A more miserable morning seldom had broken, even in England.
"I will go. I must go," remarked Byng at last, though there was a strange sinking of the heart as he said it. Even yet the perfume of Jasmine's cloak stole to his senses to intoxicate them. But it was his duty to offer to go; and he felt that he could do good by going, and that he was needed at Johannesburg. He, more than all of them, had been in open conflict with Oom Paul in the the past, had fought him the most vigorously, and yet for him the old veldschoen Boer had some regard and much respect, in so far as he could respect a Rooinek at all.
"I will go," Byng repeated, and looked round the table at haggard faces, at ashen faces, at the faces of men who had smoked to quiet their nerves, or drunk hard all night to keep up their courage. How many times they had done the same in olden days, when the millions were not yet arrived, and their only luxury was companionship and champagne—or something less expensive.
As Byng spoke, Krool entered the room with a great coffee-pot and a dozen small white bowls. He heard Byng's words, and for a moment his dark eyes glowed with a look of evil satisfaction. But his immobile face showed nothing, and he moved like a spirit among them his lean hand putting a bowl before each person, like a servitor of Death passing the hemlock-brew.
At his entrance there was instant silence, for, secret as their conference must be, this half-caste, this Hottentot-Boer, must hear nothing and know nothing. Not one of them but resented his being Byng's servant. Not one but felt him a danger at any time, and particularly now. Once Barry Whalen, the most outwardly brusque and apparently frank of them all, had urged Byng to give Krool up, but without avail; and now Barry eyed the half-caste with a resentful determination. He knew that Krool had heard Byng's words, for he was sitting opposite the double doors, and had seen the malicious eyes light up. Instantly, however, that light vanished. They all might have been wooden men, and Krool but a wooden servitor, so mechanical and concentrated were his actions. He seemed to look at nobody; but some of them shrank a little as he leaned over and poured the brown, steaming liquid and the hot milk into the bowls. Only once did the factotum look at anybody directly, and that was at Byng just as he was about to leave the room. Then Barry Whalen saw him glance searchingly at his master's face in a mirror, and again that baleful light leaped up in his eyes.
When he had left the room, Barry Whalen said, impulsively: "Byng, it's all damn foolery your keeping that fellow about you. It's dangerous, 'specially now."
"Coffee's good, isn't it? Think there's poison in it?" Byng asked with a contemptuous little laugh. "Sugar—what?" He pushed the great bowl of sugar over the polished table towards Barry.
"Oh, he makes you comfortable enough, but—"
"But he makes you uncomfortable, Barry? Well, we're bound to get on one another's nerves one way or another in this world when the east wind blows; and if it isn't the east wind, it's some other wind. We're living on a planet which has to take the swipes of the universe, because it has permitted that corrupt, quarrelsome, and pernicious beast, man, to populate the hemispheres. Krool is staying on with me, Barry."
"We're in heavy seas, and we don't want any wreckers on the shore," was the moody and nervously indignant reply.
"Well, Krool's in the heavy seas, all right, too—with me."
Barry Whalen persisted. "We're in for complications, Byng. England has to take a hand in the game now with a vengeance. We don't want any spies. He's more Boer than native."
"There'll be nothing Krool can get worth spying for. If we keep our mouths shut to the outside world, we'll not need fear any spies. I'm not afraid of Krool. We'll not be sold by him. Though some one inside will sell us perhaps—as the Johannesburg game was sold by some one inside."
There was a painful silence, and more than one man looked at his fellows furtively.
"We will do nothing that will not bear the light of day, and then we need not fear any spying," continued Byng.
"If we have secret meetings and intentions which we don't make public, it is only what governments themselves have; and we keep them quiet to prevent any one taking advantage of us; but our actions are justifiable. I'm going to do nothing I'm ashamed of; and when it's necessary, or when and if it seems right to do so, I'll put all my cards on the table. But when I do, I'll see that it's a full hand—if I can."
There was a silence for a moment after he had ended, then some one said:
"You think it's best that you should go? You want to go to Johannesburg?"
"I didn't say anything about wanting to go. I said I'd go because one of us—or two of us—ought to go. There's plenty to do here; but if I can be any more use out there, why, Wallstein can stay here, and—"
He got no further, for Wallstein, to whom he had just referred, and who had been sitting strangely impassive, with his eyes approvingly fixed on Byng, half rose from his chair and fell forward, his thick, white hands sprawling on the mahogany table, his fat, pale face striking the polished wood with a thud. In an instant they were all on their feet and at his side.
Barry Whalen lifted up his head and drew him back into the chair, then three of them lifted him upon a sofa. Barry's hand felt the breast of the prostrate figure, and Byng's fingers sought his wrist. For a moment there was a dreadful silence, and then Byng and Whalen looked at each other and nodded.
"Brandy!" said Byng, peremptorily.
"He's not dead?" whispered some one.
"Brandy—quick," urged Byng, and, lifting up the head a little, he presently caught the glass from Whalen's hand and poured some brandy slowly between the bluish lips. "Some one ring for Krool," he added.
