Читать книгу Luck at the Diamond Fields - Dalrymple J. Belgrave - Страница 5

The coach to the Diamond Fields was just starting from the Beaufort West railway-station, and the passengers who were destined to travel over hundreds of miles of burnt-up veldt together, to be jolted over water-courses, choked in dust-storms, and suffer the many discomforts and annoyances of South African travel in each other’s society, were eyeing one another distrustfully.

The feeling uppermost in the minds of several of them was that they were very likely to become not a little tired of one another before they reached the iron town of Kimberley.

With one or two exceptions they were old residents on the Diamond Fields, returning after a trip home to Europe or to the Colony, and therefore they knew each other very well, at least by sight. Their acquaintanceship as a rule made them look forward with all the more distaste to the idea of spending some days in the same coach.

There were ten passengers, and Kate Gray, a soft, refined-looking English girl who was travelling by herself, and whose black dress suggested that she was equally alone in her journey through life, shrunk into the corner of the coach with a half shudder, and thought that her fellow-passengers were a singularly unprepossessing lot. She had tried to make light in anticipation of the annoyances in store for her; but now they were forced upon her, and she felt uncomfortable and out of heart. She had lived for two years in South Africa, and though she had had great sorrow, none of those rougher experiences of colonial life had come in her way which it now seemed likely enough that she was destined soon to meet with. She was the daughter of a retired army officer, who, believing much in his business capacity and power to make money, had put his all when he left the army into an ostrich farm in the Cape Colony, and had taken his daughter out with him. Their life had been a pleasant one enough for some time. The farm was a pretty place. They were not very far off Capetown, and they had pleasant neighbours within reach.

Unfortunately the farm was not suited to ostriches. The wretched birds refused to thrive and increase. They showed a wayward ingenuity in hunting poisonous plants and shrubs, on which they succeeded in committing suicide. Colonel Gray, when his birds died, borrowed money and bought more; then they died, and he bought sheep, which did the same. Then he died himself—more of sheep and ostriches than anything else; and after his death it was found out that he had lived long enough to ruin himself, and to leave his daughter without a penny. She at first thought of going home, but the long list of girls placed as she was, who advertised their willingness to teach, or act as companion only for a home, made her think that she was fortunate to be out of England. Then she heard of some Cape Dutch people up country near the Diamond Fields who wanted an English governess, and she took the place. She was plucky and capable, as well-bred English women are as a rule, and she had determined to think little about the discomfort of the journey, but as she noticed one of her fellow-passengers, a peculiarly aggressive specimen of the Diamond Field Jew, trying to stare her out of countenance, with an impudent leer of admiration in his coarse face, she realised that her position was an unpleasant one. This gentleman was a rather well-known character at Kimberley—a certain Mr Joe Aarons, who had bought many stolen diamonds during his sojourn on the Fields, and was represented to be very rich and prosperous. Unfortunately for his fellow-travellers, Mr Aarons, in the circle in which he moved, was considered a neat humourist, and already he had made one or two remarks which gave his audience a foretaste of the comfort he would likely be to them. Two meaner Jews, men of the Aaron type, but less distinguished characters, appeared to be highly delighted at Joe’s wit; and so was the only other representative of the fair sex, a lady known on the Diamond Fields, where she kept a canteen, as Mother Hemp—the prefix being added to her name rather in a spirit of sarcasm than affection. Probably this good lady had realised that it was quite useless to expect the arts of her toilet to withstand the strain of a coach-journey of almost a week, so she had not even taken the trouble to start fair, and already the coating of paint and powder was cracking and curling away from her yellow old cheeks, which looked curiously shrunk. Also, to be more comfortable on the journey, she had packed away her false teeth. The rest of the company, however, looked upon Mr Aarons with anything but favour. A big, important-looking man, Mr Bowker, the great Kimberley claim-owner, who was just returning from the Cape House of Assembly, felt somewhat disgusted at the idea of having to travel up to the Fields in the company of Mr Aarons. He had perhaps had in his time a little more to do with that person than he would like every one to know, and he was afraid that he might become too familiar on the journey. Then there was a young gentleman who was going to practise in the High Court of Kimberley, and who having had the advantage of three years of home education, was horribly disgusted with the land of his birth to which he had returned, and lost no opportunity of railing at all things connected with Africa. A colonial attorney, on his return from a trip home as he called it—though in England he was strangely abroad—made up the aristocratic element. The two other passengers were river-diggers, partners, and in a way great friends, though men of somewhat different character, and curiously unlike experience. One of them, Jim Brawnston by name, was as good a specimen as one might wish to meet with of the South African born Anglo-Saxon—a brawny giant, of about twenty-eight, with a bushy beard, a pleasant honest look in his light blue eyes, and a laugh like a lion’s roar. In his time he had followed most of the callings which are open to a Cape colonist who has a disposition to rove about rather than to settle down anywhere. He had been a digger when the Diamond Fields first broke out, then had gone a trading trip up country, then had taken a turn at transport riding, and had for a time returned to his old business and become a digger on the banks of the Vaal.

