“Seest thou a man wise in his own conceit? There is more hope
of a fool than of him!”--_Jewish Proverb._
I think it is the Chinese who have a proverb that says: “To expect one
who does not come, to eat and not to be satisfied, and to work for
years and get no promotion, are three things which are enough to kill
a man.” Mrs. Lewin had been proving the wearing process of the first
clause for a good half-hour, before the telephone bell rang, and her
husband’s voice informed her that he was detained, and--er--awfully
sorry, but would not be in to lunch. “I’ll come up later--have you got
a headache, Chum?” said the strong tones, muffled to half their weight
like a ventriloquist’s.
The “er” was a fatal hesitation, and struck Mrs. Lewin’s keenness
of perception. Ally had not been detained by duty as he wished her
to imagine--he was lunching on board the mail boat, catching at the
nearest pleasure as usual, to his own detriment and hers. For a minute
a wave of very human irritation prompted her to let him go his own way.
Why should she for ever stand between him and retribution? She was
tired, and inclination prompted her to let the struggle go, and take
consequences as easily and without regret as he did. Then with another
change of mood she saw that Ally’s lack of purpose was no excuse for
her own. The very things she saw and condemned in him were a spur to
her to be on her own guard. The danger was hers as well as his--the
object to be gained her own safety too. She could let no chance go by,
and the feeblest of human excuses always is, “I am no worse than my
neighbours.” It all passed over her conscious mind while she stood with
the little apparatus still in her hands.
“No, I’ve no headache--I’m all right,” she said quietly. “But come up
after lunch, Ally--I want to see you. It’s important--but don’t say
anything to any one. Tell them I am seedy if you like, and that you
must get back.”
She wondered as she heard his half-uneasy “Yes, of course I’ll come the
minute I can,” if there were any one standing near him. One could hear
too much in a public place, if one were only near the instrument. Well,
it could not be helped, and after all they might think it was a private
matter--something contained in her own home mail. But in Key Island
every one’s business is of importance to discuss for lack of one’s own,
and even her own guarded sentences would have grown to a state secret
before nightfall, had they been overhead.
Ally was so relieved to be easily excused that he really did as he
had promised, and rode up before three o’clock, feeling a virtuous
husband and deserving of much welcome and something to drink, for he
was really very hot. He brought many invitations to consider themselves
engaged for the next two days, beginning with a dance that night at the
Wessex Mess, and including a breakfast party and two luncheons, for the
mail boat and the _Greville_ were both busy in friendly rivalry. The
projected gaiety was driven out of his head, however, by his wife’s
private news, and he was so really engrossed with the possibility of
their removal, that Chum forgave him his defection from lunch, and came
over and sat on the arm of his chair, while he read her friend’s letter.
“Great Scot, what luck!” he said with boyish excitement. “Chum, we must
manage it, if you have to go on your knees to Gregory’s Powder, and I
to lick old Sir Geoffrey’s boots! Malta or a home station--thank Heaven
the old boy always liked me!”
“Did he like Brissy as well?” said Leoline anxiously, and without any
enmity towards Brissy, feeling glad of his shortcomings. “Ally, he
_can’t_ have thought Brissy as nice as you!”
“Poor old Bristles! No, I do think I showed up rather well against
him, you know, Chum. Anyhow it seems to rest with Gregory. What a good
stroke that was of yours to play up to him, old girl! You always said
he was a good man to have behind you--I think you’re the smartest Chum
a fellow ever married! No, you don’t like that word, do you--I mean
you’re the quickest, and the most farseeing----”
He broke off to laugh and put his arm round her as she leaned over his
shoulder, giving her a boyish hug that seemed to take her breath away,
for she freed herself of him with a protest like a cry.
“Don’t, Ally!--let me get up--I can’t breathe!--No, it’s nothing. Yes,
of course we must have the appointment--it’s all in your hands now.”
