Chapter VI: Part 6

"It 's hardly a disguise," commented Boy Bailey, as he surveyed himself when the change was made. "Disguise is n't the word that covers it, and I 'm hanged if I know what word does. But these pants are chronic."

"You can roll 'em up another couple of inches," suggested Mrs. du Preez.

"It isn't that," complained Mr. Bailey. "If they want to cover my feet, they can. But I 'd need a waist like a wasp before the three top buttons would see reason. Damme, I feel as if I was going to break in halves. What 's that dear boy of yours grinning at?"

"I wasn't grinning," protested Paul. "I was only going to say that father 's coming in now."

The tramp and his mother exchanged a glance of which the meaning was hidden from him, the look of allies preparing for a crucial moment. Already they were leagued to defeat the husband.

Christian du Preez came with heavy footsteps along the passage from the outer door, saw that there was a stranger in the parlor and paused.

"Christian," said Mrs. du Preez, with a false sprightliness. "Come in; here 's a--an old friend of mine come to see us."

"An old friend?"

The Boer stared at the stranger standing with straddled legs before the fireplace, and recognized him forthwith. Without speaking, he made a quick comparison of the bold photograph, whose fleshy perfection had so often invited him to take stock of his own imperfections, and then met the living Boy Bailey's rigid smile with a smile of his own that had the effect of tempering the other's humor.

"I see," said the Boer. "What's the name?" He came forward and read from the photograph where the bold showy signature sprawled across a corner. "'Yours blithely, Boy Bailey,'" he read. "And you are Boy Bailey?"

"You 've got it," replied the photograph's original. "Older, my dear sir, and it may be meatier; but the same man in the main, and happy to make the acquaintance of an old friend's husband."

His impudence cost him an effort in face of the Boer's stare of contemptuous amusement, a stare which comprehended, item by item, each article of his grotesque attire and came to rest, without diminishing its intensity, upon the specious, unstable countenance.

"_Allemachtag,_" was the Boer's only reply, as he completed his survey.

"I don't think you saw Bailey, that time we were married, Christian," said Mrs. du Preez. "But he was a dear old friend of mine."

Christian nodded. "You walked here?" he inquired of the guest. On the Karoo, the decent man does not travel afoot, and none of the three others who were present missed the implication of the inquiry. Mrs. du Preez colored hotly; Boy Bailey introduced his celebrated wave of the hand.

"I see you know what walking means," he replied. "It ain't a human occupation--is it now? What I say is--if man had been meant for a _voetganger_ (a walker)"--he watched the effect of the Dutch word on the Boer--"he 'd have been made with four feet. Is n't that right? You bet your shirt it is."

"My shirt." Christian seemed puzzled for the moment, though the phrase was one which his wife used. She watched him uneasily. "Oh, I see. Yes, you can keep that shirt you 've got on. I don't want it."

Boy Bailey made him a bow. "Ah, thanks. A shirt more or less don't matter, does it?"

Christian turned to Paul. "You brought him in?"

"Yes," answered Paul.

"Well, come and help me with the sacks. Your mother an' her friend wants to talk, an' we don't want to listen to them talking."

Boy Bailey watched them depart.

"What 's he mean by that?" he asked of Mrs. du Preez.

"Never mind what he means," she answered. "He can't have his own way in everything. Sit down an' tell me about the others an' what happened to them after I left. There was Kitty Cassel--what did she do? Go home?"

Boy Bailey pursed his lips. "No," he answered slowly. "She and I went down to Capetown together. She did n't come to any good, Kitty did n't. Ask me about some one else; I don't want to offend your ears."

But Mrs. du Preez was in error in one particular: Christian had seen Boy Bailey "that time we were married," and remembered him very clearly. Those were days when he, too, lived vividly and the petty incidents and personalities of the moment wrote themselves deep on his boyish mind. As he worked at the empty sacks, telling them over by the stencils upon them, while Paul waded among them to his knees and flung them towards him, he returned in the spirit to those poignant years when a thin girl walking across a little makeshift stage could shake him to his foundations.

He remembered the little town to which the commando had returned to be paid off and disbanded, a single street straggling under a rampart of a gray-green mountain, with the crude beginnings of other streets budding from it on either side, and the big brown, native location like a tuberous root at its lower end. Along its length, beetle-browed shops, with shaded stoeps and hitching-rails for horses, showed interior recesses of shade and gave an illusion of dignified prosperous commerce, and at the edge of it all there was a string of still pools, linked by a dribble of water, which went by the name of a river and nurtured along its banks gums and willows, the only trees of greater stature than a mimosa-bush that Christian had ever seen.

It was a small, stagnant veld dorp, in fact, one of hundreds that are littered over the face of the Colony, and have for their districts a more than metropolitan importance. Christian knew it as a focus of life, the center of incomprehensible issues and concerns and when his corps returned to it, flavored in its single street the pungencies of life about town. The little war in the neighborhood had drawn to it the usual riff-raff of the country that follows on the heels of troops, wherever armed men are gathered together, predatory women too wise in their generation, a sample or two of the nearly extinct species of professional card-sharper, a host of the sons of Lazarus intent upon crumbs that should fall from the pay-table, and a fair collection of ordinary thieves. These gave the single street a vivacity beyond anything it had known, and the armed burgher, carrying his rifle slung on his back from mere habit, would be greeted by the name of "Piet" and invited to drink once for every ten steps he took upon it.

