Part 10

"I 'm an invalid," said Margaret placidly. "A crock, you know. I 've got to take what chances I can find of doing things. But it 's no use explaining such a thing as this. If you 're not going to understand and be sympathetic, don't let 's talk about it at all."

He did not at once reply. She stood on the last step but one and looked down towards him where he stood like a part of the night, and though she could see of him only the shape, she showed to him as a tall slenderness, with the faint luminosity of bare arms and face and neck. He seemed to be staring at her very intently.

"Anyhow," he said suddenly--"what is wanted principally is to bring him in. That is so, is n't it? Well, I 'll fetch him for you. Will you be satisfied with that?"

"No, you mustn't," said Margaret. "Mrs. Jakes wouldn't allow it. Never mind why. She simply wouldn't."

"I know why," he answered. "I 've come across all that before. But this Kafir has seen the state of that white man. That does n't make any difference? No?"

Margaret had shaken her head. "I 'm awfully sorry," she said. "I feel like a brute--but if you had seen her when I suggested getting help. It was the one thing that terrified her. You see, it 's her I want to help, much more than Dr. Jakes, and she must have her way. So please don't be hurt, will you?"

He laughed a little. "Oh, _that_ doesn't hurt me," he said. "If it were you, it would be different, but Mrs. Jakes can't help it. However--do you know where this man keeps his drugs?"

"In the study," answered Margaret. "In there, on the left. But why?"

"I 'm a doctor too; you 'd forgotten that, had n't you? If I had two or three things I could mix something that would sober him in a couple of minutes."

"Really?" Margaret considered it for a minute, but even that would not do. She could not bring herself to brave Mrs. Jakes' horror and sense of betrayal when she should see the deliverer who came out of the night. And, after all, it was she who had claimed Margaret's help. "We're friends, aren't we?" she had asked, and the girl had answered "Yes." It was not the part of a friend to press upon her a gift that tasted pungently of ruin and shame.

"No," said Margaret. "Don't offer any more help, please. It hurts to keep on refusing it. But it isn't what Mrs. Jakes woke me up to beg of me and it isn't what I got up from bed to grant her. Can't you see what I mean? I 've told you all about it, and I 'm trusting you to understand."

"I understand," he answered. "But I hate to let you go down to that drunken beast. And suppose the pair of you can't manage him--what will you do then? You 'll have to get help somewhere, won't you?"

"I suppose so," said Margaret.

"Well, get me," he urged, and came a pace nearer, so that only the width of the two bottom steps separated them and she could feel his breath upon the hands that hung clasped before her. "Let me help, if you need it," he begged. "I 'll wait, out of sight. Mrs. Jakes shan't guess I 'm there. But I won't be far, and if you just call quietly, I 'll hear. It--it would be kind of you--merciful to let me bear just a hand. And if you don't call, I 'll not show myself. There can't be any harm in that."

"No," agreed Margaret, uncertainly. "There can't be any harm in that."

She saw that he moved abruptly, and had an impression that he made some gesture almost of glee. But he thanked her in quiet tones for her grace of consent.

Mrs. Jakes, returning, found Margaret as she had left her. She had in her hand one of those stable lanterns which consist of a glass funnel protected by a wire cage, and she spilled its light about her feet as she went and walked in a shifting ring of light through a darkness made more opaque by the contrast. There was visible of her chiefly her worn elastic-sided boots as she came down the steps with the lantern swinging in her hand; and the little feet in those uncomely coverings were somehow appealing and pathetic.

"I found it in Fat Mary's room," she explained. "She nearly woke up when I was taking it."

Margaret wondered whether Kamis were near enough to hear and acute enough to picture the tiptoe search for the lantern by the bedside of snoring Kafirs, the breathless halts when one stirred, the determination that carried the quest through, and the prosaic matter-of-factness of it all.

They stumbled their way arm in arm across the spit of patched grass that stood between the house and the road, and the lantern diffused about them a yellow haze. Then their feet recognized soft loose dust and they were on the road and moving along it.

"It is n't far," said Mrs. Jakes, in her flat quiet voice. "Be careful, my dear; there are sometimes snakes on the road at night."

Dr. Jakes was apparent first as an indeterminate bulk against the dust that spread before them under the lantern. Mrs. Jakes saw him first.

