Wild Honey Part 8

Vivienne was a.s.sailed by a choking sensation, and a bitter flavour came into her mouth, but she knew that as a prospective millionaire she must get accustomed to such discomforts. They were part of the training. As also was the skilful fencing she began to practise on the unsuspecting Montague. Certainly it was a case of Greek meeting Greek, but sometimes it seemed to her more like a duel between a sucking dove and a serpent.

And she was not the dove. A London journalist had once said to her that he believed all women were natural-born crooks, and now she began to believe it.

"The black drop was in me all the time," she thought bitterly. "But it has taken Africa to bring it out!"

Although the negotiations for the sale went forward apace, they were not pushed on fast enough to please her, and she almost worried Cornwall out of his wits in her determination to have the thing signed and sealed before de Windt was well enough to get about. She did not yet feel quite hardened enough in the ways of millionaires to be able to face over a deed of sale the man whose gold she was stealing.

Another miserable part of the transaction was the receiving of Wolfe Montague's cheque. That was a bad moment. The paper burnt her hand like flame. But she examined it carefully, and pulled Montague up sharply when she found that it was drawn on a local Bank.

"That would never do," she said firmly. "I cannot have my affairs all over Buluwayo."

"I thought you wanted it for immediate use," he replied suavely, "and Banks don't talk."

"I wouldn't trust them," she averred; "I give my confidence to few."

But she smiled her confidence in him at least with such lovely eyes that he went away with content in his heart to arrange the matter on such lines as only millionaires can command. Forty-eight hours later the money was to hand by cabled draft from London on the Standard Bank, Buluwayo.

The same morning Vivienne went for the first time to look at the farm.

Montague's carriage was at her disposal as usual, and by the aid of a small local map she was able to direct the groom. They calculated that the distance there and back could be easily covered in a couple of hours, and that she could get back in plenty of time to prepare for a ball which the magistrate was giving that night in the Court House.

The farm lay out towards the Matopos, along a dusty, sun-baked road, but Vivienne, well shaded in the luxuriously cus.h.i.+oned body of the carriage noticed neither dust nor heat. The excitement of the gamble for money was in her veins, and she was telling herself how good a subst.i.tute it made for happiness. The flickering glance of envious hatred Lady Angela had shot at her from under a white umbrella on the sidewalk was part of the game that she was in now, up to her nostrils--the game which, though the weapons were sheathed in silk and the blows prepared behind honeyed smiles, was just the same old sweet game, governed by the same old sweet law, that was in the beginning and shall be in the end--the law of Club and Fang!

"What is the use of pretending I am too good for it, and was made for better things?" she meditated, and her smile took the little bitter twist that was now becoming habitual. With it still on her lips, she looked over the side of the carriage into a pair of grey eyes full of veld light and far places. A dog-cart containing two men had pa.s.sed and gone, but not too soon for her to recognise Kerry and see an answering flash of recognition in his eyes.

Gone too her satisfaction, such as it was, in the gamble and the game.

Fever died out of her veins and her heart lay cold as a stone. She looked not a girl, but a pale tired woman of thirty when she stepped out of the carriage and climbed over the little sloping kopjes that gave a view of the six thousand acres that would some day be a famous gold mine. Silent, lovely acres they were, full of colour and peace.

Low-spreading trees standing alone, scattered purple rocks on which lay patches of rust red as blood, a carpet of wild gra.s.ses and little star-shaped veld flowers. Here and there great boulders were pitched together with enough earth to harbour a spiking tree and trailing creepers. Some lines of red gum had been planted and in their shadow stood a little thatched hut, before whose door, its slender branches tapping the thatch, grew a little tree of the laburnum cla.s.s, laden with cl.u.s.tering golden bloom that gave a lovely scent.

A sudden poignant regret, stronger than herself, rushed through her, that the peace of these brooding acres of loneliness should be destroyed by what lay hidden under them. In imagination, she saw the dirt and debris of a new gold diggings, the purple rocks shattered by dynamite, trees and flowers torn out and lying dead, the little perky sand-blooms trodden down. All for gold to poison the hearts of men and buy the souls of women as hers had been poisoned, bought!

Was it too late now to repent, and instead of digging out the gold keep the land as it was, silent and peaceful? Go and live in that little thatched hut with the tree by the door? She dreamed with the thought a moment then turned bitterly away. The land was not even hers unless she could pay for it with the gold that came out of it! It was Montague's as _she_ was Montague's until she repaid the thousand pounds. She must go back to the scheme of avarice and duplicity she had entered into with eyes open and heart greedy for power and revenge. Her path was clear before her. It had nothing to do with peace and beauty and nothing in it that was n.o.ble, but it was her path. As she got back into the carriage and drove away, she knew that the memory of that place would haunt her all her days.

