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“How glad I am to see you, darling,” she said, a sunny light in her eyes as she looked at him. Le Sage grunted to himself, but it did not escape Wyvern. Something of warning too in Lalanté’s eyes did not escape him either.
“Father is only just back from the sale at Krumi Post,” she went on, “and although he did a good stroke of business there he’s come back grumpy. Well now it’s just dinner-time and you’ll all be better after that.”
Wyvern was quick to take in that something was wrong, but it never occurred to him to connect it with the doings of the day before. He set it down rather to the general disapproval of himself which had become more and more manifest of late in the demeanour of his quondam friend. There might have been an awkwardness but that Lalanté took care never to leave them alone together.
“Did anyone take your horse, dear?” she said. “Because, if not, I can send someone to shout for Piet.”
“That’s all right, Piet took him from me at the gate. Well, Le Sage – what did you do at the sale?”
The other told him, thawing a bit. Then, when they sat down to table, Wyvern opened the story of the slaughtering incident, and the tragic end of one of the actors therein. But of the attack of both upon himself he said nothing.
“A most infernal nuisance,” grumbled Le Sage. “I don’t know why I was fool enough to allow myself to be nominated Field-cornet. Well, if one of the schepsels has cheated the ‘cat’ the other’s all there for it, that’s one consolation.”
“Oh, I don’t know. I’m going to let the poor devil off.”
“Going to – what?” snapped Le Sage. “Oh, look here, Wyvern, really you’re getting past a joke. A fellow like you is a nuisance to the whole community. Why it’s putting a premium on ‘slaag-tag.’ You catch this swine red-handed – a clear case for the ‘cat’ – and then say you’re going to let him off. It isn’t fair to the rest of us. Don’t you see that?”
As a matter of fact Wyvern did see it; and felt a little uncomfortable.
“Perhaps you’re right, Le Sage,” he said. “But I’m too soft-hearted I suppose, and the sight of that other wretched devil, with that beastly snake tied round his leg, squirting blue death into him with every bite, is a sight I shan’t get rid of all in a hurry. And one human life, even that of a Kafir, is about expiation enough for a miserable sheep, worth eighteen bob or a pound at the outside. Eh?”
“I never heard such rot in my life,” was the answer. “All the more reason why the other chap’s hide should be made to smart for the whole mischief. Eh? Aren’t I right, Lalanté?”
A spirit of cussedness made him thus appeal to his daughter, a sort of longing to make her espouse his side against this other. But, even as he did so, he realised that he might as well have spared himself the trouble.
“No. I don’t think you are, since you put it to me,” she answered unhesitatingly. “On the contrary, I think you’d do much better to go and hold your enquiry and leave the other part of the business alone altogether.”
“The devil you do!”
“That’s it. You’ve put it exactly, father,” laughed Lalanté; “You’ll be riding over there after dinner, I suppose. Well, I’ll go with you.”
He expostulated. It was no place for a girl. The sight of a dead Kafir was no sight for her, he pointed out with some show of reason.
“But I’ve no intention of seeing any such sight,” she objected serenely. “I’ll wait for you a little way off while you make your investigations. That’ll be all right.”
Wyvern caught one swift look which rejoiced his heart. She had resolved not to let the whole afternoon go by without him if she could be with him. But there was more beneath her plan than he suspected. She did not mean to afford her father any opportunity of quarrelling with him, as he almost certainly would, in his then mood, if they were alone together for any space of time just then. In most things Lalanté contrived to get her own way.
Now with a rush and a racket, two small boys came tumbling in, hot and ruddy with their scramblings about the veldt. Each exhibited, in triumph, a bunch of long feathers from the tail of the mouse-bird, or rather of many mouse-birds; the spoil of their bow and spear – or rather, catapults.
“Here you are, dad. You’re set up in pipe-cleaners now for some time to come. Hullo, Mr Wyvern. There’ll be enough for you too.”
They chucked the feathers down unceremoniously upon the table, and began to draw up chairs. But Lalanté interposed.
“No. No you don’t, Charlie – Frank – away you go, and do the soap and basin trick. I’m not going to have you sitting down to table straight out of the veldt,” she said decisively. “Come – scoot – do you hear?”
“Oh, all right. Man – Mr Wyvern, but there’s a big troop of guinea-fowl down by the second draai. I hope you brought your gun.”
