"Oh, truce! Truce!" Alice Mellen protested. "Don't talk shop,
Cooee."
"It's not shop; it is topics of the day," Ethel responded
tranquilly. "Besides, I want to hear about Mr. Carew. Is he
dangerous?"
Weldon laughed.
"No, for his wound; yes, for his temper. One was only a scratch; the
other way, he was horribly cut up."
"Did he swear?" Alice queried, while she distributed lumps of sugar
among the cups.
"Alice!"
"Don't pretend to be shocked, Cooee. Even if you haven't been out
but one season, you ought to know what happens when a man turns
testy. Frankly, I think it is a healthy sign, if a man stops to
swear when he is hit. It shows there are no morbid secretions."
"You prefer superficial outbreaks, Miss Mellen?" Frazer inquired, as
he handed Ethel her cup.
"Yes. They are far less likely to produce mortification later on,"
she answered, laughing up into his steady eyes. "What do you do,
when you are hit, Captain Frazer?"
"They call me Lucky Frazer, you know," he replied. "I've been in no
end of scrimmages, and I was never hit but once."
Bending over, Ethel turned back the cloth and thumped on the under
side of the table.
"Unberufen and Absit omen," she said hastily. "Don't tempt
Providence too far, Captain Frazer. At my coming-out reception, I
met a man who boasted that he always broke everything within range,
from hearts to china. Ten minutes later, he tripped over a rug and
fell down on top of the plate of salad he was bringing me. And he
didn't break a thing--"
"Except his own record," Weldon supplemented unexpectedly. "I
suspect he also broke the third commandment. The keeping of that and
the falling down in public are totally incompatible."
"And that reminds me, you were going to tell what Mr. Carew did when
he was hit," Ethel reminded him.
"I never tell tales, Miss Dent."
"But, really, how does it feel to be under fire?" she persisted.
"Ask Captain Frazer. He has had more experience than I."
She barely turned her eyes towards Frazer's face.
"He is talking to my cousin and won't hear. Were you frightened?"
"No."
"Truly? But you wouldn't confess, if you were."
He blushed at the mockery in her tone.
"Yes. Why not? I expected to be desperately afraid; but I was only
desperately angry."
"At what?"
"Nothing. That's the point. There was nothing in sight to be angry
at. Bullets came from nowhere in a pelting shower. Most of them
didn't hit anything; there was no cloud from which the shower could
come. One resented it, without knowing exactly why. It was being the
big fellow who can't hit back when the little one torments him."
"Cooee!"
The remonstrance was long-drawn and forceful. This time, Ethel
heeded.
"What is it, Alice?"
"Do you remember that, this noon, we agreed not to mention the war?
These men fight almost without ceasing. When they aren't fighting,
they do sentry and stables and things. This is an afternoon off for
them. We really must talk accordingly."
"What are you and Captain Frazer talking about?"
"Cricket and seven-year locusts."
Ethel held out her empty cup.
"Very well. Then Mr. Weldon and I will discuss mosquitoes and seven-day
Baptists. No sugar, please, and I'd like another of those snappy
things."
"Does that mean a Mauser?" Weldon asked, as he brought back her cup.
"No. I mean biscuits, not cats. But you sinned then. However, my
cousin has her eye upon us, so we must be distinctly frivolous. Is
there any especially peaceful subject you would like to discuss?"
"Yes. Please explain your name."
She looked up at him with sudden literalness.
"It is for my grandmother. For four hundred years there has been an
Ethel Dent in every generation."
"I meant the other."
"Oh, Cooee?" She laughed. "It dates from our first coming out here,
when we were children. My old Kaffir nurse--I was only five, that
first trip--used to call me so, and every one took it up. We went
back to England, after a few weeks, and the name was dropped; but my
uncle stayed out here, and he and my cousin always kept the old
word."
Weldon stirred his tea thoughtfully.
"I rather like it, do you know?" he said.
"Surely, you don't think it fits me?"
His eyes moved from her shining hair to the hem of her elaborate
white gown. Then he smiled and shook his head.
"Not to-day, perhaps. But the Miss Dent of the Dunottar Castle--"
She interrupted him a little abruptly.
"Does that mean I am two-sided?"
"No; only complex."
She smiled in gracious response.
