Chapter Four.Cassidy.“And the greatest of these is charity.”I met Cassidy under trying circumstances. But it worked out all right eventually, principally because, so far as I knew him—and that got to be pretty well—Cassidy was not amenable to circumstances. He beat them mostly, and some of them were pretty tough.The circumstances surrounding our meeting were trying, because Cassidy was in bed after a hard day’s work, and I aroused him at 3 a.m. by firing a revolver at his bulldog. His huts were on the railway works, and near the footpath to Jim Mackay’s canteen—a pretty hot show. He used to be roused this way every Saturday and Sunday, and occasionally throughout the week, by visitors, black and white, warlike and friendly, thieving and sociable, but all drunk. At first he got a bulldog, but they got to know him, and after awhile the tip went round that half a pound of beefsteak was a good buy and better than a blunderbuss for Cassidy’s Cutting. Then he loaded fifty Number 12’s with coarse salt, mixed with pebbles and things, and, as he said to me afterwards:“Ye were the fourth that night, and ye ’noyed me wid yer swearin’ an’ shootin’ an’ that, so I just passed the salt an’ wint for the dust shot as bein’ more convincing like; but the divil an’ all of it was, I couldn’t get the cartridge in by reason of drawin’ the charge that was there already. Too bad! too bad! for dust shot it was, av I’d only known it, an’ me thinkin’ it was nothin’ but salt. Lord, Lord! we’re a miscontented lot! Av it wasn’t for bein’ greedy, I’d ’ve had ye wid the dust shot safe as death. Faith, ye niver know yer luck!”That was all right from his point of view, but as I had left my horse dying of Dikkop sickness just this side of Kilo 26, and had walked along the formation carrying saddle and bridle up to Kilo 43—about ten miles—without a drink, and twice lost my way between unconnected sections, and twice walked over the ends of the formation where culverts should have been and rolled down twenty feet of embankment, and once got bogged in a bottoming pit in a vlei, and many times hacked my shins against wheelbarrows and piles of picks stacked on the track, I think it was reasonable to let out at a bulldog that came at me like a hurricane out of the darkness and silence of 3 a.m. in the Bush veld, to say nothing of a half-finished railway cutting. And I think it only human to have cursed the owner with all my resources until the dog was called off.I don’t exactly know how it came about, but I slept in Cassidy’s hut that night. He pushed me in before him, guiding me to the bed with a hand on each elbow. He said that there were no matches in the show and that it wasn’t worth while looking for the candle, which, as he had no means of lighting it, I suppose it wasn’t.He had a rare brogue and a governing nasal drone, but it was the brogue that emboldened me to ask for whisky.“Spirits!” said he; “not a drop, an’ niver have; but jist sit ye where ye are, an’ I’ll fetch ye out some beer—Bass’s, no less, av ye’ll thry that; and can dhrink from the bottle.”He talked in jerks, and had a quaint knack of chucking remarks after an apparently completed sentence, evidently intending them to catch up to it and be tacked on. He dived under the bed somewhere, and a minute later I heard the squeaking of a corkscrew and the popping of a cork.“Here y’ are,” said he, as he pressed the bottle into my two hands; “drink hearty, me lad, and praise yer God Dan O’Connell there’s got too fat an’ lazy to pull ye down.”I dare say he knew what he was talking about, but, for my part, I confess that nothing in the whole business had impressed me less than any lack of earnestness on Dan O’Connell’s part. I sat awhile munching biscuits from a tin which he had placed on the table and gurgling down beer from the bottle. Cassidy was asleep. Ten minutes passed, and I was finishing the beer, when he sat up again, as I judged from the sound, and remarked in a brisk, clear tone:“Ye called me a mud-dollopin’, dyke-diggin’, Amsterdam’d Dutchman! Ye’ll take back the Dutchman, I believe?”“I will indeed,” I said, laughing.“An’ the mud?”“Yes, and the mud.”He settled himself in the bunk again with a grunt, and murmured in a tone of indignant contempt:“Mud, sez he, mud! An’ me shiftin’ granite boulders for soft rock, an shtruck solid formation a fut from surface, an’ getting two an’ six a cubic fer the lot! Mud, faith! An’ not enough water this three miles to the Crocodile to make spit for an ant, barrin’ what I can tap from the Figaro Battery pipe! An’ mud, sez he? Holy Fly! Mud, be Gawd!”It died away in a sleepy grunt, and Cassidy was off I groped about for a blanket, and, rolling back into the meal-sack stretcher, forgot all about mad Irishmen, sick horses, and earnest bulldogs.One always experiences a curious sensation on seeing by daylight that which one has only known in the dark. Persons do for years a certain journey or voyage, always starting and always arriving at regular hours. One day something happens which necessitates their passing in daylight the places formerly passed at night. On such occasions even the most matter-of-fact must marvel at the wanton freaks of their imaginations. The real thing seems so inconceivably wrong after what the mind had pictured. The appearance of a room, the outside of a house, are ludicrously, hopelessly at variance with what one had thought they should be. But it is, if possible, worse when the subject is a person. I have many times travelled with men at night by coach, on horseback, on foot, and in a waggon; have chatted sociably and exchanged all manner of friendly turns; have slept at the same wayside hotel, and in the morning found myself unable, until he spoke, to pick out of any two the one with whom I had spent hours the night before.In the case of Cassidy the difference was appalling.I awoke in such light as might leak through the grass hut; which was very little for light, but not bad for leakage.The boy brought breakfast—coffee, bread, and cold venison, which suited me well—and I was turning my thoughts to the matter of a fresh horse for my homeward journey when I met the eye of one of my friends of the previous night. I say the eye, because I don’t count the one in the black patch—I couldn’t see it. But when Dan O’Connell stood in the doorway and allowed his one bloodshot, pink-rimmed eye to rest thoughtfully on me, it fairly fixed me. I used to recall his bandy legs and undershot jaw long afterwards whenever I thought of Cassidy’s Cutting; but it was only when the luminous eye uprose before me that I used unconsciously to twitch about and draw my legs up as I did the morning I saw him in the flesh. Cassidywasa surprise; O’Connell wasn’t. His appearance was only the cold chill of proof following a horrible conviction. I was much relieved when the boy cleared Dan out of the doorway with a bare-toed kick in the ribs and a vigorous “Ow! Foosack!” I admired the boy for that, and even envied him.Through the open doorway I saw a white man walking briskly towards the hut, and I stepped out to meet him. He was a man of medium height, but there was something in his walk and figure that arrested attention. I am sure I have never seen in any man such lithe, active movement and perfect symmetry. A close-fitting vest and a pair of white flannel trousers were what he wore. I remember that because, somehow, I always recall that first view in the morning light—the springy walk, the bare muscular arms, the curve of the chest, and the poise of the head, as the face was turned from me.If I could tell this story without saying another word about his appearance, I would stop right here. I would greatly prefer to do so, but it is not possible. I hope no one will feel exactly as I felt when this man turned his face to me. It serves no good purpose to give revolting details, so I will only say that the man was disfigured—most horribly so.I cannot recall what was said or done during the few minutes that passed after we met, but there are some impressions seared into my brain as with red-hot irons; there are some recollections which even now make me feel faint and dazed, and some which make me burn with shame. I take shame—bitter, burning shame—that I failed to grasp his outstretched hand, and that I let him read in my face the horror that seized me. It is one of those pitiful things that the longest lifetime is not long enough to let a man forget. Surging across this comes the vivid recollection of my conviction that this man was Cassidy. The first instant my glance lighted on him I felt what I can only call a sort of joyous conviction that it was he. I felt, in fact, that I recognised him. No doubt it seems odd, illogical, contradictory, even impossible, that, strong as the gratifying conviction was, the other, when he turned his face to me, was a thousand times stronger. It ought to have been a reversal of the first conviction. It wasn’t. It was a smashing, terrible corroboration. It crushed me with a sense of personal affliction. It never germinated a doubt.I had to stay all that day with him, and he was most gentle and courteous; most kindly and considerate. Every act heaped coals of fire on my ill-conditioned head. God knows I tried my best, but I could hardly look in his face, and I could not control my physical repugnance. I schooled myself to speak, and even to look, without betraying my thoughts, but I could not eat with him. I could not sit opposite a face half of which was gone; I could not use the plate, the cup, the fork, that he had used. I pleaded illness, and feigned it; but by night-time I was ill enough to need no feigning.It was common enough for anyone benighted on those unhealthy flats to pay the penalty with a dose of fever. I got fever, and no one seemed surprised; but for the life of me I cannot even now help attaching some significance to the fact that I was certainly not ill before the scene at the hut door.I lay in that grass hut for a week or more, some of the time delirious—all the time panting with fever and shivering with ague; tossing wakefully and gasping for air; complaining of everything, unutterably miserable and despondent; hating the sight of food, shrinking from each act of kindness, scowling at the sound of a voice. My case was not worse than hundreds of others. I mention these things only to make clear what I mean when I say that never at any moment during that time did I awake or want anything but Cassidy was there to tend me. His was the care, the watchfulness, the gentleness, of a good woman. Can one say more?It is odd that during that time I only saw him as he ought to have been—as I am sure at one time he had been—a man whose countenance matched his character. It is not so odd, perhaps, that as I recovered and became rational the feeling of repulsion did not return, only an infinite pity for a hardly-stricken fellow-creature whose physical endowments and whose prospects must have been far above the average, and whose affliction was proportionately great.When I left there was one feeling that was stronger than simple gratitude to him. It was thankfulness that something had occurred to prevent me from leaving with only horror and repulsion. I was thankful for the sickness that left me richer by a heart full of pity and—I think the right word is—reverence!My lines were laid in other places than Cassidy’s, and as months passed by without my either seeing or hearing of him, I might, for aught I know, have forgotten him, or come to recall him only as one recalls, after lapse of years, some curious experience. Thismighthave happened, I say; but it didn’t. Mainly because of a conversation which revived my keenest interest in him.Several of us had walked out to dine and spend the evening at the Chaunceys’, and as we sat on the stoep smoking and chatting, the ladies being with us, the conversation turned on a concert or entertainment of some kind which was being got up for the relief of some distressed families in the place. Somebody hazarded the opinion that the “distressed family” business was being somewhat overdone, and that there was no evidence of it as far as he had been able to see.The remark was unfortunate, for Mrs Chauncey happened to be one of the promoters of the charity. She—good little woman!—had her young matron’s soul full of sympathy still; her store had not been plundered by impostors, and she vehemently defended her project. She did more; she carried war and rout into the enemy’s quarters and surmised that men, young men, whose lives are divided between money-making and pleasure-seeking, are not the best judges of what those who keep their troubles to themselves may have to endure.“When you,” (the young men) “are settling differences on shares or cards, or having your occasional splits—or whatever else you do all day long—there are women and children aching for one good meal, shrinking back for want of ordinary clothing, languishing and dropping for want of a man’s arm to fend and support them.”Jack Chauncey—good chap!—must have thought this from his wife just a wee bit spirited, for, after a pause, he gently drew a herring across the trail.