A moment later Krool entered. "The doctor—my doctor and his own—and a couple of nurses," Byng said, sharply, and Krool nodded and vanished. "Perhaps it's only a slight heart-attack, but it's best to be on the safe side."
"Anyhow, it shows that Wallstein needs to let up for a while," whispered Fleming.
"It means that some one must do Wallstein's work here," said Barry Whalen. "It means that Byng stays in London," he added, as Krool entered the room again with a rug to cover Wallstein.
Barry saw Krool's eyes droop before his words, and he was sure that the servant had reasons for wishing his master to go to South Africa. The others present, however, only saw a silent, magically adept figure stooping over the sick man, adjusting the body to greater ease, arranging skilfully the cushion under the head, loosening and removing the collar and the boots, and taking possession of the room, as though he himself were the doctor; while Byng looked on with satisfaction.
"Useful person, eh?" he said, meaningly, in an undertone to Barry Whalen.
"I don't think he's at home in England," rejoined Barry, as meaningly and very stubbornly: "He won't like your not going to South Africa."
"Am I not going to South Africa?" Byng asked, mechanically, and looking reflectively at Krool.
"Wallstein's a sick man, Byng. You can't leave London. You're the only real politician among us. Some one else must go to Johannesburg."
"You—Barry?"
"You know I can't, Byng—there's my girl. Besides, I don't carry enough weight, anyhow, and you know that too."
Byng remembered Whalen's girl—stricken down with consumption a few months before. He caught Whalen's arm in a grip of friendship. "All right, dear old man," he said, kindly. "Fleming shall go, and I'll stay. Yes, I'll stay here, and do Wallstein's work."
He was still mechanically watching Krool attend to the sick man, and he was suddenly conscious of an arrest of all motion in the half-caste's lithe frame. Then Krool turned, and their eyes met. Had he drawn Krool's eyes to his—the master-mind influencing the subservient intelligence?
"Krool wants to go to South Africa," he said to himself with a strange, new sensation which he did not understand, though it was not quite a doubt. He reassured himself. "Well, it's natural he should. It's his home.... But Fleming must go to Johannesburg. I'm needed most here."
There was gratitude in his heart that Fate had decreed it so. He was conscious of the perfume from Jasmine's cloak searching his senses, even in this hour when these things that mattered—the things of Fate—were so enormously awry.
"Soon he will speak you. Wait here, madame."
Krool passed almost stealthily out.
Al'mah looked round the rather formal sitting-room, with its somewhat incongruous furnishing—leopard-skins from Bechuanaland; lion-skins from Matabeleland; silver-mounted tusks of elephants from Eastern Cape Colony and Portuguese East Africa; statues and statuettes of classical subjects; two or three Holbeins, a Rembrandt, and an El Greco on the walls; a piano, a banjo, and a cornet; and, in the corner, a little roulette-table. It was a strange medley, in keeping, perhaps, with the incongruously furnished mind of the master of it all; it was expressive of tastes and habits not yet settled and consistent.
Al'mah's eyes had taken it all in rather wistfully, while she had waited for Krool's return from his master; but the wistfulness was due to personal trouble, for her eyes were clouded and her motions languid. But when she saw the banjo, the cornet, and the roulette-table, a deep little laugh rose to her full red lips.
"How like a subaltern, or a colonial civil servant!" she said to herself.
She reflected a moment, then pursued the thought further: "But there must be bigness in him, as well as presence of mind and depth of heart—yes, I'm sure his nature is deep."
She remembered the quick, protecting hands which had wrapped her round with Jasmine Grenfel's cloak, and the great arms in which she had rested, the danger over.
"There can't be much wrong with a nature like his, though Adrian hates him so. But, of course, Adrian would. Besides, Adrian will never get over the drop in the mining-stock which ruined him—Rudyard Byng's mine.... It's natural for Adrian to hate him, I suppose," she added with a heavy sigh.
Mentally she took to comparing this room with Adrian Fellowes' sitting-room overlooking the Thames Embankment, where everything was in perfect taste and order, where all was modulated, harmonious, soigne and artistic. Yet, somehow, the handsome chambers which hung over the muddy river with its wonderful lights and shades, its mists and radiance, its ghostly softness and greyness, lacked in something that roused imagination, that stirred her senses here—the vital being in her.
It was power, force, experience, adventure. They were all here. She knew the signs: the varied interests, the primary emotions, music, art, hunting, prospecting, fighting, gambling. They were mixed with the solid achievement of talent and force in the business of life. Here was a model of a new mining-drill, with a picture of the stamps working in the Work-and-Wonder mine, together with a model of the Kaffir compound at Kimberley, with the busy, teeming life behind the wire boundaries.
