Читать книгу The Triumph of Hilary Blachland - Mitford Bertram - Страница 4

“I don’t care. I’ll say it again. It’s a beastly shame him leaving you alone like this.”

“But you are not to say it again, or to say it at all. Remember of whom you are speaking.”

“Oh, no fear of my forgetting that – of being able to forget it. All the same, he ought to be ashamed of himself.”

And the speaker tapped his foot impatiently upon the virgin soil of Mashunaland, looking very hot, and very tall, and very handsome. The remonstrant, however, received the repetition of the offence in silence, but for a half inaudible sigh, which might or might not have been meant to convey that she was not nearly so angry with the other as her words seemed to imply or their occasion to demand. Then there was silence.

An oblong house, of the type known as “wattle and daub,” with high-pitched thatch roof, partitioned within so as to form three rooms – a house rough and ready in construction and aspect, but far more comfortable than appearances seemed to warrant. Half a dozen circular huts with conical roofs, clustered around, serving the purpose of kitchen and storehouse and quarters for native servants; beyond these, again, a smaller oblong structure, constituting a stable, the whole walled round by a stockade of mopani poles; – and there you have a far more imposing establishment than that usually affected by the pioneer settler. Around, the country is undulating and open, save for a not very thick growth of mimosa; but on one hand a series of great granite kopjes rise abruptly from the plain, the gigantic boulders piled one upon the other in the fantastic and arbitrary fashion which forms such a characteristic feature in the landscape of a large portion of Rhodesia.

“Well?”

The woman was the first to break the silence – equally a characteristic feature, a cynic might declare.

“Well?”

The answer was staccato, and not a little pettish. The first speaker smiled softly to herself. She revelled in her power, and was positively enjoying the cat and mouse game, though it might have been thought that long custom would have rendered even that insidious pastime stale and insipid.

“So sorry you have to go,” she murmured sweetly. “But it’s getting late, and you’ll hardly reach home before dark.”

The start – the blank look which overspread his features – all this, too, she thoroughly enjoyed.

“Have to go,” he echoed. “Oh, well – yes, of course, if you want to get rid of me – ”

“I generally do want to get rid of people when they are sulky, and disagreeable, and ill-tempered,” was the tranquil reply. But the expression of her eyes, raised full to his, was such as to take all the sting out of her words.

Not quite all, however, for his mind was in that parlous state best defined as “worked up” – and the working-up process had been one, not of hours or of days, but of weeks.

“Well, then, good-bye.” Then, pausing: “Why do you torment me like this, Hermia, when you know – ”

“What’s that? I didn’t say you might call me by my name.”

“Oh, I beg your pardon, Mrs Blachland,” was the reply, bitterly, resentfully emphatic. Then, thawing suddenly, “You didn’t mind it the other day, and – well, you know what you are to me and always will be.”

“Until somebody else is more so,” came the smiling interruption. “Hark” – raising a hand suddenly, and listening intently. “Yes, it is. Will you be a very dear boy, Justin, and do something for me?”

“You know I would do anything for you – anything in the wide world.”

“Oh, this is nothing very great. There are guinea-fowl over there in the kopje – I can hear them. I only want you to take Hilary’s gun, and go and shoot me a few. Will you? The supplies are running low.”

“Of course I will,” was the answer, as they both went inside, and Justin Spence, invested with an excellent Number 12 bore, and a belt full of cartridges, started off on his errand of purveyor to the household, all his ill-humour gone. He was very young, you see, and the next best thing to glowing in the presence of his charmer was to be engaged in rendering her some service.

She stood there watching his receding form, as it moved away rapidly over the veldt in long elastic strides. Once he turned to look back. She waved her hand in encouragement.

“How good-looking he is!” she said to herself. “How well he moves too – so well set up and graceful! But why was he so emphatic just now when he called me that? Was it accidental? I wonder was it? Oh yes, it must have been. That’s the worst of an arrière pensée, one is always imagining things. No, the very fact of his putting such emphasis upon the name shows it was accidental. He’d never have been so mean – Justin isn’t that sort.”

She stood for a little longer, shading her eyes to gaze after him, again smiling softly to herself as she reflected how easily she could turn him round her little finger, how completely and entirely he was her slave; and, indeed, Justin Spence was not the only one of whom this held good. There was a warm-blooded physical attractiveness about her which never failed to appeal to those of the other sex. She was not beautiful, hardly even pretty. Her dark hair was plentiful, but it was coarse and wavy, and she had no regularity of feature, but lovely eyes and a very fascinating smile. Her hands were large, but her figure, of medium height, was built on seductive lines; and yet this strange conglomeration of attractions and defects was wont to draw the male animal a hundredfold more readily than the most approved and faultless types of beauty could ever have done.

Still musing she entered the house. It was cool within. Strips of “limbo,” white and dark blue, concealed the wattle and thatch, giving the interior something of the aspect of a marquee. There were framed prints upon the walls, mostly of a sporting character, and a few framed photographs. Before one of these she paused.

“I think you are tired of me, Hilary,” she murmured, as though addressing the inanimate bit of cardboard. “I think we are tired of each other. Yet – are we?”

Was there a touch of wistfulness in the words, in the tone as she gazed? Perhaps.

