"I want to have a word with you in private, Wyvern."
"In private?"
"Yes. I was going to yesterday but left it till now. Business matters
are best talked about in the morning."
Thus Le Sage, as the two met over their early coffee. Lalante had not
yet appeared.
"All right," assented Wyvern, who had a pretty straight inkling of what
was coming. "Where shall we hold our council of war?"
"Out in the open. Nothing like the open veldt if you want to talk over
anything important. If you do it in a room ten to one a word or two
gets overheard, and a word or two is often quite enough to give away the
whole show."
"There I entirely agree. Well--lead on."
Le Sage did so. Hardly a word was exchanged between the two as they
walked for about half a mile, first along a bush path, then over the
veldt. One was turning over in his mind how he should put the case to
the other. The other, anticipating their bearing, had already made up
his as to how he should meet the arguments advanced.
Le Sage came to a halt. They had reached the brink of a _krantz_, of no
great height and railing away now in slabs, now in aloe-grown boulders,
to the Kunaga River, the swirl and babble of whose turgid waters they
could hear, as it coursed between its willow grown banks--could hear but
not see, for a morning mist hung over the land, shutting out everything
beyond a radius of twenty yards.
"We shall be all right here," said Le Sage, seating himself upon a
stone. Then he relapsed into silence, and proceeded to fill his pipe.
Wyvern did the same. Decidedly the situation was awkward. When two men
who have been friends are about to embark on a discussion which the
chances are fifty to one will leave them enemies--in short, is bound to
culminate in a quarrel, and that a bitter one--why the preliminaries are
sure to be awkward. Wyvern was the one to force the situation.
"Look here, Le Sage. We didn't come here to smoke the pipe of silent
meditation, did we? You said something about business matters you
wanted to talk over with me. Now--drive ahead."
"Yes. How are you getting on?"
The words came out jerkily.
"Wish I could answer `Pretty well, thanks. How are you?'" said Wyvern
with a rueful laugh. "I'm not getting on at all."
"No. And I don't suppose you ever will."
Wyvern stiffened. The other had never used that tone towards him
before.
"That sounds nice, and friendly, and cheering," he answered coldly.
"May I ask why you happen to hold that opinion?"
"Because you haven't got it in you," rapped out Le Sage. He was nettled
at a certain spice of _hauteur_ that the other had infused into his tone
and manner. Moreover, he was nervous, and a commingling of nervousness
and irritation is a very bad equipment indeed for the starting upon a
difficult and delicate discussion. Wyvern, for his part, was the more
sensitive to the bluntness of the statement, in that at the back of his
mind lurked a misgiving that the speaker might be stating no more than
the truth. Nothing he had ever touched had succeeded. He was no fool
in the matter of intellect, but--somehow--he had never quite managed to
"get there," and the consciousness of this was the secret canker of his
life. He was disappointed, but not yet soured. In time he might come
to be that.
"Are you quite sure of your ground in making that flattering statement?"
he said, mustering great self-control--for this sort of talk was not at
all what he was used to. Decidedly Le Sage was straining his privileges
as father-in-law elect to a dangerous point.
"Well, I don't know. Only that events seem to bear it out most
remarkably. Got rid of that mortgage on your place yet?"
"You know I haven't."
"Well, they were going to foreclose, weren't they? And if they do, it's
tantamount to selling you up. Oh, I know. Of course, it would be no
damn business of mine under ordinary circumstances. Under existing ones
it is. I'm thinking of Lalante."
"Great minds jump together then, for so am I. In fact, I'm thinking of
her every day, every moment of my life."
"If you were to think a little more of her interests, then, it would be
better all round.--For instance--I don't say it with any wish to be
inhospitable, mind!--but by the time you get back you'll have been about
twenty-fours hours away from home, and that quite unnecessarily. That's
not the way to run a farm--and especially one like yours. I don't
wonder your people get `slaag-ing,' and all the rest of it."
This was not a fair hit, thought Wyvern to himself. A decided case of
"below the belt." But he said nothing. He merely puffed away at his
pipe, looking straight in front of him. The mist seemed lightening a
little above the river.
"Well, then, if the worst comes to the worst, and you have to leave
Seven Kloofs, what then? How will you stand? The sale of your stock
won't amount to anything like a fortune I take it."
"No, but it'll amount to something. After that--I have an idea."
"An idea. Pho! That for an idea. One plan's worth all the `ideas' in
the world."
Le Sage, you see, had got into his element now. His nervousness had
quite left him.
"Call it a plan then. And as to it I am hopeful. Why should a man's
luck always be bad, Le Sage. Why the deuce shouldn't good times dawn
for him? Ah! Look there."
Even as he spoke the mist, which had been lightening over the river,
parted with a suddenness that was almost startling, and from a widening
patch of vivid blue the newly risen sun poured down his life-giving
beams. It was as an instantaneous transition from darkness to light--to
bright, beautiful. Nature-awakening light--and with it the birds began
to pipe and call with varying note from the surrounding bushes, while a
troop of monkeys gambolling upon a sandspit down in the river-bed, were
amusing themselves by leaping its channel, to and fro, as though in
sheer gladness of heart. Further and further the mist rolled back,
unfolding a dewy sparkle upon bush and veldt, a shroud as of myriad
diamonds.
"Look--where?" queried Le Sage, shortly.
"Why, at how suddenly it became light, just as I was talking about my
plan--and luck changing. I'm not superstitious, but I'll be hanged if I
won't take that as an omen--and a good one."
Le Sage grunted, and shook his head in utter disgust.