Thus near was Byng to the ways of a child, she thought, thus near to the everlasting intelligence and the busy soul of a constructive and creative Deity—if there was a Deity. Despite the frequent laughter on her tongue and in her eyes, she doubted bitterly at times that there was a Deity. For how should happen the awful tragedies which encompassed men and peoples, if there was a Deity. No benign Deity could allow His own created humanity to be crushed in bleeding masses, like the grapes trampled in the vats of a vineyard. Whole cities swallowed up by earthquake; islands swept of their people by a tidal wave; a vast ship pierced by an iceberg and going down with its thousand souls; provinces spread with the vile elements of a plague which carpeted the land with dead; mines flooded by water or devastated by fire; the little new-born babe left without the rightful breast to feed it; the mother and her large family suddenly deprived of the breadwinner; old men who had lived like saints, giving their all to their own and to the world, driven to the degradation of the poorhouse in the end—ah, if one did not smile, one would die of weeping, she thought.
Al'mah had smiled her way through the world; with a quick word of sympathy for any who were hurt by the blows of life or time; with an open hand for the poor and miserable,—now that she could afford it—and hiding her own troubles behind mirth and bonhommie; for her humour, as her voice, was deep and strong like that of a man. It was sometimes too pronounced, however, Adrian Fellowes had said; and Adrian was an acute observer, who took great pride in her. Was it not to Adrian she had looked first for approval the night of her triumph at Covent Garden—why, that was only a few days ago, and it seemed a hundred days, so much had happened since. It was Adrian's handsome face which had told her then of the completeness of her triumph.
The half-caste valet entered again. "Here come, madame," he said with something very near a smile; for he liked this woman, and his dark, sensual soul would have approved of his master liking her.
"Soon the Baas, madame," he said as he placed a chair for her, and with the gliding footstep of a native left the room.
"Sunny creature!" she remarked aloud, with a little laugh, and looked round. Instantly her face lighted with interest. Here was nothing of that admired disorder, that medley of incongruous things which marked the room she had just left; but perfect order, precision, and balance of arrangement, the most peaceful equipoise. There was a great carved oak-table near to sun-lit windows, and on it were little regiments of things, carefully arranged—baskets with papers in elastic bands; classified and inscribed reference-books, scales, clips, pencils; and in one clear space, with a bunch of violets before it, the photograph of a woman in a splendid silver frame—a woman of seventy or so, obviously Rudyard Byng's mother.
Al'mah's eyes softened. Here was insight into a nature of which the world knew so little. She looked further. Everywhere were signs of disciplined hours and careful hands—cabinets with initialed drawers, shelves filled with books. There is no more impressive and revealing moment with man or woman than when you stand in a room empty of their actual presence, but having, in every inch of it, the pervasive influences of the absent personality. A strange, almost solemn quietness stole over Al'mah's senses. She had been admitted to the inner court, not of the man's house, but of his life. Her eyes travelled on with the gratified reflection that she had been admitted here. Above the books were rows of sketches—rows of sketches!
Suddenly, as her eyes rested on them, she turned pale and got to her feet. They were all sketches of the veld, high and low; of natives; of bits of Dutch architecture; of the stoep with its Boer farmer and his vrouw; of a kopje with a dozen horses or a herd of cattle grazing; of a spruit, or a Kaffir's kraal; of oxen leaning against the disselboom of a cape-wagon; of a herd of steinboks, or a little colony of meerkats in the karoo.
Her hand went to her heart with a gesture of pain, and a little cry of misery escaped her lips.
Now there was a quick footstep, and Byng entered with a cordial smile and an outstretched hand.
"Well, this is a friendly way to begin the New Year," he said, cheerily, taking her hand. "You certainly are none the worse for our little unrehearsed drama the other night. I see by the papers that you have been repeating your triumph. Please sit down. Do you mind my having a little toast while we talk? I always have my petit dejeuner here; and I'm late this morning."
"You look very tired," she said as she sat down.
Krool here entered with a tray, placing it on a small table by the big desk. He was about to pour out the tea, but Byng waved him away.
"Send this note at once by hand," he said, handing him an envelope. It was addressed to Jasmine Grenfel.
"Yes, I'm tired—rather," he added to his guest with a sudden weariness of manner. "I've had no sleep for three nights—working all the time, every hour; and in this air of London, which doesn't feed you, one needs plenty of sleep. You can't play with yourself here as you can on the high veld, where an hour or two of sleep a day will do. On-saddle and off-saddle, in-span and outspan, plenty to eat and a little sleep; and the air does the rest. It has been a worrying time."
"The Jameson Raid—and all the rest?"
"Particularly all the rest. I feel easier in my mind about Dr. Jim and the others. England will demand—so I understand," he added with a careful look at her, as though he had said too much—"the right to try Jameson and his filibusters from Matabeleland here in England; but it's different with the Jo'burgers. They will be arrested—"
"They have been arrested," she intervened.
"Oh, is it announced?" he asked without surprise.
"It was placarded an hour ago," she replied, heavily.
"Well, I fancied it would be," he remarked. "They'll have a close squeak. The sympathy of the world is with Kruger—so far."