“Did I say ‘Scoot’?” repeated Lalanté, the disciplinarian.
They lingered no further after that. They were good-looking boys, with their sister’s large grey eyes. In a trice they were back again, keeping things lively with their chatter, and the girl encouraged them. There was thunder in the air, she recognised, and her main anxiety was to avert the impending storm. And afterwards, before she retired to put on her riding-gear, she managed to impress upon the two youngsters that they were to help entertain their guest for all they knew how until her return, which duty – Wyvern being a prime favourite with them – was not an onerous one; moreover with them Lalanté’s word was law.
Their ride forth was not exactly a success. Lalanté, bright, beautiful, sparkling, kept up a flow of laughing quips, but the more she did so, the more gloomy – grumpy she called it – did her father become. Wyvern, riding by her side, felt all aglow with the pride of possession as he noted every fascinating little trick of speech, or manner, or pose, all absolutely natural and unaffected, and all going to make up the very complete charm of her personality. Not for the first time either did he find himself marvelling how this pride of possession should be his at all. Though only in the early twenties Lalanté had had time and opportunity for “experiences,” but such experiences, however disquieting to the other parties to them, had left her unscathed. She had come to him heart-whole. None before him had ever had power to awaken her. That had been reserved for him, and the awakening had been mutual from the very first.
“We’d better leave the horses here, Le Sage,” suggested Wyvern as they drew near the donga wherein the unfortunate Kafir would be lying. “It’ll be cool for Lalanté under these trees, and the place is only a hundred yards further. Moreover we shall have to scramble a bit to get to it.”
Le Sage glumly assented, cursing the bother of the whole business. He had just got home off a journey and here he was, lugged out over miles of veldt because an infernal fool of a nigger had got bitten by a snake. The Field-cornet job wasn’t good enough at that price, and he’d chuck it.
Thus grumbling, he followed Wyvern in what was literally a scramble, not always free from danger either; for the river bank along the face of which they had to make their way here was steep enough to be almost precipitous, and high enough to render a fall on to the stones below a contingency not to be contemplated with equanimity. But fortune favoured them, and they gained their objective without accident.
“Magtig! what a beastly hole,” grunted Le Sage, as they stood within the mouth of the donga. “Well, the brute must be pretty far gone by this time. Sss! I can smell him already. We’d better start our pipes, Wyvern.”
They were standing at the bottom of a narrow rift some thirty feet in depth, its sides narrowing walls of a sandy-clayey soil and looking uncomfortably suggestive of the possibility of falling in upon them. A close network of boughs and prickly pear plants overhead well-nigh shut off the light of day, turning the place into a regular cavern. A little further and the walls narrowed, necessitating single file progress.
“A devilish unpleasant place to find oneself confronted in by a kwai geel slang,”[1 - The geel slang, anglice “yellow-snake,” is a variety of cobra, and takes first rank among the deadliest reptiles of South Africa.] said Wyvern – who was leading – over his shoulder, grimly. “We couldn’t dodge him at any price here.”
“Yes, yes. But what about the nigger?” said the other testily. “Where the devil is he?”
The same idea had struck Wyvern, who had stopped, and after looking in front was now gazing upwards in most unfeigned amazement.
“Where the devil indeed,” he echoed. “Look, Le Sage. There’s the hole he made in the green stuff tumbling through. Prickly pear leaves too, broken off by the fall. But – where the devil is the chump himself? He ought to be here, but isn’t.”
This was indisputable. The precipitous banks of the place were marked and scored, and leaves and twigs, obviously freshly torn, still clung to the said banks here and there. Some heavy body had manifestly fallen down there at that spot, but of any such thing there was now no other sign.
“Oh, look here, Wyvern. Haven’t you been filling us up with some sick old yarn?” said Le Sage disgustedly. “Why, man, there’s no sign of any dead nigger here. Sure your imagination didn’t play you tricks?”
“Oh, very. No mistake about that – by the way weren’t you saying just now you could smell him?” good-humouredly. “What if some of his pals came and carted him away?”
“Then there’d be spoor, and plenty of it. As it is there’s none. And I do know a little about spoor,” added Le Sage significantly.
“Well it bangs me, I own,” declared Wyvern. “But now we’re here we’d better follow the ditch right up. I don’t feel like taking on that nasty scramble again, do you?”
