Part 12

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.