"That is what I have come about," she said, with an involuntary and shrinking glance at the sketches on the walls.
"What you have come about?" he said, putting down his cup of tea and looking at her intently. "How are you concerned? Where do you come in?"
"There is a man—he has been arrested with the others; with Farrar, Phillips, Hammond, and the rest—"
"Oh, that's bad! A relative, or—"
"Not a relative, exactly," she replied in a tone of irony. Rising, she went over to the wall and touched one of the water-colour sketches.
"How did you come by these?" she asked.
"Blantyre's sketches? Well, it's all I ever got for all Blantyre owed me, and they're not bad. They're lifted out of the life. That's why I bought them. Also because I liked to think I got something out of Blantyre; and that he would wish I hadn't. He could paint a bit—don't you think so?"
"He could paint a bit—always," she replied.
A silence followed. Her back was turned to him, her face was towards the pictures.
Presently he spoke, with a little deferential anxiety in the tone. "Are you interested in Blantyre?" he asked, cautiously. Getting up, he came over to her.
"He has been arrested—as I said—with the others."
"No, you did not say so. So they let Blantyre into the game, did they?" he asked almost musingly; then, as if recalling what she had said, he added: "Do you mind telling me exactly what is your interest in Blantyre?"
She looked at him straight in the eyes. For a face naturally so full of humour, hers was strangely dark with stormy feeling now.
"Yes, I will tell you as much as I can—enough for you to understand," she answered.
He drew up a chair to the fire, and she sat down. He nodded at her encouragingly. Presently she spoke.
"Well, at twenty-one I was studying hard, and he was painting—"
"Blantyre?"
She inclined her head. "He was full of dreams—beautiful, I thought them; and he was ambitious. Also he could talk quite marvellously."
"Yes, Blantyre could talk—once," Byng intervened, gently.
"We were married secretly."
Byng made a gesture of amazement, and his face became shocked and grave. "Married! Married! You were married to Blantyre?"
"At a registry office in Chelsea. One month, only one month it was, and then he went away to Madeira to paint—'a big commission,' he said; and he would send for me as soon as he could get money in hand—certainly in a couple of months. He had taken most of my half-year's income—I had been left four hundred a year by my mother."
Byng muttered a malediction under his breath and leaned towards her sympathetically.
With an effort she continued. "From Madeira he wrote to tell me he was going on to South Africa, and would not be home for a year. From South Africa he wrote saying he was not coming back; that I could divorce him if I liked. The proof, he said, would be easy; or I needn't divorce him unless I liked, since no one knew we were married."
For an instant there was absolute silence, and she sat with her fingers pressed tight to her eyes. At last she went on, her face turned away from the great kindly blue eyes bent upon her, from the face flushed with honourable human sympathy.
"I went into the country, where I stayed for nearly three years, till—till I could bear it no longer; and then I began to study and sing again."
"What were you doing in the country?" he asked in a low voice.
"There was my baby," she replied, her hands clasping and unclasping in pain. "There was my little Nydia."
"A child—she is living?" he asked gently.
"No, she died two years ago," was the answer in a voice which tried to be firm.
"Does Blantyre know?"
"He knew she was born, nothing more."
"We were married secretly."
"And after all he has done, and left undone, you want to try and save him now?"
He was thinking that she still loved the man. "That offscouring!" he said to himself. "Well, women beat all! He treats her like a Patagonian; leaves her to drift with his child not yet born; rakes the hutches of the towns and the kraals of the veld for women—always women, black or white, it didn't matter; and yet, by gad, she wants him back!"
She seemed to understand what was passing in his mind. Rising, with a bitter laugh which he long remembered, she looked at him for a moment in silence, then she spoke, her voice shaking with scorn:
"You think it is love for him that prompts me now?" Her eyes blazed, but there was a contemptuous laugh at her lips, and she nervously pulled at the tails of her sable muff. "You are wrong—absolutely. I would rather bury myself in the mud of the Thames than let him touch me. Oh, I know what his life must have been—the life of him that you know! With him it would either be the sewer or the sycamore-tree of Zaccheus; either the little upper chamber among the saints or eating husks with the swine. I realize him now. He was easily susceptible to good and evil, to the clean and the unclean; and he might have been kept in order by some one who would give a life to building up his character; but his nature was rickety, and he has gone down and not up."
"Then why try to save him? Let Oom Paul have him. He'll do no more harm, if—"
"Wait a minute," she urged. "You are a great man"—she came close to him—"and you ought to understand what I mean, without my saying it. I want to save him for his own sake, not for mine—to give him a chance. While there's life there's hope. To go as he is, with the mud up to his lips—ah, can't you see! He is the father of my dead child. I like to feel that he may make some thing of his life and of himself yet. That's why I haven't tried to divorce him, and—"
"If you ever want to do so—" he interrupted, meaningly.