“No. Drive ahead then.”
Proceeding with some caution, for it was just the place in which to come upon a snake, they made their way gradually upward and soon stood within the open light of day.
“Well, my imagination didn’t play me tricks this shot,” said Wyvern, as they stood looking at the bones of the slaughtered sheep, picked clean by aasvogels and jackals.
“No. There were two of them at this job. I can see that plainly enough,” said Le Sage, scrutinising the ground. “Well, we’ve had our ride for nothing. The first essential towards holding an inquiry on a dead nigger is for there to be a dead nigger to hold it on, and there isn’t one here.”
“Well, I own it bangs me,” said Wyvern, puzzled.
“So it does me,” said Le Sage, significantly.
Chapter Seven.
A Scare – And a Home Circle
“Well, Lalanté. Wyvern’s snake-bitten Kafir has not only killed himself, but he has performed his own funeral into the bargain – at least, he must have, because there’s no sign of him down there. Why – what’s the row?”
There was a curious, startled look upon the girl’s face – hearing the sound of their voices she had come forward to meet them. She was pale, too, as from the effects of a fright.
“What scared you, dearest?” said Wyvern anxiously – he was at her side in a moment. “Not another snake?”
“No. I believe it was a Kafir.”
“A Kafir?” echoed Le Sage. “Hullo, Wyvern. Your snake-bitten chap has not only performed his own funeral but he has already begun to walk.”
“Come over to where I was sitting,” said the girl. “I can show you better from there.”
“But hang it, Lalanté, you’re not the one to be scared by the sight of a Kafir,” said her father, incredulously.
“This one had an awful look,” she answered, with a little shudder. “Hardly human – almost like someone dead.”
She had been leading the way – it was only a few yards – to where she had been seated under the shade of some willows.
“Look,” she said. “It was over that prickly pear stem. Something made me look up and I saw a head – a fearful-looking black head, not like anything in life. It was glaring at me with such an awful expression, I wonder I didn’t scream, but I believe I was afraid even to do that. Then it sank down again and disappeared.”
The point indicated might have been a couple of dozen yards distant Wyvern, pressing her hand, felt that she was in a state of tremble.
“Come along, Wyvern. We’ll look into this,” said Le Sage irritably. He was a man who hated mystery, and was incredulous as regarded this one. “If there is any mad Kafir hanging about here a touch of stirrup iron’ll be the best remedy should he prove obstreperous.” And so saying he went to his horse’s side and detached one of the stirrups. Now a stirrup iron in the hands of one who knows how to use it, is a very formidable weapon of offence or defence.
“But I’ll go too,” said the girl, quickly. “I’m dead off staying here by myself after that experience.”
“Quite sure it was an experience?” queried her father, somewhat sourly.
But reaching the place she had pointed out, there was no sign of anybody having stood there. Le Sage’s first instinct was to examine the ground. He looked up again, baffled.
“No trace of any spoor whatever,” he said irritably. “No living being could have stood there and left none – let alone coming here and getting away again. Your imagination is very much on the warpath to-day, Lalanté.”
“Just as you like,” she answered, piqued. “Only, I was never credited with such a vivid imagination before.”
She felt hurt. She really had been badly frightened. The comforting pressure of Wyvern’s hand was inexpressibly sweet to her at that moment.
“Oh, well. We’ll just take a cast further round,” said Le Sage… “No, just as I thought;” he added, after this operation. “My dear child, your spectral Kafir must have vanished into thin air. He certainly couldn’t have done so over hard firm ground and left no trace whatever.”
“Well, here are two deuced odd things,” pronounced Wyvern. “First of all, the chap who was bitten again and again by a puff-adder, and should have been lying down there in an advanced stage of – well – unpleasantness, isn’t there at all. The next, Lalanté, who isn’t easily frightened, meets with a bad scare at sight of something which sounds uncommonly like the deceased defaulter when last I saw him.”
“Yes – it’s rum – very,” declared Le Sage drily, replacing the stirrup he had taken off his saddle. “Well, good-bye, Wyvern.”
“What’s that?” said Lalanté, decisively. “Goodbye? But he’s going back with us. Aren’t you, dear? I shall be most frightfully disappointed if you don’t.”
