In a lonely shanty on the veld, twenty good miles from the nearest town.
Lawless took up his quarters with the woman in whose society he had
left Cape Town. The shanty was of corrugated iron lined with planks,
and consisted of two small bedrooms and a living-room, divided from one
another by matchboard partitions. There were primitive out-buildings
that had served a former occupier for stables, and a disused mud hut
stood in a sort of blank isolation some quarter of a mile distant.
Behind the hut on steeply shelving ground was densely wooded cover, the
only sign of shade in the whole picture. The hut had been used by
natives apparently quite recently. The wooden blocks, curved to fit the
neck, that serve the black man for pillow, stood on the ground. These
blocks were joined together by a wooden chain, as is the marital custom
of the land. Beside them was a worn and dirty blanket, and a calabash
and mealie stamper lay against the wall close to the doorless opening.
This primitive native home, with its rude implements and poor
accommodation, was seemingly deserted. Probably the coloured occupants,
having no lawful possession of the place, had fled precipitately at the
coming of strangers who might question their right to be there, and were
doubtless watching at no great distance until the white man should
depart, as he always departed after the briefest of sojourns in that
lonely spot. That they would return eventually was certain; no native,
save under compulsion, vacates a place and leaves his blanket behind.
Lawless and his companion settled into their temporary home and
proceeded to do for themselves. The woman set the house to rights,
while Lawless stabled the horses he had hired from the town, and went
out to gather wood to make a fire. When he had collected a sufficient
quantity, he returned to the house, piled the logs upon the hearth, and
set light to them. They had brought provisions with them, and he filled
a new tin kettle from his water-bag and set it on the flames. The woman
emerged from the bedroom while he knelt upon the hearth, and stood in
the doorway watching him with a light of admiration in her eyes.
"Say, baas, there are no sheets to the beds," she drawled,--"nor
blankets."
He was intent on his occupation, and did not look round.
"Damn it!" he muttered. "I never thought of that... Of course not...
We'll have to sleep in our clothes."
"Been jumped, I expect," she said.
"Very likely. What an ass I was not to come better prepared."
"Oh! what does it matter?" she returned. "We've both roughed it before.
It's a picnic. Get up, Grit. The cooking's my department. You unpack
the food stuff. I tumbled on a gridiron under one of the beds. It's a
bit rusty, but I'll clean it in the flame; then we'll cook some of those
chops you bought. I'm hungry."
He was hungry also, and he fell to with appetite, the roughness of the
fare notwithstanding, when she placed the fizzling chops on a tin plate
and brought them to the table. He cleared a space for them, and cut a
chunk of bread from the loaf for himself and another for her, while she
made the tea. Then they sat down to the first meal in their new
quarters.
It was a silent meal. They were too hungry to talk, and both were tired
after a long day in the saddle. It was more than three weeks since they
had left Cape Town. They had stayed at different places, until, hearing
of the shanty from a man in Stellenbosch, who was anxious to let it, and
who told wonderful fairy-tales of the sport to be enjoyed in the
neighbourhood. Lawless had decided to take it, and having paid the
first month's rent in advance, bought provisions and hired horses and
set out with his companion to take possession of what the owner
described as a comfortably furnished shooting-box. Comfort is largely a
matter of comparison. Lawless had roughed it often, had fared worse,
and been worse housed; but his new surroundings depressed him. It was
probably the contrast between them and the recent comfort he had enjoyed
that forced home the sordidness of the present life.
When they had supped he dragged his chair nearer the doorway and sat
smoking, while the woman cleared away the remains of their meal. She
joined him when she had finished her task, drawing up a chair opposite
to his on the other side of the opening. Then she took a packet of
cigarette-papers and tobacco from her pocket, and rolled herself a
cigarette.
"You are dull, dear boy," she remarked, as she caught the box of matches
which Lawless tossed her in silence. "You are a man of action, and the
solitudes are not to your taste. This life is the silly sort of mistake
made by most honeymooners."
Lawless looked across at her, a queer expression in his eyes. In the
dim light, which mercifully concealed the thickness of the paint upon
her face, she was really strikingly handsome. She looked younger than
she appeared in the daytime.
"You ought always to sit in the twilight," he said with brutal
frankness.
She laughed good-naturedly.
"If you pay me compliments like that, Hughie, you'll make me vain," she
said.
She drew at her cigarette, inhaling the smoke and discharging it through
her nostrils. He watched her with an odd feeling of disgust. The bond
between them was peculiar. The affection was without doubt stronger on
her side than on his. But he ungrudgingly admitted she made a man a
capital chum; and since throwing in his lot with hers he was keenly
alive to the fact that many men envied him his possession. It had been
a source of much annoyance to him, and of great gratification to Tottie,
that she had been the object of offensive admiration at every place they
visited. She had declared that it was because he was jealous that he
determined to bury her in the wilds of the veld.
