Part 15

They looked at each other. Bailey still sitting on the floor, she on her knees, and each read in the other's eyes an appraisement and a stratagem. The coffee-pot that stood all day beside the fire to be ready for Boer visitors, sibilated mildly at their backs.

"It would n't last for ever, the bit you 've got," said Bailey. "There 's that to think of."

"It 's a good bit," she replied.

"Is it--is it as much as fifty pounds?" he asked.

"It 's more," she answered. "Never you mind how much it is, Bailey. It's a good bit and it 's mine, not his."

He thought upon it with his under-lip caught up between his teeth, almost visibly reviewing the possibilities of profit in the company of a woman who had money about her. Mrs. du Preez continued to urge him in hard whispers.

"I 'd never manage it by myself, Bailey, or I wouldn't be begging you like this. I 've tried to bring myself to it again and again, but I was n't game enough. And it isn't as if I was goin' to be a burden to you. It won't be long before I 'll get a job--you 'll see. A barmaid, p'r'aps, or I might even get in again with a show. I haven't lost my figure, anyhow. And as for staying here now, with him, after this--Bailey, I 'll take poison if you leave me."

Boy Bailey frowned and looked up at the clock which swung a pendulum to and fro against the wall, as though to invite human affairs to conduct themselves in measure.

"Well, we haven't got too much time to talk about it," he said. "He said an hour. Now supposin' I take you, you know it's a case of footin' it down the line to the next siding? It wouldn't suit me to be nabbed with you on my hands. He 'd shoot as soon as think about it, and then where would I be?"

"I can walk," Mrs. du Preez assured him eagerly. "You 'll take me with you, then, Bailey?"

Boy Bailey sighed. "Oh, I'll take you," he said. "I 'll take you, since your mind 's made up. My good nature has been the ruin of me--that and my temperament. But don't forget later on that I warned you."

Mrs. du Preez jumped up. "I won't forget," she promised. "This is my funeral. Get up from there, Bailey, and we 'll have a drink on it."

They made their last arrangements over the glasses. Christian's absence was to be counted upon for the greater part of the next day; their road would be clear.

The first word above a whisper which had been spoken since Christian left them was by Mrs. du Preez. She sat down her glass at the last with a jolt.

"But, Bailey," she cried, on a note of hysterical gaiety, "Bailey--we got to be careful, I know, and all that--but what a lark it 'll be."

He stared at her, not quick enough to keep up with her mounting mood. She was flushed and feverish with excitement and the reaction of strong feeling and her eyes danced like a child's on the brink of mischief.

"The woman 's a fool," thought Boy Bailey.

His own attitude towards the affair, as he reviewed it that night in the forage-shed, where he reposed full dressed in the scent of dry grasses and stared reflectively through a gap in the roof at the immortal patience of the stars, was strictly businesslike. Not even a desire to be revenged upon Christian du Preez, who had called him names and beaten him, impaired the consistency of that attitude. Boy Bailey allowed for a certain proportion of thrashings in his experiences; they ranked in the balance-sheet of his transactions as a sort of office expenses. They had to be kept down to the lowest figure compatible with convenience and good business, but they were not to be weighed against a lucky deal. The one thing that engaged his fancy was the fact that the woman, though close on forty, would come with money about her--more than fifty pounds. It would make up his equipment to a handsome, an imposing, figure. Never before had he possessed a round hundred pounds in one sum. The mere possibilities that it opened out were exciting; it seemed as large and as inexhaustible as any other large sum. He did not dwell on the fact that it belonged to Mrs. du Preez and not to him; he did not even give his mind to a scheme for securing it. All that was detail, a thing to be settled at any advantageous moment. A dodge, a minute of drowsiness on her part--or perhaps, at most, a blow on the breasts--would secure the conveyance of the money to him. In the visions of Capetown that hovered on the outskirts of his thought, a ghostly seraglio attending his nod, there moved many figures, but Mrs. du Preez was not among them. His imagination made a circuit about her and her fate, or at most it glanced with brevity and distaste on the spectacle of a penniless woman weeping on a bench at a wayside station, seeing the tail-lights of a vanishing train blurred through tears.