"An omen?" he repeated. "Good Lord, Wyvern, what rot. Man, you'll
never be anything but a dreamer, and you can't run a farm upon dreams--
no nor anything else. Would you mind letting me into this `plan' of
yours?"
"At present I would. Later on, not now. And now, Le Sage, if you have
quite done schoolmastering me, I move that we go back. In fact, I don't
know that it was worth while our coming so far just to say all that."
"But you'll think so in a minute. It happens I haven't said all I came
to say, and as it has to be said, I may as well say it at once and
without beating around the bush. You must cease thinking of Lalante at
all. You must consider your engagement to her at an end."
Wyvern had felt nearly certain that some such statement constituted the
real object of their talk, but now that it was made, it was none the
less a blow. He felt himself growing a shade paler under the weather
worn bronze of his face.
"What does Lalante herself say about it," was his rejoinder.
"Say? Say?" echoed Le Sage, angrily. "She has no say in the matter. I
simply forbid it."
"You can't do that, Le Sage. She is of full age, you know," said Wyvern
quietly, but with a ring of sadness in his tone. "Look here--no, wait--
hear me out," seeing that the other was about to interrupt with a
furious rejoinder. "I've set myself out all through this interview
never for a moment to lose sight of the fact that you are her father,
consequently have sat quiet under a tone I would stand from no other man
alive. But even the authority of a father has its limits, and you have
started in to exercise yours a trifle too late."
"Then you refuse to give her up?" furiously.
"Most distinctly. Unless, that is, she herself wished it."
"Oh, you would then?" said Le Sage, quickly, clutching at a straw.
"Certainly. But I must hear it from her own lips, face to face. Not
through a third party, or on paper." Le Sage's "straw" seemed to sink.
"I don't want to irritate you further, Le Sage," went on Wyvern after a
moment's pause. "But I'm convinced as firmly as that you and I are
sitting here that I shall never hear anything of the sort. It is not in
Lalante to turn from me in misfortune. Our love is too complete."
"And I don't count. I, her father, am to stand aside as of no account
at all?"
The unconscious pathos that welled up in the very bitterness of his
tone, reflected what had lain beneath his mind since some time back--
that his child should be so ready and eager to leave him. And Wyvern's
instinct was quick to grasp it.
"I quite see your import and sympathise," he said. "Yes, I sympathise,
thoroughly. But Nature is nothing if not pitiless, and this is a
provision of Nature. And look here, Le Sage, my existing run of
ill-luck ought to be a recommendation from your point of view in that
you will be able to keep the child longer with you, for of course I
don't dream of claiming her until my luck changes."
"That'll be never then," rejoined the other, savagely. "Man, haven't
you more sense of honour than to pin a girl to her contract when you
know you haven't enough to keep yourself, let alone her? She is very
young too. I don't know how I ever gave my consent."
"She has commonsense and capability far beyond her years, and you know
it. Now see here, Le Sage. Be reasonable about this, and give me some
sort of a show. If I bring off my plan satisfactorily, I shan't be the
first man whose luck has turned."
"Oh, damn your `plan' and your `luck' too!" retorted the other, now
completely losing his temper. "The first's a fraud and the other's
fudge. Look here, if you weren't so much infernally bigger and stronger
than me, I'd start in now to hammer you within an inch of your life, but
as you are, it's of no use trying."
"No, it isn't," said Wyvern quietly, but not sneeringly.
Le Sage had got up and was pacing up and down feverishly. Wyvern had
never moved. Had he known it, he was at that moment in some
considerable peril. He was sitting right on the edge of the _krantz_,
and the other was behind him; and Le Sage was one of those men who when
they do fairly lose their tempers go nearly mad. Now his face was
ghastly, and he snarled like a cornered animal.
"Your plan's a fraud," he repeated furiously, "and you're a fraud
yourself. You humbugged me into believing you were a man of solid
position, while all the time you were a damned, useless, bankrupt
waster. You sneaked my consent under false pretences. Yes, under false
pretences," he bellowed, "and now I withdraw it. D'you hear? I
withdraw it unconditionally, you--swindler."
Wyvern had risen now, but with no sort of idea of violence, and stood
confronting the infuriated man.
"Now, Le Sage, don't you think all this is rather cowardly on your
part?" he said, in a quiet, expostulatory tone. "I mean because you
must know that you're the one man privileged to say such things to me--
in fact, to go on all day calling me all the frauds and swindlers you
want to, and still remain absolutely immune from retaliation. It's not
fair."
"Not fair, eh?" snarled Le Sage, infuriated by the other's coolness,
though there was nothing in this that was in the least offensive or
taunting. "Well, now, look here. Get away off my place, d'you see?
This is my ground. A mile further on is my boundary. Well, get across
that as soon as ever you like, and don't set foot on my place again, or
by God, I might even blow your brains out."
"Then you'd get hanged or shut up for a considerable time, and would
that be good for Lalante?"
"Go--d'you hear," stamped the furious man. "Go. There's the boundary.
Go over it--to hell or the devil."
"You don't expect me to walk ten miles when I've got a horse, do you? I
left one at your place, and, incidentally, a tooth-brush."
Le Sage by this time was reduced to exhausted speechlessness. He could
only glare helplessly. Not wishing to exasperate him further and
needlessly, Wyvern had refrained from saying that he had no intention of
going until he had seen Lalante once more. She would be on the look-out
for their return, he knew that, would probably come forth to welcome--
him, Le Sage would have no power to prevent their meeting.
So they walked back these two, as they had come, in silence.