"Yes, I know. I have always been sure that nothing could be quite so easy; but I waited, on the chance of something getting hold of him which would lift him out of himself, give him something to think of so much greater than himself, some cause, perhaps—"
"He had you and your unborn child," he intervened.
"Me—!" She laughed bitterly. "I don't think men would ever be better because of me. I've never seen that. I've seen them show the worst of human nature because of me—and it wasn't inspiring. I've not met many men who weren't on the low levels."
"He hasn't stood his trial for the Johannesburg conspiracy yet. How do you propose to help him? He is in real danger of his life."
She laughed coldly, and looked at him with keen, searching eyes. "You ask that, you who know that in the armory of life there's one all-powerful weapon?"
He nodded his head whimsically. "Money? Well, whatever other weapons you have, you must have that, I admit. And in the Transvaal—"
"Then here," she said, handing him an envelope—"here is what may help."
He took it hesitatingly. "I warn you," he remarked, "that if money is to be used at all, it must be a great deal. Kruger will put up the price to the full capacity of the victim."
"I suppose this victim has nothing," she ventured, quietly.
"Nothing but what the others give him, I should think. It may be a very costly business, even if it is possible, and you—"
"I have twenty thousand pounds," she said.
"Earned by your voice?" he asked, kindly.
"Every penny of it."
"Well, I wouldn't waste it on Blantyre, if I were you. No, by Heaven, you shall not do it, even if it can be done! It is too horrible."
"I owe it to myself to do it. After all, he is still my husband. I have let it be so; and while it is so, and while"—her eyes looked away, her face suffused slightly, her lips tightened—"while things are as they are, I am bound—bound by something, I don't know what, but it is not love, and it is not friendship—to come to his rescue. There will be legal expenses—"
Byng frowned. "Yes, but the others wouldn't see him in a hole—yet I'm not sure, either, Blantyre being Blantyre. In any case, I'm ready to do anything you wish."
She smiled gratefully. "Did you ever know any one to do a favor who wasn't asked to repeat it—paying one debt by contracting another, finding a creditor who will trust, and trading on his trust? Yet I'd rather owe you two debts than most men one." She held out her hand to him. "Well, it doesn't do to mope—'The merry heart goes all the day, the sad one tires in a mile-a.' And I am out for all day. Please wish me a happy new year."
He took her hand in both of his. "I wish you to go through this year as you ended the last—in a blaze of glory."
"Yes, really a blaze if not of glory," she said, with bright tears, yet laughing, too, a big warm humour shining in her strong face with the dark brown eyes and the thick, heavy eyebrows under a low, broad forehead like his own. They were indeed strangely alike in many ways both of mind and body.
"They say we end the year as we begin it," he said, cheerily. "You proved to Destiny that you were entitled to all she could give in the old year, and you shall have the best that's to be had in 1897. You are a woman in a million, and—"
"May I come and breakfast with you some morning?" she asked, gaily.
"Well, if ever I'm thought worthy of that honour, don't hesitate. As the Spanish say, It is all yours." He waved a hand to the surroundings.
"No, it is all yours," she said, reflectively, her eyes slowly roaming about her. "It is all you. I'm glad to have been here, to be as near as this to your real life. Real life is so comforting after the mock kind so many of us live; which singers and actors live anyhow."
She looked round the room again. "I feel—I don't know why it is, but I feel that when I'm in trouble I shall always want to come to this room. Yes, and I will surely come; for I know there's much trouble in store for me. You must let me come. You are the only man I would go to like this, and you can't think what it means to me—to feel that I'm not misunderstood, and that it seems absolutely right to come. That's because any woman could trust you—as I do. Good-bye."
In another moment she had gone, and he stood beside the table with the envelope she had left with him. Presently he opened it, and unfolded the cheque which was in it. Then he gave an exclamation of astonishment.
"Seven thousand pounds!" he exclaimed. "That's a better estimate of Krugerism than I thought she had. It'll take much more than that, though, if it's done at all; but she certainly has sense. It's seven thousand times too much for Blantyre," he added, with an exclamation of disgust. "Blantyre—that outsider!" Then he fell to thinking of all she had told him. "Poor girl—poor girl!" he said aloud. "But she must not come here, just the same. She doesn't see that it's not the thing, just because she thinks I'm a Sir Galahad—me!" He glanced at the picture of his mother, and nodded toward it tenderly. "So did she always. I might have turned Kurd and robbed caravans, or become a Turk and kept concubines, and she'd never have seen that it was so. But Al'mah mustn't come here any more, for her own sake.... I'd find it hard to explain if ever, by any chance—"
He fell to thinking of Jasmine, and looked at the clock. It was only ten, and he would not see Jasmine till six; but if he had gone to South Africa he would not have seen her at all! Fate and Wallstein had been kind.
Presently, as he went to the hall to put on his coat and hat to go out, he met Barry Whalen. Barry looked at him curiously; then, as though satisfied, he said: "Early morning visitor, eh? I just met her coming away. Card of thanks for kind services au theatre, eh?"