Hither came Christian--twenty-two years of age, six-foot in his bare soles of slender thew and muscle, not yet bearded and hungry with many appetites after a campaign against Kafirs. The restless town was a bait for him.

At that time, there was much in him of that solemn-eyed quality which came to be Paul's. The steely women laughed harshly as he passed them by, with all the sweetness of his youth in his still face, his lips parted, his look resting on them and beyond them to the virtues and the delicacy they had thrown off to walk the faster on their chosen road. His ears softened their laughter, his eyes redeemed their bitterness; everything was transfigured for him by the dynamic power of his mere innocence and his potent belief in his own inferiority to the splendor of all that offered itself to his vision. He saw his comrades, fine shots and hard men on the trek, lapse into drunkenness and evil communications, and it was in no way incompatible with his own ascetic cleanliness of apprehension that he excused them on the grounds of the hardships they had undergone. He could idealize even a sot puking in a gutter.

It was here that he saw a stage-play for the first time in his life, sitting in a back-seat in the town hall among young shop-assistants and workmen, not a little distracted between the strange things upon the stage which he had paid to witness and the jocular detachment from them by the young men about him. The play at first was incomprehensible; the chambermaid and the footman, conversing explanatorily, with which it opened, were figures he was unable to recognize, and he could not share the impression that seemed to prevail among the characters in general that the fat, whitish heroine was beautiful. The villain, too, was murderous in such a crude fashion; not once did he make a clean job of an assassination. Christian felt himself competent to criticize, since it was only a week or so since he had pulled a trigger and risen on his elbow to see his man halt in mid-stride and pitch face forward to the earth. He was confirmed in his dissatisfaction by the demeanor of his neighbors; they, men about town, broken to the drama and its surprises, were certainly not taking the thing seriously. After a while, therefore, he made no effort to keep sight of the thread of the play; he sat in an idle content, watching the women on the stage, curious to discover what it was in each one of them that was wrong and vaguely repellent.

His neighbors had no doubts about it. "There 's not a leg in the whole caboodle," one remarked. "It 's all mouth and murder, this is."

Christian did not clearly understand the first phrase, but the second was plain and he smiled in agreement. He looked up to take stock of another character, a girl who made her entrance at that moment, and ceased to smile. Her share in the scene was unimportant enough, and she had but a few words to speak and nothing to do but to walk forward and back again. She was thin and girlish and carried herself well, moving with a graceful deliberation and speaking in an appealing little tinkle to which the room lent a certain ring and resonance; she accosted the villain who replied with brutality; she smiled and turned from him, made a face and passed out again. And that was all.

The young man who had deplored the absence of legs nudged his neighbor to look at the tall young Boer and made a joke in a cautious whisper. His precaution was unnecessary; he might have shouted and Christian would not have heard. He was like a man stunned by a great revelation, sitting bolt upright and staring at the stage and its lighted activity with eyes dazzled by a discovery. For the first time in his life he had seen a woman, little enough to break like a stick across his knee, brave and gay at once, delicate and tender, touching him with the sense of her strength and courage while her femininity made all the male in him surge into power. Gone was his late attitude of humorous judgment, that could detach the actress from her work and assess her like a cow; the smile, the little contemptuous grimace had blown it all away. He was aghast, incapable of reducing his impression to thoughts. For a while, it did not occur to him that it would be possible to see her again. When it did, he leaned across the two playgoers who were next to him and lifted a program from the lap of the third, who gaped at him but found nothing to say.

"That _meisjie_, the one in a red dress--is her name in this?" he inquired of his neighbor, and surprised him into assistance. Together they found it; the unknown was Miss Vivie Sinclair.

"Skinny, wasn't she?" commented the helpful neighbor sociably.

But Christian was already on his feet and making his way out, and the conversational one got nothing but a slow glare for an answer across intervening heads.

And yet the truth of it was, a connoisseur in girls could have matched Miss Vivie Sinclair a hundred times over, so little was there in her that was peculiar or rare. The connoisseur would have put her down without hesitation for a product of that busy manufactory which melts down the material of so many good housemaids to make it into so many bad actresses. Her sex and a grimace--these were the total of her assets, and yet she was as good a peg as another for a cloudy youth to drape with the splendors of his inexperienced fancy and glorify with the hues of his secret longings. Probably she had no very clear idea of herself in those days; she was neither happy nor sad, as a general thing; and her aspirations aimed much more definitely at the symptoms of success--frocks, bills lettered large with her name, comely young men in hot pursuit of her, gifts of jewelry--than at success itself. As she passed down the main street next morning, on her way to the telegraph office in the town hall, she offered to the slow, appraising looks from the stoeps a sketchy impression of a rather strained modernity, an effect of deftly managed skirts and unabashed ankles which in themselves were sufficient to set Fereira thinking. It was as she emerged from the telegraph office that she came face to face with Christian.

"Well, where d'you think you 're comin' to?"