"You did that very well, Mr. Weldon," she said, with a slight accent
of superiority which galled him. Then, before he could reply, she
changed the subject, speaking with a lowered voice. "And what of the
Captain?"
It suited his mood not to understand her.
"In what way?"
"Every way. What do you think of him?"
Then she drew back, abashed by the fervor of the answer, as he said
slowly,--
"That the Creator made him, and then broke the pattern."
The little pause which followed caught the alert attention of the
hostess, and convinced her that it was time to shift the groups to
another combination. A swift gesture summoned Weldon to the table,
while Frazer dropped into his vacant chair. Ethel met the Captain
with only a half-concealed eagerness. This was not the first time
that a consciously trivial word of hers had been crushed out of life
by Weldon's serious dignity. She was never quite able to understand
his mood upon such occasions. The man was no prig. At times, he was
as merry as a boy. At other times, he showed an inflexible
seriousness which left her with the vague feeling of being somehow
or other in the wrong. The result was a mood of pique, rather than
of antagonism. Up to that time, Ethel Dent had known only unreserved
approval. Weldon's occasional gravity, to her mind, suggested
certain reservations. By way of overcoming these reservations, she
focussed her whole attention upon Captain Leo Frazer. Across the
table, Weldon, in the intervals of his talk with his hostess, could
hear the low murmur of their absorbed conversation.
It had been at Ethel's suggestion that the tea-table had been set,
that hot afternoon, under the trees in the heart of the garden. Just
at the crossing of two broad walks, a vine-roofed kiosk gave shelter
from the late sunshine, while its bamboo screens were half raised to
show the long perspective of garden walk and distant lawn. Save for
the orange grove at the left and the ash-colored leaves of the
silver wattle above them, Weldon could almost have fancied himself
in England. The lawn with its conventional tennis court was
essentially English; English, too, the tray with its fixtures.
There, however, the resemblance stopped. The ebony handmaiden who
brought out the tray was never found in private life outside the
limits of South Africa. When she sought foreign countries, it was
merely as a denizen of a midway plaisance.
"Yes, and their names are their most distinctive feature," Alice
assented to Weldon's comment.
"More than their mouths?" he asked, with a flippant recollection
of Kruger Roberts engrossed in his jam tin.
"At least as much so," she responded, laughing. "You notice that I
called our maid Syb. She told me, when she came, that her old master
named her Sybarite. I understood it, the next day, when I found her
snoring on the drawing-room sofa."
During the time of her answer, Weldon took his opportunity to look
steadily at his young hostess. Up to the moment of the shifting of
the groups, he had been too fully absorbed in the pleasure of once
more meeting Ethel to pay much heed to any one else. Now he turned
his gray eyes upon Alice Mellen, partly from real interest in her
personality; partly to counterbalance the rapt attention which Ethel
was bestowing upon the Captain. She had been the selfsame Ethel, a
bundle of contradictions that attracted him at one moment and
antagonized him at the next. He liked her absolutely; his very
liking for her increased the sense of antagonism when, for the
instant, she departed from his ideals of what she ought to be. And
yet, Weldon was candid enough to admit to himself that she departed
from them, rather than fell below them. Often as she had antagonized
him, she had never really disappointed him.
As for Alice Mellen, he confessed himself surprised. Gathering
together all that Ethel had ever told him of her cousin, of her
living her entire life out there in the southern end of South
Africa, of her desire to be a nurse, he had pieced together an
effigy of the combined traits of a Hottentot and a vivandiere. This
girl answered to neither description. Her clothes and her manners
and her accent all had come, albeit with slow indirectness, from
London. Not only would she and her gowns pass muster in a crowd; but
furthermore she would end by being the focal point of a good share
of that crowd. Nevertheless, Weldon found it impossible to discover
her most distinctive point. Even while he sought it, he wondered to
himself whether this might not be another cousin of whom he had
never heard. The women doctors and nurses at home wore stout shoes
and had pockets let in at the seams of their frocks, useful,
doubtless, but with an unlovely tendency to yawn and show their
contents. This girl was a mere fluff of pale yellow organdie which
brought out the purplish lights in her ink-black hair.
"Did you have the heart to disturb her?" he asked, reverting to the
subject of Syb's nap.
"I was forced to. She was on all the cushions, and I needed one for
myself. She took it in good part, though. She told me she had been
disturbed, the night before, by the snoring of the parrot, two rooms
away. As a result, she left me feeling that the apology really ought
to come from me."