"He has n't moved," she remarked. "I was rather afraid he might have. These fits, you know--he 's had them before."

She stood at his head, with the lantern held before her, like a sentinel at a lying-in-state, and the whole unloveliness of his slumbers was disclosed. He sprawled upon the road in his formal black clothes, with one arm outstretched and his face upturned to the grave innocence of the night. It had not the cast of repose; he seemed to have carried his torments with him to his couch of dust and to brood upon them under his mask of sleep. What was ghastly was the eyelids which were not fully shut down, but left bare a thin line of white eyeball under each, and touched the broken countenance with deathliness. His coat, crumpled about him and over him, gave an impression of a bloated and corpulent body, and he was stained from head to foot with dust.

Mrs. Jakes surveyed him without emotion.

"He 's undone his collar, anyhow," she remarked.

"Did n't you do it?" asked Margaret, seeing the white ends that rose on each side of his chin.

"No; I forgot," was the answer. "He can't be very bad, since he did that."

Margaret detected the hand of Kamis in this precaution. She said nothing, but stooped with Mrs. Jakes to try to rouse the doctor. The sickening reek of the man's breath affronted her as she bent over him.

Mrs. Jakes shook him and called on him by name in a loud half-whisper, lowering her face close to his ear. She was persuasive, remonstrant; she had the manner of reasoning briskly with him and rousing him to better ways.

"Eustace, Eustace," she called, hushing her tones as though the night and the desert were perilous with ears. "Come, Eustace; you can get up if you try. Make just one effort, now, and you 'll be all right."

The gurgle of his breath was the only answer.

"We 'll have to lift him," she said, staring across his body at Margaret.

"All right," agreed the girl.

"Get hold of his right arm and I 'll take his left," directed Mrs. Jakes. "If we get him on his feet, perhaps he 'll rouse. Are you ready?"

Margaret closed her lips and put forth the strength that she had, and between them they dragged him to a sitting posture, with his head hanging back and his heels furrowed deep in the dust.

"Now, if I can just get behind him," panted Mrs. Jakes. "Don't let go. That's it. Now! Could you just help to lift him straight up?"

Margaret went quickly to her aid. It had become horrible. The gross carcass in their hands was inert like a flabby corpse, and its mere weight overtaxed them. They wrestled with it sobbingly, to the noise of their harsh breath and the shuffle of their straining feet on the grit of the road. Suddenly Margaret ceased her laboring and the doctor collapsed once more upon the ground.

"Why did you do that?" cried Mrs. Jakes. "He was nearly up."

"It was my chest," answered Margaret weakly. "It--it hurt."

There was a warm feeling in her throat and a taste in her mouth which she knew of old. She found her handkerchief and dabbed with it at her lips. The feeble light of the lantern showed her the result--the red spots on the white cambric.

"It 's just a strain," said Mrs. Jakes, dully. "That 's all. The doctor will see to it to-morrow. If you rest a moment, you 'll be all right." She hesitated, but her husband and her life's credit lay upon the ground at her feet, and she could not weigh Margaret's danger against those. "You wouldn't leave me now, my dear?" she supplicated.

"No," said the girl, after a moment's pause. "I won't leave you."

"What 's that?" cried Mrs. Jakes and put a quick frightened hand upon her arm. "Listen! Who is it?"

Steps, undisguised and clear, passed from the grass to the stone steps of the house and ascended, crossed the stoep and were lost to hearing in the doorway.

The two women waited, breathless. It sprang to Margaret's mind that the lantern must have shown her clearly to Kamis, where he waited in the darkness, and he must have seen the climax of her efforts and her handkerchief at her lips, and gone forthwith to the study for the drugs which would put an end to the matter.

"Look," whispered Mrs. Jakes. "Some one is striking matches--in the study."

The window brightened and darkened again and then lit with a steady glow; the invader had found a candle. Mrs. Jakes dropped Margaret's arm.

"I must see who it is," she said. "Walking into people's houses like this."

Margaret held her back; she was starting forthwith to bring the majesty of her presence to bear on the unknown and possibly dangerous intruder. Mrs. Jakes had a house as well as a husband and could die at need for either.

"No, don't go," said Margaret. "I know who it is. It's all right, if only you won't be--well, silly about it."

"Who is it, then?" demanded Mrs. Jakes.

