Blue Aloes Part 11

More anger melted away.

"I haven't even had my dinner yet."

Gay sprang up like a whirlwind.

"Oh, how detestable you are," she said, in a low, furious voice, "with your dinner and your wretched excuses! Do you think I don't know what you were doing that you forgot? Everyone knows what you are doing when you forget your engagements--playing poker and drinking with a lot of low gambling men, wasting your money and your time and all that is fine in you!"

Druro had stood up, too, and faced her with the first bolt she flung.

They were quite alone, for the trilling notes of a two-step had swiftly emptied the veranda. He still wore a smile on his lips, but its singularly heart-warming quality had gone from it. His red-brown face had grown a shade less red-brown, and his grey, whimsical, good-natured eyes looked suddenly hard as rock. He addressed her as if she were someone he had never met before.

"You are very plain-spoken!"

"You need a little plain-speaking," she said pa.s.sionately.

"It is a pity to waste wit and wisdom on an object so unworthy.

Obviously, I am past reforming"--his smile had a mocking turn to it now--"even if I wanted to be reformed."

"_Of course_ you don't want to be reformed," said Gay. "No drunkard and gambler ever does."

Her voice was hard, but there was a pain in her heart like the twist of a knife there. She pressed her hand among the laces of her dress, and all the little paste jewels twinkled. Druro noticed them. They engaged his attention, even while he was swallowing down her words like a bitter dose of poison. He was deeply offended. She spoke to him as if he were some kind of a pariah, and it was unpardonable. If she had been a man, he would have known what to do, and have done it quick.

But what could be done with a slip of a girl who stood there with a folded lace b.u.t.terfly around her and looked like a pa.s.sionate tea-rose twinkling with dewdrops? Nothing, except just smile. But only the self-control gained in many a hard-won and ably bluffed game of life (and poker) enabled him to do it, and to say, with great gentleness:

"I'm afraid that I am as I am. You must take me or leave me at that."

"I'll leave you, then," she said burningly, and slipped past him. At the door of the ballroom she looked back and flung him a last word, "Until you are a different man from the present Lundi Druro."

Druro, entirely taken aback by her decisive retort and action, stood staring long after she had disappeared.

"Well, by the living something or other!" he muttered at last, and walked away from the hotel, filled with wholesale rage and indignation.

"The little shrew! Who asked her to take me, I wonder? Or for her opinions on my ways of living? Of all the cheeky monkeys! Pitching into me like that--just because she missed her blessed waltz!

_Certainly_ it was rotten of me--I don't say it wasn't. _But I forgot_. I _told_ her I forgot. Didn't I come straight down here and tell her? Left those fellows--left a jack-pot! O my aunt! And that's all I get for it--a decent and reasonable fellow like me to be called such names just because I distract myself with the only one or two things that can delude one into believing that life is worth living in this rotten country! Drunkard and gambler--fine words to fling at a man like bomb-sh.e.l.ls!"

Thus it was with Druro, whom all men hailed as "well-met," and all women liked, and all Rhodesia called "Lundi," though his Christian names were really Francis Everard. No one had ever called him anything but Lundi since the day he jumped into the Lundi River to save his dog's life. He was on a shoot with half a dozen other men, and they had heavily dynamited a portion of the river to bring up some fresh fish for dinner. Druro's dog, thinking it was a game he knew, jumped in after one of the sticks of dynamite to bring it out to his master, and Druro, like a flash, was in after him and out again, just in time to save himself and the dog from being blown to smithereens. "The bravest action he had ever seen in his life," one of the witnesses described it--and he had been through several native wars and knew what he was talking about, just as Druro, who was a mining expert, knew the risk he was taking when he jumped in among the dynamite.

This was the man who was filled with rage and desolation of heart at the words of "a little monkey of eighteen or nineteen--old dissipated Derek Liscannon's daughter, I thank you! Nice school to come to for temperance lectures! Not that she can help being Derry's daughter, and not that old Derry is a bad sort--far from it--but as hard a drinker as you could find in a day's march. And young Derry hits it up a bit, too, though one of the nicest boys in the world. I've always said that Gay was the sweetest, prettiest little kid in Rhodesia--in Africa, if it comes to that--and now she turns on me like this--blow her b.u.t.tons!"