This was her greeting as he pulled up all standing to avert a collision. Clothes to fit both his stature and his esthetic sense had not been procurable, and he had been only able to wash himself to a state of levitical cleanliness. But his youthful bigness and his obvious reverence of her served his purpose. She stood looking at him with a smile.

"I saw you," he said, "in the play."

"Did you? What d' you think of it?"

"_Allemachtag,_" he answered. "I have been thinking of it all night."

To his eye, she was all she had promised to be. The fragility of her was most wonderful to him, accustomed to the honest motherly brawn of the girls of his own race. The rather aggressive perkiness of her address was the smiling courage that had thrilled and touched him. He stood staring, unable to carry the talk further.

But it was for this kind of thing that Miss Vivie Sinclair had "gone on the stage," and she was not at all at a loss.

"I 'm going this way," she said, and in her hands, Christian was wax--willing wax. He found himself walking at her side under the eyes of the town. She waited before she spoke again till they were by the stoep of Pagan's store, where a dozen loungers became rigid and watchful as they passed.

"You 've heard about the smash-up?" she inquired then.

"Smash-up?"

"Our smash-up? Oh, a regular mess we 're in, the whole lot of us. You had n't heard?"

"No," he answered.

"Padden 's cleared out. He was our manager, you know, and now he 's run away with the treasury and left us high and dry. Went last night, it seems, after the show."

"Left you?" repeated Christian. The old story was a new one to him and he did not understand. Miss Sinclair thought him dense, but proceeded to enlighten him in words of one syllable, as it were.

"That 's why I was telegraphing," she concluded. "There was a feller in Capetown I used to know; I want to strike him for my fare out of this."

So she was in trouble; there was a call upon her courage, an attack on her defenselessness. Miss Sinclair, glancing sidelong at his face, saw it redden quickly and was confirmed in her hope that the "feller" in Capetown was but an alternative string to her bow.

"That telegram took all I 'd got but a couple of shillings," she added. "Padden had been keeping us short for a long time."

The long street straggled under the sun, bare to its harsh illumination, a wide tract of parched dust hemmed between walls and roofs of gray corrugated iron. The one thing that survived that merciless ordeal of light without loss or depreciation was the girl. They halted at the door of the one-storied hotel where her room was and here again the shaded stoep was full of ears and eyes and Christian had to struggle with words to make his meaning clear to her and keep it obscure to every one else.

"It 'll be all right," he assured her stammeringly. "I 'll see that it 's all right. I 'll come here an' see you."

"When?" she asked, and helped him with a suggestion. "This evening? There 'll be no show to-night."

"This evening," he agreed.

Miss Sinclair gave him her best smile, all the better for the mirth that helped it out. She was as much amused as she was relieved. As she passed the bar on her way indoors, she winked guardedly to a florid youth within who stood in an attitude of listening.

If Christian had celebrated the occasion with libations in the local fashion, if he had talked about it and put his achievement to the test of words--if, even, he had been capable of thinking about it in any clear and sober manner instead of merely relishing it with every fiber of his body--the evening's interview might have resolved itself into an act of charity, involving the sacrifice of nothing more than a few sovereigns. As it was, he spent the day in germinating hopes and educating his mind to entertain them. Under the stimulating heat of his sanguine youth, they burgeoned superbly.

As he walked away from the hotel, the florid youth spoke confidentially to the fat shirt-sleeved barman.

"Hear that?" he asked. "_She_ 'll do all right, she will. That 's where a girl 's better off than a man. Who 's the feller, d'you know?"

The barman heaved himself up to look through the window, and laughed wheezily. He was a married man and adored his children, but it was his business to be knowing and worldly.

"It 's young Du Preez," he answered, as Christian stalked away. "One of them Boers, y'know. Got a farm out on the Karoo."

"Rich?" queried the other.

"Not bad," said the barman. "Most of those Dutch could buy you an' me an' use us for mantel ornaments, if they had the good taste."

"So--ho," exclaimed the florid youth. "But they don't carry it about with 'em, worse luck."

He sighed and grew thoughtful. He was thoughtful at intervals for the rest of the morning, and by the afternoon was melancholy and uncertain of step. But he was on hand and watchful when Christian arrived.

Christian was vaguely annoyed when a young man of suave countenance and an expression of deep solemnity thrust up to him at the hotel door and stood swaying and swallowing and making signs as though to command his attention.

"What d'you want?" he demanded.

"Word with you," requested the other. "Word with you."

He was sufficiently unlike anything that was native to Fereira to be recognizable as an actor and Christian suffered himself to be beckoned into the bar.

"Shall I do it or you?" asked the other. "I shtood so many to-day, sheems to me it 's your turn. Mine 's a whisky. Now, 'bout this li'l girl upshtairs."

"Eh?" Christian was startled.

"I 'm man of the world," the other went on, with the seriousness of the thoroughly drunken. "Know more 'bout the world then ever you knew in yer bally life. An' I don't blame you--norra bit. Now what I want shay is this: I can fix it for you if you 're good for a fiver. Jush a fiver--shave trouble and time, eh? Nice li'l girl, too. Worth it."

Christian watched him lift his glass and drink. He was perplexed; these folk seemed to have a language of their own and to be incomprehensible to ordinary folk.

"Worth it?" he repeated. "Fix _what_?" he demanded.

