Antony Gray-Gardener Part 4

For full ten minutes his brown eyes gazed ardently towards the table.

What had happened? What untoward event had occurred? Antony was oblivious of his very existence. Munching bread and b.u.t.ter, drinking hot tea himself, he appeared entirely to have forgotten that a thirsty and bewilderedly disappointed puppy was gazing at him from the harbourage of his old coat. At length the neglect became a thing not to be borne.

Waving a deprecating paw, Josephus gave vent to a pitiful whine.

Antony turned. Then realization dawned on him. He grasped the milk jug.

"You poor little beggar," he laughed. "It's not often you get neglected.

But it's not often that bombsh.e.l.ls in the shape of ordinary, simple, harmless-looking letters fall from the skies, scattering extraordinary contents and my wits along with them. Here you are, you morsel of injured patience."

Josephus lapped, greedily, thirstily, till the empty saucer circled on the stoep under the onslaughts of his small pink tongue.

Antony had again sunk into a reverie, a reverie which lasted for another fifteen minutes or so. At last he roused himself.

"Josephus, my son," he announced solemnly, "there are jobs to be done, and in spite of bombsh.e.l.ls we'd better do them, and leave Arabian Night wonders for further contemplation this evening."

CHAPTER II

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 m.u.f.fled 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 gra.s.s, sucking a wounded finger. The mood of determination had pa.s.sed 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 astonis.h.i.+ng 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.

CHAPTER III

QUOD SCRIPTUM EST

The _Fort Salisbury_ was cutting her way through the translucent green water. Cape Town, with Table Mountain and the Lion's Head beyond it, was vanis.h.i.+ng into the increasing distance.

Antony had taken his pa.s.sage on the _Fort Salisbury_ for three reasons: number one, she was the first boat sailing from Cape Town after he had dispatched his momentous cablegram; number two, he had a certain diffidence regarding the expenditure of other people's money, and his pa.s.sage on the _Fort Salisbury_ would certainly be lower than on a mail boat; number three, a curious and altogether unaccountable impulse had impelled him to the choice. This reason had, perhaps unconsciously, weighed with him considerably more than the other two. He often found instinct throwing itself into the balance for or against the motives of mere reason. When it was against mere reason, matters occasionally complicated themselves in his mind. It had been a comfort to find, in this case, reason on the same side of the scale as instinct.