"Well, it isn't any business of yours what it is, Barry," came the reply in tones which congealed.
"No, perhaps not," answered his visitor, testily, for he had had a night of much excitement, and, after all, this was no way to speak to a friend, to a partner who had followed his lead always. Friendship should be allowed some latitude, and he had said hundreds of things less carefully to Byng in the past. The past—he was suddenly conscious that Byng had changed within the past few days, and that he seemed to have put restraint on himself. Well, he would get back at him just the same for the snub.
"It's none of my business," he retorted, "but it's a good deal of Adrian Fellowes' business—"
"What is a good deal of Adrian Fellowes' business?"
"Al'mah coming to your rooms. Fellowes is her man. Going to marry her, I suppose," he added, cynically.
Byng's jaw set and his eyes became cold. "Still, I'd suggest your minding your own business, Barry. Your tongue will get you into trouble some day.... You've seen Wallstein this morning—and Fleming?"
Barry replied sullenly, and the day's pressing work began, with the wires busy under the seas.
At a few moments before six o'clock Byng was shown into Jasmine's sitting-room. As he entered, the man who sat at the end of the front row of stalls the first night of "Manassa" rose to his feet. It was Adrian Fellowes, slim, well groomed, with the colour of an apple in his cheeks, and his gold-brown hair waving harmoniously over his unintellectual head.
"But, Adrian, you are the most selfish man I've ever known," Jasmine was saying as Byng entered.
Either Jasmine did not hear the servant announce Byng, or she pretended not to do so, and the words were said so distinctly that Byng heard them as he came forward.
"Well, he is selfish," she added to Byng, as she shook hands. "I've known him since I was a child, and he has always had the best of everything and given nothing for it." Turning again to Fellowes, she continued: "Yes, it's true. The golden apples just fall into your hands."
"Well, I wish I had the apples, since you give me the reputation," Fellowes replied, and, shaking hands with Byng, who gave him an enveloping look and a friendly greeting, he left the room.
"Such a boy—Adrian," Jasmine said, as they sat down.
"Boy—he looks thirty or more!" remarked Byng in a dry tone.
"He is just thirty. I call him a boy because he is so young in most things that matter to people. He is the most sumptuous person—entirely a luxury. Did you ever see such colouring—like a woman's! But selfish, as I said, and useful, too, is Adrian. Yes, he really is very useful. He would be a private secretary beyond price to any one who needed such an article. He has tact—as you saw—and would make a wonderful master of ceremonies, a splendid comptroller of the household and equerry and lord-chamberlain in one. There, if ever you want such a person, or if—"
She paused. As she did so she was sharply conscious of the contrast between her visitor and Ian Stafford in outward appearance. Byng's clothes were made by good hands, but they were made by tailors who knew their man was not particular, and that he would not "try on." The result was a looseness and carelessness of good things—giving him, in a way, the look of shambling power. Yet in spite of the tie a little crooked, and the trousers a little too large and too short, he had touches of that distinction which power gives. His large hands with the square-pointed fingers had obtrusive veins, but they were not common.
"Certainly," he intervened, smiling indulgently; "if ever I want a comptroller, or an equerry, or a lord-chamberlain, I'll remember 'Adrian.' In these days one can never tell. There's the Sahara. It hasn't been exploited yet. It has no emperor."
"I like you in this mood," she said, eagerly. "You seem on the surface so tremendously practical and sensible. You frighten me a little, and I like to hear you touch things off with raillery. But, seriously, if you can ever put anything in that boy's way, please do so. He has had bad luck—in your own Rand mine. He lost nearly everything in that, speculating, and—"
Byng's face grew serious again. "But he shouldn't have speculated; he should have invested. It wants brains, good fortune, daring and wealth to speculate. But I will remember him, if you say so. I don't like to think that he has been hurt in any enterprise of mine. I'll keep him in mind. Make him one of my secretaries perhaps."
Then Barry Whalen's gossip suddenly came to his mind, and he added: "Fellowes will want to get married some day. That face and manner will lead him into ways from which there's only one outlet."
"Matrimony?" She laughed. "Oh dear, no, Adrian is much too selfish to marry."
"I thought that selfishness was one of the elements of successful marriages. I've been told so."
A curious look stole into her eyes. All at once she wondered if his words had any hidden meaning, and she felt angrily self-conscious; but she instantly put the reflection away, for if ever any man travelled by the straight Roman road of speech and thought, it was he. He had only been dealing in somewhat obvious worldly wisdom.
"You ought not to give encouragement to such ideas by repeating them," she rejoined with raillery. "This is an age of telepathy and suggestion, and the more silent we are the safer we are. Now, please, tell me everything—of the inside, I mean—about Cecil Rhodes and the Raiders. Is Rhodes overwhelmed? And Mr. Chamberlain—you have seen him? The papers say you have spent many hours at the Colonial Office. I suppose you were with him at six o'clock last evening, instead of being here with me, as you promised."