"Another restless ghost to walk the weary corridors of memory!" she said to herself.

Cornwall banished it for a while with the business of signing the transfer deed, but at the dance given by the magistrate that night it returned. A pair of eyes looking at her across s.p.a.ce and gems and jewels, as once she had seen them stare across the veld, brought back the ghost and made it seem a very alive thing. She had never seen Kerry in the evening dress of convention before, and tried to feel astonished that he should resemble a distinguished man of the world rather than a sort of Boer. Inexplicably, as she stared, she forgot everything except to notice how worn and ill he looked. Over the shoulder of her partner, she met his clear gaze, and it became curiously and inextricably mixed in her memory with the lovely peace of the land she had visited that day. It was hot for dancing, and most people were beginning to meander out of doors and stay there.

"I want to introduce to you a great pal of mine--Kerry de Windt," said her partner, Marshall Brunton, who was also her host the magistrate.

"May I?"

"Kerry de Windt?" she answered slowly.

"A splendid chap. He's here to-night, after a bad go of fever and pneumonia he got somehow on his way up-country."

"On his way up-country?" she repeated mechanically.

"It appears that he was coming up by coach but left it at Palapye to go off on a hunt for a little child that was lost from some waggons.

Everyone had given up the search, but he found the child away in a wild krantz, starving, with an old mad Bechuana boy."

"Was it's mother alive?" Vivienne had a sickening vision of that poor mother sitting, hat in hand, outside her hut.

"He got back just in time to save her reason. Queer fellow! We'd never have known anything about it from _him_, of course. The story came up by wire from Palapye."

"Is that he talking to Lady Angela Vinning?"

"Yes. Shall we go over?"

"No. Take me out into the air please," she faltered. Her face was white as death. So _he_ it was whom she had robbed! Kerry de Windt!

The man who had not only saved the child's life, but herself, from G.o.d knew what worse horrors than death!

It was out in one of the verandahs, dimly lit by j.a.panese lanterns, that he was brought and introduced to her.

"You two should find plenty to talk about, as you both know all about being lost on the veld," said the host gaily, and hurried away to other duties.

They stood looking at each other. She wanted to cry out something, but she did not know what it was. His face was very haggard with an irony she had never known about his mouth. In the end, all her stiff lips found to say was:

"I am glad you are better of your illness."

"Thank you. I have something on which to congratulate you also, it seems." The flavour of irony was on his tongue as well as on his lips.

"I did not know it was your land," she stammered, and he stared a moment.

"Oh, _that_," he said carelessly. "You're welcome. It's not the loss of that I mind."

There was a silence. They had sat down in a dim corner. At last her voice came faintly.

"What then have you lost?" She hid her hand on which shone the yellow diamond.

"Something I shall get along very well without in future, I dare say-- faith in women."

She couldn't bear the bitterness of his tone and words. They hurt more than if he had taken a knife to her. Yet a miserable pride and wrath made her pursue the subject to the last fence.

"You speak as though it is some fault other than your own?"

"_You_ know whose fault it is--whose hands have robbed me," he said fiercely; "whose lips have given to another what once they gave to me."

"Never, never!" The words broke involuntarily from her lips, though what it was she denied so furiously was not quite clear at first.

"You will not deny that for a few moments at least, I had a right to believe that you gave them to me? You kissed me back that morning."

She said no word at that, only put up her hand to her eyes for a moment as though to shut out something. The gesture brought into sight the yellow diamond, and with a finger he scornfully indicated it.

"Is not that a symbol of what I have lost--and another gained?"

Even as he spoke the large shadow bore down on them of Montague come to expostulate concerning a sit-out dance that was booked to him.

Vivienne's voice, low, but very clear and cold, cut short his plainings.

"This ring is merely the symbol of a business arrangement between myself and Mr Montague. He very kindly lent me a sum of money with which to make a good speculation. I went to him in preference to applying to a money-lender, and in honour of my confidence in him he asked me to wear this charming stone. When I return the money in three months' time or less, I also return the ring. Is not that exactly how the matter stands, Mr Montague?"

"I believe it is," responded Montague with exceeding dryness, and looking anything but amiable. The unexpectedness of the attack took the wind out of his sails. He would have had more pleasure in bomb-sh.e.l.ling de Windt than making any statement of the kind.

"That is all then, thank you," said Vivienne calmly. "I shall have finished my talk with Mr de Windt in about five minutes' time."