“By—the—by, dear,” he asked thoughtfully, “what became of that good-looking young widow who came here with her kid and looked so jolly miserable? By Gad! her face has been haunting me ever since. Did you manage anything for her?”“You mean Mrs Mallandane. She would not take anything. She wanted to work; to earn, not to beg, she said. I have managed to get her some needlework, but, oh, so little, poor thing! And the pay is too dreadful! Now, there is a case in point. A widow, absolutely penniless, with a child of four or five to support. A woman of education and breeding, without a friend in the world, apparently; shunned by everyone—by some on account of her poverty, by others for her good looks and reserve. She certainly is difficult to approach. I have been to her now four times, and it was only on the last occasion that she thawed enough to tell me anything of herself. She has lived for years on what she believed to be the proceeds of her husband’s estate. Until within the last few months she was under this impression. But something happened which made her suspicious, and she found out that the income left by her husband was pure fiction, and that what she had been living on was an allowance from the only real friend she or her husband ever had—the man who was her husband’s partner when he died.”“Does she say that her husband is dead?” asked Carter, the unfortunate “young man” who had before provoked Mrs Chauncey’s ire.Carter was very young, and I could see that he had noarrière penséein asking that question. He did not mean to be impertinent. But I could also see that Mrs Chauncey did not take that view. Her little iced reply finished poor Carter.“I said that she was a widow, Mr Carter, and I do not care to make another’s misfortunes the subject of an argument.”I felt sorry for Carter, he was such an ass; and I believe the other two fellows pitied him also; so we did not refer to the subject as we walked home together in the moonlight. That, however, did not suit Carter. After awhile he gave an uncomfortable laugh, and said:“The little woman was rather down on me to-night about the charity show. I rather put my foot in it, I think.”“Think!” said Lawton (one of our party), with heavy contempt. “Think! I wonder you claim to be able to think! I never in my life saw anyone make such a blighted idiot of himself!”“Dash it all, man! give me a chance. The ‘distressed family’ allusion was unlucky, I admit; but I hadn’t the faintest intention of returning to the subject when I asked about the husband. Man alive! Why, the nerve of the Mallandane woman fairly knocked the breath out of me. The cheek of her cramming poor Mrs Chauncey with yarns of her husband’s death and estate, when everyone knows that he isn’t dead at all; that she gave him the slip, and went off with the ‘only friend’—his partner! A man with half his face eaten away by disease. I’ve seen the fellow at the house myself Old Larkin, of the Bank, knew them in Kimberley. They were claim-holders and contractors there and used to bank with him. The firm was Cassidy and Mallandane. I only wonder she continues to call herself Mallandane. It’s a formality she might as well have dispensed with.”I knew Carter to be a gossipy young devil, so I held my peace about Cassidy; but it was with an effort. My impulse was to give Carter the lie direct, but I remembered Mrs Chauncey’s last words and refrained.We walked along in silence, and after a while Carter stopped in the road opposite a small house, the door of which stood partly open. There were voices outside, and as Carter said, “Hush! listen!” we stopped instinctively, and my heart sank as I recognised a voice that said “Good-night.” I moved on hastily, disgusted at being trapped into eavesdropping, and Carter laughed.“That’s the only friend! There’s no mistakingthat. But I wonder why he’s coming away,” said the youth, with unmistakable and insinuating emphasis on the last words.No one answered his self-satisfied cackling. I was listening to the brisk walk behind us. I would have known it in a million. Closer and closer it came; his sleeve brushed mine as he stepped lightly past. I let him go, and I don’t know why. But I felt like a whipped cur for doing it.It seemed to me that I must heretofore have been living in extraordinary ignorance of what was going on round about me in a small place; for, as though it only needed the start, from the first mention of this story by Carter I was always hearing it, or a similar one, or one half corroborating it.I made an effort to see Cassidy the first thing next morning, but he had left his hotel—presumably having gone out to the works again. After a day or two had passed I felt glad that I had not met him—glad because I felt sure that he would have noticed that there was something wrong. He would instinctively have detected the cordiality and confidence which were controlled by an effort of will, and were not—as they should have been, and as they did again become—spontaneous and real.This worried me exceedingly and I turned it over and over again to get at the truth, and eventually it came to this. I knew that they were right as to the cause of his disfigurement; it was impossible to look at him and not accept it. I had no high moral prejudices about this. I only pitied him the more. But I did not believe a word of the rest of the story. All presumption and a heap of circumstances were against me, but I am glad to say that, but for the first hesitation, I never, never doubted him.It may have been a week or two after this that I met Mrs Chauncey in camp one afternoon. I had not seen her since the evening already referred to, and, as it was an off afternoon, I asked leave to join her in her walk home.We wandered on slowly through the outskirts of the camp, along the most direct road to the Chaunceys’ house. Since I had heard and seen what I had that evening my interest in Mrs Mallandane had increased. I never passed the house without looking. I claim—even to myself—that it was real interest and not curiosity that prompted me. Once or twice I had seen the figure in simple black, but not sufficiently clearly to have known the face again. Her figure I don’t think I should have mistaken; it was rather striking. There was also a little girl who used to sit under a mimosa-tree studying her lessons or doing sums on a slate. She and I became friends. I was drawn to the youngster because, when passing one day, I took the unwarrantable liberty of looking over her shoulder to see what the sum was. After a decent pause, during which I might have taken the hint, she turned up at me a very serious little face lighted by large blue eyes, and lisped slowly:“I don’t like people to thtand behind, becauth I fordet my thums.”I laughingly patted the little head, and went on; but after this I always stopped to chaff my little friend about her “thums,” and I generally brought an offering of some sort—sweets, cake, or fruit.Thinking of the house and its people as we walked along, I was not sorry when Mrs Chauncey asked if I would mind waiting for a minute or two while she went in to see herprotégéeabout some work secured or promised.I sat down in my little friend’s seat and waited. I had not long to wait. Presently I heard behind me the awkward tiptoeing of a child trying to walk very silently. Like Brer Rabbit, I lay low. Then came the climbing on to the seat, and finally a pair of childish hands were clapped over my eyes to an accompaniment of half-suppressed squeals of laughter, broken by panting efforts to maintain the blind-folding hug. I was busily keeping up the illusion by extravagantly bad guesses as to who it was, when I heard the rustle of a dress, and someone ran out, calling:“Molly, Molly! how can you be so naughty, darling? Oh, do excuse her!”I was released. My hat was in the dust and my hair rumpled. I saw Mrs Chauncey in the background in peals of laughter; Mrs Mallandane before me, looking most concerned, and holding the bewildered Molly by the hand; and Molly vindicating herself by saying with much dignity:“Mother, it’s only the gentimell that dooth my thumth an’ kitheth me.”As a defence this was, of course, adequate—not to say excellent; but it was rather embarrassing for me. It was so effective, however, that I was spared the necessity of saying anything myself Mrs Chauncey introduced me to herprotégéeas she would have done to any of her lady friends, and theprotégéebowed, as it seemed to me, with a great deal more grace and quite as much easy composure as the best of them. That was my first thought. The next was to take myself indignantly to task for instituting a comparison.As we resumed our walk I was wondering what could be the tie between this woman and Cassidy. There was no mistaking her class. She was a gentlewoman to her finger-tips. I was roused from my rather discourteous distraction by Mrs Chauncey saying:“You are not so surprised now, perhaps, that I lost my temper with Mr Carter the other evening. I am sorry I spoke as I did, but I felt it deeply—indeed I did.”“I can well understand it,” I answered. “How do you like her?” she asked abruptly. “What! after on interview of two minutes—and such an interview?”Mrs Chauncey smiled, and said: “Well, I only wanted to know your impression. And, after all, you have had time to form one, for you have been thinking of her all the time since we left the house!”“Perfectly true—I have. And to speak candidly, I think I have seldom—indeed, I think, never—seen a face that interested me more; partly, I suppose, because of what you told us. And I don’t think I have ever seen anyone look so infinitely sad. It is a pitiful, haunting face.”“I feel that also. I have never been able to forget her look since she came to me a month ago for work—needlework or any work. I will never believe that she could be an impostor. No, no! Truth is stamped in her face—truth and sorrow.”I had always liked Mrs Chauncey. Just at that moment I was mentally patting her on the back and calling her “a little brick,” for it was clear that she too had heard something—heard it and passed it by. Good woman!I was a bachelor, and not too old to feel; and, over and above my interest in Cassidy, this whole affair fascinated me considerably. From this time forward I never passed the house without greeting mother or child with sincere warmth, or missing them with an equally genuine sense of disappointment. I never met Mrs Chauncey without inquiring with interest the latest news of her friend and all details of her affairs.There was never much to tell. Now it was some commission for a dress, now the mending of children’s clothes—another time the trimming of hats or working a tennis-net, that helped to make ends meet without hurt to her pride. These were petty details which might pass in woman’s chat, but should fail to interest a man, you would think. Nevertheless, they interested me. They did more. In the evenings, as I sat alone and smoked out in the starlight they helped me to conjure up pictures and to see her as she would at those very moments, perhaps, be employed.I would have done anything to help her had I been able, but there was nothing I could do. I had even learned that I might not as much as evince sympathy or interest, except at the cost of insult to her. On one occasion when I happened to meet and walk with her in one of the main streets of the camp, I was frigidly cut by two ladies with whom I thought I was on quite friendly terms. This disturbed me considerably, not on my own account, but because of the insult and injustice to one who was powerless to resent it. It hurt me even more to realise that it would be wise to bow before this and prove greater friendship by showing less.I was still smarting under this next morning when I was accosted by one of those puddle-headed, blundering idiots of whom there seem to be one or more in any community, no matter how small.“I say, old chap,” he began, “look here, ye know! You’re not playin’ the game, ye know, old chap! The missis has been complainin’ to me about you. You know what I mean.”I detest this “dontcherknow,” “g”-dropping kind of animal at any time—the thing that fondles you with “old chap” and “dear boy” and refers to its wife as “the missis.” But apart from this, I was to-day especially unprepared to submit to further outrage. I was still smarting, as I said before.“My good man,” I said, “may I ask you to be more explicit?”“Why, dash it all, old chap! you know what I mean—er. It’s no affair of mine, of course, if you only keep it quiet, don’t you know. But you don’t give one a chance, don’t you know; and, after all, you can’t run with the hare and hunt with the hounds, and all that sort of thing, don’t you know!”I was trying to keep my temper, but with no very marked success, I fear; but I said as calmly as I could:“That’s a very original remark, my friend, and no doubt equally intelligent, but I shall be pleased if you will be good enough to apply it so thatIcan understand it.”