“Mine! It’s much better in yours----”
“No!--no!--you must make a good impression, somehow. I am sure the
Administrator likes you for yourself--every one does. It’s only that
you will shirk, that annoys him. Don’t play tennis or polo quite so
much--try and seem to have grasped the situation here--I’ll coach you.
We must get away--oh, we must have that appointment!”
She spoke breathlessly, but he was excited also, and seemed to catch
more fire from her. His face only fell once as he thought of the
_Greville_ and mail boat festivities.
“By Jove! and this was to be a week, too! Never mind--I’ll give up most
of it and stick to business. You’re quite right, Chum--I’ll be seized
with a savage desire to get things properly settled up before Halton
goes. I would grub in correspondence and red tape if only it would
ensure my getting out of this beastly island!”
“Don’t overdo it,” said Mrs. Lewin nervously. “He is so quick to see
through people. Ally, I wonder if he will send Mr. Halton to Port
Cecil? I suppose you’ve heard of that--isn’t it strange that Mr.
Gregory should have the nomination of both men to these appointments!”
“Oh I don’t care if the whole of East Africa is put into Halton’s
hands, so long as I get the other show. Think of it, Chum--home leave,
food that isn’t tinned, lots going on, and some sport again! _Salama_
for old Sir Geoffrey!”
He caught her round the waist, to the amazement of Abdallah, who was
bringing in the tea, and waltzed her round the room, steering through
the scattered chairs and tables and even into the next room with a
dexterity that made her laugh until she could not keep pace with him,
and dropped on to the sofa leaving Ally to finish with a grand _pas
seul_ that landed him with a thud against the butler’s portly person.
Chum sat on the sofa, wiping her eyes rather hysterically, while Ally
and Abdallah sorted themselves; and then they drank their tea with a
special allowance of sugar in it for the honour of the occasion.
“When we get to Malta,” said Chum seriously, “we will have cream
too, as well as milk--can you get cream in Malta, Ally?--and it shall
be real tea, up from India, not this nasty stuff from Natal.” In
the background of her mind she was always conscious of a sense of
reluctance, a desire that did not accord with her earnest assertions of
delight in leaving Key Island. Some deep root in her very nature seemed
dragging her back whenever she spoke of her departure, and the more she
felt it the more she repeated the idea as if to get used to it. It was
a thing she had to fight, and she faced it desperately in this its very
beginning.
It haunted her through the dance that night, and the whirl of flying
feet round the long mess-room. It was too hot for dancing, but Mrs.
Lewin did not seem to feel the heat; she was indefatigable, and
waltzed through the programme, looking as cool and dry at the end of
the evening as at the beginning which is a great feat for a Maitso
dance. Leoline wondered if this were the last time she should sit out
on the steps of the Mess, or keep time to the Gunners’ band,--and
thrust the thought away. It was an ever-recurring ghost, that “last
time,” and stung most keenly, strange to say, through an introduction
to the guests of the evening, Captain and Mrs. Ritchie Stern. Blanche
Stern had very large and searching eyes of a blue that mocked the
sea--wholesome eyes, that seemed never to have reflected the image of
any man save her husband, and indeed the only thing that Mrs. Gilderoy
could find to say of her was that she posed as being in love with
Ritchie Stern to fatiguing extent. In an assembly of auctioned men and
assorted wives, she was perhaps rather unlikely; but as their eyes met,
Mrs. Lewin put her hand to the diamond pendant at her throat with a
little start, and a choking feeling that Mrs. Stern was divining her
secret mind. They had been introduced in a pause between the dances,
and were leaning over the wooden railing of the stoep side by side,
while their respective partners fought for ices on their behalf. No
African stoep should have a railing of course, but Key Island has
improved upon its model in its own opinion, and has gone further and
twined the woodwork with stephanotis and gardenia. The strong hothouse
scents were in Mrs. Ritchie’s nostrils as she leaned out into the
night, looking down on the lights of Port Victoria.
“Captain Stern was here for a fortnight once,” she said idly; “I often
thought we should like it as a station--it is such an idyllic place.
How lovely these flowers are!”