"Nod 's good 's wink," answered the other. "Don't want to shout it. Bend your long ear down to me--tell you."

They had a corner by the bar to themselves. Near the window the barman had a customer after his own heart and was repeating to him an oracular saying by his youngest daughter but two, glancing sideways while he spoke to see if Christian and the other were listening.

Christian bent, and the hot breath of the other, reeking of the day's drinking, beat on his neck and the side of his head. The hoarse whisper, with its infernal suggestion, seemed to come warm from a pit of vileness within the man's body.

"Is that plain 'nough?"

Christian stood upright again, trembling from head to foot with some cold emotion far transcending any rage he had ever felt. For some instant he could not lift his hand; he had seen the last foul depths of evil and was paralyzed. The other lifted his glass again. His movement released the Boer from the spell.

He took the man by the wrist that held the glass with so deadly a deliberation that the barman missed his hostile purpose and continued to talk, leaning with his fat, mottled arms folded on the bar.

"What you doin', y' fool?" The cry was from the florid youth.

"Ah!" Christian put out his strength with a maniac fury, and the youth's hand and the glass in it were dashed back into that person's face. No hand but his own struck him, and the countenance Christian saw as a blurred white disk broke under the blow and showed red cracks. He struck again and again; the barman shouted and men came running in from outside. Christian dropped the wrist he held and turned away. Those in the doorway gave him passage. On the floor in the corner the florid youth bled and vomited.

Christian knew him later as a bold and serene face in a plush photograph frame, signed across the lower right corner: "Yours blithely, Boy Bailey."

How he made inquiries for the girl's room and came at last to the door of it was never a clear memory to him. But he could always recall that small austere interior of whitewash and heat-warped furniture to which he entered at her call, to find her sitting on the narrow bed. He came to her bereft of the few faculties she had left him, grave, almost stern, gripping himself by force of instinct to save himself from the outburst of emotion to which the scene in the bar had made him prone. Everything tender and protective in his nature was awake and crying out; he saw her as the victim of a sacrilegious outrage, threatened by unnamable dangers.

She looked at him under the lids of her eyes, quickly alive to the change in him. It is necessary to record that she, too, had made inquiries since the morning, and learned of the farm that stood at his back to guarantee him solid.

"I wondered if you 'd come," she said. "That feller in Capetown has n't answered."

"I said I 'd come," he replied gravely.

"Yes, I know. All the same, I thought--you know, when a person 's in hard luck, nothing goes right, an' a girl, when she 's in a mess, is anybody's fool. Is n't that right?"

She knew her peril then; she lived open-eyed in face of it.

"You shall not be anybody's fool," he answered. "If anybody tries to be bad to you, I 'll kill him."

He was still standing just within the closed door, no nearer to her than the size of the little chamber compelled.

"Won't you sit down?" she invited.

"Eh?" His contemplation of her seemed to absorb him and make him absent-minded. "No," he replied, when she repeated her invitation.

"As you like," she conceded, wondering whether after all he was going to be amenable to the treatment she proposed for him. It crossed her mind that he was thinking of getting something for his money and her silly mouth tightened. If her sex was one of her assets, her virtue--the fanatic virtue which is a matter of prejudice rather than of principle,--was one of her liabilities. She had nothing to sell him.

"You know," she said, "the worst of it is, none of us have n't had any salary for weeks. That's what puts us in the cart. We 're all broke. If Padden had let us have a bit, we would n't be stranded like this. And the queer thing is, Gus Padden 's the last man you 'd have picked for a wrong 'un. Fat, you know, and beaming; a sort of fatherly way, he had. He used to remind me of Santa Claus. An' now he 's thrown us down this way, and how I 'm going to get up again I can't say." She gave him one of her shrewd upward glances; "tell me," she added.

"I can tell you," he replied.

"How, then?" she asked.

"Marry me," said Christian. "This acting--it's no good. There 's men that is bad all around you. One of them--I broke his face like a window-glass downstairs just now--he said you was--bad, like him. And it was time to see what he was worth. Unless you can you are ach--so--so little, so weak. Marry me, my _kleintje_ and you shall be nobody's fool."

The girl on the bed stared at him dumbly: this was what she had never expected. Salvation had come to her with both hands full of gifts. She began to laugh foolishly.

"Marry me," repeated Christian. "Will you?"

She jumped up from her seat, still laughing and took two steps to him.

"Will I?" she cried. "Will a duck swim? Yes, I will; yes, yes, yes!"

Christian looked at her dazed; events were sweeping him off his feet. He took one of her hands and dropped it again and turned from her abruptly. With his arm before his face he leaned against the door and burst into weeping. The girl patted him on the back soothingly.

"Take it easy," she said kindly. "You'll be all right, never fear."

"That 's all the Port Elizabeth ones," said Paul. "How many do you make them?"

Christian du Preez looked up uncertainly. "_Allemachtag,_" he said. "I forgot to count. I was thinking."

"Oh. About the tramp?"

"Yes. Paul, what did you bring him in for? Couldn't you see he was a _skellum_?"

Paul nodded. "Yes, I could see that. But--_skellums_ are hungry and tired, too, sometimes."