“Look here, old chap. If you will go and walk in broad daylight with a woman like that, you know—well, you can’t expect—”“Stop now!” I said. I had hardly breath enough to speak, and there must have been something unpleasant in my face, for he stepped back a pace or two. “So far you are only a babbling fool. If you go on now you will be an infernal cad and must take the consequences. You understand what I mean. And further, as you have been good enough to hint that I should choose my line, I may tell you—to adopt your happy illustration—that I elect to ‘run with the hare.’ You see! Perhapsyouunderstand what I mean!”Now, before two minutes had passed, I did not need anyone to tell me that I had done the worst and most unwise thing possible under the circumstances. Of course I knew well enough that when a woman is concerned two things are very essential—that the man shall keep his temper, and that he shall be judicious, even circumspect, in defending. Having failed in the former, I necessarily failed in the latter, and I felt sick with impotent rage when I realised it.I knew how the story would circulate, and I knew exactly how it would be touched up, amplified, and illustrated with graphic gesticulations when it reached the club and Exchange and passed through the hands of certain expertraconteurs; and to avoid the lamentable result of chaff and further provocation I got away for a couple of days to give myself—and the story—a chance.Several weeks passed after this incident, during which I saw but little of Mrs Mallandane, and heard not much more. Occasionally I heard of Cassidy from men coming up the line. In spite of his grumbling and seeming discontent with the nature of the country in his section nobody believed that Cassidy’s Cutting was such a very unprofitable job as he gave out. Cassidy was too old a hand to be drawn into any admission which could be used against him for the purpose of cutting down prices in future contracts. Those best able to judge put him down to make close on 10,000 pounds out of that job. His section lay some sixty miles from Barberton, and, as far as I knew, he had been into camp only twice during the five months that had passed since I had first met him. One occasion was the night on which I had seen him; the other when he called at the office to see me. I was out of camp that day and missed him. I do not know how often he may have been in besides those two occasions.Mrs Chauncey and I were real friends. Jack was one of my oldest chums, and when he married I found—what does not necessarily follow—that his wife was just one to strengthen the friendship and not weaken it. With regard to her, I felt that if an occasion should arise requiring that I should make a confidante of any woman Mrs Chauncey would be the one. I don’t know that I ever realised this sufficiently forcibly to express it even to myself until after a remark which she made to me about this time.She had been telling me some little thing about Mrs Mallandane, and I may have shown by my attention—perhaps even by questions—more interest than she expected or thought called for. There was quite a long silence, during which I felt that she was thinking of something concerning me. When she turned towards me her expression was one of almost tender consideration, and in the gentlest possible voice she said:“It is good to be kind and generous, and to help those who need it; but when a man means to help a woman it should be clear to him from day to day, from hour to hour, not only how farhemeans to go, but also what she will understand.”The words went home to me, and I suppose I showed it, for she added a little nervously:“You must not mind that from me. ‘Faithful are the wounds of a friend.’”“Taken as meant, Mrs Chauncey; and—thank you!” I meant it.I made a careful and impartial examination of conscience that night when I had the silence and darkness to favour me; and although I honestly acquitted myself, there was just the faintest suggestion of the finding of the Irish jury: “We find the prisoner not guilty; but he’s not to do it again.” I told myself again that Mrs Chauncey was a “little brick” for her timely and well-judged warning; for I thought it was quite possible that I might have drifted on and “gone soft” before knowing it. I am satisfied that there was no cause for alarm, as the resolution to “ease up” cost me neither effort nor pang.I abided fairly by the spirit of my unspoken pact. I changed my daily route to one that did not lead past Mrs Mallandane’s house. I ceased to talk of her; I even tried not to think of her. But just there I failed—for the effort to forget makes occasion to remember.It was the tail end of summer. The heat was terrible, and in all the outlying parts—even in the lower portions of the camp—malarial fever was prevalent. The accounts from the line were particularly bad, nearly all the engineers, contractors, and sub-contractors being more or less laid up by attacks of the summer fiend. One of the engineers suffering from a mild attack was brought in, and, being at the hotel when he arrived, I heard accounts of what was going on. He told me that Cassidy had had attack after attack, but that he would neither lie up there nor come into hospital. It was work, work, work, with him, all day and night, except when he was looking after others—and, in truth, his camp was a kind of improvised hospital Cassidy, he said, with his superb strength and physique would not give in. He would not believe that fever could beat a man who was game, and he fought it.There was no suitable conveyance to be got before night, so I arranged to start after dark, for I was determined to do something to repay the kindness I had had at Cassidy’s hands. I took a serious view of his case, for I knew how these things usually ended, and he was not going to die without an effort on my part to save him.I walked home that night worrying considerably about poor Cassidy and wishing to Heaven that the trap was ready to start at once. I had reached the crossing-stones in the little stream, where my old and new paths forked out. It was dusk, and I was not thinking of whom I might meet, so I started at the sight of Mrs Mallandane a few paces off coming towards me, evidently to meet me.“Oh, I have waited for hours to meet you!” she began without any ceremony, and talking nervously and fast. “I thought you had gone already, and yet I feared to annoy you by going to your office. Look here—look! Tell me, is this true? Oh, you can’t see—I forgot; it’s too dark. Here in the paper they say you are going down the line to-night to bring in someone who is ill, very ill with fever. Tell me, is it true?”“It is quite true. I leave to-night after nine,” I answered—I hope without betraying surprise; but I could not help noticing that she did not mention Cassidy’s name, and that she was painfully excited. I drew no conclusions—I had no time for thought; but these things left a weight on my heart for all that, and it was not lightened as she went on.“I have come to ask you something. You will please bring him to my house. I must nurse him! He must come to me!” This was not a favour sought, it was rather a direction given, and there was only the slightest note of interrogation in her voice. I could only repeat in surprise: “To your house, Mrs Mallandane?”“Yes—yes! You will do that for me, please?”“I am sorry, but I do not think that would be right. His place is clearly in the hospital, and I have no right to take him elsewhere.”“You refuse? Oh, you cannot refuse me!”“Mrs Mallandane, you put it very harshly. You must see that I cannot do otherwise. I know of nothing to justify me in not sending him to hospital. It will be better for him, and far better for you.”She drew a sharp breath and faced me drawn up to her full height, looking me straight in the eyes.“I half expected this,” she said. “I only asked you because I feared to worry him. Your refusal is nothing. He will come to me all the same. You will not refuse to take a letter to him, will you, if I detain you a few minutes longer?”We were quite close to her little cottage, and as we walked towards it I tried to soften my refusal as best I could. She, however, did not seem to hear me.She left me seated in the little parlour. There was no light in the room, but she carried in a lamp from an adjoining one; and I have never been so struck by a face as I was by hers when the glow of the lamp lighted it up. The charm of her beauty was not one whit abated—for beautiful she was; and yet there was only one thing to be read in her face, and that was resolution. It lay in her lips, the curve of the nostrils, a peculiar look in the eye, and a certain poise of the head. In very truth, she looked superb.I sat waiting while the minutes passed, and not a sound broke the perfect silence in the house. Everything was so still that it seemed as if there could be no one within miles of me.There was a book on the table before me, and I took it up unthinkingly. It opened where a cabinet-sized photograph had been left in it—as a marker I suppose. The photograph showed the head and shoulders of a man, and the face shown in full was one of the gayest and most resolute that I ever remember to have seen. There was something very attractive about it, and there was, as I thought, a faint suggestion of somebody I had known or seen. It was agoodface, splendidly strong and honest, and, from a man’s point of view, a right handsome face too.To look at a photograph uninvited may be an impertinence; to read the inscription on the back certainly is. And yet these are things which one is apt to do unthinkingly and even instinctively. I turned the photograph round and read:“O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory?” and under that a date. I put it back in the book, feeling that I had been prying into the secrets of a woman’s grief.Presently I heard a chair pushed back in the next room and Mrs Mallandane’s step approaching. She handed me a closed note.“You will give that to him, please,” she said politely, but very firmly. “He will come here if he receives it; but it is possible that he may still be delirious, and if so, I only ask you again if you will be good enough to bring him to me.”With the knowledge which after-events have given me it is difficult to say whether I was concerned only for Cassidy’s health and Mrs Mallandane’s good name, or whether I was not pricked to anxiety by some other feeling. My heart did sink at her suggestion, I don’t know whether through selfishness or something better. I felt that I was beginning to yield before her evident purpose, but my answer was evasive. I said I did not see how I could promise anything.She waved that impatiently aside. I recall the motion of her hand, as though she could literally brush such things away. She came a step nearer to me, the light shone full in her face, on the waves of her hair, on her slightly-parted lips, and glinted and flashed back from her eyes. For half a minute she stood so looking at me, and I was conscious of the grip of her hand on the back of a chair, and of the rise and fall of her breast as she breathed.“You know him! You have seen him?” she queried in a low, deliberate voice.“Yes,” I answered.“You know he is disfigured?”I could barely answer again, “Yes.”“When I tell you, then, thatI am the cause of that, will you deny me the privilege of any reparation I can make?”The words met me like a blow in the face. I was crushed! God knows what I would have done but that I saw the flame of colour that leapt into her face, and the trembling and quivering of her lips. I gasped out:“No, no! I will do it.”She seemed so upset, so unsteady, that I made a half-step towards her, but she motioned me back, saying:“Go now—go! Please go, and leave me.” A hundred thoughts were surging and churning in my head as I drove down the long, long valley of the Lampogwana River that night. I felt as miserable as man need feel. Everything seemed wrong—most of it horribly so—but turn as I might from one phase to another, the one thing always recurred, pervading, dominating everything: “I am the cause of that.” The words rang in my ears again and again, and the horrible significance shamed me afresh each time, always to be answered by something which said, “No, I will believe! I will trust!”Poor Cassidy was very, very bad when I reached him, and his lucid intervals were far between. His appearance was terrible, the ghastly pallor adding, as I had thought nothing could add, to the face from which one eye, the nose, half the upper lip, and portion of one cheek, were gone. It was terrible—truly terrible!There is no need to dwell on it all. I got him in and he lived for five days. Fever didn’t kill him; it couldn’t have; he was too strong and too stout-hearted. It was haemorrhage resulting from some old injury received in an accident years before. The doctor told me that when the artery had gone Cassidy knew he would be dead in a few minutes. He begged the doctor to leave him, and turning to Mrs Mallandane, asked her to cover his face with a handkerchief, and to hold his hand. He said to her, “God bless you, Molly! Good-bye!” and died like the man he was.Mrs Chauncey was the real friend in that time of need. It was she who had supplied everything that an invalid could want; it was she who stayed all that long night through with Mrs Mallandane, who went with her to the funeral and stood by her, and stayed with her when all was over.The day after the funeral I sat in my office dazed and stupefied with worrying and puzzling over many things in connection with these people whose affairs and whose lives seemed to have become suddenly entangled with mine. Not the least of my worries was the document before me, which was Cassidy’s will: “I give everything absolutely to Mary Mallandane,” and nominating me as his executor.I dreaded the first interview—so much so, in fact, that I got Mrs Chauncey to go with me. The tall black figure and the excessive pallor of her face smote very hard on my heart, but I was relieved by the presence of little Molly, who stuck to me from the time I entered the room until Mrs Mallandane sent her away. I had already stated my object in calling when she sent Molly out, and I was about to resume, when she asked me abruptly:“Do you know anything of his past life?”