Kate thought, as she caught a glance of the face of the other, a man some half dozen years older than his companion, that he was the most interesting of her fellow-travellers. Though his get-up was rough enough—he wore a flannel shirt, a pair of Bedford cord trousers, and an old shooting coat, which, though an expert would recognise it as having been the work of a good maker, was curiously faded and worn—Kate felt certain that he was an English gentleman. And there was an expression in his tanned face and sad-looking eyes—eyes which seemed to tell that he had had in his time a good deal of trouble—which made her feel that his presence in the coach would make the journey less distasteful to her. He was listening with an expression of grave amusement to the two limbs of the law as they swaggered about England, what they had done when they were at home, where they had been, and whom they had known.

His expression altered to one of anger and disgust when he caught some of Aarons’ conversation, and noticed how horrified and frightened Kate looked. “Surely she can’t be travelling with that old hag,” he thought to himself, as he looked at Mrs Hemp.

“And are you going up to the Fields, my dear?” said that lady to Kate, with a sham smile on her evil old face. “We two ladies and all these gentlemen; well, we must look after each other, and keep them in their right place.”

“I am in my right place sitting next to you, ain’t I, miss?” said Aarons, with a look of insolent admiration, which made her feel extremely uncomfortable.

Jim Brawnston had always found that his partner George Darrell avoided woman’s society, and seemed to have a deep-rooted dislike to the sex, but to his surprise on this occasion he interfered.

“I think you had better change places with me, you will be more comfortable,” he said to Kate, with a look at Aarons which expressed a good deal. The latter seemed to be considerably surprised.

“Sit where you are, my dear,” he said; “you’re in very good company where you are, and I’ll look after you.” However, the young lady changed places without paying any attention to him, and as they settled themselves down, there was a crack of the whip and a yell from the driver, and the horses started off at a gallop.

Darrell took his seat next to Aarons, and after he had settled himself down, he turned round to his neighbour.

“You hound, if you open your lips to speak to that lady I will throw you out of the coach,” he whispered to him.

The Jew replied, with a choice collection of bad language, that he would talk to whom he pleased.

“Who are you, with your damned side? I dare say you ’aven’t got a couple of pound in the pocket of your ragged coat; who the—” Joe said, and then pulled up and stopped—there was something in the other’s expression he didn’t like. Darrell had no more to say to him, but leaned back in his seat and smoked his pipe.

He wondered whether or no he had not made a fool of himself in interfering. Well, it would have annoyed him all the journey to have seen her sitting near that greasy-looking brute of a Jew, he thought to himself; she seemed a good deal happier sitting next to Jim Brawnston, and talking to him brightly enough. The woman didn’t live who would not be perfectly reassured by that kindly giant’s honest face.

It was a pretty face enough, Darrell thought; it reminded him of days long past before he left all he cared for behind, and became the hopeless wanderer he was now. “She looks as if she has had a good deal of trouble; what can she be going up to the Diamond Fields by herself for? If she had people there they ought to look after her better than that,” he thought. As he looked at her, another face rose up before his memory, which had once intoxicated him by its beauty till he threw his life away for it—the face of the woman in England who called herself by his name, and had a right to do so. He had seen no refined woman for years, and there was something in Kate’s face which brought old memories back. Yes, he had made a mess of it and spoilt his life—that was the burthen of his thoughts as the coach made its way across the sandy veldt, and the sun got up and scorched them, and the dust-clouds gathered together and choked them, and the stones on the road threw them up and down till all their bones ached.