The eyes which met hers from the pictured cardboard were the eyes which had been all powerful to sway her, body and soul, as no other glance had ever availed to do; the face was that which had filled her every thought, day and night, and as no other had ever held it. Ah, but that was long ago: and time, and possession, utterly without restriction, had palled the heretofore only dreamed-of bliss!

“Yes, I think we are tired of each other,” she pursued. “He never takes me anywhere with him now. Says a camp’s no place for me, with nothing but men in it. As if I’d go if there were other women. Pah! I hate women. He used not to say that. Ah, well! And Justin! he really is a dear boy. I believe I am getting to love him, and when he comes back I shall give him a – Well, wait till he does. Perhaps by then I shall have changed my mood.”

She had dropped into a roomy rocking-chair – a sensuous, alluring personality as she lay back, her full supple figure swaying to the rhythmic movement of the rocker, kept going by one foot.

“It is as Justin said,” pursued the train of her meditations, “an abominable shame – a beastly shame, he called it – that I should be left all alone like this. Well, if I am, surely no one can blame me for consoling myself. But what a number of them there have been, all mad, quite mad, for the time, though not all so mad as poor Reggie. No, I oughtn’t to be proud of that – still I suppose I am. It isn’t every woman can say that a man has blown his brains out for her – and such a man as that too – a man of power and distinction, and wealthy enough even for me. If it hadn’t been for Hilary, he needn’t have done it. And, now Hilary and I are tired of each other. Ah!”

The last aloud. She rose and went to the door. The sound of a distant shot, then another, had given rise to this diversion. It came from away behind the granite kopjes. Her deputed hunter had got to work at any rate, with what result time would show.

The afternoon sun was declining. His rays swept warm and golden upon the spreading veldt and the pioneer residence, the latter looking, within its stockade, like a miniature fort. The air was wonderfully clear and pure; the golden effulgence upon the warm and balmy stillness rendering life well-nigh a joy in itself. The distant mellow shouts of the native herders, bringing in the cows; the thud of the hoofs of knee-haltered horses, nearer home, driven into their nightly stabling – for lions were prone to sporadic visits, and nothing alive could with safely be left outside; and then, again and again from time to time, the distant crack of the gun away behind the great granite kopjes, – all seemed much nearer by reason of the sweet unearthly stillness.

“He is doing me real service,” said Hermia to herself, as she gazed forth over this, and as each far-away report of the double-barrel was borne to her through the sweet evening air. “I think I can see him, sparing no pains – no trouble – climbing those horrid rocks, blown, breathless, simply because I —I– have asked him to do so.”

The sensuous glow of the rich African evening seemed to infect her. She stood, the sunlight bathing her splendid form, in its easy but still well-fitting covering. She began to wrap herself in anticipation, even as the glow of the declining day was wrapping her in its wondrous, ever-changing light. He would be back soon, this man whom she had sent out to toil through the afternoon heat in obedience to her behest. What would he not do if she so ordained it? And yet, as a saving clause, there was ever present to her mind the certainty that in any great and crucial matter his will would come uppermost, and it would be she who should have to receive instructions and follow them implicitly.

But then, if no great or crucial matter ever arose, her regard for him, so far from growing would, in time, diminish. He was younger than she was; his knowledge of the world – let alone his experience of life – immeasurably inferior to hers. Why, even his whole-souled and entire devotion to herself was the outcome of a certain callowness, the adoration of a boy. But to her omnivorous appetite for adoration it counted for something at any time, and here, where the article was scarce, why, like everything else in that remote corner of the earth, its value stood vastly enhanced. Yet even she could not in candour persuade herself that it contained the element of durability.

And that other? Well, he was tired of her – and she was just a little tired of him. Yet she had at one time pictured to herself, and to him, that life, alone with him, such as she was now leading, would be simple and unalloyed Paradise – they two, the world apart. She had looked up to him as to a god: now she wondered how she could ever have done so; there were times, indeed, when she was not careful to avoid saying as much. He had never replied, but there was that in his look which had told her plainer than words that she was fast driving nail after nail into the coffin of their love. His absences had grown more frequent and more prolonged. When at home he was graver, less communicative, never confidential.

And yet – and yet? Could that past ever be slurred over? Had it not left too deep, too indelible a mark on her, on both of them for that? This was a side, however, upon which Hermia never dwelt. Though physically seductive beyond the average, she was lacking in imagination. This kept her from looking forward, still more from such unprofitable mental exercise as retrospect. In sum, she was little more than a mere animal, enjoying the sunniness of life, cowering and whimpering when its shadow came. Just now, sunshine was uppermost, and her strong, full-blooded temperament expanded and glowed with pulsating and generous life.

Her meditations were broken in upon, and that by the sound of distant whistling, rapidly drawing nearer. Somehow the strains of “A bicycle made for two,” and “Ta-ra-ra boomdeay,” seemed to frame a jarring harmony to the sweet sunset beauty of that green and golden sweep of surrounding – the feathery mimosa and the tropical mahobo-hobo tree, and the grey granite piles, yonder, against the purple and red of the western sky – but the shrill whoop and dark forms of the Mashuna boys bringing in the cattle fitted in with the picture. But no eye or ear had she for any such incongruities, any such contrast. Justin Spence was drawing nearer and nearer to the house, with rapid impatient strides, and she could see that he was not returning empty-handed either.

Assuming her most seductive manner and most bewitching smile, she strolled down to the gate to welcome him.