Margaret felt feeble and unequal to the position. Her chest was painful, she was cold, and now there was about to be a delicate affair with Mrs. Jakes. She could have laughed at the growing complexity of things, but had the wit not to.

"It 's a doctor," she said; "a real London doctor. He was passing when you left me to get the lantern, and I wouldn't let him stay because I thought you 'd be annoyed. He 's gone into the house to--"

"Does he know?" whispered Mrs. Jakes, feverishly, thrusting close to her. "Does he know--about this?" Her downward-pointing finger indicated the slumbers of Dr. Jakes. "Say, can't you--does he know?"

"He 'd seen him," said Margaret. "I expect he loosened the collar--you know. He wanted to help but I wouldn't let him."

"Is he a friend of yours?" asked Mrs. Jakes again, still in the same agitated whisper.

"Yes," answered Margaret. "He is. It 's all right, really, if only you 'll be sensible and not make a fuss. He 'll help us and then he 'll go away and he 'll say nothing. You did n't think I 'd do anything to hurt you, did you? Are n't we friends?"

Mrs. Jakes stood silent; she asked no questions as to how a London doctor, a friend of Margaret's, chanced to be walking upon the Karoo at night.

"Well," she said at last, with a long sigh; "perhaps we might have needed some help, in any case."

That was all she said, till the footsteps came again across the stoep and down the steps, more deliberately this time, as though something were being carried with precaution. Then they were noiseless for a minute or more on the grass, and at last the figure of Kamis came into the further edge of the lighted circle.

"I had to do it," he said, before either of them could speak, and showed the graduated glass in his hand. "I saw you with your handkerchief."

Margaret, with an instinct of apprehension, looked at Mrs. Jakes. At the first dim view of him, she had roused herself from her dejection, and put on her prim, social face to meet the London doctor effectively. Her little meaningless smile was bent for him; she would make a blameless and uneventful drawing-room of the August night and guard it against unseemly dramatics.

He turned from Margaret towards her and came further into the lamp-light, and she had a clear view of the black face and sorrowful, foolish negro features. She uttered a gasp that was like a low cry and stood aghast, staring.

"Madam," began Kamis.

She shivered. "A Kafir," she said. "The doctor will never forgive us." And then, wheeling upon Margaret, "And I 'll never forgive you. You said we were friends--and this is what you do to me."

"Mrs. Jakes," implored Margaret. "You must be sensible. It 's all right, really. This gentleman--"

"This gentleman," Mrs. Jakes uttered a passionate spurt of laughter. "Do you mean this nigger? Gentleman, you call it? A London doctor? A friend of yours? A friend. Ha, ha!" She spun round again towards Kamis, waiting with the glass in his hand, the liquid in which shone greenish to the lamp. "_Voetzaak!_" she ordered, shrilly. "_Hamba wena--ch'che. Skellum. Injah. Voetzaak!_"

Kamis stood his ground. He cast a look at Margaret, past Mrs. Jakes, and spoke to her.

"Will she let me give him this?" he asked. "Tell her I am a doctor and this will bring him to very quickly. And then I 'll go away at once and never say a word about it."

"Don't you dare touch him," menaced Mrs. Jakes. "A filthy Kafir--I should think so, indeed."

Kamis went on in the same steady tone. "If she won't you must go in at once and send for another doctor to-morrow. This man ought to be reported."

"You dare," cried Mrs. Jakes. "You 'd report him--a Kafir." She edged closer to the prostrate body of Dr. Jakes and stood beside it like a beast-mother at bay. "I 'll have you locked up--walking into my husband's study like that."

"Mrs. Jakes." Margaret tried once more. "Please listen. If you 'll only let the doctor have this drink, he 'll be able to walk. If you don't, he 'll have to stay here. I am your friend; I got up when you came to me and I said I wouldn't leave you even when I hurt my chest. Doesn't that prove that I am? I wouldn't do you any harm or shame you before other people for anything. What will Dr. Jakes say if he finds out that you let me stay here pleading when I ought to be in bed? He 's a doctor himself and he 'll be awfully annoyed--after telling me I should get well, too. Aren't you going to give him a chance--and me?"

Mrs. Jakes merely glared stonily.

"Come," said Margaret. "Won't you?"

