This is a deep, terrible pit—we are in—Maurice.” I stammered, hardly having strength to speak. “We must try and help each other—to climb out of it—together.”

Looking past him out through the open door, into the grey weeping morning I saw a vista of long weary years.

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