“Nothing whatever,” I said. “Nor of mine?”“No, Mrs Mallandane.”She laid a hand on one of Mrs Chauncey’s, who was sitting near, and said gravely:“You, who have been my friend, know nothing either. It is right that you should—that you both should.”We were sitting at a table in the parlour; the writing materials were lying on it ready for my use. The two ladies sat close together opposite me.I cannot give Mrs Mallandane’s own words, nor can I convey her manner when telling us the story of her life. Sometimes she would talk in a subdued monotone, telling, with an absence of feeling that was infinitely pathetic, of their troubles. Sometimes she would be roused to a pitch of feeling that left her voice but a husky whisper. Once—just once—I fancied there was the faintest trace of contempt in her tone when referring to—well, not to Cassidy. If it was so, it was at any rate instantly lost in a flow of pity.This is substantially what she told us. Mallandane and Cassidy had owned claims in the Kimberley or one of the neighbouring mines, and were in fact partners doing business together. They were both young Irishmen, and had come out on the same boat some years before—which were considered sufficient reasons for their entering into partnership. Cassidy was the one with the brains, money, and work; and, from what I gathered, there seems to have been no reason, except Cassidy’s good-nature, for the alliance with Mallandane at all. However, they prospered, and Mallandane went home for a trip, and married and brought his wife back to Kimberley.For a couple of years all went well—in fact, until the firm began to lose money. Reverses only stimulated Cassidy to harder work and more cheery, indomitable effort. You couldn’t beat him. But it was different with Mallandane. All his wife said was that he lost heart; used to go away day after day and night after night to where he could forget his worries—drinking and gambling. When Cassidy first recognised that his partner was falling, he gave up his own house, suggesting that it would be doing him (Cassidy) a good turn if they would let him board with them. He gave himself up to a splendid effort to save his partner from ruin.For a time it answered, but Mallandane, besides being naturally unstable, must have been bitten by drink, for he broke out again, and nothing either wife or friend could do could save him. There came scenes—brutality and insult to the wife, ingratitude and insult to the friend. She told us nothing except in pity and forgiveness of her dead husband—nothing, that is, that justice to Cassidy did not require; but it is not difficult to imagine what happened, and, indeed, I know now that it was only the pitiful helplessness of the wife and child, and the knowledge that his presence was food, and even life, to them, that held Cassidy to his partner; for in his fits of drunkenness Mallandane would have murdered both wife and child.Cassidy worked from four in the morning until eight at night, and at times through the day he would run up from the claims to the house, to see that all was well. All he made went to keep the house going, and it was given as a matter of course. No complaint was made, although Mallandane now ceased even the pretence of work and spent the whole day in the canteens.But the end came when least expected. Mallandane, when he did come home at all, did not get up until hours after Cassidy was at work. He used to awake drunk and dazed, and wander off at once, unshaven, dirty and half dressed, to the nearest canteen.One morning, however, there was a change. He was grey-faced, puffy and sodden, it is true, but he fussed about the house briskly, talking to himself. He got out a clean moleskin suit, and told the servant that he could not wait for breakfast, as he had to fire the eight o’clock shots, and the holes were all charged and waiting for him.Within a quarter of an hour Cassidy had come up for breakfast. Mrs Mallandane met him on the way and told him what the servant had in the meantime told her; and Cassidy raced back to stop his delirious partner. With a madman’s cunning and instinct he had slipped down the mine from ledge to ledge and along dangerous slopes until he reached the lowest workings, and when Cassidy, after some delay in getting a bucket on the hauling-gear to go down in, reached the spot, the boys told him that Mallandane “umtagati” (bewitched) had gone into the drive to fire the charges, and would let no one go near him.Cassidy looked at the black mouth of the drive. He did not think of the worthless sodden wretch who had gone in there. He recalled the partner of years, the mate of good times and bad, and he recalled, too, the horror-stricken look on the face of the woman he had just left. He dashed in to the sound of a warning yell from every man in the mine.When occasion calls there is still no lack of brave men. Heroes spring into recognition from every grade of life, from every class of material; and while the half-dozen explosions still echoed and reverberated in the circle of the mine, there were men dashing in to the rescue at the imminent risk of their lives, heedless of the deadly fumes and of possible unexploded charges.“The firm” lay in one heap—Cassidy on his back, Mallandane athwart him. To the only person to whom he ever spoke of the affair, Cassidy said: “He was stooping to light another fuse when I reached him. I gripped both arms round him as he turned on me and tried to carry him out. It was a wrestling match, for he showed fight. My face was over his one shoulder, as his was over mine; but mine was turned towards the shots.”A piece of the rock that shattered poor Cassidy’s face entered the back of his partner’s head, andhenever stirred again.Cassidy lay for months in hospital, bandaged, blindfolded, barely alive; and the woman he had stood by, stood by him. When he was able to walk about, it was on her arm he leaned. When he was fit to leave, it was to her house he went to be tended for months longer. He never complained nor lost heart, although he knew that one eye was gone and thought he would lose the other.Some seven or eight months had passed, and he was getting well and strong—he was healing. She had always dreaded the effect of the first sight of himself, and for this reason had removed the mirrors from the rooms he frequented; but one day, when she had been out for a while, she found him lying on the sofa, the bandage off his eyes, and a hand-glass dropped on the carpet close by. It was the only time he had fainted or in any way given in.Later in the evening he said:“I don’t really mind so much now that I know. It was the suspense that worried me.” And, after a pause, he added in a voice that seemed to let youhearhis heart lifting: “I’ll be able to tackle work again soon, and will be all right again.”“That was the only allusion,” Mrs Mallandane said, “that he ever made to his disfigurement. I believe it was out of delicacy and consideration for my feelings that he never spoke about it. You could not even see that he ever thought of it, for he had that splendid manliness that doesn’t know what self-consciousness means.“Only one thing showed unmistakably that he did feel it, and that he felt he was dead to all the promise of his past. You must have remarked his manner of speech?” she observed, turning to me. “He spoke like a working man.Thatwas his only shield. He deliberately sank himself to that level to be spared the prominence and pity that would be given him as a gentleman. It was his hope to pass through life unnoticed. With me, and with me only, he had no disguise, no concealment, no reserve!”He used always to talk of their affairs as one and the same, in order to keep up the illusion he had encouraged in her from the beginning when he had told her very seriously that “it would never do to liquidate the firm’s business now. It would mean sacrificingeverything.” She agreed to do whatever he thought right; and at the end of every month he used to hand to her, scrupulously accounted for, a sum greater or less, according to “the firm’s profits for the month.”From his own “profits” he always managed to have something—no matter how little—to spend on Molly, who was his pet and companion always. The proceeds of the sale of house and furniture—when they had to be given up—were handed over to Mrs Mallandane “for a stand-by,” and she went into lodgings because she “would feel more comfortable and have more time to give to Molly there,”—not because he was watchful over her good name and would not stay in the house once he was well enough to walk alone.When Cassidy extended the firm’s “business”—that is to say, went to the Cape Colony, Natal, and Transvaal, in search of contracts on the various railway lines—he continued to remit the “profits” with the most elaborate statements, which Mrs Mallandane, as a partner, felt bound to study, and, as a woman, often wept over in despair.This had gone on for several years, and it was not until after she had gone to Barberton, “to be near the business,” that something had made her suspicious that the joint capital locked up in the business was all a generous imposition.“It only needed the suggestion,” said Mrs Mallandane, “to show me an appalling chain of evidence—evidence of his generosity and patient tactful help—evidence of my blind content and foolishness. I spoke to him when next he came in. He could see that I knew, and he simply said that ‘Ralph would have done the same for him.’ God forgive me! He gave up his life to me! He suffered living death for me! He lived when it would have been a million mercies to have died. He bore all that man could bear and never grudged it. And I—I cut his heart in two when I refused his help! I know it! I wished I had died before I got the look he gave me when I told him that I could not take his help. Month after month went by and he did not come to me—he, who used to be here on the first day of every month. But I knew he was near. Twice I saw him passing slowly by at night when he had come to watch over us. The first time I was too surprised to call. The second time I called him and he came to me. He stayed until late that evening; and he went away happy again because we registered our second compact: that if we (Molly and I) were ever in real need I would send for him; that if he were sick or in need of friends the privilege of friends should be ours.”She stopped for quite a while, and when she spoke again her voice trembled and it was all she could do to control it so that she could speak at all. I could not bear to look in her face.“You two have seen him,” she said, and, turning to me, added, “You have known him. I have liked to tell you all about him; and I like to tell you now that I know he loved me—that I think it is the greatest honour a woman can have to be loved by such a man: for not any woman that I have ever known, or heard of, or read of, was good enough for him!”She left the room for a moment, and returning laid something on the table before us, saying:“You remember him as you saw him. Try—try to think of him as I do—likethis! It is all you can do for the memory of a good and honourable man.”It was the photograph I had seen in her book the day I left to bring him in.All those things happened some years ago.Out on the grass there, in front of my window, there is a little girl trying to dissuade a very small boy from pulling the black ear off an old white bulldog; but the fat little fists keep their grip, and as he staggers under the effort the little chap says:“Molly mus’ pull Danl Conn! olla ear!Makehim det up!”Watching them with the brightest, merriest smile in the world, and looking years younger than when I first saw her, Mrs—But if I mentioned her name this would not be an anonymous story.
“And the greatest of these is charity.”
“And the greatest of these is charity.”
I met Cassidy under trying circumstances. But it worked out all right eventually, principally because, so far as I knew him—and that got to be pretty well—Cassidy was not amenable to circumstances. He beat them mostly, and some of them were pretty tough.