"You are the type of man who would be capable of murdering a woman,
Grit," she said.
"There you are mistaken," he had answered. "If a woman once washed her
hands of me, I should simply have done with her."
"One can't turn one's back on an incident so as to forget it
altogether," she had objected.
"For the matter of that," he had returned, "a man can't command memory,
but he can so put a thing out of mind that it ceases to disturb him."
"Then, if ever I chance to elope with Van Bleit," Tottie had flung at
him audaciously, "I shall have the satisfaction of knowing my memory is
relegated to the ashbin..."
They sat on until the light failed and darkness settled upon the veld,
closing about them stealthily, and shutting out the immensity of the
endless stretch of treeless waste that was all that could be seen from
the house, a wide expanse of undulating veld held in the blue hollow of
the sky. The darkness crept closer. It shut out the face of each from
the other's view. A small red glow marked where Tottie still held a
cigarette between her painted lips, and a larger duller glow shone from
the bowl of Lawless' pipe.
"The moon will be up in a short while," he said abruptly, and the words,
quietly as he had spoken, snapped the silence almost violently, as a
voice raised above a whisper in a death-chamber might do. "Shall we
stay and see it rise?"
"Yes, if you like."
She flung the end of her cigarette out into the darkness, and watched it
where it lay like a somewhat fiery glow-worm until it smouldered out.
And then slowly the darkness began less to roll away than to disclose
itself. Black objects stood out dimly from the shade, and the line of
the horizon defined itself and almost imperceptibly, so gradual was the
change, grew lighter. Tones of colour appeared in the picture; the
black melted into purple, so rich and deep as to seem more dense than
the sombre shade it superseded. And then abruptly the scene brightened.
A soft yellow glow appeared in the sky, and the inverted curve of a
blood-red moon showed above the horizon.
Lawless stood up, and knocking the ash from his pipe, leant with his
shoulder pressed against the framework of the door, and watched the
rising of the moon in silence until, like a thing released from
restraining bonds, new-dipped in the life-blood of departed day, it shot
up into the sky. He was not aware how long he remained thus, he was not
aware that his companion had risen also and stood beside him, until he
felt the touch of a hand upon his shoulder.
"Grit, it's cold," a voice said, rousing him from his meditations.--"And
we haven't any bedclothes."
He turned his head slowly and surveyed her by the increasing light of
the moon. Then he pushed her inside and shut the door.
"We'll take a mattress off one of the beds," he said, "and sleep in
front of the fire..."
The next day Lawless announced his intention of going into town in quest
of a further supply of comforts. Tottie suggested accompanying him, but
he negatived the idea.
"I want your mount for a pack-horse," he said.
"That's all very fine," she grumbled. "What am I to do all day by
myself? Think of the risk in a place like this... The white woman and
the black man, you know."
He laughed grimly.
"You have a revolver. I'd back you against any nigger that happened
along."
He rode away in the morning sunshine with the second horse on a lead.
For the first mile the woman accompanied him, walking beside him with
her hand on his stirrup. Once or twice she looked up at him as he sat,
a straight soldierly figure, in the saddle, with the strong stern face
shaded by the wide-brimmed hat, and the keen sombre eyes fixed steadily
ahead, and in her own eyes shone the light of loyal affection and
admiration which so often appeared in them when they rested on him
unseen.
"Bring some sort of a newspaper back with you, Grit," she begged.
"It'll help to keep up the fiction that we're still in the world,
somehow."
Then she parted from him and started to walk back alone, and he put the
horses at a canter and rode forward into the blue haze that shrouded and
softened the scene. The morning air was delicately fresh and crisp with
a touch of sharpness in it like the feel of an English spring. The
African winter, with its warm sunshiny days and cold nights, is the most
perfect season in a land that boasts one of the finest climates in the
world. White man's weather, it is called; and it sets the white man
thinking pleasantly of the land he speaks of and thinks of as Home. It
set Lawless thinking of Home as he rode across the veld,--of a gabled
grey-walled house set down in a pretty garden that gave upon a lane.
The lane in summer was gay with wild flowers and shaded by find old
elms, and he had walked there often with the beautiful woman who had
lived in the grey stone house, the woman who had professed to love him,
and who had written to him later that she never wished to see him again.