The glance she shot at him – her father was busy lighting his pipe – expressed love, entreaty, the possibility of disappointment, all rolled into one. Wyvern would not have been human if he had withstood it. As a matter of fact he had no wish to, but Le Sage’s manner was such that the words seemed to convey a broad hint that to that worthy at any rate his room was preferable to his company. But he was not going to take any marching orders from Le Sage.
“Then that you most certainly shall not be,” he said, cheerfully, returning, to the full, the girl’s loving glance.
“Of course not,” she rejoined, brightly. “I had arranged a little programme in my own mind, and you are to stay the night. It seems to me we have not seen half enough of each other lately. Well, it’s time to remedy that and I propose we begin now.”
Inwardly Le Sage was furious. He rode on in front grimly silent, but it was little enough those two minded that as they wended over the golden glory of the sunlit plains – together. Together! Yes, and the word covered a haven of rest to both, for then it was that all the world – with its worries and anxieties and apprehensions – was a thing outside. Yet from the point of view of Le Sage there was a good deal to be said. He was not a demonstrative man, this one, who enjoyed the repute of never having made a bad bargain in his life; yet in his heart of hearts he had a very soft place for this beautiful only daughter of his, and the secret of his rancour lay in the fact that he resented her leaving him at all – or at any rate for some time to come. It was unreasonable, he would candidly allow to himself – but the feeling was there. She had brightened his home and his life, and now she was prepared – even anxious – to cease doing both – to leave him at the call of an outside stranger of whose very existence barely a year ago she had hardly been aware. Had it been a man of solid gifts and substantial position upon whom she had bestowed her love, it would have been a gilding of the pill; but she had chosen to throw herself away upon a “waster” – as his favourite and wrathful epithet put it – one on the verge of insolvency, and without the requisite faculties for righting himself – ah, that rendered the potion a very black and nauseous one to the universally successful man.
Now as he rode, in gloomy silence, the laugh, and quip, and tender tone of the pair behind him, was as fuel to the fire of his anxiety to give Wyvern his congé, and that in unmistakable terms. He had made up his mind to do this, from the moment he had looked and had seen him coming in at the gate, but Lalanté had taken care they should never be alone together. Well, he would do it – not to-day but to-morrow morning, and if no opportunity occurred he would make one; point-blank if need be. A “waster” like that, who couldn’t even keep himself!
“Hullo, Le Sage. You seem a bit off colour,” cried Wyvern genially, ranging up alongside, as they topped the last rise, wherefrom the homestead came into view about a mile in front. “It really was a beastly shame to lug you off on that fool’s errand after the long ride of it you had had.”
“Oh, I’m all right. It’s all in the day’s job, and I’m as tough as wire, thank the Lord. Is that confounded vermin-preserve behind your place as full as ever, Wyvern? It’s about time you killed some of it off, isn’t it?”
The reference was to the network of rugged bushy kloofs of which mention has been made, and which were specially adapted for the harbouring of various forms of wild life, antipathetic and detrimental to stock.
“Well, I think it is, now you mention it,” was the answer. “We might get up a big hunt next week. You’ll come, won’t you? Come the day before and sleep the night. Bring Lalanté too, and the youngsters.”
“Don’t know. I’m going to be jolly busy next week,” was the answer, the speaker grimly wondering whether their relations even next day would still be such as to render any arrangement of the kind possible.
And so they reached home.
It must be recorded of Lalanté Le Sage that she had no “accomplishments.” She could not play three notes, she declared, neither did she sing, though the voice in which she trilled forth odd snatches naturally and while otherwise occupied, seemed to show that she might have done so had she chosen. Drawing and painting too, were equally out of her line. She had had enough of that sort of thing at school she would explain, and was not going to be bothered with it any more. On the other hand she had a remarkably shrewd and practical mind, and her management of her father’s house was perfect. So also was that of her two small brothers, who, by the way, were only her half brothers, Le Sage having twice married – the first time at an unusually early age. Them she ruled with a rule that was absolute, and – they adored her. Her orders admitted of no question, and still they adored her. Was there one of their boyish interests and pursuits – from the making of a catapult to the most thrilling details of the last blood-and-thunder scalping story they had been reading – into which she did not enter? Not one. And when the question arose of sending them away to school, it was Lalanté who declared in her breezy, decisive way that they were still too small, and what did it matter if they were behind other kiddies of their age in matters of history and geography? They would soon pick it all up afterwards. For her part she never could see what was the advantage of learning a lot of stuff about all those rascally old kings who chopped off everybody’s head who had ever been useful to them. That was about all that history consisted of so far as she remembered anything of it. Geography – well, that of course was of some use – might be, rather, for as taught in school it seemed to consist of what were the principal towns of all sorts of countries none of them were ever likely to see in their lives, and whether this particular place was noted for the manufacture of carpets, or that for the production of bone-dust. As for the “three R’s” she herself had given the youngsters an elementary grounding there, which was about all she was capable of doing, she declared frankly, with her bright laugh – indeed, she wondered that she was even capable of doing that.