The circumstances surrounding our meeting were trying, because Cassidy was in bed after a hard day’s work, and I aroused him at 3 a.m. by firing a revolver at his bulldog. His huts were on the railway works, and near the footpath to Jim Mackay’s canteen—a pretty hot show. He used to be roused this way every Saturday and Sunday, and occasionally throughout the week, by visitors, black and white, warlike and friendly, thieving and sociable, but all drunk. At first he got a bulldog, but they got to know him, and after awhile the tip went round that half a pound of beefsteak was a good buy and better than a blunderbuss for Cassidy’s Cutting. Then he loaded fifty Number 12’s with coarse salt, mixed with pebbles and things, and, as he said to me afterwards:
“Ye were the fourth that night, and ye ’noyed me wid yer swearin’ an’ shootin’ an’ that, so I just passed the salt an’ wint for the dust shot as bein’ more convincing like; but the divil an’ all of it was, I couldn’t get the cartridge in by reason of drawin’ the charge that was there already. Too bad! too bad! for dust shot it was, av I’d only known it, an’ me thinkin’ it was nothin’ but salt. Lord, Lord! we’re a miscontented lot! Av it wasn’t for bein’ greedy, I’d ’ve had ye wid the dust shot safe as death. Faith, ye niver know yer luck!”
That was all right from his point of view, but as I had left my horse dying of Dikkop sickness just this side of Kilo 26, and had walked along the formation carrying saddle and bridle up to Kilo 43—about ten miles—without a drink, and twice lost my way between unconnected sections, and twice walked over the ends of the formation where culverts should have been and rolled down twenty feet of embankment, and once got bogged in a bottoming pit in a vlei, and many times hacked my shins against wheelbarrows and piles of picks stacked on the track, I think it was reasonable to let out at a bulldog that came at me like a hurricane out of the darkness and silence of 3 a.m. in the Bush veld, to say nothing of a half-finished railway cutting. And I think it only human to have cursed the owner with all my resources until the dog was called off.
I don’t exactly know how it came about, but I slept in Cassidy’s hut that night. He pushed me in before him, guiding me to the bed with a hand on each elbow. He said that there were no matches in the show and that it wasn’t worth while looking for the candle, which, as he had no means of lighting it, I suppose it wasn’t.
He had a rare brogue and a governing nasal drone, but it was the brogue that emboldened me to ask for whisky.
“Spirits!” said he; “not a drop, an’ niver have; but jist sit ye where ye are, an’ I’ll fetch ye out some beer—Bass’s, no less, av ye’ll thry that; and can dhrink from the bottle.”
He talked in jerks, and had a quaint knack of chucking remarks after an apparently completed sentence, evidently intending them to catch up to it and be tacked on. He dived under the bed somewhere, and a minute later I heard the squeaking of a corkscrew and the popping of a cork.
“Here y’ are,” said he, as he pressed the bottle into my two hands; “drink hearty, me lad, and praise yer God Dan O’Connell there’s got too fat an’ lazy to pull ye down.”
I dare say he knew what he was talking about, but, for my part, I confess that nothing in the whole business had impressed me less than any lack of earnestness on Dan O’Connell’s part. I sat awhile munching biscuits from a tin which he had placed on the table and gurgling down beer from the bottle. Cassidy was asleep. Ten minutes passed, and I was finishing the beer, when he sat up again, as I judged from the sound, and remarked in a brisk, clear tone:
“Ye called me a mud-dollopin’, dyke-diggin’, Amsterdam’d Dutchman! Ye’ll take back the Dutchman, I believe?”
“I will indeed,” I said, laughing.
“An’ the mud?”
“Yes, and the mud.”
He settled himself in the bunk again with a grunt, and murmured in a tone of indignant contempt:
“Mud, sez he, mud! An’ me shiftin’ granite boulders for soft rock, an shtruck solid formation a fut from surface, an’ getting two an’ six a cubic fer the lot! Mud, faith! An’ not enough water this three miles to the Crocodile to make spit for an ant, barrin’ what I can tap from the Figaro Battery pipe! An’ mud, sez he? Holy Fly! Mud, be Gawd!”
It died away in a sleepy grunt, and Cassidy was off I groped about for a blanket, and, rolling back into the meal-sack stretcher, forgot all about mad Irishmen, sick horses, and earnest bulldogs.
One always experiences a curious sensation on seeing by daylight that which one has only known in the dark. Persons do for years a certain journey or voyage, always starting and always arriving at regular hours. One day something happens which necessitates their passing in daylight the places formerly passed at night. On such occasions even the most matter-of-fact must marvel at the wanton freaks of their imaginations. The real thing seems so inconceivably wrong after what the mind had pictured. The appearance of a room, the outside of a house, are ludicrously, hopelessly at variance with what one had thought they should be. But it is, if possible, worse when the subject is a person. I have many times travelled with men at night by coach, on horseback, on foot, and in a waggon; have chatted sociably and exchanged all manner of friendly turns; have slept at the same wayside hotel, and in the morning found myself unable, until he spoke, to pick out of any two the one with whom I had spent hours the night before.
In the case of Cassidy the difference was appalling.
I awoke in such light as might leak through the grass hut; which was very little for light, but not bad for leakage.
The boy brought breakfast—coffee, bread, and cold venison, which suited me well—and I was turning my thoughts to the matter of a fresh horse for my homeward journey when I met the eye of one of my friends of the previous night. I say the eye, because I don’t count the one in the black patch—I couldn’t see it. But when Dan O’Connell stood in the doorway and allowed his one bloodshot, pink-rimmed eye to rest thoughtfully on me, it fairly fixed me. I used to recall his bandy legs and undershot jaw long afterwards whenever I thought of Cassidy’s Cutting; but it was only when the luminous eye uprose before me that I used unconsciously to twitch about and draw my legs up as I did the morning I saw him in the flesh. Cassidywasa surprise; O’Connell wasn’t. His appearance was only the cold chill of proof following a horrible conviction. I was much relieved when the boy cleared Dan out of the doorway with a bare-toed kick in the ribs and a vigorous “Ow! Foosack!” I admired the boy for that, and even envied him.
Through the open doorway I saw a white man walking briskly towards the hut, and I stepped out to meet him. He was a man of medium height, but there was something in his walk and figure that arrested attention. I am sure I have never seen in any man such lithe, active movement and perfect symmetry. A close-fitting vest and a pair of white flannel trousers were what he wore. I remember that because, somehow, I always recall that first view in the morning light—the springy walk, the bare muscular arms, the curve of the chest, and the poise of the head, as the face was turned from me.
If I could tell this story without saying another word about his appearance, I would stop right here. I would greatly prefer to do so, but it is not possible. I hope no one will feel exactly as I felt when this man turned his face to me. It serves no good purpose to give revolting details, so I will only say that the man was disfigured—most horribly so.
I cannot recall what was said or done during the few minutes that passed after we met, but there are some impressions seared into my brain as with red-hot irons; there are some recollections which even now make me feel faint and dazed, and some which make me burn with shame. I take shame—bitter, burning shame—that I failed to grasp his outstretched hand, and that I let him read in my face the horror that seized me. It is one of those pitiful things that the longest lifetime is not long enough to let a man forget. Surging across this comes the vivid recollection of my conviction that this man was Cassidy. The first instant my glance lighted on him I felt what I can only call a sort of joyous conviction that it was he. I felt, in fact, that I recognised him. No doubt it seems odd, illogical, contradictory, even impossible, that, strong as the gratifying conviction was, the other, when he turned his face to me, was a thousand times stronger. It ought to have been a reversal of the first conviction. It wasn’t. It was a smashing, terrible corroboration. It crushed me with a sense of personal affliction. It never germinated a doubt.
I had to stay all that day with him, and he was most gentle and courteous; most kindly and considerate. Every act heaped coals of fire on my ill-conditioned head. God knows I tried my best, but I could hardly look in his face, and I could not control my physical repugnance. I schooled myself to speak, and even to look, without betraying my thoughts, but I could not eat with him. I could not sit opposite a face half of which was gone; I could not use the plate, the cup, the fork, that he had used. I pleaded illness, and feigned it; but by night-time I was ill enough to need no feigning.
It was common enough for anyone benighted on those unhealthy flats to pay the penalty with a dose of fever. I got fever, and no one seemed surprised; but for the life of me I cannot even now help attaching some significance to the fact that I was certainly not ill before the scene at the hut door.
I lay in that grass hut for a week or more, some of the time delirious—all the time panting with fever and shivering with ague; tossing wakefully and gasping for air; complaining of everything, unutterably miserable and despondent; hating the sight of food, shrinking from each act of kindness, scowling at the sound of a voice. My case was not worse than hundreds of others. I mention these things only to make clear what I mean when I say that never at any moment during that time did I awake or want anything but Cassidy was there to tend me. His was the care, the watchfulness, the gentleness, of a good woman. Can one say more?
It is odd that during that time I only saw him as he ought to have been—as I am sure at one time he had been—a man whose countenance matched his character. It is not so odd, perhaps, that as I recovered and became rational the feeling of repulsion did not return, only an infinite pity for a hardly-stricken fellow-creature whose physical endowments and whose prospects must have been far above the average, and whose affliction was proportionately great.
When I left there was one feeling that was stronger than simple gratitude to him. It was thankfulness that something had occurred to prevent me from leaving with only horror and repulsion. I was thankful for the sickness that left me richer by a heart full of pity and—I think the right word is—reverence!
My lines were laid in other places than Cassidy’s, and as months passed by without my either seeing or hearing of him, I might, for aught I know, have forgotten him, or come to recall him only as one recalls, after lapse of years, some curious experience. Thismighthave happened, I say; but it didn’t. Mainly because of a conversation which revived my keenest interest in him.
Several of us had walked out to dine and spend the evening at the Chaunceys’, and as we sat on the stoep smoking and chatting, the ladies being with us, the conversation turned on a concert or entertainment of some kind which was being got up for the relief of some distressed families in the place. Somebody hazarded the opinion that the “distressed family” business was being somewhat overdone, and that there was no evidence of it as far as he had been able to see.
The remark was unfortunate, for Mrs Chauncey happened to be one of the promoters of the charity. She—good little woman!—had her young matron’s soul full of sympathy still; her store had not been plundered by impostors, and she vehemently defended her project. She did more; she carried war and rout into the enemy’s quarters and surmised that men, young men, whose lives are divided between money-making and pleasure-seeking, are not the best judges of what those who keep their troubles to themselves may have to endure.