His father smiled in a worried manner. He and Paul never talked intimately with each other, but an intimacy existed of feeling and thought. They took many of the same things for granted.

"Like us," he agreed. "Come on to supper, Paul."

*CHAPTER X*

It was nearing the lunch hour when Margaret walked down from the Sanatorium to the farm, leaving Ford and Mr. Samson to their unsociable preoccupations on the stoep, and found Paul among the kraals. He had some small matter of work in hand, involving a wagon-chain and a number of yokes; these were littered about his feet in a liberal disorder and he was standing among them contemplating them earnestly and seemingly lost in meditation. He turned slowly as Margaret called his name, and woke to the presence of his visitor with a lightening of his whole countenance.

"Were you dreaming about models?" inquired Margaret. "You were very deep in something."

Paul shook his head. "It was about wagons," he answered seriously. "I was just thinking how they are always going away from places and coming to more places. That's all."

"Wishing you had wheels instead of feet? I see," smiled the girl. "What a traveler you are, Paul."

He smiled back. In their casual meetings they had talked of this before and Paul had found it possible to tell her of his dreams and yearnings for what lay at the other end of the railway and beyond the sun mist that stood like a visible frontier about his world.

"I shall travel some day," he answered. "Kamis says that a man is different from a vegetable because he hasn't got roots. He says that the best way to see the world is to go on foot."

"I expect he 's right," said Margaret. "It's jolly for you, Paul, having him to talk to. Do you know where he is now?"

"Yes," answered the boy.

"Well, then, when can I see him? He told me you could always let him know."

"This afternoon?" suggested Paul. "If you could come down to the dam wall then, he can be there. There is a signal I make for him in my window and he always sees it."

"I 'll come then," promised Margaret. "Thank you, Paul. But that signal--that 's rather an idea. Did you think of it or did he?"

"He did," answered Paul. "He said it wouldn't trouble him to look every day at a house that held a friend. And he does, every day. There was only once he didn't come, and then he had twisted his ankle a long way off on the veld, walking among ant-bear holes in the dark."

"Which window is it?" asked Margaret.

Paul pointed. "That end one," he showed her.

Margaret looked, and a figure lounging against one of the doorposts of the house took her look for himself and bowed.

"That's nobody," said Paul quickly. "Don't look that way. It 's--it 's a tramp that came to me--and I gave him a shilling to keep still and be modeled--and he knows my mother--and he 's staying in the house. He 's beastly; don't look that way."

His solicitude and his jealousy made Margaret smile.

"I shouldn't see him if I did," she said. "Don't you worry, Paul. Then--this afternoon?"

"Under the dam," replied Paul. "Good-by. He's waiting for a chance to come and speak to you."

"Let him wait," replied Margaret, and turned homewards, scrupulously averting her face from the ingratiating figure of Boy Bailey.

That pensioner of fortune watched her pass along the trodden path to the Sanatorium till she was clear of the farm, and then put himself into easy movement to go across to Paul. The uncanny combination of Christian's clothes and his own personality drifted through the arrogant sunlight and over the sober earth, a monstrous affront to the temperate eye. He was like a dangerous clown or a comical Mephistopheles. Paul, pondering as he came, thought of a pig equipped with the venom of the puff-adder of the Karoo. As he drew near, the boy fell to work on the chain and yokes.

"Well, my dear boy." The man's shadow and his voice reached Paul together. He did not look up, but went on loosening the cross bar of a yoke from its link.

"There 's more in this place of yours than meets the eye at a first glance," said Boy Bailey. "You 're well off, my lad. Not only milk and honey for the trouble of lifting 'em to your mouth, but dalliance, silken dalliance in broad daylight. What would your dear mother say if she knew?"

"I don't know," said the boy. "Ask her?"

"And spoil sport? Laddie, you 'll know me better some day. Not for worlds would I give a chap's game away. It's not my style. Poor I may be, but not that. No. I admire your taste, my boy. You 've an eye in your head. But you forgot to introduce the lady to your mother's old friend. However, you 'll be seeing her again, no doubt, an' then--"

"I didn't forget," said Paul. Still he did not look up. The iron links shook in his hands, and he detached the stout crosspiece and laid it across his knees.

"Eh?" Boy Bailey's face darkened a little, and his wary eyes narrowed. He looked down on the boy's bent back unpleasantly.

"You didn't?" he said. "I see. Well, well. A chap that 's poor must put up with these slights." His slightly hoarse voice became bland again. "But have it your own way; Heaven knows, _I_ don't mind. She 's a saucy little piece, all the same, an' p'r'aps you 're right not to risk her with me. If I got her by herself, there 's no saying--"

He stopped; the boy had looked up and was rising. His face stirred memories in Boy Bailey; it roused images that were fogged by years, but terrible yet. In the instant's grace that was accorded him, he felt his wrist gripped once more and saw the livid clenched face, tense with the spirit of murder, that burned above his ere his own hand and the glass it held were dashed athwart his eyes. The boy was rising and he held the cross-bar of the yoke like a weapon.

Boy Bailey made to speak but failed. With a sort of squeak he turned and set off running towards the house, pounding in panic over the ground with his grotesque clothes flapping about him like abortive wings. Paul, on his feet amid the tangled chains, watched him with the heavy cross-bar in his hand.