Kamis uttered a smothered exclamation. "I won't wait," he said. "I 'll count ten, slowly. Then Miss Harding must go in and I go away."

"Oh, don't begin that sort of thing," cried Margaret. "Mrs. Jakes is going to be sensible. Aren't you?"

There was no reply, only the stony and hostile stare of the little woman facing them and the gray image of disgrace.

"One," counted Kamis clearly. "Two. Three."

He counted with the stolid regularity of a clock; he made as though to overturn the glass and waste its contents in the dust as soon as he should have reached ten. "Ten," he uttered, but held it safely still. "Well?"

Mrs. Jakes did not move for some moments. Then she sighed and, still without speaking, moved away from the slumbering doctor. She walked a dozen paces from the road and stood with her back to them.

With quick skilful movements, Kamis lifted the unconscious man's head to the crook of his arm and the rim of the glass clicked on his teeth. Margaret walked after Mrs. Jakes.

"Come," she said gently. "I don't misunderstand. You trusted me or you would n't have waked me. Everything will be all right soon and then you 'll forgive me."

"I won't--never."

Mrs. Jakes would not face her. She stood looking into the blackness, tense with enmity.

"Well, I hope you will," said Margaret.

They heard grunts from the doctor and then quavering speech and one rich oath, and a noise of spitting. The Kafir approached them noiselessly from behind and paused at Margaret's side.

"That's done the trick," he said; "and he doesn't even know who gave him the draft. You 'll go in now?"

"Yes," said Margaret. "You _have_ been good, though."

Mrs. Jakes had returned to her husband; they were for the moment alone.

"I didn't mean to force your hand," he whispered. "But I had to. A doctor has duties."

She gave him her hand. "There was something I wanted to tell you, but there 's no time to explain now. Did you know you were wanted by the police?"

"Bless you, yes." He smiled with a white flash of teeth. "Were you going to warn me? How kind! And now, in you go, and good night."

Dr. Jakes was sitting up, spitting with vigor and astonishment. He had taken a heroic dose of hair-raising restoratives on the head of a poisonous amount of whisky, and his palate was a moldering ruin. But the clearness of his faculties left nothing to be desired.

"Who 's that?" he demanded at sight of Margaret. "Miss Harding. How do you come to be out here at this time?"

"You should time your fits more decently, doctor," answered Margaret coolly.

Mrs. Jakes hastened to explain more acceptably. "I was frightened, Eustace. You looked so bad--and these fits are terrible. So I asked Miss Harding if she wouldn't come and help me."

"A patient," said the doctor. He turned over and rose stiffly to his feet, dust-stained all over. He stood before her awkwardly.

"I am unfortunate," he said. "You are in my care and this is what happens. It is my misfortune--and my fault. You 'll go back to bed now, Miss Harding, please."

"Sure there 's nothing more you want?" inquired Margaret.

"At once, please," he repeated. "In the morning--but go at once now."

On the stoep she paused to listen to them following after her and heard a portion of Mrs. Jakes' excuses to her husband.

"You looked so dreadful, Eustace, and I was frightened. And then, you 're so heavy, and I suppose I was tired, and to-night I couldn't quite manage by myself, dear."

Margaret passed in at the door in order to cough unheard, that nothing might be added to the tale of Mrs. Jakes' delinquencies.

*CHAPTER IX*

"And what have we here?" said the stranger loudly. "What have we here, now?"

Paul, sitting cross-legged in his old place under the wall of the dam, with a piece of clay between his fingers, looked round with a start. The stranger had come up behind him, treading unheard in his burst and broken shoes upon the soft dust, and now stood leaning upon a stick and smiling down upon him with a kind of desperate jauntiness. His attitude and manner, with their parody of urbane ease, had for the moment power to hide the miserable shabbiness of his clothes, which were not so much broken and worn as decayed; it was decay rather than hardship which marked the whole figure of the man. Only the face, clean-shaven save for a new crop of bristles, had some quality of mobility and temper, and the eyes with which he looked at Paul were wary and hard.

"Oh, nothing," said Paul, uneasily, covering his clay with one hand. "Who are you?"

The stranger eyed him for some moments longer with the shrewdness of one accustomed to read his fortune in other men's faces, and while he did so the smile remained fixed on his own as though he had forgotten to take it off.