“When you,” (the young men) “are settling differences on shares or cards, or having your occasional splits—or whatever else you do all day long—there are women and children aching for one good meal, shrinking back for want of ordinary clothing, languishing and dropping for want of a man’s arm to fend and support them.”
Jack Chauncey—good chap!—must have thought this from his wife just a wee bit spirited, for, after a pause, he gently drew a herring across the trail.
“By—the—by, dear,” he asked thoughtfully, “what became of that good-looking young widow who came here with her kid and looked so jolly miserable? By Gad! her face has been haunting me ever since. Did you manage anything for her?”
“You mean Mrs Mallandane. She would not take anything. She wanted to work; to earn, not to beg, she said. I have managed to get her some needlework, but, oh, so little, poor thing! And the pay is too dreadful! Now, there is a case in point. A widow, absolutely penniless, with a child of four or five to support. A woman of education and breeding, without a friend in the world, apparently; shunned by everyone—by some on account of her poverty, by others for her good looks and reserve. She certainly is difficult to approach. I have been to her now four times, and it was only on the last occasion that she thawed enough to tell me anything of herself. She has lived for years on what she believed to be the proceeds of her husband’s estate. Until within the last few months she was under this impression. But something happened which made her suspicious, and she found out that the income left by her husband was pure fiction, and that what she had been living on was an allowance from the only real friend she or her husband ever had—the man who was her husband’s partner when he died.”
“Does she say that her husband is dead?” asked Carter, the unfortunate “young man” who had before provoked Mrs Chauncey’s ire.
Carter was very young, and I could see that he had noarrière penséein asking that question. He did not mean to be impertinent. But I could also see that Mrs Chauncey did not take that view. Her little iced reply finished poor Carter.
“I said that she was a widow, Mr Carter, and I do not care to make another’s misfortunes the subject of an argument.”
I felt sorry for Carter, he was such an ass; and I believe the other two fellows pitied him also; so we did not refer to the subject as we walked home together in the moonlight. That, however, did not suit Carter. After awhile he gave an uncomfortable laugh, and said:
“The little woman was rather down on me to-night about the charity show. I rather put my foot in it, I think.”
“Think!” said Lawton (one of our party), with heavy contempt. “Think! I wonder you claim to be able to think! I never in my life saw anyone make such a blighted idiot of himself!”
“Dash it all, man! give me a chance. The ‘distressed family’ allusion was unlucky, I admit; but I hadn’t the faintest intention of returning to the subject when I asked about the husband. Man alive! Why, the nerve of the Mallandane woman fairly knocked the breath out of me. The cheek of her cramming poor Mrs Chauncey with yarns of her husband’s death and estate, when everyone knows that he isn’t dead at all; that she gave him the slip, and went off with the ‘only friend’—his partner! A man with half his face eaten away by disease. I’ve seen the fellow at the house myself Old Larkin, of the Bank, knew them in Kimberley. They were claim-holders and contractors there and used to bank with him. The firm was Cassidy and Mallandane. I only wonder she continues to call herself Mallandane. It’s a formality she might as well have dispensed with.”
I knew Carter to be a gossipy young devil, so I held my peace about Cassidy; but it was with an effort. My impulse was to give Carter the lie direct, but I remembered Mrs Chauncey’s last words and refrained.
We walked along in silence, and after a while Carter stopped in the road opposite a small house, the door of which stood partly open. There were voices outside, and as Carter said, “Hush! listen!” we stopped instinctively, and my heart sank as I recognised a voice that said “Good-night.” I moved on hastily, disgusted at being trapped into eavesdropping, and Carter laughed.
“That’s the only friend! There’s no mistakingthat. But I wonder why he’s coming away,” said the youth, with unmistakable and insinuating emphasis on the last words.
No one answered his self-satisfied cackling. I was listening to the brisk walk behind us. I would have known it in a million. Closer and closer it came; his sleeve brushed mine as he stepped lightly past. I let him go, and I don’t know why. But I felt like a whipped cur for doing it.
It seemed to me that I must heretofore have been living in extraordinary ignorance of what was going on round about me in a small place; for, as though it only needed the start, from the first mention of this story by Carter I was always hearing it, or a similar one, or one half corroborating it.
I made an effort to see Cassidy the first thing next morning, but he had left his hotel—presumably having gone out to the works again. After a day or two had passed I felt glad that I had not met him—glad because I felt sure that he would have noticed that there was something wrong. He would instinctively have detected the cordiality and confidence which were controlled by an effort of will, and were not—as they should have been, and as they did again become—spontaneous and real.
This worried me exceedingly and I turned it over and over again to get at the truth, and eventually it came to this. I knew that they were right as to the cause of his disfigurement; it was impossible to look at him and not accept it. I had no high moral prejudices about this. I only pitied him the more. But I did not believe a word of the rest of the story. All presumption and a heap of circumstances were against me, but I am glad to say that, but for the first hesitation, I never, never doubted him.
It may have been a week or two after this that I met Mrs Chauncey in camp one afternoon. I had not seen her since the evening already referred to, and, as it was an off afternoon, I asked leave to join her in her walk home.
We wandered on slowly through the outskirts of the camp, along the most direct road to the Chaunceys’ house. Since I had heard and seen what I had that evening my interest in Mrs Mallandane had increased. I never passed the house without looking. I claim—even to myself—that it was real interest and not curiosity that prompted me. Once or twice I had seen the figure in simple black, but not sufficiently clearly to have known the face again. Her figure I don’t think I should have mistaken; it was rather striking. There was also a little girl who used to sit under a mimosa-tree studying her lessons or doing sums on a slate. She and I became friends. I was drawn to the youngster because, when passing one day, I took the unwarrantable liberty of looking over her shoulder to see what the sum was. After a decent pause, during which I might have taken the hint, she turned up at me a very serious little face lighted by large blue eyes, and lisped slowly:
“I don’t like people to thtand behind, becauth I fordet my thums.”
I laughingly patted the little head, and went on; but after this I always stopped to chaff my little friend about her “thums,” and I generally brought an offering of some sort—sweets, cake, or fruit.
Thinking of the house and its people as we walked along, I was not sorry when Mrs Chauncey asked if I would mind waiting for a minute or two while she went in to see herprotégéeabout some work secured or promised.
I sat down in my little friend’s seat and waited. I had not long to wait. Presently I heard behind me the awkward tiptoeing of a child trying to walk very silently. Like Brer Rabbit, I lay low. Then came the climbing on to the seat, and finally a pair of childish hands were clapped over my eyes to an accompaniment of half-suppressed squeals of laughter, broken by panting efforts to maintain the blind-folding hug. I was busily keeping up the illusion by extravagantly bad guesses as to who it was, when I heard the rustle of a dress, and someone ran out, calling:
“Molly, Molly! how can you be so naughty, darling? Oh, do excuse her!”
I was released. My hat was in the dust and my hair rumpled. I saw Mrs Chauncey in the background in peals of laughter; Mrs Mallandane before me, looking most concerned, and holding the bewildered Molly by the hand; and Molly vindicating herself by saying with much dignity:
“Mother, it’s only the gentimell that dooth my thumth an’ kitheth me.”
As a defence this was, of course, adequate—not to say excellent; but it was rather embarrassing for me. It was so effective, however, that I was spared the necessity of saying anything myself Mrs Chauncey introduced me to herprotégéeas she would have done to any of her lady friends, and theprotégéebowed, as it seemed to me, with a great deal more grace and quite as much easy composure as the best of them. That was my first thought. The next was to take myself indignantly to task for instituting a comparison.
As we resumed our walk I was wondering what could be the tie between this woman and Cassidy. There was no mistaking her class. She was a gentlewoman to her finger-tips. I was roused from my rather discourteous distraction by Mrs Chauncey saying:
“You are not so surprised now, perhaps, that I lost my temper with Mr Carter the other evening. I am sorry I spoke as I did, but I felt it deeply—indeed I did.”
“I can well understand it,” I answered. “How do you like her?” she asked abruptly. “What! after on interview of two minutes—and such an interview?”
Mrs Chauncey smiled, and said: “Well, I only wanted to know your impression. And, after all, you have had time to form one, for you have been thinking of her all the time since we left the house!”
“Perfectly true—I have. And to speak candidly, I think I have seldom—indeed, I think, never—seen a face that interested me more; partly, I suppose, because of what you told us. And I don’t think I have ever seen anyone look so infinitely sad. It is a pitiful, haunting face.”
“I feel that also. I have never been able to forget her look since she came to me a month ago for work—needlework or any work. I will never believe that she could be an impostor. No, no! Truth is stamped in her face—truth and sorrow.”
I had always liked Mrs Chauncey. Just at that moment I was mentally patting her on the back and calling her “a little brick,” for it was clear that she too had heard something—heard it and passed it by. Good woman!
I was a bachelor, and not too old to feel; and, over and above my interest in Cassidy, this whole affair fascinated me considerably. From this time forward I never passed the house without greeting mother or child with sincere warmth, or missing them with an equally genuine sense of disappointment. I never met Mrs Chauncey without inquiring with interest the latest news of her friend and all details of her affairs.
There was never much to tell. Now it was some commission for a dress, now the mending of children’s clothes—another time the trimming of hats or working a tennis-net, that helped to make ends meet without hurt to her pride. These were petty details which might pass in woman’s chat, but should fail to interest a man, you would think. Nevertheless, they interested me. They did more. In the evenings, as I sat alone and smoked out in the starlight they helped me to conjure up pictures and to see her as she would at those very moments, perhaps, be employed.
I would have done anything to help her had I been able, but there was nothing I could do. I had even learned that I might not as much as evince sympathy or interest, except at the cost of insult to her. On one occasion when I happened to meet and walk with her in one of the main streets of the camp, I was frigidly cut by two ladies with whom I thought I was on quite friendly terms. This disturbed me considerably, not on my own account, but because of the insult and injustice to one who was powerless to resent it. It hurt me even more to realise that it would be wise to bow before this and prove greater friendship by showing less.
I was still smarting under this next morning when I was accosted by one of those puddle-headed, blundering idiots of whom there seem to be one or more in any community, no matter how small.
“I say, old chap,” he began, “look here, ye know! You’re not playin’ the game, ye know, old chap! The missis has been complainin’ to me about you. You know what I mean.”
I detest this “dontcherknow,” “g”-dropping kind of animal at any time—the thing that fondles you with “old chap” and “dear boy” and refers to its wife as “the missis.” But apart from this, I was to-day especially unprepared to submit to further outrage. I was still smarting, as I said before.
“My good man,” I said, “may I ask you to be more explicit?”
“Why, dash it all, old chap! you know what I mean—er. It’s no affair of mine, of course, if you only keep it quiet, don’t you know. But you don’t give one a chance, don’t you know; and, after all, you can’t run with the hare and hunt with the hounds, and all that sort of thing, don’t you know!”