“Well, I do declare he ain’t much company; seems mighty proud, and I dare say he ain’t got a penny to spend. I knows his sort, and don’t like ’em,” said Mrs Hemp to Mr Aarons, after she had addressed several remarks to Darrell and got no answer.

Joe Aarons scowled at Darrell and made no reply. When his interests were not at stake he seldom felt very keenly about anything, but he did long to pay the other out for the treatment he had received from him, and for supposing that he, Mr Aarons, the well-known Kimberley diamond-buyer, who was worth his fifty thousand pounds, insulted a girl who was travelling up by herself and couldn’t be of much account, by talking to her. He felt mad with anger as he looked at him. How he would like to pound in that face which had borne a look of such unaffected contempt for him, and hear that cold insolent voice cry out for mercy! Darrell paid little attention to him, and sat gloomily wrapt in his own thoughts.

Mrs Hemp addressed various remarks to him which he did not listen to. The English girl in the front seat talked to Jim Brawnston.

“Queer tastes that girl must have,” Aarons thought to himself; “talks to that digger chap who’s as rough as they make ’em, and looks at me when I say a word to her as if I were dirt,” and he looked at the diamond rings on his coarse dirty hands, and wondered at that to him unknown specimen of humanity, the English gentlewoman.

Some hours after sunset the coach drew up at one of those squalid roadside canteens which in South Africa are dignified by the name of hotels. The days one spends in South African travel are bad enough, but the nights at the worst of all bad inns are far more wretched. A blanket in the open air under the marvellous star-lit Southern sky is something to look back to with pleasure, though the chill half hour before daybreak is not so very pleasant at the time. But those hotel bedrooms are things to shudder at, not to see; they open up to one’s mind new possibilities of dirtiness. Then there is the evil-smelling dining-room, where the table has a historic cloth supposed once to have been white, which bears the grease and stains of long-forgotten meals, which generally consist of lumps of mutton and hard poached eggs served on the same plate. If the master of the house is a Dutchman, he will most likely be full of dull, brutish insolence; if he is an Englishman, he probably will be drunk. The waitress will be a filthy Hottentot woman; while as one eats in the inner rooms one will hear noisy natives getting drunk off Cape smoke just outside.

It was at such a place as this that the coach stopped for the night, and discharged its passengers for a few hours’ enjoyment of the accommodation it afforded.

A meal had been served, and those passengers who were able to secure beds had retired for the night. Darrell was smoking and reading by the dim light of a flickering oil lamp in the living-room. Jim Brawnston was stretched upon the floor in a sleep from which he would not easily wake. The Jews were listlessly fingering a dirty pack of cards; nobody had cared to play with them, and they had not thought it worth while to play with one another; while the landlord, who was not very sober, was laughing hoarsely at some not over pleasant stories they were telling.

“Do you know there is a lady in the next room?” said Darrell, who had thrown his book down and walked up to where they sat.

“Lady? Do you mean Mother Hemp, or the other girl?” said Aarons, and his brutal nature found vent in a sentence of Houndsditch sarcasm. His words were coarse enough to have aroused a milder temper than Darrell’s, whose face turned pale with anger as he heard them. Aarons’ sentence was not quite completed, for before he finished it Darrell’s long left arm had swung out from his shoulder, and his fist had come down with a crash on to the Jew’s jaw. The others saw that if they joined in they would be four to one, so they made a rush at Darrell, the landlord swearing that he’d be damned if he’d see a gent who’d behaved like a gent in his place, ordering drinks and paying for them, hit like that. He looked at Jim Brawnston’s sleeping form, and reassured by the sound of a deep snore, he joined in the fight, aiming a blow at Darrell’s head with a bottle. The latter was not quite as cool as a man ought to be who is fighting four men at once. Instead of keeping on the defensive, he only thought of inflicting as much punishment as possible upon Aarons, and pressed on to strike him again as he staggered back from the first blow. This gave the landlord a chance of getting at him from behind, and he succeeded in pinning his arms, and preventing him from hitting out. A savage gleam came into the Jew’s eyes; he saw that his enemy was in his power as he forced back Darrell’s face with his left hand so as to get a good blow at it with his right.

