When Clare Vidal awoke on the morning after the race meeting, and her
thoughts went back to some of the events and incidents of that sporting
and festive gathering, she was fain to own herself sorely puzzled: and
those events and incidents, it may as well be said, comprised the
extraordinary behaviour of Lamont. He had deliberately snubbed her. He
had been especially favoured in being singled out and asked to help
her--and, incidentally, her sister--and had, lamely, but decidedly
refused. Refused! Why, not a man there present but would have sprung
to comply with such a request--such a command--as she laughingly
recalled how on their first arrival in the country, by the Umtali route
at the close of the war of occupation, she had been christened `The
Queen of the Laager,' when a passing scare had rendered it advisable to
laager up. Yet this one had refused--refused her! Well, what then? He
was simply a morose, unmannerly misogynistic brute! No. She could not
look upon it in this light at all.
She had awakened early, and felt that a walk in the cloudless morning
air, before the sun rays developed into an oppressive steaminess, would
do her good. Gandela at large had not awakened early. There had been a
good deal of late carousing among the rougher spirits there gathered
together for the occasion, and a good deal of house-to-house visitation,
also late, on the part of the more refined. So Gandela at large slept
late proportionately.
The Fullertons' house was on the very outskirts of the township, and she
stepped forth straight on to the open veldt. The dew lay, sparkling and
silvery, upon the green mimosa fronds, and made a diamond carpet of the
parched burnt-up grass upon which her steps left footprints. How
beautiful was the early morning in this fresh open land. The call and
twitter of birds made strange unknown melody as she passed on her way,
leaving the shining zinc roofs of the straggling township, turning her
face toward the free open country. There lay the race-course, away on
her left, and her face was set toward the dark bushy ridge of Ehlatini.
Two `go-away' birds sped before her, uttering their cat-like call, as,
with crest perkily erect and flicking their tails, they danced from
frond to frond. How cool the inviting depths of that bush line looked,
billowing down the slope of the hill, challenging exploration of their
bosky recesses.
Clare was in splendid physical form, and walked with a straight willowy
swing from the hips, rejoicing in the sheer physical exercise of her
youth and strength. She looked up at the ridge above her, then back at
the scattered township behind. To gain the summit would mean a fine
view, also taking in the far, unknown stretch of country beyond. She
had never wandered this way before, and it would be a novelty and
something to expatiate upon to those lazy people whom she had left
behind in a state of prolonged slumber. Slumber! and on such a morning.
The morning air blew balmy and warm, straight down from the Zambesi and
beyond; straight down from the heart of the great mysterious continent.
Later on it would be hot, oppressive. And in the shade of the mimosa,
and wild fig, and mahobo-hobo, birds piped and called to each other.
Clare struck into a narrow path, which wound up, a mere cattle-track,
through the thickness of the bush. It was delightful this roaming about
a wild land alone. Soon, with no great effort or tax upon her powers of
wind and limb, she had gained the summit of the ridge.
And then, on the farther side, other ridges went ribbing away in the
distance, like billows of dark verdure; but on the right, where they
ended, sloping abruptly to the more even ground of the gently undulating
country beyond, far away in a film of light and vista, to lose itself in
a hazy blue on the skyline nearly a hundred miles distant, stretched a
vast mysterious wilderness. Then she sat down beneath the shade of a
large overhanging wild fig, to take it all in.
She was used to wildness, and loved it. Reared in one of the wildest
tracts of wild Ireland, she had delighted to go forth on solitary
rambles, with trout rod and creel, more than ankle deep in soft bog
soil, tramping laboriously to her field of action in high mountain
lough, where the shrieking gust of a squall every half hour or so drove
her to refuge beneath some great rock, what time the trout sulked, only
to rise fast and furious when the rain squall had passed, and the raven
croaked from the shining wet crags. And this solemn blue vista,
stretching away in its vastness, formed a contrast indeed to the stormy
glistening grandeur of her former mountain home; here with its hot,
sub-tropical steaminess; yet there was that in common between both of
them--that both were the wilds.
In the dreaminess of her reverie she started suddenly. The loud
neighing of a horse, together with the violent flapping of an empty
saddle as the animal shook himself, caused a sudden inroad upon her
meditations that produced that effect. There, hitched to a bush, stood
a horse, one moreover that she seemed to recognise. Yes, it was the
large, high-withered roan that Lamont had ridden when, at her urgent
request, he had entered for the tent-pegging competition and--had not
won.
In a moment Clare's meditations, dreamy and otherwise, were scattered to
the winds. There was the horse, but--where was its owner? A strange
inclination--impulse, rather--to get away, to return before he should
discover her presence, came upon her. Yet--why? Why on earth--why?
But whatever the ground for such aspirations they were not to be
fulfilled, for at that moment a voice hailed her--an astonished voice.
"Why, Miss Vidal, good morning. Who in the world would have dreamed of
meeting you up here?"
"I might say the same, Mr Lamont. I thought I would take a bit of a
stroll while all Gandela was sleeping off last night's orgies. Strange,
but I've never been up here. I suppose it is because the climb rather
froze Lucy off--and I didn't bother to come alone. Do you know I think
this country makes people very lazy."
"Oh yes. There's a steaminess about it that gets on to one's energies
somehow. It'll infect you too when you've been out here a little
longer."
"Now don't talk down to me, Mr Lamont. I feel quite an old pioneer. I
came up here during the war, you know."
"Yes, yes. Just over two years ago."
"Well, you needn't be so supercilious. Especially as you don't seem to
have been over-successful yourself this morning."
"Successful? Oh, I see," following her glance to the magazine rifle he
carried. "No. Game is scarce since the rinderpest, and especially
right near Gandela, like this."
"Look what I found just now, in the bush, before I got to the top here,"
she said. "It must be some sort of native ornament."
She held out to him two white cow-tails, fastened to a kind of bracelet
of twisted sinew.
"Yes, it is. Very much of a native ornament."