I was trying to keep my temper, but with no very marked success, I fear; but I said as calmly as I could:
“That’s a very original remark, my friend, and no doubt equally intelligent, but I shall be pleased if you will be good enough to apply it so thatIcan understand it.”
“Look here, old chap. If you will go and walk in broad daylight with a woman like that, you know—well, you can’t expect—”
“Stop now!” I said. I had hardly breath enough to speak, and there must have been something unpleasant in my face, for he stepped back a pace or two. “So far you are only a babbling fool. If you go on now you will be an infernal cad and must take the consequences. You understand what I mean. And further, as you have been good enough to hint that I should choose my line, I may tell you—to adopt your happy illustration—that I elect to ‘run with the hare.’ You see! Perhapsyouunderstand what I mean!”
Now, before two minutes had passed, I did not need anyone to tell me that I had done the worst and most unwise thing possible under the circumstances. Of course I knew well enough that when a woman is concerned two things are very essential—that the man shall keep his temper, and that he shall be judicious, even circumspect, in defending. Having failed in the former, I necessarily failed in the latter, and I felt sick with impotent rage when I realised it.
I knew how the story would circulate, and I knew exactly how it would be touched up, amplified, and illustrated with graphic gesticulations when it reached the club and Exchange and passed through the hands of certain expertraconteurs; and to avoid the lamentable result of chaff and further provocation I got away for a couple of days to give myself—and the story—a chance.
Several weeks passed after this incident, during which I saw but little of Mrs Mallandane, and heard not much more. Occasionally I heard of Cassidy from men coming up the line. In spite of his grumbling and seeming discontent with the nature of the country in his section nobody believed that Cassidy’s Cutting was such a very unprofitable job as he gave out. Cassidy was too old a hand to be drawn into any admission which could be used against him for the purpose of cutting down prices in future contracts. Those best able to judge put him down to make close on 10,000 pounds out of that job. His section lay some sixty miles from Barberton, and, as far as I knew, he had been into camp only twice during the five months that had passed since I had first met him. One occasion was the night on which I had seen him; the other when he called at the office to see me. I was out of camp that day and missed him. I do not know how often he may have been in besides those two occasions.
Mrs Chauncey and I were real friends. Jack was one of my oldest chums, and when he married I found—what does not necessarily follow—that his wife was just one to strengthen the friendship and not weaken it. With regard to her, I felt that if an occasion should arise requiring that I should make a confidante of any woman Mrs Chauncey would be the one. I don’t know that I ever realised this sufficiently forcibly to express it even to myself until after a remark which she made to me about this time.
She had been telling me some little thing about Mrs Mallandane, and I may have shown by my attention—perhaps even by questions—more interest than she expected or thought called for. There was quite a long silence, during which I felt that she was thinking of something concerning me. When she turned towards me her expression was one of almost tender consideration, and in the gentlest possible voice she said:
“It is good to be kind and generous, and to help those who need it; but when a man means to help a woman it should be clear to him from day to day, from hour to hour, not only how farhemeans to go, but also what she will understand.”
The words went home to me, and I suppose I showed it, for she added a little nervously:
“You must not mind that from me. ‘Faithful are the wounds of a friend.’”
“Taken as meant, Mrs Chauncey; and—thank you!” I meant it.
I made a careful and impartial examination of conscience that night when I had the silence and darkness to favour me; and although I honestly acquitted myself, there was just the faintest suggestion of the finding of the Irish jury: “We find the prisoner not guilty; but he’s not to do it again.” I told myself again that Mrs Chauncey was a “little brick” for her timely and well-judged warning; for I thought it was quite possible that I might have drifted on and “gone soft” before knowing it. I am satisfied that there was no cause for alarm, as the resolution to “ease up” cost me neither effort nor pang.
I abided fairly by the spirit of my unspoken pact. I changed my daily route to one that did not lead past Mrs Mallandane’s house. I ceased to talk of her; I even tried not to think of her. But just there I failed—for the effort to forget makes occasion to remember.
It was the tail end of summer. The heat was terrible, and in all the outlying parts—even in the lower portions of the camp—malarial fever was prevalent. The accounts from the line were particularly bad, nearly all the engineers, contractors, and sub-contractors being more or less laid up by attacks of the summer fiend. One of the engineers suffering from a mild attack was brought in, and, being at the hotel when he arrived, I heard accounts of what was going on. He told me that Cassidy had had attack after attack, but that he would neither lie up there nor come into hospital. It was work, work, work, with him, all day and night, except when he was looking after others—and, in truth, his camp was a kind of improvised hospital Cassidy, he said, with his superb strength and physique would not give in. He would not believe that fever could beat a man who was game, and he fought it.
There was no suitable conveyance to be got before night, so I arranged to start after dark, for I was determined to do something to repay the kindness I had had at Cassidy’s hands. I took a serious view of his case, for I knew how these things usually ended, and he was not going to die without an effort on my part to save him.
I walked home that night worrying considerably about poor Cassidy and wishing to Heaven that the trap was ready to start at once. I had reached the crossing-stones in the little stream, where my old and new paths forked out. It was dusk, and I was not thinking of whom I might meet, so I started at the sight of Mrs Mallandane a few paces off coming towards me, evidently to meet me.
“Oh, I have waited for hours to meet you!” she began without any ceremony, and talking nervously and fast. “I thought you had gone already, and yet I feared to annoy you by going to your office. Look here—look! Tell me, is this true? Oh, you can’t see—I forgot; it’s too dark. Here in the paper they say you are going down the line to-night to bring in someone who is ill, very ill with fever. Tell me, is it true?”
“It is quite true. I leave to-night after nine,” I answered—I hope without betraying surprise; but I could not help noticing that she did not mention Cassidy’s name, and that she was painfully excited. I drew no conclusions—I had no time for thought; but these things left a weight on my heart for all that, and it was not lightened as she went on.
“I have come to ask you something. You will please bring him to my house. I must nurse him! He must come to me!” This was not a favour sought, it was rather a direction given, and there was only the slightest note of interrogation in her voice. I could only repeat in surprise: “To your house, Mrs Mallandane?”
“Yes—yes! You will do that for me, please?”
“I am sorry, but I do not think that would be right. His place is clearly in the hospital, and I have no right to take him elsewhere.”
“You refuse? Oh, you cannot refuse me!”
“Mrs Mallandane, you put it very harshly. You must see that I cannot do otherwise. I know of nothing to justify me in not sending him to hospital. It will be better for him, and far better for you.”
She drew a sharp breath and faced me drawn up to her full height, looking me straight in the eyes.
“I half expected this,” she said. “I only asked you because I feared to worry him. Your refusal is nothing. He will come to me all the same. You will not refuse to take a letter to him, will you, if I detain you a few minutes longer?”
We were quite close to her little cottage, and as we walked towards it I tried to soften my refusal as best I could. She, however, did not seem to hear me.
She left me seated in the little parlour. There was no light in the room, but she carried in a lamp from an adjoining one; and I have never been so struck by a face as I was by hers when the glow of the lamp lighted it up. The charm of her beauty was not one whit abated—for beautiful she was; and yet there was only one thing to be read in her face, and that was resolution. It lay in her lips, the curve of the nostrils, a peculiar look in the eye, and a certain poise of the head. In very truth, she looked superb.
I sat waiting while the minutes passed, and not a sound broke the perfect silence in the house. Everything was so still that it seemed as if there could be no one within miles of me.
There was a book on the table before me, and I took it up unthinkingly. It opened where a cabinet-sized photograph had been left in it—as a marker I suppose. The photograph showed the head and shoulders of a man, and the face shown in full was one of the gayest and most resolute that I ever remember to have seen. There was something very attractive about it, and there was, as I thought, a faint suggestion of somebody I had known or seen. It was agoodface, splendidly strong and honest, and, from a man’s point of view, a right handsome face too.
To look at a photograph uninvited may be an impertinence; to read the inscription on the back certainly is. And yet these are things which one is apt to do unthinkingly and even instinctively. I turned the photograph round and read:
“O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory?” and under that a date. I put it back in the book, feeling that I had been prying into the secrets of a woman’s grief.
Presently I heard a chair pushed back in the next room and Mrs Mallandane’s step approaching. She handed me a closed note.
“You will give that to him, please,” she said politely, but very firmly. “He will come here if he receives it; but it is possible that he may still be delirious, and if so, I only ask you again if you will be good enough to bring him to me.”
With the knowledge which after-events have given me it is difficult to say whether I was concerned only for Cassidy’s health and Mrs Mallandane’s good name, or whether I was not pricked to anxiety by some other feeling. My heart did sink at her suggestion, I don’t know whether through selfishness or something better. I felt that I was beginning to yield before her evident purpose, but my answer was evasive. I said I did not see how I could promise anything.
She waved that impatiently aside. I recall the motion of her hand, as though she could literally brush such things away. She came a step nearer to me, the light shone full in her face, on the waves of her hair, on her slightly-parted lips, and glinted and flashed back from her eyes. For half a minute she stood so looking at me, and I was conscious of the grip of her hand on the back of a chair, and of the rise and fall of her breast as she breathed.
“You know him! You have seen him?” she queried in a low, deliberate voice.
“Yes,” I answered.
“You know he is disfigured?”
I could barely answer again, “Yes.”
“When I tell you, then, thatI am the cause of that, will you deny me the privilege of any reparation I can make?”
The words met me like a blow in the face. I was crushed! God knows what I would have done but that I saw the flame of colour that leapt into her face, and the trembling and quivering of her lips. I gasped out:
“No, no! I will do it.”
She seemed so upset, so unsteady, that I made a half-step towards her, but she motioned me back, saying:
“Go now—go! Please go, and leave me.” A hundred thoughts were surging and churning in my head as I drove down the long, long valley of the Lampogwana River that night. I felt as miserable as man need feel. Everything seemed wrong—most of it horribly so—but turn as I might from one phase to another, the one thing always recurred, pervading, dominating everything: “I am the cause of that.” The words rang in my ears again and again, and the horrible significance shamed me afresh each time, always to be answered by something which said, “No, I will believe! I will trust!”
Poor Cassidy was very, very bad when I reached him, and his lucid intervals were far between. His appearance was terrible, the ghastly pallor adding, as I had thought nothing could add, to the face from which one eye, the nose, half the upper lip, and portion of one cheek, were gone. It was terrible—truly terrible!