“Now, my broken-down swell, you’re going to learn not to give your betters any of your damned cheek,” he was saying with a tone of triumph in his voice. The whole group had been too busy to notice a bedroom door which led into the living-room open, and a figure dressed in white glide up to where Brawnston lay sleeping. Kate, as she tried in vain to get some sleep, had heard the row from the beginning. It was not a pleasant scene for a young lady to take part in, but she had heard enough to tell her that the man who had been foolish enough to begin the fight on her account was likely to suffer more than he deserved. She had not understood Aarons’ brutal remark, and would have been better pleased if Darrell had not answered it so forcibly, but she knew the blow she had heard through the door had been given on her account. As she opened the door she saw Brawnston’s sleeping figure close to it; near him on a table there was a jug of water; she dashed it over his face as the quickest way of waking him. The experiment had succeeded admirably. He had woke up with a start, saw the fight which was going on, and in a second was in it. It did not take him long to knock two of the Jews out of time, while the landlord, seeing how things were going, took up the position of a non-combatant.

“Leave him to me,” Darrell cried out as he tried to close with Aarons. There was a look in his partner’s white face which made Brawnston know that he meant mischief. A few seconds’ struggling and then Darrell’s long, lithe fingers were round the Jew’s throat, and as he tightened them there was an ominous twitch round the corners of his mouth.

“Stop it, man, or you’ll kill me,” the Jew gasped out as he felt himself choking. If he had been a good judge of expression, and had been in a position to take stock of Darrell, he would not have been much reassured at the effect his suggestion had. Brawnston didn’t interfere; he was contemplating in a dreamy way the two other men whom he had knocked down. It looked as if a crisis had come in Joe Aarons’ history, but just then a cool hand clasped Darrell’s wrist, and on looking round he for the first time saw that there was a woman present at the not very pretty scene that was taking place.

“Stay, leave him alone, you’ll kill him!” she said, rescuing Darrell from himself and his savageness as she had rescued him just before from his enemies. He will never be likely to forget the little figure with her glorious brown hair sweeping over her shoulders, and the half-frightened, half-disgusted look on her face. He felt rather more ashamed of himself than he had been for some time, so he let go his grip on Aarons’ throat, who fell back a limp mass upon the ground.

“I am sorry that you should have been disturbed by this sort of thing; extremely sorry,” he said to her as she disappeared through the door again.

“What a brute she must think me, as bad as that cur,” he said half to himself, half to Brawnston, glancing at Aarons. “By Jove!” he added, “he looks rather queer.”

“He’s all right; it will be a rope that will break his neck,” said Brawnston, as the man on the ground began to move. The other two men began to pull themselves together, and after a good deal of bad language from the defeated party, the incident came to an end, and every one turned off to sleep; Darrell thinking to himself that his endeavour to prevent the lady passenger’s sleep from being disturbed had been singularly unsuccessful.

The next morning when the coach started, several black eyes and damaged faces bore witness to the disturbance of the night before. Aarons was badly marked, and seemed by no means to have recovered the rough handling he had received; for he was much less cheerful than he had been, and his conversation for some time was confined to a few muttered vows of vengeance against Darrell. Jim Brawnston, too, had the satisfaction of being able to admire the colour he had put on to the faces of Aarons’ two friends. The treatment seemed to have been very beneficial in taking the insolence and noise out of the patients who had been subjected to it, and in consequence the journey became much pleasanter; and after all it was not so bad as it had promised to be. Brawnston had plenty of stories to tell of South African adventure. After Darrell expressed his remorse at having been to a certain extent the cause of the unseemly broil of the night before, and had been forgiven by Kate, as he was soon enough, a sympathy that became stronger every day grew up between them.