If he had any clear feeling at all, it was disappointment at the waste of a rare energy. He could have killed the man in the heat of it, and now it was wasted. Boy Bailey was whole, his pulpy face not beaten in, his bones functioning adequately as he ran instead of creaking in fractures to each squirm of his broken body. It was an occasion squandered, lost, thrown away. It had the unsatisfying quality of mere prevention when it might have been a complete cure.

Margaret returned to the Sanatorium in time to meet Mrs. Jakes in the hall as she led the way to lunch and to receive the unsmiling movement of recognition which had been her lot ever since the night of Dr. Jakes' adventure. Contrary to Margaret's expectation, Mrs. Jakes had not come round; no treatment availed to convince her that she had not been made a victim of black treachery and the doctor wantonly exposed and humiliated. When she was cornered and had to listen to explanations, she heard them with her eyes on the ground and her face composed to an irreconcilable woodenness. When Margaret had done--she tried the line of humorous breeziness, and it was a mistake--Mrs. Jakes sniffed.

"If you please," she said frigidly, "we won't talk about it. The subject is very painful. No doubt all you say is very true, but I have my feelings."

"So have I," said Margaret. "And mine are being hurt."

"I am extremely sorry," replied the little wan woman, with stiff dignity. "If you wish it, I will ask the doctor to recommend you a Sanatorium elsewhere, where you may be more comfortable."

"You know that is n't what I want," protested Margaret. "This is all very silly. I only want you to understand that I have n't done you any harm and that I did the best I could and let's stop acting as if one of us had copied the other's last hat."

"No doubt I am slow of understanding, Miss Harding," retorted Mrs. Jakes formidably. "However--if you have quite finished, I 'm in rather a hurry and I won't detain you."

And she made her escape in good order, marching unhurried down the matted corridor and showing to Margaret a retreating view of a rigid black alpaca back.

Dr. Jakes was equally effective in his treatment of the incident. He went to work upon her lungs quite frankly, sending her to bed for a couple of days and gathering all his powers to undo the harm of which he had been the cause. On the third day, there was a further interview in the study, a businesslike affair, conducted without unnecessary conversation, with monosyllabic question and reply framed on the most formal models. At the close of it, he leaned back in his chair and faced her across the corner of his desk. He was irresistibly plump and crumpled in that attitude, with his sad, uncertain eyes expressing an infinite apprehension and all the resignation of a man who has lost faith in mercy.

"That is all, then, Miss Harding. Unless--?"

The last word was breathed hoarsely. Margaret waited. He gazed at her owlishly, one nervous hand fumbling on the blotting-pad before him.

"There is nothing else you want to say to me?" he asked.

"I can't think of anything," said Margaret.

He continued to look at her, torpidly, helplessly. It was impossible to divine what fervencies of inarticulate emotion burned and quickened behind his mask of immobile flesh. The rumpled hair, short and blond, lay in disorder upon his forehead and his lips were parted impotently. He had to blink and swallow before he could speak again, visibly recalling his wits.

"If you don't tell me, I can't answer," he said, and sighed heavily. He raised himself in his big chair irritably.

"Nothing more, then?" he asked. "Well--take care of yourself, Miss Harding. That 's all you have to do. Whatever happens, your business is to take care of yourself; it's what you came here for."

"I will," answered Margaret. She wished she could find a plane on which it would be possible to talk to him frankly, without evasions and free from the assumptions which his wife wove about him. But the resignation of his eyes, the readiness they expressed to accept blows and penalties, left her powerless. The gulf that separated them could not be bridged.

"Then--" he rose, and in another pair of moments Margaret was outside the study door in the hall, where Mrs. Jakes, affecting to be concerned in the arrangement of the furniture, examined her in sidelong glances, to know whether she had used the weapon which the doctor's adventure had put into her hand. Apparently there was no convincing her that the girl's intentions were not hostile.

It did not simplify life for Margaret, this enmity of Mrs. Jakes. Lunch and breakfast under her pale, implacable eye, that glided upon everything but skipped Margaret with a noticeable avoidance, had become ordeals to be approached with trepidation. Talk, when there was anything to talk about, died still-born in that atmosphere of lofty displeasure. It was done with a certain deftness; Mrs. Jakes was incapable of anything crude or downright; and when it was necessary, in order that the state of affairs should not be conspicuous, she could smile towards the wall at the girl's back and spare her an empty word or so, in a way that was sometimes as galling as much more dexterous snubs that Margaret had seen administered. One can "field" a snub that conveys its purpose in its phrasing and return it with effect to the wicket; but there is nothing to be done with the bare word that just stops a gap from becoming noticeable.

Ford was waiting outside the front door when Margaret came out after exercising the virtue of forbearance throughout a meal for which she had had no appetite.

"What 's the row with Mrs. Jakes?" he asked, without wasting words on preamble.

"Oh, nothing," answered Margaret crossly. "You 'd better ask her if you want to know. I 'm not going to tell you anything."

"Well, don't, then. But you couldn't arrange a truce for meal-times, could you? It turns things sour--the way you two avoid looking at each other."