"Who am I!" he exclaimed. "My boy, it 'd take a long time to tell you. But there 's one thing that perhaps you can see for yourself--I 'm a gentleman."

Paul considered this information deliberately.

"Are you?" he said.

"I 'm dusty," admitted the other; "dusty both inside and out. And I 'm travelin' on foot--without luggage. So much I admit; I 've met with misfortunes. But there 's one thing the devil himself can't take away from me, and that 's the grand old name of gentleman. An' now, my lad, to business; you live at that farm there?"

"Yes," replied Paul. This tramp had points at which he differed from other tramps, and Paul stared at him thoughtfully.

"So far, so good," said the stranger. "Question number two: does it run to a meal for a gentleman on his travels, an' a bed of sorts? Answer me that. I don't mean a meal with a shilling to pay at the end of it, because--to give it you straight--I 'm out of shillings for the present. Now, speak up."

"If you go up there, they 'll give you something to eat, and you can sleep somewhere," said Paul, a little puzzled by the unusual rhetoric.

The stranger nodded approvingly. "It's all right, then?" he said. "Good--go up one. But say! Ain't you going there yourself pretty soon?"

"Presently," said Paul.

"Then, if it 's all the same to you," said the stranger, "I 'll wait and go up with you. Nothing like being introduced by a member," he added, as he lowered himself stiffly to a seat among the rank grass under the wall. "Gives a feller standing, don't it?"

He took off his limp hat and let himself fall back against the slope of the wall, grunting with appreciation of the relief after a day's tramp in the sun. His rather full body and thin legs, ending in a pair of ruinous shoes that let his toes be seen, lay along the grass like an obscene corpse, and above them his feeble, sophisticated face leered at Paul as though to invite him to become its confidant.

"You go on with what you 're doing," urged the stranger. "Don't let me hinder you. Makin' marbles, were you--or what?"

"No," said Paul. He hesitated, for an idea had come to him while he watched the stranger. "But--but if you 'll do something for me, I 'll give you a shilling."

"Eh?" The other rolled a dull eye on him. "It isn't murder, is it? I should want one-and-six for that. I never take less."

Paul flushed. "I don't know what you mean," he said. "I only want you to keep still like that while I--while I make a model of you. You said you had n't got any shillings just now."

"Did I say that?" inquired the stranger. "Well, well! However, chuck us over your shilling and I 'll see what I can do for you."

He made a show of biting the coin and subjecting it to other tests of its goodness while the boy looked on anxiously. Paul was relieved when at last he pocketed it and lay back again.

"I 'll get rid of it somehow," he said. "It's very well made. And now, am I to look pleasant, or what?"

"Don't look at all," directed Paul. "Just be like--like you are. You can go to sleep if you like."

"I never sleep on an empty stomach," replied the stranger, arranging himself in an attitude of comfort.

"Is this all right for you? Fire away, then, Mike Angelo. Can I talk while you 're at it?"

"If you want to," answered Paul. The clay which he had been shaping was another head, and now he kneaded it out of shape between his hands and rounded it rudely for a sketch of the face before him. The Kafir, Kamis, had bidden him refrain from his attempts to do mass and detail at once, to form the features and the expression together; but Paul knew he had little time before him and meant to make the most of it. The tramp had his hands joined behind his head and his eyes half-closed; he offered to the boy the spectacle of a man beaten to the very ground and content to take his ease there.

"D'you do much of this kind of thing?" asked the tramp, when some silent minutes had passed.

"Yes," said Paul, "a lot."

"Nothing like it, is there?" asked the other. He spoke lazily, absorbed in his comfort. "We 've all got our game, every bally one of us. Mine was actin'."

"Acting?" Paul paused in his busy fingering to look up. "Were you an actor?"

The actors he knew looked out of frames in his mother's little parlor, intense, well-fed, with an inhuman brilliance of attire.

"Even me," replied the tramp equably. He did not move from his posture nor uncover his drowsy eyes; the swollen lids, in which the veins stood out in purple, did not move, but his voice took a rounder and more conscious tone as he went on: "And there was a time, my boy, when actin' meant me and I meant actin'. In '87, I was playing in 'The Demon Doctor,' and drawing my seven quid a week--you believe me. Talk of art--why! I 've had letters from Irving that 'd make you open your eyes."