It was on the fourth day of their journey that the coach had outspanned at a farm-house by the roadside, and Kate and Darrell were sitting under some trees in the garden of the farm-house, by the edge of a cool shaded pool of water. There is a certain charm about those South African farms which most travellers in the country must have experienced. One seems to have never before enjoyed seeing trees and the soft green of vegetation until one has travelled for miles in the desert. The few bright flowers and the patch of waving maize are more grateful than in a country of fields and trees the most carefully tended garden could be. One of the team of mules which had been inspanned at the last station had turned sick, and the guard of the coach, careless of the remonstrance of the other passengers, who were in a hurry to get to their journey’s end, had prolonged their outspan for some hours to give the sick beast time to get round. Neither Darrell nor Kate were indignant at the delay or were in a hurry to start. They had only known each other for a few days, but already they felt as if they were old friends. Those long days of travelling across the stretches of desert veldt can be pleasant enough. There is something in the atmosphere and surroundings of the country that makes one forget the past, and feel careless of the future; it has the same effect upon one’s mind as the sea has. One gets the feeling of rest and distance, and begins to fancy that one has little to do with oneself, as one was once in other lands that seem so far away. There is nothing to be met with that reminds one of the rest of the world. The strings of laden waggons slowly wending their way over the veldt to the distant Diamond Fields, give an idea of carelessness about time, and worry, and the world in general. The sleepy looking farm-houses, where there is none of the thriving bustle of other lands—and everything suggests progression only at ox-waggon pace—help to carry out the idea.

In those days Darrell had learnt almost all that there was to learn about this companion’s history, but had in return told her very little about himself, though she had gathered from what he said that he had seen a good deal of life, had lived most of his life in good society, was a gentleman, but for some reason or other, so she fancied, the memory of his past life was painful to him, though she was sure that his story had not been discreditable. As they sat in the shade looking at the group of passengers collected round the sick mule, and listening lazily to the voice of the member of the Legislative Assembly, who was denouncing the guard for not inspanning at once, the same thought was in both their minds—their journey would soon be at an end, and very likely they would never see each other again; for the farm she was going to was sixty miles from Kimberley, while he was going to the Vaal River diggings. One thought had been for some time in his mind. Why should his whole life be wrecked because of that act of folly in his youth? Did not the thousands of miles that separated him from England break the shameful tie he loathed? Who need ever know that George Darrell, digger, of Red Shirt Rush, Vaal River, was the same man as Darrell of the Lancers, who like a fool made his good old name shameful by giving it to the woman he had married. He cursed his folly as he remembered himself little more than a boy marrying a woman years older than himself, who, wild as he was then, was as much his inferior morally as she was socially. It was the life he had been leading which had left him weak enough to become drunk with that woman’s coarse beauty, he told himself, as he cursed the folly of that one sin, for which fate never forgives a man, which he had committed. She did not want anything more from him. He had settled all he had on her before he left England for ever; she had got all she married him for, and would not bother him any more. Why should he not forget all about her and his old life?

“Yes,” he said, partly answering something she had said and partly continuing his own thoughts, “there is something in this country that gets rid of old memories, hopes, and ambitions. Four or five generations of it have turned the descendants of knightly French Huguenots into the dull brutish Dutch Boers one meets here, who have not two ideas in their heads beyond eating and sleeping, and are far less civilised than the Kaffirs. Yes, it’s a good country to forget in.”

“I hope not,” she answered; “I don’t want to forget my past; I have plenty of happy memories.” As she spoke a sad look came into her eyes.

“You have a past you can look back on with pleasure; I can only curse my folly when I look back,” he said bitterly.

For a second or two he was silent, struggling with himself. Why should he suppose that she would take any interest in hearing the shameful secret of his life?—but something told him that he had better tell it. Then without leading up to it, he told her the story of his marriage, and about the woman in England who was his wife.

Very clumsily he told it, but he felt all the better when he had got it out. At first when she heard his story she realised how much she had begun to care for this man whom she had known only a few days; then she felt angry with herself for feeling so much interested in his history, and determined that he should never know that she had not listened to it with perfect indifference.

“What a fool I was to think that she would care; I might have saved myself the trouble of telling her my private affairs,” Darrell said to himself, when, having listened to him with ostentatious unconcern, she made some excuse to leave him and go to the coach.

When he came up some ten minutes after he found that she had left the party. The people to whose farm she was going had been to Kimberley, and on their way back they had come round to meet the coach. She was to go with them, and had got into their waggon. The horses were inspanned to the coach; he had only time to say good-bye when they started off. Would they ever meet again, he thought, as he looked back over the flat at the waggon, until it became a white speck on the horizon.