"I knew I 'd strike it lucky one of these days," was Mr. Bailey's reflection, as he composed himself to slumber. "With two or three more like her--I 'll be a millionaire yet."

The stars watched his upturned face as he slept with a still scrutiny that must have detected aught in its unconscious frankness that could redeem it or suggest that once it had possessed the image of God. He slept as peacefully, as devotedly, as a baby, confiding his defenselessness to the night with no tremors or uncertainty. He left unguarded the revelations of his loose and feeble face that the mild stars searched, always with their stare of stagnant surprise.

In the farmhouse, there was yet a light in the windows when dawn paled the eastward heaven. Christian du Preez slept in his bed unquietly, with clenched hands outstretched over the empty place beside him, and in another room Paul had transferred himself from waking dreams to a dream-world. Tiptoeing here and there in the house, Mrs. du Preez had gathered together the meager handful of gear that was to go with her; she had shaken out a skirt that she treasured and made ready a hat that smelt of camphor. Her money, in sovereigns, made a hard and heavy knob in a knotted napkin. All was gathered and ready for the journey and yet the light shone in the window of the parlor where she sat through the hours. Her hands were in her lap and there were no tears in her eyes--it was beyond tears. She was taking leave of her furniture.

She saw her husband at breakfast, facing him across the table with a preoccupied expression that he took for sullenness. She did not see the grimness of his countenance nor mark his eye upon her; she was thinking in soreness of heart of six rosewood chairs, upholstered in velvet, a rosewood table, a sofa, and the rest of it--the profit of her marriage, her sheet-anchor and her prop. She felt as though she had given her life for them.

Christian rode away with his back to the sun, with no word spoken between them, and as his pony broke into a lope--the Boer half-trot, half-canter,--he caught and subdued an impulse to look back at the house. Even if he had looked, he would hardly have seen the cautious reconnoiter of Boy Bailey's head around the corner of it, as that camp-follower of fortune made sure of his departure. Thrashings Mr. Bailey could make light of, but the Boer's threat of shooting had stuck in his mind. He rested on his hands and knees and stuck his chin close to the ground in prudent care as he peered about the corner of the house to see the owner of the rifle make a safe offing.

Even when the Boer had dwindled from sight, swallowed up by the invisible inequalities of the ground that seemed as flat as a table, he avoided to show himself in the open. He lurked under the walls of kraals, frightening farm Kafirs who came upon him suddenly and finally made a sudden appearance before Paul at the back of the house.

"I won't waste words on you," he said to the boy. "I 've got something better to do, thank God. But I 'm told you have a message for me."

"Two messages," said Paul.

"One 'll do," replied Boy Bailey. "I don't want to hear you talking. I 've been insulted here and I 'm not done with you yet. Mind that. So hand over what you 've got for me and be done with it--d'you hear?"

"Here it is." Paul put his hand into the loose bosom of his shirt and drew out a small paper packet. He held it out to Boy Bailey.

"That!" Boy Bailey trembled as he seized it, with a frightful sense of disappointment. He had seen the money as gold, a brimming double handful of minted gold, with gold's comforting substance and weight. The packet he took into his hand was no fatter than a fat letter and held no coin.

He rent the covering apart and stared doubtfully at the little wad of notes it contained, sober-colored paper money of the Bank of Africa. It had never occurred to him that the Kafir, Kamis, would have his riches in so uninspiring a shape. Two notes of twenty pounds each and one of ten and all three of them creased and dirty. No chink, no weight to drag at his pocket and keep him in mind of it, none of the pomp and panoply of riches.

"Why--why," he stammered. "I told him--cash down. Damn the dirty Kafir swindler, what does he call this?"

"Blackmail, I think he said," replied Paul. "That was the other message. If you don't do what you said you 'd do, you 'll go to _tronk_ (jail) for it, and I am to be a witness. That 's if he does n't kill you himself--like I told him he 'd better do."

Boy Bailey arrived by degrees at sufficient composure to pocket the notes, thrusting them deep for greater security and patting them through the cloth.

"Oh, you told him that, did you?" he said. "And you call yourself a white man, do you? Murder, is it? You look out, young feller. You don't know the risks you 're running. I 'm not a man that forgets."