He shook his head. "Rhodes? The bigger a man is the greater the crash when he falls; and no big man falls alone."
She nodded. "There's the sense of power, too, which made everything vibrate with energy, which gave a sense of great empty places filled—of that power withdrawn and collapsed. Even the bad great man gone leaves a sense of desolation behind. Power—power, that is the thing of all," she said, her eyes shining and her small fingers interlacing with eager vitality: "power to set waves of influence in motion which stir the waters on distant shores. That seems to me the most wonderful thing."
Her vitality, her own sense of power, seemed almost incongruous. She was so delicately made, so much the dresden-china shepherdess, that intensity seemed out of relation to her nature. Yet the tiny hands playing before her with natural gestures like those of a child had, too, a decision and a firmness in keeping with the perfectly modelled head and the courageous poise of the body. There was something regnant in her, while, too, there was something sumptuous and sensuous and physically thrilling to the senses. To-day she was dressed in an exquisite blue gown, devoid of all decoration save a little chinchilla fur, which only added to its softness and richness. She wore no jewelry whatever except a sapphire brooch, and her hair shone and waved like gossamer in the sun.
"Well, I don't know," he rejoined, admiration unbounded in his eyes for the picture she was of maidenly charm and womanly beauty, "I should say that goodness was a more wonderful thing. But power is the most common ambition, and only a handful of the hundreds of millions get it in any large way. I used to feel it tremendously when I first heard the stamps pounding the quartz in the mills on the Rand. You never heard that sound? In the clear height of that plateau the air reverberates greatly; and there's nothing on earth which so much gives a sense of power—power that crushes—as the stamps of a great mine pounding away night and day. There they go, thundering on, till it seems to you that some unearthly power is hammering the world into shape. You get up and go to the window and look out into the night. There's the deep blue sky—blue like nothing you ever saw in any other sky, and the stars so bright and big, and so near, that you feel you could reach up and pluck one with your hand; and just over the little hill are the lights of the stamp-mills, the smoke and the mad red flare, the roar of great hammers as they crush, crush, crush; while the vibration of the earth makes you feel that you are living in a world of Titans."
"And when it all stops?" she asked, almost breathlessly. "When the stamps pound no more, and the power is withdrawn? It is empty and desolate—and frightening?"
"It is anything you like. If all the mills all at once, with the thousands of stamps on the Rand reef, were to stop suddenly, and the smoke and the red flare were to die, it would be frightening in more ways than one. But I see what you mean. There might be a sense of peace, but the minds and bodies which had been vibrating with the stir of power would feel that the soul had gone out of things, and they would dwindle too."
"If Rhodes should fall, if the stamps on the Rand should cease—?"
He got to his feet. "Either is possible, maybe probable; and I don't want to think of it. As you say, there'd be a ghastly sense of emptiness and a deadly kind of peace." He smiled bitterly.
She rose now also, and fingering some flowers in a vase, arranging them afresh, said: "Well, this Jameson Raid, if it is proved that Cecil Rhodes is mixed up in it, will it injure you greatly—I mean your practical interests?"
He stood musing for a moment. "It's difficult to say at this distance. One must be on the spot to make a proper estimate. Anything may happen."
She was evidently anxious to ask him a question, but hesitated. At last she ventured, and her breath came a little shorter as she spoke.
"I suppose you wish you were in South Africa now. You could do so much to straighten things out, to prevent the worst. The papers say you have a political mind—the statesman's intelligence, the Times said. That letter you wrote, that speech you made at the Chamber of Commerce dinner—"
She watched him, dreading what his answer might be. There was silence for a moment, then he answered: "Fleming is going to South Africa, not myself. I stay here to do Wallstein's work. I was going, but Wallstein was taken ill suddenly. So I stay—I stay."
She sank down in her chair, going a little pale from excitement. The whiteness of her skin gave a delicate beauty to the faint rose of her cheeks—that rose-pink which never was to fade entirely from her face while life was left to her.
"If it had been necessary, when would you have gone?" she asked.
"At once. Fleming goes to-morrow," he added.
She looked slowly up at him. "Wallstein is a new name for a special Providence," she murmured, and the colour came back to her face. "We need you here. We—"
Suddenly a thought flashed into his mind and suffused his face. He was conscious of that perfume which clung to whatever she touched. It stole to his senses and intoxicated them. He looked at her with enamoured eyes. He had the heart of a boy, the impulsiveness of a nature which had been unschooled in women's ways. Weaknesses in other directions had taught him much, but experiences with her sex had been few. The designs of other women had been patent to him, and he had been invincible to all attack; but here was a girl who, with her friendly little fortune and her beauty, could marry with no difficulty; who, he had heard, could pick and choose, and had so far rejected all comers; and who, if she had shown preference at all, had shown it for a poor man like Ian Stafford. She had courage and simplicity and a downright mind; that was clear. And she was capable. She had a love for big things, for the things that mattered. Every word she had ever said to him had understanding, not of the world alone, and of life, but of himself, Rudyard Byng. She grasped exactly what he would say, and made him say things he would never have thought of saying to any one else. She drew him out, made the most of him, made him think. Other women only tried to make him feel. If he had had a girl like this beside him during the last ten years, how many wasted hours would have been saved, how many bottles of champagne would not have been opened, how many wild nights would have been spent differently!