He strode along the soft, dusty roads that still had a feel of the veld in them, neither looking nor listing whither he went. It was a soft, plaintive voice that brought him to a standstill, and the realization that he was close to the w.a.n.kelo railway station.

"Oh, _can_ you tell whether the Falcon Hotel is far from here?"

"The Falcon Hotel, madam?" His hand went instinctively to his head, but there was no hat upon it. "There is surely a bus here that will take you to it," he said, looking about him.

She gave a little laugh.

"Yes; but I don't want my poor bones rattled to pieces in a bus if it is not too far to walk."

Dimly he could see a slight figure swathed in velvety darkness of furs and veils that gave out a faint perfume of violets, and the suggestion of a pale, oval face. Her voice was low and sweet.

"It is not very far," said Druro. "I will gladly show you the way, if you will allow me."

"That is so very kind of you," she answered softly, and fell into step by his side.

As they walked, she told him, with the simple aplomb of a well-bred woman of the world, that she had just arrived by the train from Buluwayo and was going on to a place called Selukine for a week or two.

It was not necessary for her to tell him that she was recently from home, for he knew it by her air, her voice, her accent, her rustly garments, the soft perfume of fur and violets, and a dozen little intangible signs and symbols that all had an appeal for him. For Druro was one of those Englishmen who love England from afar a great deal better than they do when at home. He had lived in Rhodesia, off and on, for ten years, and the veld life was in the very blood and bones of him. Yet he always spoke of it as a rotten country, and gravely affirmed that it was bad luck to have to live away from England.

"Give me London lamp-posts," he was in the habit of saying, "and you can have all the veld you want for keeps." And he went home every year, declaring that he was finished with Africa and would never come back. Yet he came back. Also, he had built himself a lovely little ranch-house in the midst of five thousand acres of Sombwelo Forest, where there were no lampposts at all, only trees and a silent, deep river full of crocodiles. It is true that he had never lived there.

He only went there and mooned by himself sometimes, when he was "out"

with the world. It had occurred to him, since his _rencontre_ with Gay, that he would go there very shortly. But now this rustling, softly perfumed lady made him remember his beloved lampposts. It was a year since he had been home, and she meant home.

She was London; she was Torment; she was Town.

Curiosity to see her face consumed him. He felt certain that she was beautiful. No plain woman could be so self-possessed and sure of herself, could give out such subtle charm and fascination. After the brutal and unexpected treatment he had received at the hands of Gay Liscannon, he felt himself under some sweet, healing spell.

They reached the hotel all too soon. The bus, with her luggage on it, had pa.s.sed them by the way, and host and porters were awaiting her at the front door. In the light she turned to thank him with a charming smile, and he saw, as he expected, that her face was subtly beautiful.

"I hope we shall meet again, Mr.----" She paused smiling.

"Druro," he supplied, smiling too, "and this is Rhodesia. I'm afraid you can't miss meeting me again--if you try."

He, too, as she very well observed, was good to behold, standing there with the light on his handsome head. She did not miss the potency of his smile. Nor, being a woman who dealt in lights and shades herself, was the flattering significance of his words wasted upon her.

"_Tant meiux!_" she said, and, in case he was no French scholar, repeated it in English, as she held out her slim gloved hand--"All the better!"

Gay and a man she had been dancing with came out and pa.s.sed them as they stood there smiling and touching hands--a handsome, debonair man and a subtly beautiful woman. Gay took the picture of them home with her, and stayed long thinking of it when she should have been sleeping.