“It is horrible!” said Mrs. Lewin, with sudden energy. “It is like a
trap--you cannot get out, and there is nothing to do. You would hate
it!” She was unconscious that she repeated every one else’s _Miserere_
for the first time.
“I don’t think I should mind, if my husband were here too,” said
Blanche frankly. She turned her eyes on Mrs. Lewin as if she saw
something that interested her in the restless beautiful figure. “The
worst of marrying a Navy man is that one is not sufficiently considered
in his appointments! They _will_ send Ritchie to dubious corners of the
earth, just when the children have arranged to have the measles, and I
can’t be in two places at once.”
Mrs. Lewin looked across the stoep to the open doorway where Captain
Stern presented a good flat back to her view as he talked to Major
Churton. She looked with unconscious wistfulness at his shaven fair
head and tanned neck, and wondered if under the circumstances she would
have felt her heart torn in two because the seas divided them? And then
she remembered her ghost of reluctance to leave this place that she
said she hated, and Mrs. Stern’s next words were full of horror to her.
“It is so short-sighted of women to stake their little all on a man who
is not safe to be no farther off than the next room! I know I shall
loathe this harbour when I see the _Greville_ slipping out of it and
over the horizon with a peace-maker for East Africa--you know that that
is what she is here for, of course, or is it still an official and
consequently an open secret?”
“We have heard something of it. Does Captain Stern expect to be here
long?”
“He will leave the instant your Administrator produces the man he has
come to fetch. I don’t really know who I dislike the most just now--the
Capetown people, who hurried him away on this business, or the Port
Cecil people, who are making the trouble, or the man he is taking to
the scene of action.”
“Will he stop there?”
“I am afraid so, for goodness knows how long! Until the affair is
settled one way or another, I expect. Ritchie hopes he will get a
chance to shell the town, of course--you can imagine my feelings! I
do hope you are sending a nice, timid man from Key’land, who prefers
diplomacy to shells!”
“I can’t say who it will be, but it is almost certain to be Mr. Halton,
and he is a thorough diplomatist. The whole thing is to be rather
hushed up, isn’t it?”
“Yes, and as peacefully arranged as possible, I believe. That is my
great comfort!” Mrs. Stern laughed a little whimsically at herself.
“The two things the Government is aiming at are speed and secrecy--not
that there is much secrecy about it amongst us, of course. But they
seem bent on prompt action for once, and I believe they want to get it
all settled quietly before the public at home recognise that anything
_more_ is taking place in Africa! That is why they are forwarding a man
from Key’land instead of from home or direct from the Government out
here. It is like going up the back stairs to avoid comment! Well, it is
about time that Africa dropped into the background, isn’t it? We were
at Beira when Ritchie got his orders, and as the mail was there I came
on first. They seem to have cabled in all directions from Capetown--to
us, and to your Administrator, and to the regiment at Durban.”
“That is my husband’s regiment,” remarked Chum, as she took the ice
from her triumphant partner at last. “I suppose it was quicker to
transport them by sea than across land.”
Later on it chanced that she danced with Ritchie Stern, and caught
herself analysing him with feverish intensity as a man loved by, and
in love with, his own wife. Captain Stern was not a comforting study,
because there were no excuses in him for one’s own failings. He was so
simply a gentleman as to make more questionable characters seem shady
by contrast, when without it they had been merely complex. It was
like plunging one’s hand into cold, still water of an infinite depth,
to try and plumb his character, and his habit of speaking from the
bottom of his lungs rather than the top of his throat intensified the
impression. It was a matter of training, but it seemed an outcome of
his personality. He struck Leoline Lewin as very kind, which depressed
her still more--she did not know why--and he stood out in her mind as
the one man she had danced with who had not looked or spoken her a
compliment.
“I like the Sterns very much, Ally,” she said as they rode home in the
faint coolness of the hour before dawn--a mere promise of coolness,
that was never fulfilled by the day. “But they give me the feeling of
having been to church--do Navy people ever strike you like that?”