There is no need to dwell on it all. I got him in and he lived for five days. Fever didn’t kill him; it couldn’t have; he was too strong and too stout-hearted. It was haemorrhage resulting from some old injury received in an accident years before. The doctor told me that when the artery had gone Cassidy knew he would be dead in a few minutes. He begged the doctor to leave him, and turning to Mrs Mallandane, asked her to cover his face with a handkerchief, and to hold his hand. He said to her, “God bless you, Molly! Good-bye!” and died like the man he was.
Mrs Chauncey was the real friend in that time of need. It was she who had supplied everything that an invalid could want; it was she who stayed all that long night through with Mrs Mallandane, who went with her to the funeral and stood by her, and stayed with her when all was over.
The day after the funeral I sat in my office dazed and stupefied with worrying and puzzling over many things in connection with these people whose affairs and whose lives seemed to have become suddenly entangled with mine. Not the least of my worries was the document before me, which was Cassidy’s will: “I give everything absolutely to Mary Mallandane,” and nominating me as his executor.
I dreaded the first interview—so much so, in fact, that I got Mrs Chauncey to go with me. The tall black figure and the excessive pallor of her face smote very hard on my heart, but I was relieved by the presence of little Molly, who stuck to me from the time I entered the room until Mrs Mallandane sent her away. I had already stated my object in calling when she sent Molly out, and I was about to resume, when she asked me abruptly:
“Do you know anything of his past life?”
“Nothing whatever,” I said. “Nor of mine?”
“No, Mrs Mallandane.”
She laid a hand on one of Mrs Chauncey’s, who was sitting near, and said gravely:
“You, who have been my friend, know nothing either. It is right that you should—that you both should.”
We were sitting at a table in the parlour; the writing materials were lying on it ready for my use. The two ladies sat close together opposite me.
I cannot give Mrs Mallandane’s own words, nor can I convey her manner when telling us the story of her life. Sometimes she would talk in a subdued monotone, telling, with an absence of feeling that was infinitely pathetic, of their troubles. Sometimes she would be roused to a pitch of feeling that left her voice but a husky whisper. Once—just once—I fancied there was the faintest trace of contempt in her tone when referring to—well, not to Cassidy. If it was so, it was at any rate instantly lost in a flow of pity.
This is substantially what she told us. Mallandane and Cassidy had owned claims in the Kimberley or one of the neighbouring mines, and were in fact partners doing business together. They were both young Irishmen, and had come out on the same boat some years before—which were considered sufficient reasons for their entering into partnership. Cassidy was the one with the brains, money, and work; and, from what I gathered, there seems to have been no reason, except Cassidy’s good-nature, for the alliance with Mallandane at all. However, they prospered, and Mallandane went home for a trip, and married and brought his wife back to Kimberley.
For a couple of years all went well—in fact, until the firm began to lose money. Reverses only stimulated Cassidy to harder work and more cheery, indomitable effort. You couldn’t beat him. But it was different with Mallandane. All his wife said was that he lost heart; used to go away day after day and night after night to where he could forget his worries—drinking and gambling. When Cassidy first recognised that his partner was falling, he gave up his own house, suggesting that it would be doing him (Cassidy) a good turn if they would let him board with them. He gave himself up to a splendid effort to save his partner from ruin.
For a time it answered, but Mallandane, besides being naturally unstable, must have been bitten by drink, for he broke out again, and nothing either wife or friend could do could save him. There came scenes—brutality and insult to the wife, ingratitude and insult to the friend. She told us nothing except in pity and forgiveness of her dead husband—nothing, that is, that justice to Cassidy did not require; but it is not difficult to imagine what happened, and, indeed, I know now that it was only the pitiful helplessness of the wife and child, and the knowledge that his presence was food, and even life, to them, that held Cassidy to his partner; for in his fits of drunkenness Mallandane would have murdered both wife and child.
Cassidy worked from four in the morning until eight at night, and at times through the day he would run up from the claims to the house, to see that all was well. All he made went to keep the house going, and it was given as a matter of course. No complaint was made, although Mallandane now ceased even the pretence of work and spent the whole day in the canteens.
But the end came when least expected. Mallandane, when he did come home at all, did not get up until hours after Cassidy was at work. He used to awake drunk and dazed, and wander off at once, unshaven, dirty and half dressed, to the nearest canteen.
One morning, however, there was a change. He was grey-faced, puffy and sodden, it is true, but he fussed about the house briskly, talking to himself. He got out a clean moleskin suit, and told the servant that he could not wait for breakfast, as he had to fire the eight o’clock shots, and the holes were all charged and waiting for him.
Within a quarter of an hour Cassidy had come up for breakfast. Mrs Mallandane met him on the way and told him what the servant had in the meantime told her; and Cassidy raced back to stop his delirious partner. With a madman’s cunning and instinct he had slipped down the mine from ledge to ledge and along dangerous slopes until he reached the lowest workings, and when Cassidy, after some delay in getting a bucket on the hauling-gear to go down in, reached the spot, the boys told him that Mallandane “umtagati” (bewitched) had gone into the drive to fire the charges, and would let no one go near him.
Cassidy looked at the black mouth of the drive. He did not think of the worthless sodden wretch who had gone in there. He recalled the partner of years, the mate of good times and bad, and he recalled, too, the horror-stricken look on the face of the woman he had just left. He dashed in to the sound of a warning yell from every man in the mine.
When occasion calls there is still no lack of brave men. Heroes spring into recognition from every grade of life, from every class of material; and while the half-dozen explosions still echoed and reverberated in the circle of the mine, there were men dashing in to the rescue at the imminent risk of their lives, heedless of the deadly fumes and of possible unexploded charges.
“The firm” lay in one heap—Cassidy on his back, Mallandane athwart him. To the only person to whom he ever spoke of the affair, Cassidy said: “He was stooping to light another fuse when I reached him. I gripped both arms round him as he turned on me and tried to carry him out. It was a wrestling match, for he showed fight. My face was over his one shoulder, as his was over mine; but mine was turned towards the shots.”
A piece of the rock that shattered poor Cassidy’s face entered the back of his partner’s head, andhenever stirred again.
Cassidy lay for months in hospital, bandaged, blindfolded, barely alive; and the woman he had stood by, stood by him. When he was able to walk about, it was on her arm he leaned. When he was fit to leave, it was to her house he went to be tended for months longer. He never complained nor lost heart, although he knew that one eye was gone and thought he would lose the other.
Some seven or eight months had passed, and he was getting well and strong—he was healing. She had always dreaded the effect of the first sight of himself, and for this reason had removed the mirrors from the rooms he frequented; but one day, when she had been out for a while, she found him lying on the sofa, the bandage off his eyes, and a hand-glass dropped on the carpet close by. It was the only time he had fainted or in any way given in.
Later in the evening he said:
“I don’t really mind so much now that I know. It was the suspense that worried me.” And, after a pause, he added in a voice that seemed to let youhearhis heart lifting: “I’ll be able to tackle work again soon, and will be all right again.”
“That was the only allusion,” Mrs Mallandane said, “that he ever made to his disfigurement. I believe it was out of delicacy and consideration for my feelings that he never spoke about it. You could not even see that he ever thought of it, for he had that splendid manliness that doesn’t know what self-consciousness means.
“Only one thing showed unmistakably that he did feel it, and that he felt he was dead to all the promise of his past. You must have remarked his manner of speech?” she observed, turning to me. “He spoke like a working man.Thatwas his only shield. He deliberately sank himself to that level to be spared the prominence and pity that would be given him as a gentleman. It was his hope to pass through life unnoticed. With me, and with me only, he had no disguise, no concealment, no reserve!”
He used always to talk of their affairs as one and the same, in order to keep up the illusion he had encouraged in her from the beginning when he had told her very seriously that “it would never do to liquidate the firm’s business now. It would mean sacrificingeverything.” She agreed to do whatever he thought right; and at the end of every month he used to hand to her, scrupulously accounted for, a sum greater or less, according to “the firm’s profits for the month.”
From his own “profits” he always managed to have something—no matter how little—to spend on Molly, who was his pet and companion always. The proceeds of the sale of house and furniture—when they had to be given up—were handed over to Mrs Mallandane “for a stand-by,” and she went into lodgings because she “would feel more comfortable and have more time to give to Molly there,”—not because he was watchful over her good name and would not stay in the house once he was well enough to walk alone.
When Cassidy extended the firm’s “business”—that is to say, went to the Cape Colony, Natal, and Transvaal, in search of contracts on the various railway lines—he continued to remit the “profits” with the most elaborate statements, which Mrs Mallandane, as a partner, felt bound to study, and, as a woman, often wept over in despair.
This had gone on for several years, and it was not until after she had gone to Barberton, “to be near the business,” that something had made her suspicious that the joint capital locked up in the business was all a generous imposition.
“It only needed the suggestion,” said Mrs Mallandane, “to show me an appalling chain of evidence—evidence of his generosity and patient tactful help—evidence of my blind content and foolishness. I spoke to him when next he came in. He could see that I knew, and he simply said that ‘Ralph would have done the same for him.’ God forgive me! He gave up his life to me! He suffered living death for me! He lived when it would have been a million mercies to have died. He bore all that man could bear and never grudged it. And I—I cut his heart in two when I refused his help! I know it! I wished I had died before I got the look he gave me when I told him that I could not take his help. Month after month went by and he did not come to me—he, who used to be here on the first day of every month. But I knew he was near. Twice I saw him passing slowly by at night when he had come to watch over us. The first time I was too surprised to call. The second time I called him and he came to me. He stayed until late that evening; and he went away happy again because we registered our second compact: that if we (Molly and I) were ever in real need I would send for him; that if he were sick or in need of friends the privilege of friends should be ours.”
She stopped for quite a while, and when she spoke again her voice trembled and it was all she could do to control it so that she could speak at all. I could not bear to look in her face.
“You two have seen him,” she said, and, turning to me, added, “You have known him. I have liked to tell you all about him; and I like to tell you now that I know he loved me—that I think it is the greatest honour a woman can have to be loved by such a man: for not any woman that I have ever known, or heard of, or read of, was good enough for him!”
She left the room for a moment, and returning laid something on the table before us, saying:
“You remember him as you saw him. Try—try to think of him as I do—likethis! It is all you can do for the memory of a good and honourable man.”
It was the photograph I had seen in her book the day I left to bring him in.
All those things happened some years ago.
Out on the grass there, in front of my window, there is a little girl trying to dissuade a very small boy from pulling the black ear off an old white bulldog; but the fat little fists keep their grip, and as he staggers under the effort the little chap says:
“Molly mus’ pull Danl Conn! olla ear!Makehim det up!”
Watching them with the brightest, merriest smile in the world, and looking years younger than when I first saw her, Mrs—
But if I mentioned her name this would not be an anonymous story.