MEMORIES
Some four hours later, Antony, once more in his deck-chair on the stoep,
set himself to review the situation. Shorn of its first bewilderment it
resolved itself into the fact that he, Antony Gray, owner of a small farm
on the African veldt, which farm brought him in a couple of hundred a
year or thereabouts, was about to become the proprietor of an estate
valued at a yearly income of twelve thousand,--subject, however, to
certain conditions. And in that last clause lay the possible fly in the
ointment. What conditions?
Antony turned the possibilities in his mind.
Matrimony with some lady of Nicholas Danver's own choosing? He dismissed
the idea. It savoured too much of early Victorian melodrama for the
prosaic twentieth century. The support of some antediluvian servant or
pet? Possibly. But then it would hardly be necessary to require verbal
communication of such a condition; a brief written statement to the
effect would have sufficed. The house ghost-haunted; a yearly exorcising
of the restless spirit demanded? Again too melodramatic. A promise to
live on the estate, and on the estate alone? Far more probable.
Well, he'd give that fast enough. The veldt-desire had never gripped him
as it is declared to grip those who have found a home in Africa. Behind
the splendour, the pageantry, the vastness, he had always felt a hint of
something sinister, something cruel; a spirit, perhaps of evil, ever
wakeful, ever watching. Now and again a sound, a scent would make him
sick with longing, with longing for an English meadow, for the clean
breath of new-mown hay, for the fragrance of June roses, for the song of
the thrush, and the sweet piping of the blackbird.
He had crushed down the longing as sentimental. Having set out on a path
he would walk it, till such time as Fate should clearly indicate another
signpost. He saw her finger now, and welcomed the direction of its
pointing. At all events he might make venture of the new route,--an
Arabian Night's path truly, gold-paved, mysterious. If, after making some
steps along it, he should discover a barrier other than he had a mind to
surmount, he could always return to the old road. Fate might point, but
she should never push him against his will. Thus he argued, confident
within his soul. He had the optimism, the trust of youth to his balance.
He had not yet learned the deepest of Fate's subtleties, the apparent
candour which conceals her tricks.
He gazed out into the night, ruminative, speculative. The breeze which
had rippled across the Indian corn during the day had sunk to rest. The
darkened field lay tranquil under the stars big and luminous. From far
across the veldt came the occasional beating of a buzzard's wings, like
the beating of muffled drums. A patch of gum trees to the right, beyond
the garden, stood out black against the sky.
Nicholas Danver. The name repeated itself within his brain, and then,
with it, came a sudden flash of lucid memory lighting up a long forgotten
scene.
He saw a small boy, a very small boy, tugging, pulling, and twisting at a
tough gorse stick on a moorland. He felt the clenching of small teeth,
the bruised ache of small hands, the heat of the small body, the
obstinate determination of soul. A slight sound had caused the boy to
turn, and he had seen a man on a big black horse, watching him with
laughing eyes.
"You'll never break that," the man had remarked amused.
"I've got to. I've begun," had been the small boy's retort. And he had
returned to the onslaught, regardless of the watching man.
Ten minutes had ended in an exceedingly heated triumph. The boy had sunk
upon the grass, sucking a wounded finger. The mood of determination had
passed with the victory. He had been too shy to look at the rider on the
black horse. But the gorse stick had lain on the ground beside him.
"Shake hands," the man had said.
And the boy had scrambled to his feet to extend a grubby paw.
"What's your name?" the man had demanded.
"Antony Gray."
"Not Richard Gray's son?"
"Yes."
The man had burst into a shout of laughter.
"Where is your father?"
"In London."
"Well, tell him his son is a chip of the old block, and Nicholas Danver
says so. Ask him if he remembers the coach road from Byestry to
Kingsleigh. Good-bye, youngster."
And Nicholas had ridden away.
It was astonishing in what detail the scene came back to him. He could
smell the hot aromatic scent of the gorse and wild thyme. He could hear
the humming of the bees above the heather. He could see the figure on the
black horse growing speck-like in the distance as he had gazed after it.
The whole thing pieced itself together. He remembered that he had gone to
that cottage on the moorland with his nurse to recover after measles. He
remembered that his father had said that the air of the place would make
a new boy of him. He remembered his father's laugh, when, later, the tale
of the meeting had been recounted to him.
"Good old Nick," he had said. "One loses sight of the friends of one's
boyhood as one grows older, more's the pity. I must write to old Nick."
There the incident had closed. Yet clearly as the day on which it had
occurred, a day now twenty-five years old, it repainted itself on
Antony's brain, as he sat on the stoep, gazing out into the African
night.
It never occurred to him to wonder why Nicholas should have left him his
money and property. That he had done so was marvellous, truly; his
reasons for doing so were not even speculated upon. Antony had a
childlike faculty for accepting facts as they presented themselves to
him, with wonderment, pleasure, frank disapprobation, or stoicism, as the
case might be. The side issues, which led to the presentation of the
facts, were, generally speaking, the affair of others rather than his
own; and, as such, were no concern of his. It was not that he
deliberately refused to consider them, but merely that being no concern
of his, it never occurred to him to do so. He walked his own route,
sometimes singing, sometimes dreaming, sometimes amusedly silent, and
always working. Work had been of necessity from the day his father's
death had summoned him hurriedly from college. A quixotic, and, it is to
be feared, culpable generosity on Richard Gray's part had left his son
penniless.
Antony had accepted the fact stoically, and even cheerfully. He had
looked straight at the generosity, denying the culpability, thereby
preserving what he valued infinitely more than lands or gold--his
father's memory, thus proving himself in very truth his son. He had no
ties to bind him; he was an only child, and his mother was long since
dead. He set out on his own route, a route which had led him far, and
finally had landed him, some five years previously, on the African veldt,
where he had become the owner of the small farm he now occupied.
After all, there had been compensations in the life. All unconsciously
he had taken for his watch-word the cry: "I will succeed in spite of
..." rather than the usual old lament: "I could succeed if...."
Naturally there had been difficulties. He had considered them
grave-eyed and silent; he had tackled them smiling and singing. Inwardly
he was the same Antony who had conquered the gorse-stick on the
moorland; outwardly--well, he didn't make the fight so obvious. That
was all the difference.
And now, sitting on the stoep with the silence of the African night
around him, he tried to shape his plans, to bring them forth from the
glamour of the marvellous which had enshrouded them, to marshal them up
into coherent everyday form. But the glamour refused to be dispelled.
Everything, the smallest and most prosaic detail, stood before him bathed
in its light. It was all so gorgeously unexpected, so--so stupendously
mysterious.
And through all the glamour, the unexpectedness, and the mystery, there
was sounding an ever-repeated chord of music, composed of the notes of
youth, happiness, memory, desire, and expectation. And, thus combined,
they struck the one word--England.