“No,” said Ally, who had other impressions of ward-rooms, “very much
the other way.”
“Oh, I don’t mean that,” said Chum vaguely. “Only I feel that I have
been listening to a sermon in the open air--and I have grown so unused
to the open air that I am afraid of catching a moral cold. Ally, how
dreadfully confined we grow in garrisons! Mrs. Stern brings the sea
winds to you in her eyes.”
“You are not growing poetical, are you, Chum?” said Ally suspiciously.
“I thought Stern a very decent chap--can’t imagine him preaching.”
“He couldn’t!” said Chum, dropping to the old level of his thought,
and abandoning her own. “But I preached myself the sermon on him as
the text, and it was, ‘Woe unto them who can see their own wives, for
they shall not see any one else’s!’ What lovely emeralds Mrs. Stern was
wearing, by the way.”
“Yes, I wish I could give you some more stones. I’ll try, if we get to
Malta.”
“I would rather have nice clothes than jewels,” said Chum. “A dowdy
woman with diamonds is worse dressed than a _chic_ one with paste, all
the world over. And we can’t run to both--even at Malta.”
“Did you like Mrs. Stern?”
“Yes!” said Chum, her eyes darkening to the shadows on purple velvet.
“And I hope I shall not meet her again.”
She said the last words savagely, under her breath. They were her echo
to Mrs. Stern’s, that still hurt her, and made her afraid of the eyes
that divined her secret mind.
“It is so short-sighted of women to stake their little all on a man
who is not safe to be no farther off than the next room!”
She began to feel that she could hardly wait for Ally’s appointment
to be a certainty; if the Administrator did not inform him of his
good fortune soon, the strain on their nerves would make them both
ill-tempered, and that was a vulgarity not to be contemplated.
Alaric and she had always been as courteous to each other as two
acquaintances; it was one of her theories of married life, and not
yet overthrown by experience. The indefiniteness of his own escape
affected Ally too, so that they were both unusually restless, and it
was a relief next morning when breakfast was over and he could go up to
Government House.
“Don’t be late for luncheon, Ally!” Chum said, following him on to the
stoep, where he paused to light his cigarette, a white figure against
the green of the garden. “It will be so awful waiting!”
“Perhaps I shan’t have any news,” said Alaric in gloomy anticipation.
“He must speak of it to-day!”
“It would be just like him not to. He will be so immersed in the East
African business, he will forget all about our little affairs.”
A momentary doubt dawned in Mrs. Lewin’s eyes. She thought of the
Gilderoys’ picnic, and that large heavy hand on her own. Was she indeed
a slight incident in his mind, to be brushed aside by larger interests?
She had never set eyes on Gregory since that moment, and the new sweet
fear of him that had overwhelmed her was in abeyance for the present.
Perhaps Ally was right, and they were only details in this man’s
career, a mere speck on his ambition. She tried for nothing but honest
relief as she turned back to the house.
“Well come and tell me anyway,” she said over her shoulder. “I _must_
know!”
“All right,” he replied, more soberly than usual. “I will come back the
second he will let me--I really will! It’s no joking matter to either
of us.”
The morning was growing too hot to be out of doors as he walked off
through the rose-bushes, and out of the gate into the grounds of
Government House. Mrs. Lewin stood in the doorway until the white
helmet flitted out of sight among the thickening trees, and then
went in to write letters. The writing-table stood close to one of
the seven windows, and she slid up the shutter and fastened the pin
so that the draught should fan her comfortably, before she began her
correspondence. Outside a wild hot wind was rushing over the hillside,
and the smell of innumerable flowers dripped in on its breath. She
wrote slowly, and the sentences would not come. All her brain seemed to
have followed Ally, and to be waiting with him for the Administrator to
speak.
At the hour of the Miroro she went into her room and lay down under the
mosquito curtains with a fan in her hand. Usually she fanned herself
to sleep, but to-day sleep would not come any more than the flow of
words. For half-an-hour she lay in the hot, still room, counting the
silver things on the dressing-table, and the photographs on the wall,
and noticing without her will that the black girl who attended to her
room, had not hung her gowns aright. Natives were so tiresome; it would
be almost better to experiment with an Arab.