Lalanté’s order of beauty was extremely hard to define, but it was there for all that. Hers were no straight classical features; the contour of the face was rather towards roundness, and the cupid-bow mouth was not small, but it was tempting in repose, and perfectly irresistible when flashing into a frequent and brilliant smile. It was a face that was provoking in its contradictoriness – the lower half, mobile, mischievous, fun-loving: while the steady straight glance of the large grey eyes, and the clearly marked brows, spelt “character” writ in capitals. It seemed, too, as if Nature had been undecided whether to create her fair or dark, and had given up the problem half way, for there was a golden sheen in the light brown hair, which the warmth of colouring that would come and go beneath the clear skin almost seemed to contradict.
All of which Wyvern was going over in his own mind, for the hundredth time, as on this particular evening he sat watching her, deciding, not for the first time either, that if there was one situation more than another in which she seemed at her very best, it was here in her home circle. He was not talking much; Le Sage was drowsy and inclined to nod. However, he was more than content to sit there revelling in the sheer contemplation of her – now helping to amuse the small boys, now running a needle through a few stitches of work, now throwing a bright smile or some laughing remark across to him. Then, having at length packed the youngsters off to bed, she was free for a long, delightful chat – Le Sage was snoring audibly by this time. It was an evening – one of many – that he would remember to the end of his life, and no instinct or presentiment seemed to warn him that it might be the last of the kind he was destined to experience. At last Le Sage snored so violently that he woke himself, and, jumping up, pronounced it time to turn in – which indisputably it was. But the announcement brought a certain amount of relief to Lalanté, for she had not been without anxiety on the ground of leaving the two alone together.
“I have been simply adoring you all the evening, my darling,” whispered Wyvern passionately, as he released her from a good-night embrace.
She did not answer, but her eyes grew luminous, as she lifted her lips for a final kiss. A word of love from him was sufficient to make her simply lose herself. A pressure of two hands, and she was gone.
Chapter Eight.
The “Word in Private.”
“I want to have a word with you in private, Wyvern.”
“In private?”
“Yes. I was going to yesterday but left it till now. Business matters are best talked about in the morning.”
Thus Le Sage, as the two met over their early coffee. Lalanté had not yet appeared.
“All right,” assented Wyvern, who had a pretty straight inkling of what was coming. “Where shall we hold our council of war?”
“Out in the open. Nothing like the open veldt if you want to talk over anything important. If you do it in a room ten to one a word or two gets overheard, and a word or two is often quite enough to give away the whole show.”
“There I entirely agree. Well – lead on.”
Le Sage did so. Hardly a word was exchanged between the two as they walked for about half a mile, first along a bush path, then over the veldt. One was turning over in his mind how he should put the case to the other. The other, anticipating their bearing, had already made up his as to how he should meet the arguments advanced.
Le Sage came to a halt. They had reached the brink of a krantz, of no great height and railing away now in slabs, now in aloe-grown boulders, to the Kunaga River, the swirl and babble of whose turgid waters they could hear, as it coursed between its willow grown banks – could hear but not see, for a morning mist hung over the land, shutting out everything beyond a radius of twenty yards.
“We shall be all right here,” said Le Sage, seating himself upon a stone. Then he relapsed into silence, and proceeded to fill his pipe. Wyvern did the same. Decidedly the situation was awkward. When two men who have been friends are about to embark on a discussion which the chances are fifty to one will leave them enemies – in short, is bound to culminate in a quarrel, and that a bitter one – why the preliminaries are sure to be awkward. Wyvern was the one to force the situation.
“Look here, Le Sage. We didn’t come here to smoke the pipe of silent meditation, did we? You said something about business matters you wanted to talk over with me. Now – drive ahead.”