"I don't care," said Margaret. "It 's not my fault. I 've been as loyal as anybody--more loyal, I think, and certainly more helpful. I 've done simply everything she asked of me, and now she 's like this."

Ford gave her a whimsical look of question.

"Sure you haven't at some time done more than she asked you?" he inquired.

"Why?" Margaret was surprised. She laughed unwillingly. "Is it shrewdness or have you heard something?"

"I haven't heard a word," he assured her. "But is that it?"

"It 's just your natural cleverness, then? Wonderful," said Margaret. "You ought to go on the stage, really. Yes, that 's what it is--I suppose. And now d'you think she 'll see the reasonable view of it? Not she! I 'm a villain in skirts and if I won't stand it, she 'll ask the doctor to recommend a Sanatorium where I can be more comfortable. And just at this moment, I don't think I can stand much more of it."

"Eh?" Ford scowled disapprovingly. "That 's a rotten thing to say. You don't feel inclined to tell me about it?"

"I can't; I mustn't. That 's the worst of it," answered Margaret. "I can't tell you anything."

"At any rate," said Ford, "don't take it into your head to go away. This won't do you any harm in the end. You weren't thinking of it seriously, were you?"

"Wasn't I? I was, though. I hate all this."

Ford took a couple of steps toward the door and a couple back.

"It won't weigh with you," he said, "but I 'd be sorry if you went. _I_ would, personally--awfully sorry. But if you must go, you must. It 's a thing you can judge for yourself. Still, I 'd be sorry."

Margaret shrugged impatiently.

"Oh, I 'd be sorry, too. It 's been jolly, in a way, with you here, and all that. I 'd miss you, if you want to know. But--"

She stopped. Ford was looking at her very gravely.

"Don't go," he said, and put his thin, sun-browned hand upon her shoulder. "It 'll make things simpler for me if you say you won't. Things will arrange themselves, but even if they don't--don't go away."

"Simpler? How do you mean?"

"Just that," he answered. "If you stay, here we are--friends. We help each other out and talk and see each other and have time before us and there 's no need to say anything. And it's because a lunger like me must n't say anything till he sees whether he 's going to get well or--or stay here forever, that it 'll be simpler if you don't go. Do you see?"

His hand upon her shoulder was pleasant to feel; she liked the freedom he took--and gave--in resting it there; and his young, serious face, touched to delicacy by the disease that governed him, was patient and wise.

"It 's not because of that _that_ you mustn't say anything," she answered. "I did n't know--you 've given me no warning. What can I say?"

"Say you won't go," he begged. "Say you won't act on any decision you 've made at present. And then we can go on--me lecturing you, and you flouting me, till--till I can say things--till I 'm free to say what I like to anybody."

She smiled rather nervously. "If I agree now," she answered, "it will look as if--" she paused; the thing was difficult to put in its nicety. But he was quick in the uptake.

"It won't," he said. "I 'm not such a bounder as that."

"But I 'd rather be here than take my chance among other people," she went on. "I suppose I can stand Mrs. Jakes if I give my mind to it, particularly if you 'll see me through."

"I 'll do what I can," he promised. "You 'll do it, then? You'll stay?"

"I suppose so," said Margaret. His hand for a moment was heavier on her shoulder; she felt as though she had been slapped on the back, with the unceremoniousness of a good friend; and then he loosed her.

"Good of you," he answered shortly.

Both were weighted by the handicap of their race; they had been, as it were, trapped into a certain depth of emotion and self-revelation, and both found a difficulty in stepping down again to the safe levels of commonplace intercourse. Ford shoved both hands into his pockets and half-turned from her.

"Well--doing anything this afternoon?" he inquired in his tersest manner.

"Yes," said Margaret, whom the position could amuse.

"What?"

"Oh--going yachting," she retorted.

He sniffed and nodded. "I 'm going to paint," he announced. "So long."

Margaret smiled at his back as he went, and its extravagant slouch of indifference and ease. She knew he would not look round; once his mood was defined, it was reliable entirely; but she felt she would have forgiven him if he had. The last word in such a matter as this is always capable of expansion, and probably some such notion was in the mind of the oracle who first pronounced that to women the last word is dear.

He was still at his easel when she set forth to keep her appointment under the dam wall, working on his helpless canvas with an intensity that spared not a look as she went by on the parched grass below the stoep. It was a low easel, and he sat on a stool and spread his legs to each side of it, like a fighter crouched over an adversary, and his thumb was busy smudging among masses of pigment. Margaret could see the canvas as a faintly shining insurrection of colors which suggested that he had broken an egg upon it. A score of times in the past weeks those cryptic messes had irritated her or showed themselves as a weakness in their author. The domineering thumb and the shock tactics of the palette knife had supplied her with themes for ridicule, and the fact that the creature could not paint and yet would paint and refused all instruction had put the seal of bitterness on many a day of weary irritation. But suddenly his incompetence and his industry, and even the unlovely fruit of their union--the canvases that he signed large with his name and hung unframed upon the walls of his room--were endearing; they were laughable only as a little child is laughable, things to smile at and to prize.

Her smiling and thoughtful mood went with her across the grass and dust and around the curved shoulder of the dam wall, where Kamis, obedient to Paul's signal, sat in the shade and awaited her. At her coming he sprang up eagerly with his face alight. His tweed clothes were, if anything, shabbier than before, but it seemed that no usage could subdue them to congruity with the broad black face and its liberal smile.