Would the time never go? Was Ally never coming?
She rose before lunch could possibly be ready, and dressed herself.
Then she wandered into the central room that served for drawing-room
and lounge, and from which the others all opened out. She found Ally’s
cigarettes on a table and smoked one, turning over the pages of last
month’s magazines, which had just come in by the mail. The smudgy
illustrations annoyed her, and she flung them by and rose restlessly,
wandering about the hot, sweet rooms, and listening for his step
through the glare outside.
Still he did not come. It was past the luncheon hour now, and Abdallah
had put the finishing touches to the table and stood by in grave
reproach, his snowy turban already on, and his hands folded over his
tunic. Abdallah was always severely white at luncheon, his costume
consisting merely of a tunic and turban; but by dinner-time he had
added a coloured bandana and an embroidered jacket. His motionless
presence added the last irritation to her overwrought mood, and she
sent him away until Captain Lewin should appear.
The hours dragged away, until the morning had slipped into afternoon.
Still he did not come. With a feeling that she wanted to shriek
hysterically, Leoline paced steadily up and down the broad floors of
the bungalow, from one shaded room into another, and so back to the
corner where the table was still spread. She could not eat, and she
felt that Ally might come at any moment. Something was keeping him--not
his own pleasure this time; his being transferred from Key Island was
a weighty matter even to him, and she knew he would return to her for
advice and support as soon as he could. He could see his own interest
sufficiently in this to resist a passing temptation, but there was none
to keep him at Government House. The horrible part was that it might
be nothing but trivial duties that detained him after all, and they
might have to go through this suspense again. The heat seemed to get
no less as the day wore towards four o’clock, and her limbs began to
feel lifeless and heavy, as if paralysed. When at last the door opened
and he walked quietly in, she did not rise to meet him or spring up for
a minute. She sat there watching him come straight towards her with a
curious speculative feeling that there was a grave importance in his
manner that seemed a little ridiculous. She criticised him as if he
were somebody not belonging to her.
“Well!” she said rising at last, in a slow mechanical fashion. She
looked at him all across the room. Yes, certainly he was so grave as to
be unlike himself--not depressed, but self-sufficient, almost pompous.
It was so foreign to any mood in which she had seen Alaric before that
she could only stare at him.
He sat down heavily in a basket chair that creaked beneath his weight,
and so added to her absurd impression that he was assuming the air of
an elderly and important personage. He did not speak either at once,
and when he did he seemed to be weighing his words, as if he said a
solemn thing.
“I have got it!”
“The appointment?” she said with a long breath, trying to shake off
her own leadenness and the effect of his strange manner. “Oh, Ally,
what good news! I have been so frightened--when you did not come, you
know,--I thought we might still have to wait.”
“He spoke of it almost at once. We have talked of little else. He was
giving me minute instructions.”
A blank feeling of non-comprehension seemed to take possession of
her. He was still unlike himself, or else Gregory’s earnestness had
impressed him at last. Perhaps the force of the stronger man had been
let loose on the weaker for once, for the sake of urging him to a more
serious sense of his position. She knew that Gregory had been impatient
of his indifference in his present post; perhaps he had told him
plainly that he must be more conscientious with Sir Geoffrey Vaughan.
“Instructions!” she repeated slowly. “For Malta?”
“No--not that. I am going to East Africa.”
She did not cry out, but she fell back a step as if some unknown hand
had struck her a heavy blow. Her eyes were absolutely frightened, and
she spoke in a low voice of intense terror.
“But Ally--you can’t! You daren’t accept it--you can’t do it!”
He fired at the last words as if he half expected them. “Why not?” he
said irritably. “Why can’t I do it? I must accept it--you must see
that! I have accepted it already. It is arranged.”
“You can’t do it!” she repeated bluntly. “It is a heavy responsibility
to give to any man--any experienced man even. Why isn’t Mr. Halton
going?”
