roughly to mean, “He says (i.e. the King), ‘Let it (the impi) arm. Let it arm at once. Come with its food, with its sandals.’ He says always. He says, ‘Let it arm at once!’”—was boomed forth from nearly two thousand throats, deafening, terrifying. But the impi swept by, and, passing within a hundred yards, singing in mighty volume its imposing war-song, shields waving, and assegais brandished menacingly towards the white men, it poured up the opposite slope, taking a straight line, significantly symbolical of the unswerving purpose it had been sent to fulfil.
An involuntary feeling of relief was upon the party, upon all but one, that is. For Hilary Blachland, noting the direction taken by this army of destroyers, could not but admit a qualm of very real and soul-stirring misgiving. That he had good grounds for the same we shall see anon.
Chapter Four.
Hermia.
“I don’t care. I’ll say it again. It’s a beastly shame him leaving you alone like this.”
“But you are not to say it again, or to say it at all. Remember of whom you are speaking.”
“Oh, no fear of my forgetting that—of being able to forget it. All the same, he ought to be ashamed of himself.”
And the speaker tapped his foot impatiently upon the virgin soil of Mashunaland, looking very hot, and very tall, and very handsome. The remonstrant, however, received the repetition of the offence in silence, but for a half inaudible sigh, which might or might not have been meant to convey that she was not nearly so angry with the other as her words seemed to imply or their occasion to demand. Then there was silence.
An oblong house, of the type known as “wattle and daub,” with high-pitched thatch roof, partitioned within so as to form three rooms—a house rough and ready in construction and aspect, but far more comfortable than appearances seemed to warrant. Half a dozen circular huts with conical roofs, clustered around, serving the purpose of kitchen and storehouse and quarters for native servants; beyond these, again, a smaller oblong structure, constituting a stable, the whole walled round by a stockade of mopani poles;—and there you have a far more imposing establishment than that usually affected by the pioneer settler. Around, the country is undulating and open, save for a not very thick growth of mimosa; but on one hand a series of great granite kopjes rise abruptly from the plain, the gigantic boulders piled one upon the other in the fantastic and arbitrary fashion which forms such a characteristic feature in the landscape of a large portion of Rhodesia.
“Well?”
The woman was the first to break the silence—equally a characteristic feature, a cynic might declare.
“Well?”
The answer was staccato, and not a little pettish. The first speaker smiled softly to herself. She revelled in her power, and was positively enjoying the cat and mouse game, though it might have been thought that long custom would have rendered even that insidious pastime stale and insipid.
“So sorry you have to go,” she murmured sweetly. “But it’s getting late, and you’ll hardly reach home before dark.”
The start—the blank look which overspread his features—all this, too, she thoroughly enjoyed.
“Have to go,” he echoed. “Oh, well—yes, of course, if you want to get rid of me—”
“I generally do want to get rid of people when they are sulky, and disagreeable, and ill-tempered,” was the tranquil reply. But the expression of her eyes, raised full to his, was such as to take all the sting out of her words.
Not quite all, however, for his mind was in that parlous state best defined as “worked up”—and the working-up process had been one, not of hours or of days, but of weeks.
“Well, then, good-bye.” Then, pausing: “Why do you torment me like this, Hermia, when you know—”
“What’s that? I didn’t say you might call me by my name.”
“Oh, I beg your pardon, Mrs Blachland,” was the reply, bitterly, resentfully emphatic. Then, thawing suddenly, “You didn’t mind it the other day, and—well, you know what you are to me and always will be.”
“Until somebody else is more so,” came the smiling interruption. “Hark”—raising a hand suddenly, and listening intently. “Yes, it is. Will you be a very dear boy, Justin, and do something for me?”
“You know I would do anything for you—anything in the wide world.”
“Oh, this is nothing very great. There are guinea-fowl over there in the kopje—I can hear them. I only want you to take Hilary’s gun, and go and shoot me a few. Will you? The supplies are running low.”
“Of course I will,” was the answer, as they both went inside, and Justin Spence, invested with an excellent Number 12 bore, and a belt full of cartridges, started off on his errand of purveyor to the household, all his ill-humour gone. He was very young, you see, and the next best thing to glowing in the presence of his charmer was to be engaged in rendering her some service.
She stood there watching his receding form, as it moved away rapidly over the veldt in long elastic strides. Once he turned to look back. She waved her hand in encouragement.
“How good-looking he is!” she said to herself. “How well he moves too—so well set up and graceful! But why was he so emphatic just now when he called me that? Was it accidental? I wonder was it? Oh yes, it must have been. That’s the worst of an arrière pensée, one is always imagining things. No, the very fact of his putting such emphasis upon the name shows it was accidental. He’d never have been so mean—Justin isn’t that sort.”
She stood for a little longer, shading her eyes to gaze after him, again smiling softly to herself as she reflected how easily she could turn him round her little finger, how completely and entirely he was her slave; and, indeed, Justin Spence was not the only one of whom this held good. There was a warm-blooded physical attractiveness about her which never failed to appeal to those of the other sex. She was not beautiful, hardly even pretty. Her dark hair was plentiful, but it was coarse and wavy, and she had no regularity of feature, but lovely eyes and a very fascinating smile. Her hands were large, but her figure, of medium height, was built on seductive lines; and yet this strange conglomeration of attractions and defects was wont to draw the male animal a hundredfold more readily than the most approved and faultless types of beauty could ever have done.
Still musing she entered the house. It was cool within. Strips of “limbo,” white and dark blue, concealed the wattle and thatch, giving the interior something of the aspect of a marquee. There were framed prints upon the walls, mostly of a sporting character, and a few framed photographs. Before one of these she paused.
“I think you are tired of me, Hilary,” she murmured, as though addressing the inanimate bit of cardboard. “I think we are tired of each other. Yet—are we?”
Was there a touch of wistfulness in the words, in the tone as she gazed? Perhaps.
The eyes which met hers from the pictured cardboard were the eyes which had been all powerful to sway her, body and soul, as no other glance had ever availed