"Is that the way of the race?" Weldon queried, as he set down his
empty cup. "If so, you make me tremble."
"Why?"
"Because, without in the least intending it, I have accumulated a
boy."
She looked up suddenly.
"How do you mean?"
"I don't know how. It apparently did itself. It was the day before
we went out to be fired at, and he said his name was Kruger Roberts,
and I fed him some empty jam tins."
"A huge black boy with bristly hair?" she interpolated.
"Yes, and a mouth so large that one wonders how his face can hold it
all."
She sat up alertly, resting her folded arms on the edge of the
table.
"This becomes interesting. Kruger Roberts is Syb's avowed and lawful
lover."
Weldon laughed.
"Mine also, as it appears. As I say, I fed him jam tins. There were
four of them, and they were very jammy. Then we became interested in
the Boers, and I forgot Kruger Roberts. When I came back, yesterday
morning, dead tired and my horse all in a mess, I found Kruger
Roberts calmly sitting on my extra blankets, cleaning my shoes with
Paddy's best dishcloth. Paddy was in a wild state of mutiny, and
told me that that chattering baboon had vowed he was Trooper
Weldon's boy. Since then, I have tried in vain to dislodge him; but
it is no use. The Nig is like a piece of satin, and it is all I can
do to keep my compressed-paper buttons from winking defiance at the
Boers on the northern edge of Sahara."
Alice Mellen laughed with the air of one who understood the
situation.
"You builded better than you knew, Mr. Weldon, and your jam tins
will be no house of cards. The Kaffirs are an unaccountable race of
beings, lazy and good-natured. Once let them love or hate, though,
and all their strength goes into the working out of the feeling.
Kruger Roberts obviously has a sweet tooth; the day may come when
your enemies may find it changed to a poisoned fang. Do you want the
advice of one who knows the country?"
"I do," he assented heartily.
"Then keep your Kruger Roberts," she said decisively.
"But what shall I do with him?"
"Let him do for you."
"As a valet? I've never been used to such luxury," he protested,
laughing.
She shook her head.
"Not only valet. He will be groom, cook, guide, interpreter and,
whether you wish it or not, your chum. Moreover, he will do it all
with the face of a clown and the manner of a tricksy monkey. As a
panacea for the blues, you will find him invaluable."
There was a little pause. Then she added, with a complete change of
tone, "My cousin has spoken of you so often, Mr. Weldon."
"And of you," he returned.
The directness of her answer pleased him.
"Then we ought to start as friends, and not waste time over mere
acquaintance."
"I thought there were no acquaintances out here," he answered
lightly. "In camp, our first question is: Friend, or foe?"
"In the towns, we have every grade between. Often the same person
slides through all the grades in a single day. But you haven't
answered me."
His eyes met her eyes frankly.
"About the friendship? I thought that wasn't necessary."
"Customary, however," she suggested, with a smile.
"But, as I say, there are no customs here," he retorted. "At least,
I should have said so, this morning. Now I am not so sure." Then he
laughed. "I've bungled that horribly, Miss Mellen. What I meant was
that you have given me a very good time, this afternoon."
"Prove it by coming again," she advised him.
"If I may. I don't wish to wear out my welcome; but one hasn't so
many friends in South Africa."
"What about Kruger Roberts?" she reminded him.
"That gives me two."
"And Captain Frazer?"
Weldon's eyes lighted.
"Some day, perhaps. I would be willing to wait for that."
Gravely her glance roved from the alert young Canadian at her side
to the older, more steadfast face across the table. Then she shook
her head.
"You will not have to wait long, Mr. Weldon?" she said quietly.
"Captain Frazer spoke of you, a week ago. I have known him for
months; I know what, with him, stands for enthusiasm."
"I wish you might be a true prophet. I would honor you, even here in
your own garden. For the sake of Captain Frazer's regard, I would
give up most things," he replied, too low to be overheard by the
couple who were now chaffing each other above their cooling cups.
Later on, he wondered a little how far the apparent inconsequence of
her next question was the result of chance.
"What about Cooee?" she asked, in a voice as low as his own had
been.
He hesitated. Then he looked up at her steadily.
"Miss Mellen, I am sure I don't know," he answered gravely.