But Paul was not daunted. He watched the battered face that threatened him with an expression which the other did not understand. There was a curious warm interest in it that might have flattered a man less bare of illusions as to his appearance.

"I suppose you 've never seen a black eye before, you gaping moon-calf," he cried irritably. "What are you staring like that for?"

Paul smiled. "I would give you a shilling again to let me make a model of you," he answered. "I 'd give you two shillings."

Boy Bailey swore viciously and swung on his heel. He was stung at last and he had no answer. He made haste to get around the corner and away from eyes that would keep the memory of him as he appeared to Paul.

It was more than an hour later that Mrs. du Preez discovered him, squatting under the spikes of a dusty aloe, humped like a brooding vulture and grieving over that last affront. He lifted mournful eyes to her as she stood before him.

"Bailey," she said breathlessly. "I hunted everywhere for you. I thought you 'd gone without me."

She was ready for the long flight on foot. All that she had in the way of best clothes was on her body, everything she could not bring herself to leave. The seemliness of Sunday was embodied in her cloth coat and skirt, her cream silk bosom and its brooches, the architectural elaborateness of her hat. She stood in the merciless sun in all her finery, with sweat on her forehead and a small bundle in each hand.

"You 're coming, then?" he asked stupidly.

She stamped her foot impatiently. "Of course I 'm coming," she said. "Don't go into all that again, Bailey. D' you think I 'd stop with him now, after--after everything?"

She was holding desperately to her resolution, eager to be off before the six rosewood chairs, the table and the sofa should overcome her and make good their claim to her.

"What 's those?" Bailey nodded at the bundles torpidly.

"Oh," she was burning to be moving, to be committed, to see her boats flaming and smoking behind her. "This is grub, Bailey. We 'll want grub, won't we? And this is my things."

"The--er--money, I suppose, an' all that?"

"Yes, yes. Oh, do come on, Bailey. The money 's all here. Everything 's here. You carry the grub an' let 's be going."

"The grub, eh?" Mr. Bailey rose grunting to his feet. "You 'd rather--well, all right."

None viewed that elopement to mark how Mrs. du Preez slipped her free hand under Bailey's arm and went forth at his side in the bravery she had donned as though to bring grace to the occasion. Paul was down at the dam with sheep, and before he returned the brown distances of the Karoo had enveloped them and its levels had risen behind them to blot out the dishonored roof of the house.

At the hour of the midday meal, Paul ate alone, contentedly and unperturbed by his mother's absence. For all he knew she had one of her weeping fits upstairs in her bedroom, and he was careful to make no noise.

*CHAPTER XII*

Margaret entered the drawing-room rather late for tea and Mrs. Jakes accordingly acknowledged her arrival with an extra stoniness of regard. In his place by the window, Ford turned from his abstracted contemplation of the hot monotony without and sent her a discreet and private smile across the tea-table. Mrs. Jakes, noting it and the girl's response, tightened her mouth unpleasantly as the suspicion recurred to her that there was "something between" Mr. Ford and Miss Harding. More than once of late she had noticed that their intercourse had warmed to the stage when the common forms of expression need to be helped out by a code of sympathetic looks and gestures. She addressed the girl in her thinnest tones of extreme formality.

"I thought perhaps you were n't coming in," she said. "I 'm afraid the tea 's not very hot now."

"I 'll ring," said Mr. Samson, diligently handing a chair.

"Please don't," said Margaret, taking it. "I don't mind at all. Don't bother, anybody."

"I forget if you take sugar, Miss Harding," said Mrs. Jakes, pouring negligently from the pot. Ford grinned and turned quickly to the window again.

"No sugar, thanks," answered Margaret agreeably; "and no milk and no tea."

"No tea?" Mrs. Jakes raised her eyebrows in severe surprise and looked up. The movement sufficed to divert the stream from the tea-pot so that it flowed abundantly on the hand which held the cup and splashed thence into the sugar basin. She sat the pot down sharply and reached for her handkerchief with a smothered ejaculation of annoyance.

"Oh, I 'm sorry," said Margaret. "But how lucky you didn't keep it hot for me. You might have been scalded, might n't you?"