“He can’t be spared; there is an awful row going on already over the
crops.”
“The hemp!” she said breathlessly, her memory going back to those words
of Gregory’s--“They have given me _carte blanche_ to do as I think
best”--“They are not burning the crops?”
“Yes they are. The order went out yesterday. There is a compensation of
course, but the Chinese are furious, and that gives them away, for they
must have been making their fortunes out of the hashish. Halton must
stay and see Gregory through it--he has no one to send but me.”
In a streak of terror through her quickened brain it seemed as if she
saw all the disaster of the choice. She had never finally acknowledged
to herself that Ally depended on her for the least success in his life,
but in the stress of the moment she knew that with her to guide and
counsel and manage he might come through this ordeal--not creditably,
but without failure. Without her it was like sending a child to play
with a train of gunpowder. Some horrible intuition seemed to tell her
his incapacity, and excuse the belief in herself. Ally in a position
that needed absolute diplomacy! Ally managing a delicate enquiry that
might lead to a serious issue! She realised only in her dismay that she
could not go with him to East Africa to save him from failure--the loss
of her own escape from secret peril did not really trouble her mind at
the time. The fear for him drove her to repeating blankly, “You can’t
do it--you mustn’t!”
“Good God, Chum!” he exclaimed in a sudden squall of irritation,
“you are ridiculous! What do you mean? You are always worrying me
over getting on, and having a career, and now that I have got an
opening, you seem to want me to back out! Don’t you see that I can’t?
Gregory isn’t the man to give me a second chance. He is offering me a
tremendous lift in putting me in such a position.”
Only one sentence in his angry speech found room for itself in her
mind, for she saw that it was true. He could not back out. Evelyn
Gregory had him fast in his iron grip, and if he chose to send him to
his ruin he was helpless. She laid her hand on the back of a chair and
held it cruelly tight as if to help herself to think. Why had he done
this? Why? She kept asking herself the question again and again, and
found no answer. It was so plausible on the face of it, this threatened
rising over the hemp-crops, and Halton’s presence as an immediate
necessity, that she felt that it was not true. To the outside world the
appointment of an emissary sent to Port Cecil to “enquire” might come
within Alaric’s sphere, particularly under the stress of circumstances
in Key Island, but not to her. She had a giant fear of Gregory born of
her greater knowledge of him that no one in the Island could share.
As she stood there looking with unseeing eyes at Alaric’s handsome,
annoyed face, she saw only the shadowy strength of the man whom she
had learned to know--unscrupulous, tyrannical, successful because he
allowed nothing to stand in his way. Now that she and hers were to be
swept aside after his method, she began to realise for the first time
the atmosphere of terror that had seemed to hang round him in the minds
of those who first spoke of him to her. Hitherto she had been but a
spectator, and he had interested her as a danger of which one only
reads. To find oneself threatened by the same thing in reality makes
the difference.
“Well!” said Alaric at last, with the half-offended air of a spoilt
child, “I’m sorry you are not better pleased, Chum! I thought you would
be as proud as I felt when he told me. Of course I’m sorry to leave you
behind, old girl, but perhaps we shall get something good out of this
later.” He spoke half apologetically, but the old easy optimism was
coming back to him. Fortune had always given Alaric what he wanted; he
took her gifts for granted.
“Who will have Malta? Brissy?” said his wife quietly.
“Yes, he’s off next mail--not by this. Of course he’ll have to be
officially appointed; but Gregory has answered Sir Geoffrey’s letter
privately, as he was asked. I shall have to go to-morrow, or next day
at latest, Chum. I’m sorry!” he added simply, as a tribute to parting
with her.
But she felt suddenly that he was glad to go--glad even of this chance
of action. He did not mind leaving her behind if only he were free of
the monotony of Key Island, which also held more uncomfortable memories
for him than his wife guessed. Things were getting complicated round
Ally, and what had been a pleasant indulgence and flattering to his
vanity, was growing to be a tie exacted from him by a jealous woman.