"This is great luck," he said. "I half expected you 'd find it too hot for you. Are you all right again after that night?"

Margaret seated herself on the slope of the wall and rested with one elbow on the freshness of its water-fed grass.

"Quite all right," she assured him. "Dr. Jakes has done everything that needed to be done. But I didn't thank you half enough for what you did."

He smiled and murmured deprecatingly and found himself a place to sit on at the foot of the wall, with legs crossed and his back to the sun. Leaning forward a little in this posture, with his drooping hat-brim shadowing him, it was almost possible for Margaret to avoid seeing the blunt negro features for which she had come to feel something akin to dread; they affected her in the same way that darkness with people moving in it will affect some children.

"I saw Paul's signal," said Kamis. "We have an understanding, you know. He hangs a handkerchief in his window when he wants me and when you want me he hangs two. It shows as far as one can see the window; all the others are just black squares, and his has a white dash in it. That 's rather how I see Paul, you know. Other people are just blanks, but he means something--to me, at any rate. By the way, before I forget--did you want me for anything in particular?"

Margaret shook her head. "I wanted to talk," she said; "and to make that police matter clear to you."

"Oh, that." He looked up. "Thank you."

"Do you know of a Mr. Van Zyl, a police-officer?" she asked him. "He thinks you are guilty of sedition among the natives. I suppose it 's nonsense, but he means to arrest you, and I thought you 'd better know."

"It 's awfully good of you to bother about it," he answered. "I 'll take care he doesn't lay hands on me. But it is nonsense, certainly, and anybody but he would know it. He 's been scouring the kraals in the south for me and giving the natives a tremendous idea of my importance. They were nervous enough of me before, but now--"

He shrugged his shoulders disgustedly, but still smiled.

"That is what he said--they 're uneasy," agreed Margaret. "But why are they? You see, I know scarcely more of you than Mr. Van Zyl. What is it that troubles them about you?"

"Oh," the Kafir deliberated. "It's simple enough, really. You see," he explained, "the fact is, I 'm out of order. I don't belong in the scheme of things as the natives and Mr. Van Zyl know it. These Kafirs are the most confirmed conservatives in the world, and when they see a man like themselves who can't exist without clothes and a roof to sleep under, who can't walk without boots or talk their language and is unaccountable generally, they smell witchcraft at once. Besides, it has got about that I 'm Kamis, and they know very well that Kamis was hanged about twenty years ago and his son taken away and eaten by the soldiers. So it's pretty plain to them that something is wrong somewhere. Do you see?"

"Still"--Margaret was thoughtful--"Mr. Van Zyl is n't an ignorant savage."

"No," agreed Kamis. "He isn't that. For dealing with Kafirs, he 's probably the best man you could find; the natives trust him and depend on him and when they 're in trouble they go to him and he gives them the help they want. When they misbehave, he 's on hand to deal with them in the fashion they understand and probably prefer. And the reason is, Miss Harding--the reason is, he 's got a Kafir mind. He was born among them and nursed by them; he speaks as a Kafir, understands as a Kafir and thinks as a Kafir, and he 'll never become a European and put away Kafir things. They 've made him, and at the best he 's an ambassador for the Kafirs among the whites. That 's how they master their masters. Oh, they 've got power, the Kafirs have, and a better power than their hocus-pocus of witchcraft."

The afternoon was stored with the day's accumulated heat and the cool of the grass beneath and the freshness of the water, out of sight beyond the wall but diffusing itself like an odor in the air, combined to contrast the spot in which they talked with the dazed sun-beaten land about them and gave to both a sense of privacy and isolation. The Kafir's words stirred a fresh curiosity in Margaret.

"He thinks you are making the natives dangerous," she said. "I don't believe that, of course, but what are you doing?"

"What am I doing?"

The black face was lifted to hers steadily and regarded her for a space of moments without replying. Nothing mild or subtle could find expression in its rude shaping of feature; the taciturnity of the Karoo itself governed it.

"What am I doing?" repeated Kamis. He dropped his eyes and his hands plucked at the grass absently. "Well, I 'm looking for a life for myself."

Margaret waited for him to continue but he was silent, plucking the grass shoots and shredding them in his fingers.

"A life," she prompted. "Yes; tell me."

Kamis finished with the grass in his hand and threw it with an abrupt gesture from him.

"I 'll tell you if you like," he said, as though suppressing a feeling of reluctance. "It isn't anything wonderful; still--. You know already how I began; Paul told me how you learnt that; and you can see where I 've got to with my education and my degree and my profession and all that. I 'm back where I came from, and besides what I 've learned, I 've got a burden of civilized habits and weaknesses that keep me tied by the leg. I need friendship and company and equality with people about me, just as you do, and I 'm apt to find myself rather forlorn and lost without them. In England, I had those things--I had some of them, at any rate; but what was there for a black doctor to do, do you think, among all those people who look on even a white foreigner as rather a curiosity?"

"Wasn't there anything?" Margaret was watching the nervous play of his gesticulating hands, so oddly emphasizing his pleasant English voice.