"Thank you," replied Mrs. Jakes, with all the dignity she could summon while she mopped at her sleeve. "Thank you; I am not hurt."

That was the second time Margaret had turned her own guns, her own little improvised pop-guns of ineffectual enmity, back upon her; and she did not quite understand how it was done. The first time had been when she had pretended not to hear a remark Margaret had addressed to her. The girl had crossed the room and joined Dr. Jakes in his hearth-rug exile, and Mr. Samson had stared while Ford laughed silently but visibly. Mrs. Jakes had not understood the implication of it; she was only aware, reddening and resentful, that Margaret had scored in some subtle fashion.

The hatred of Mrs. Jakes was a cue to consistency of action no less plain than her love. "I like people to know their own minds," was one of her self-revelations, and she believed that worthy people, decent people, good people were those who saw their way clear under all circumstances of friendship and hostility and were prepared to strike and maintain a due attitude upon any encounter. Her friends were those who indulged her the forms of courtesy and consideration; her enemies those who opposed her or were rude to her. To her friends she returned their indulgence in kind; her enemies she pursued at each meeting and behind their backs with an implacable tenacity of hate. One conceives that in the case of such lives as hers, only those survive whose feebleness is supplemented by claws. Take away their genuine capacity for making themselves disagreeable at will, and they would be trodden under and extinguished. Mrs. Jakes' girlhood was illuminated by the example of an aunt, who lived for fourteen years with only a thin wall between her and a person with whom she was not on speaking terms. The aunt had known her own mind with such a blinding clearness that she was able to sit with folded hands, listening through the wall to the sounds of a raving husband murdering her enemy, and no impulse to cry for help had arisen to dim the crystal of that knowledge. "She was a bad one at forgiving, was your Aunt Mercy," Mrs. Jakes had been told, always with a suggestion in the speaker's voice that there was something admirable in such inflexibility. Primitive passions, the lusts of skin-clad ancestors, fortified the anemia of the life from which she was sprung. Marriage by capture would have shocked her deeply, but she would not have been the worse squaw.

She dropped into a desultory conversation with Mr. Samson, with occasional side-references to Dr. Jakes, and managed at the same time to keep an eye on the other two. Margaret had walked across to Ford, and was sitting at his side on the window-ledge; he had a three-days-old copy of the _Dopfontein Courant_, in which the scanty news of the district was printed in English and Dutch and they were looking it over together. Ford held the paper and Margaret leaned against his arm to share it; the intimacy of their attitude was disagreeable to Mrs. Jakes. An alliance between the two of them would be altogether too strong for her, and besides, it was warfare as she understood it to destroy the foe's supports whenever possible.

"Nothing in the rag, I suppose, Ford?" asked Mr. Samson, in his high, intolerant voice.

"Not a thing," answered Ford, "unless you 're interested in the price of wools."

"Grease wool per pound," suggested Margaret. "Guess how much that is, Mr. Samson."

"It ought to be cheap," said Mr. Samson. "It sounds beastly."

"Well, then, how 's this?" Margaret craned across Ford's shoulder and read: "'Mr. Ben Bongers of Tomtown, the well-known billiard-marker, underwent last week the sad experience of being kicked at the hands of Mr. Jacobus Van Dam's _quaai_ cock. Legal proceedings are pending.' There now. But does anybody know what kicked him?"

"Cock ostrich," rumbled Dr. Jakes from the back of the room. "_Quaai_--that means bad-tempered."

"You see," said Ford, "ostriches are common hereabouts. They say cock and ostrich is understood. What would they call a barn-door cock, though?"

"A poultry," said Mr. Samson. "But we must watch for those legal proceedings; they ought to be good."

Mrs. Jakes had listened in silence, but now an idea occurred to her.

"There 's nothing about that woman in Capetown this week?" she asked, and smiled meaningly as she caught Margaret's eye.

"No," said Ford. "I was looking for that, but there 's nothing."

"What woman was that?" inquired Margaret.

"Oh, a rotten business. A woman married a Kafir parson--a white woman. There 's been a bit of a row about it."

"Oh," said Margaret, understanding Mrs. Jakes' smile. "I didn't see the paper last week."