He could not have told, if he had honestly tried to do so, how he had
drifted so far with Diana Churton; such men as Alaric Lewin are as
incapable of accounting for the crisis of their lives as they are of
managing them. He trusted to fortune again. Events had generally shaped
themselves comfortably for him; and, as in the present case, when there
was a tight corner the natural march of circumstances had forced him
out of it without any responsibility on his part.
Circumstances were marching him out now, and he was really glad.
Captain Stern and the _Greville_ would carry him safely away from Key
Island to-morrow, and Diana’s last note which he had found at the club
would go unanswered through no fault of his. He couldn’t go to Maitso
to-night, it was out of the question. For the look of the thing he
must spend what might be his last evening with Chum--and of course he
wanted to, he added mentally to the back of her head, as she bent over
his portmanteau. His Malagasan man was busy over the shirt case, and
he himself ramming the surplus of his property into the kit-bag, but
Chum had become her old self again, and risen to the occasion of his
packing, once the stupefaction of his news had passed off. He was sure
it was only the surprise which had made her unlike herself; she was
getting on more with the portmanteau, in spite of the heat, than either
Longa or himself with their share.
“Ally,” said Mrs. Lewin quietly, as she tucked a pair of socks into
an empty corner, “will you go over to the Churtons to-night to say
good-bye?”
“N--no!” He stammered a little, in the discomfort of his own knowledge.
“It’s my last evening most likely, Chum!--at least we may go to-morrow.”
“Yes, of course. (Mind the gun-case, Longa!) I didn’t mean you to
be out all the time. But I think you might ride over and just say
good-bye--you would be back in an hour. They will be so awfully hurt if
you don’t.”
“Yes,” said Ally uneasily. A sensible and considerate wife is a very
useful article so long as her husband wishes to make use of these
two qualities; when he does not, he would prefer her to be more
unreasonable.
Chum’s suggestion was awkward, because he was afraid to refuse to go to
Maitso lest she should be surprised.... Hang it! the whole thing had
become a nuisance. How glad he was he should be out of it to-morrow!
Then a brilliant idea struck him. He would go down to the club and be
detained. He could write Di a note, too, from there, and ask her to
come down and see him off if possible. He did not know when they would
leave, so it was most probable that she would miss him--he did not mind
that either. Anyhow, there would be plenty of fellows at the club to
make an excuse for getting no further. He might see Churton too. He
liked Churton--when he didn’t feel a grovelling cad.
“All right, perhaps I’d better. I can go after dinner, but I shan’t be
long,” he said. Mrs. Lewin did not answer or look at him. She was very
busy over the portmanteau.
It was rather a silent dinner, but he noticed with real pain and
affection how soft and fair Leoline looked in her long white
dinner-gown, and wondered when they would have one of their merry
_tête-à-tête_ meals again. He was devoted to his wife--in theory at
any rate. Perhaps Chum could not have pleaded much more, save that
she tried to practise what she preached. If men were not such complex
animals the Day of Judgment would be a simpler ceremony, but as things
are they will have many pleas to enter of former good conduct and
extenuating circumstances. Ally rode away with his heart full of his
wife, because she had entered there through his eyes, and with no
thought of infidelity to her. At the club he sat down and wrote a note,
which was the more emphatic because he did not mean it, and a little
more reckless in expression than usual because he was going away in
safety.
He could not find his own sais, who should have followed him into town
to look after his pony, and risked sending a loafer whom he knew by
sight, to Maitso. The man grinned and put the letter in his breast
before he hitched up his trousers to show his zeal, the action meaning
that Captain Lewin was to understand he would run all the way.
Ally laughed good-naturedly. “Mind it’s important. Give it to Mrs.
Churton herself,” he said. “I’ll pay you when you come back without it.”
“Yes, Baas! I give it dere!” said the nigger, and he started off at a
jog-trot along the twinkling street towards the dusk of Maitso Hill.
Ally turned back into the club, still laughing.