As he thought of it now a wave of bitterness surged over him. He
recalled a sentence in her letter that had stung him at the time--that
stung him still with a no less poignant pain: "_I do not know you... I
think I have never known you. You are a stranger to me, and, I see now,
my greatest enemy_." ... There were other things in the letter that had
hurt; but that sentence stood out luridly with no whit of the bitterness
gone from it after all the years...
And so he rode, haunted by memories, his consciousness lashed with the
knowledge that what she had written was true. And he knew that the pain
of it all was still fresh in her memory as in his. He had read that in
her face, and in the tones of her voice, when, at what cost to her pride
he dimly understood, she had met and spoken with him again. And he was
consciously, deliberately, adding to her distress. At the time it had
been a matter of indifference to him what she thought of the life he was
leading; now, with his thoughts of her softened by distance, he
regretted that he had not deceived her as to the manner of his leaving
Cape Town. It had been a poor sort of revenge to flout his mistress in
her face--and unnecessary. A man usually conceals such ugly facts. But
it could avail little to harbour regrets at this stage. The thing was
at an end for ever. He was out of her life now. If she allowed her
thoughts to dwell upon him at all, it would only be, he felt, as upon
one who was dead to her, and who had caused her no less pain in his
dying than he had caused her in his life.
Lawless was late in getting back to the shanty. The light had fallen
and night was settling upon the land. While he was still a good way off
he discerned the house by the flickering yellow glimmer of the candles
Tottie had put in the window as a landmark for him. It was the only
means of illumination she had at hand. There was an oil lamp in the
house, but the paraffin, which Lawless was bringing with him, had been
forgotten on the day of their arrival.
He gave a short sharp whistle as he rode up, and she opened the door and
came forth to meet him.
"Lend a hand at unloading," he said, swinging himself out of the saddle.
"The pack's heavy. Come round this side."
She helped him lift the sacks from the back of the led horse, and
accompanied him to the stable to settle the animals for the night,
carrying a dripping tallow-candle in her hand, by the feeble light of
which they accomplished their task.
Lawless was very silent, almost taciturn, while he off-saddled and
rubbed down his weary horse, giving to Tottie's gossiping inquiries curt
monosyllabic replies.
"Tired, Grit?" she asked, noting his preoccupation.
He swore.
"It's something more than tired," he said.
They left the stables, and walking back to where they had deposited the
sacks, lifted them, and carried them indoors.
"Got my paper?" she inquired.
He took the newspaper from his pocket and flung it on the table with an
oath. The woman looked at him searchingly. It occurred to her that he
had been drinking. If it were not that, something had happened to put
him out.
Lawless suddenly approached the table and struck the paper, lying where
he had flung it, with his open hand.
"They've bungled this business again," he said savagely,--"that pompous
fool, Grey, and his crony, Simmonds... Simmonds has gone to his
account, poor devil! And Van Bleit's in tronk, awaiting his trial for
murder."
Tottie's mouth fell open.
"And the letters?" she gasped.
Having fired his bomb. Lawless cooled down. He took out his pipe,
filled, and lighted it, and dropped wearily into a chair.
"You'll read it all in the paper," he said. "There's no mention of the
letters." He gave a short laugh. "My little plan, which I've rehearsed
to you, in which you were to help, is knocked on the head. I might just
as well never have come here. It's that crass, pig-headed, officious
old muddler's doing. He never trusted me... He fancies I've done a
bunk... That's because you're in it." He laughed again. "It hasn't
occurred to them that you might be useful--I'm supposed to be simply
enjoying myself."
He smoked for a few minutes at a furious rate, while Tottie opened and
read the paper with her elbows on the table and her chin in her hands.
"It's a case of the biter bit," observed Lawless. "Looks as though they
had intended murdering him... A silly sort of a game."
"Do you think Van Bleit will hang for it?" she asked presently.
"It's impossible to say. If it pans out at a term of imprisonment it's
checkmate. I've a mind to wash my hands of the job."
Tottie looked up.
"Don't do that," she said earnestly. "The Colonel might take it that
his suspicions were justified, if you did."
"I don't care a damn what he thinks. If a man can't trust me, he can do
the other thing."
"But I care," she said quickly. "I'm jealous for your honour, Grit."
He lifted his head and surveyed her in surprise.
"You!" he said.
Then he laughed awkwardly at the half-shamed admiration he surprised in
the woman's eyes. She turned her face aside quickly, and resumed her
reading of the paper.
"All right!" he said sheepishly.
When she had finished the case, she got up and stood opposite him on the
other side of the hearth.
"What is your next move?" she asked.
"I don't move," he answered quietly, "until after the case is finished."
"And in the meantime?"
"In the meantime," he replied, smiling across at her, "you stay here
with me in this God-forsaken hole."