She looked at Mrs. Jakes with interest. Evidently the little woman saw the matter of Kamis, and Margaret's familiar acquaintance with him, as a secret with which she could be cowed, a piece of dark knowledge that would be held against her as a weapon of final resort. The fact did more than all Kamis' warnings and Boy Bailey's threats to enlighten her as to the African view of a white woman who had relations, any relations but those of employer and servant, with a black man. Not only would a woman in such a case expose herself to the brutal scandal that flourishes in the atmosphere of bars where Boy Baileys frame the conventions that society endorses, but she would be damned in the eyes of all the Mrs. Jakes in the country. They would tar and feather her with their contumely and bury her beneath their disgust.

She returned Mrs. Jakes' smile till that lady looked away with a long-drawn sniff of defiance.

"But why a row?" asked Margaret. "If she was satisfied, what was there to make a row about?"

She really wanted to hear what two sane and average men would adduce in support of Mrs. Jakes' views.

Old Mr. Samson shook his head rebukingly.

"Men and women ain't on their own in this world," he said seriously. "They 've got to think of the rest of the crowd. We 're all in the same boat out here--white people holdin' up the credit of the race. Can't afford to have deserters goin' over to the other camp, don't y' know. Even supposin'--I say, _supposin'_--there was nothing else to prevent a white girl from taking on a nigger, it's lowerin' the flag--what?"

"A woman like that deserves to be horsewhipped," cried Mrs. Jakes, with sudden vigor. "To go and marry a _Kafir_--the vile creature."

"This is very interesting," said Margaret. "Do you mean the Kafir is vile, Mrs. Jakes, or the woman?"

"I mean both," retorted Mrs. Jakes. "In this country we know what such creatures are. A respectable woman does n't let a Kafir come near her if she can help it. She never speaks to them except to give them their orders. And as to--to marrying them, or being friendly with them--why, she 'd sooner die."

Margaret had started a subject which no South African can exhaust. They discuss it with heat, with philosophic impartiality, with ethnological and eugenic inexactitudes, and sometimes with bloodshed; but they never wear it out.

"You see, Miss Harding, there are other reasons against it," Mr. Samson struck in again. "There 's the general feelin' on the subject and you can't ignore that. One woman mustn't do what a million other women feel to be vile. It 's makin' an attack on decency--that 's what it comes to. A woman might feel a call in the spirit to marry a monkey. It might suit her all right--might be the best thing she could do, so far as a woman of that sort was concerned; but it would n't be playin' the game. It wouldn't be cricket."

He shook his spirited white head with a frown.

"I see," said Margaret. "But there 's one other point. I only want to know, you know."

"Naturally," agreed Mr. Samson. "What's the point?"

"Well, there are about ten times as many black people as white in this country. What about their sense of decency? Doesn't that suffer a little by this--this trades-union of the whites? That woman in Capetown has all the whites against her and all the blacks for her--I suppose. There 's a majority in her favor, at any rate."

"Hold on," cried Mr. Samson. "You can't count the Kafirs like that, you know. They 're not in it. We 're talking about white people. The whole point is that Kafirs _are n't_ whites. A white woman belongs to her own people and must stand by their way of lookin' at things. If we take Kafir opinion, we 'll be chuckin' clothes next and goin' in for polygamy."

"Would we?" said Margaret. "I wonder. D'you think it will come to that when the Kafirs are all as civilized as we are and the color line is gone?"

"The color line will never go," replied Mr. Samson, solemnly. "You might as well talk of breakin' down the line between men and beasts."

"Well, evolution did break it down," said Margaret. "Think, Mr. Samson. There will come a day when we shall travel on flying machines, and all have lungs like drums. We shall live in cities of glazed brick beside running streams of disinfectant. There will be no poverty and no crime and no dirt, and only one language. Where will the Kafirs be then? Still in huts on the Karoo being kept in their place?"

"I 'm not a prophet," said Mr. Samson. "I don't know where they 'll be. It won't bother me when that time comes. I 'll be learning the harp."

"There 'll be a statue in one of those glazed-brick cities to the woman in Capetown," Margaret went on.

"It 'll be inscribed in letters of gold--'To ---- (whatever her name was): She felt the future in her bones.'"