Long she leaned from her bedroom window, gazing at the great grey s.p.a.ces of veld that she loved so much, but seeing them not. All she could see was Druro's face turned cold, the rocklike expression of his eyes when he stared at her as though she had been some stranger--she, who had loved him for years, ever since, as a girl of sixteen, straight from England and from school, she first saw him and found in his clear, careless face and fearless ways the crystallization of all her girlish dreams. Lovely and spirited, decked in the bloom of youth, she had more, perhaps, than her fair share of admirers and adorers. Every man who met her fell, to some extent, in love with her. "Gay fever" it was called; and they all went through it, and some recovered and some did not. But Gay's fever was for Lundi Druro, though she hid it well behind locked lips and a sweet, serene gaze. She could not see him riding down the street, or standing among a group of his fellows (for other men always cl.u.s.tered about Druro), or even catch a glimpse of his big red Argyle car standing outside a building, without a tingling of all the life in her veins.

But she was neither blind nor a fool. Her spirit brooded over Druro with the half-mystical and half-maternal love that all true women accord to the beloved; but she knew very well that he had never looked her way and that the chances were he never might. He was a man's man.

He liked women, and his eyes always lit up when he saw one, but he forgot all about them when they were not there, forgot them easily in cards and conviviality and the society of other men. Once, when someone had attacked him about his indifference to women, he had answered:

"Why, I adore women! But I prefer the society of men--there are fewer regrets afterward."

There was no doubt that he exercised a tremendous personal magnetism upon other men--attracted them, amused them, and influenced them, even obsessed them. The way he could make them do things just out of sheer liking for him almost amounted to mesmerism. It must be added that, though they were often unpractical, crazy, unwise, even dangerous things he influenced others to do, they were never shameful or in any way shady. There wasn't a shameful instinct or thought in the whole of Lundi Druro's composition. Gay, however, divined in him that his power of obsessing the minds of other men had become, or was on the way of becoming, a temptation and obsession to himself. She was wise enough to realize that hardly any man in the world can stand too much popularity, also to see the rocks ahead for Druro in a country where men drink and gamble far too much, and are fast in the clutches of these vices before they realize them as bad habits. It was not for nothing that she was Derek Liscannon's daughter and Derry Liscannon's sister.

She had her worries and anxieties, poor Gay, though she carried them with a stiff lip and never let the world guess how often her heart was aching behind her smile. But, of late, the worst of them had come to be in the fear that Lundi Druro was going the way so many good men go in Rhodesia--full-tilt for the rocks of moral and physical ruin.

This was the reason for her attack on him. She had long meditated something of the kind, though quite certain that he would take it badly. But she had thought that his friends.h.i.+p with her family and herself warranted (she knew that her love did) her doing a thing from which her soul shrank but did not retreat--hurting another human soul so as to help it to its own healing. And it had all ended in disappointment and despair. Nothing to show for it but the picture of him standing happy and gay, his eyes admiringly fixed on another woman!

Perhaps the beautiful stranger would solace him for the wound Gay's hand had dealt? Who could she be? the girl wondered miserably.

But, by the next afternoon, everyone in w.a.n.kelo knew that Mrs. Hading, beautiful, unattached, and travelling for her pleasure, was staying at the "Falcon"; and Beryl Hallett, who was also staying there, had already met her and prepared a complete synopsis of her character, clothes, and manners (not to mention features, complexion, and hair) for the benefit of her friend, Gay Liscannon.

"My dear, she has lovely, weary manners and lovely, weary eyes, with an expression as if she doesn't take any interest in anything; but you bet she does!" said Beryl, whose language always contained a somewhat sporting flavour. "You bet she takes an interest in clothes and men and everything that's going! Nothing much gets past those weary eyes.

And she is as _chic_ as the deuce. Never have we seen such clothes up here. She smells so delicious, too--not scented, you know, but just little faint puffs of fragrance. I wish I knew how to do it. But I don't think you _can_ do it without sachets in your corsets and a maid to sew them into all your clothes, and salts and perfumes for your bath, and plenty of tin to keep it all going! Blow! How can poverty-stricken wretches like us contend with that kind of thing, I'd like to know?"

"We don't have to contend with it," said Gay indifferently.

The two girls were sitting in Berlie's mother's private sitting-room upstairs. Gay was in riding-kit and had come to beguile Berlie to go for a canter.