Too good, too fine for him—yes, a hundred times, but he would try to make it up to her, if such a girl as this could endure him. He was not handsome, he was not clever, so he said to himself, but he had a little power. That he had to some degree rough power, of course, but power; and she loved power, force. Had she not said so, shown it, but a moment before? Was it possible that she was really interested in him, perhaps because he was different from the average Englishman and not of a general pattern? She was a woman of brains, of great individuality, and his own individuality might influence her. It was too good to be true; but there had ever been something of the gambler in him, and he had always plunged. If he ever had a conviction he acted on it instantly, staked everything, when that conviction got into his inner being. It was not, perhaps, a good way, and it had failed often enough; but it was his way, and he had done according to the light and the impulse that were in him. He had no diplomacy, he had only purpose.
He came over to her. "If I had gone to South Africa would you have remembered my name for a month?" he asked with determination and meaning.
"My friends never suffer lunar eclipse," she answered, gaily. "Dear sir, I am called Hold-Fast. My friends are century-flowers and are always blooming."
"You count me among your friends?"
"I hope so. You will let me make all England envious of me, won't you? I never did you any harm, and I do want to have a hero in my tiny circle."
"A hero—you mean me? Well, I begin to think I have some courage when I ask you to let me inside your 'tiny' circle. I suppose most people would think it audacity, not courage."
"You seem not to be aware what an important person you are—how almost sensationally important. Why, I am only a pebble on a shore like yours, a little unknown slip of a girl who babbles, and babbles in vain."
She got to her feet now. "Oh, but believe me, believe me," she said, with sweet and sudden earnestness, "I am prouder than I can say that you will let me be a friend of yours! I like men who have done things, who do things. My grandfather did big, world-wide things, and—"
"Yes, I know; I met your grandfather once. He was a big man, big as can be. He had the world by the ear always."
"He spoiled me for the commonplace," she replied. "If I had lived in Pizarro's time, I'd have gone to Peru with him, the splendid robber."
He answered with the eager frankness and humour of a boy. "If you mean to be a friend of mine, there are those who will think that in one way you have fulfilled your ambition, for they say I've spoiled the Peruvians, too."
"I like you when you say things like that," she murmured. "If you said them often—"
She looked at him archly, and her eyes brimmed with amusement and excitement.
Suddenly he caught both her hands in his and his eyes burned. "Will you—"
He paused. His courage forsook him. Boldness had its limit. He feared a repulse which could never be overcome. "Will you, and all of you here, come down to my place in Wales next week?" he blundered out.
She was glad he had faltered. It was too bewildering. She dared not yet face the question she had seen he was about to ask. Power—yes, he could give her that; but power was the craving of an ambitious soul. There were other things. There was the desire of the heart, the longing which came with music and the whispering trees and the bright stars, the girlish dreams of ardent love and the garlands of youth and joy—and Ian Stafford.
Suddenly she drew herself together. She was conscious that the servant was entering the room with a letter.
"The messenger is waiting," the servant said.
With an apology she opened the note slowly as Byng turned to the fire. She read the page with a strange, tense look, closing her eyes at last with a slight sense of dizziness. Then she said to the servant:
"Tell the messenger to wait. I will write an answer."
"I am sure we shall be glad to go to you in Wales next week," she added, turning to Byng again. "But won't you be far away from the centre of things in Wales?"
"I've had the telegraph and a private telephone wire to London put in. I shall be as near the centre as though I lived in Grosvenor Square; and there are always special trains."
"Special trains—oh, but it's wonderful to have power to do things like that! When do you go down?" she asked.
"To-morrow morning."
She smiled radiantly. She saw that he was angry with himself for his cowardice just now, and she tried to restore him. "Please, will you telephone me when you arrive at your castle? I should like the experience of telephoning by private wire to Wales."
He brightened. "Certainly, if you really wish it. I shall arrive at ten to-morrow night, and I'll telephone you at eleven."
"Splendid—splendid! I'll be alone in my room then. I've got a telephone instrument there, and so we could say good-night."
"So we can say good-night," he repeated in a low voice, and he held out his hand in good-bye. When he had gone, with a new, great hope in his heart, she sat down and tremblingly re-opened the note she had received a moment before.
"I am going abroad" it read—"to Paris, Berlin, Vienna, and St. Petersburg. I think I've got my chance at last. I want to see you before I go—this evening, Jasmine. May I?"
It was signed "Ian."
"Fate is stronger than we are," she murmured; "and Fate is not kind to you, Ian," she added, wearily, a wan look coming into her face.
"Mio destino," she said at last—"mio destino!" But who was her destiny—which of the two who loved her?