Chapter Nine.
“Number One.”
Gilbert Warren, attorney-at-law, was seated in his office looking out upon the main street of Gydisdorp.
He was an alert, straight, well-set-up man, not much on the further side of thirty, handsome, too, in the dark-haired, somewhat hatchet-faced aquiline type. He was attired in a cool, easy-fitting suit of white duck, for the day had been hot, and still wore his broad-brimmed hat, for he had only just come in.
Now he unlocked a drawer in his table, somewhat hastily, impatiently might almost have been said. Thence he extracted a bundle of documents, and began eagerly to peruse them. Among them were deeds of mortgage.
“A damn rotten place,” he said to himself. “These fools have got bitten this time, and serves ’em right. I advised them against touching it. Now to me it doesn’t matter. I don’t mind dropping a little on it to get him out. If I take it over, why then he’ll have to go – and it’s worth it. I will – Come in.”
This in reply to a knock. A clerk entered.
“It’s Ripton, about that committal judgment. Will you see him, sir?”
” – To the devil, willingly,” replied Warren sharply. “Tell him to go there.”
The clerk went out, tittering, to inform the individual in question that Warren was very busy, and couldn’t possibly find time to attend to him to-day, an intimation which had the effect of sending that much harassed and debt-hung waggon-maker slouching down the street, gurgling forth strange profanities, and consigning lawyers in general, and Warren in particular, to the care of precisely the same potentate to whom Warren had just consigned him; only in far more sultry, and utterly unprintable, terms.
“Yes, I’ll take it over,” the attorney’s thoughts ran on, as he scanned the papers. “I can afford a loss on it – rather – and then the stake! Good God! I’d cheerfully plank down all I’ve made, and start life again, kaal, (lit: naked) for that. Out he’ll have to walk – and not much to take along with him either. He won’t show his nose around that neighbourhood again. Le Sage will take care of the rest.”
Warren was the leading attorney in Gydisdorp. The district was large, well-to-do, and litigious, wherefore over and above will-drawing and conveyancing, and so forth, he had as much practice as he could take care of. There were other matters he undertook, but on the quiet, which were even more paying. Shafto, who came next to him, used to declare that Warren ought to be struck off the rolls; but as the two were great friends and invariably took a couple of “splits” together per diem, in the bar of the Masonic Hotel, nobody believed Shafto – only laughed. Besides, Warren was popular. He was genial and gifted, could tell a good story and sing a good song; moreover, he was a keen sportsman. So life, on the whole, was a rosy thing for him, and more so that Warren’s creed could be summed up in a word and a figure. This was it: Number 1.
Pushing the deeds aside, Warren unlocked a drawer, and produced another enclosure. This he handled carefully, tenderly one might have said. Undoing the soft paper wrappings, he extracted a – photograph. Propping it up on his writing-table, he began to study it, and as he did so his face softened unconsciously. Then he took up a large magnifying glass. The powerful lens threw into relief the seductive lines of the splendid figure, the curve of the smiling mouth, the glad, luminous dilation of the eyes – and – it was identical with the portrait hanging on Wyvern’s wall – the one that was dusted and cared for.
This had not been given to Warren by its original. Only one had been given by her to anybody, and it we have seen before. Neither had he stolen it. But a considerable bribe to the photographer’s assistant, himself in difficulties – Warren was nowhere if he failed to take advantage of other people’s difficulties – had procured him this, and another copy, which, he kept at his own house. And as the photographer drove his trade at Cape Town, some hundreds of miles distant from Gydisdorp, why that rendered the transaction all the safer.
“Out he goes,” he murmured mechanically, his glance riveted on the portrait. “Out he goes – and then – I come in. Only – do I?”
The crack of a waggon whip and the harsh yell of the driver, from the street outside; the clear, deep-toned voices of a group of Kafirs passing along the footway, rising and falling in cadenced modulation, the barking of a cur, these were the sounds – everyday sounds – that smote upon his ear in the drowsy afternoon heat. Then rose another, and hearing it he quickly put the photograph face downwards, drawing over it a litter of papers. The sound was that of steps, ascending the wooden staircase – for Warren chose to have his own office off the ground floor, contrary to usual custom in Gydisdorp, so as to ensure greater privacy.
“Come in.”
There entered the same clerk, having barely had time to knock.
“Mr Wyvern would like to see you, sir.”
“Wyvern? Certainly. In a minute or two. I’ll ring.”
The clerk retired. The “minute or two” was spent by Warren in carefully wrapping up the photograph again and replacing it in the drawer. Which done he banged the spring handbell on his table and waited.
“Why, Wyvern, my dear old chap, how are you? Glad to see you again – only wish I could be of more use to you though.”
He was wringing the other’s hand, and his tone was of the most cordial Warren knew how to play on the cordiality stop in a way to soothe the most suspicious, and Wyvern was not suspicious.
“Oh, I’m all right,” said the other, with a careless laugh, not altogether free from a note of despondency.
“By Jove! You look it too,” said Warren, taking in the tall, fine figure, and the clear-cut face with its hall-mark of breeding stamped large. The clear blue eyes, too, were those of a man in the pink of condition, and taking it all in he realised that with his own powers of attraction, which were undoubted, he himself would be nowhere beside this one, or, at any rate, not where he wanted to be – and the rest didn’t matter. “Well, now, what are the latest developments? They are going to foreclose, aren’t they?”
“Yes. It doesn’t matter much in the long run. I’ve got another scheme on hand now. I’m going to sell out and clear.”
“Eh? The deuce you are?” cried Warren, surprised out of his normal and impassive attitude. “Have a drink, old chap – then we can talk things over snugly. What’ll you have? Whisky or dop?”
“Dop, thanks. It’s a Heaven-sent liquor for this climate.”
Warren took the opportunity while getting out the said refreshment to pull himself together. The other’s news had come just in the nick of time. He need not now take over the mortgage on Seven Kloofs. Its owner was going to dear out anyhow; and he himself would be saved a sure and certain loss.
“Here you are now,” he said, “help yourself. Have a weed, too,” taking a cigar out of a box, and shoving the latter across to Wyvern. “So you’re going to clear, are you? Well, I shall miss you, old chap, so will someone else, I expect – eh? Of course, as acting for Keeling, I’ve been in a sort of way a professional enemy, but I haven’t really, for I’ve more than once kept him from putting the screw on you.”
“I know you have, Warren, and it’s devilish good of you.”
“Oh, that’s all right. You see, we can’t refuse business unless it’s downright shady, so I couldn’t chuck this because you and I are pals. Besides, I’ve done you far more good by taking it. If I hadn’t, Shafto would have got it, and I don’t think, somehow, you’d have found him any improvement. Eh?”
“No, indeed,” laughed Wyvern, who didn’t like Shafto, and whom Shafto didn’t like.
“You’ll find it a bit of a wrench parting with your place, Wyvern?”
“Rather. I love every stick and stone on it, although I’ve only had it such a short time. Besides – it has associations.”
“Of course,” laughed the other, significantly. “One of them being that it has ruined you.”
“Well, yes. But even that has carried its compensations.”
“What are you going to launch out in next? I know you’re a reticent chap, Wyvern, but we’re old pals, and if there’s any sort of way in which I can ever give you a leg up, you know you can rely upon me. I don’t ask with any notion of poking my nose into your private affairs, you know.”
“Well, first of all I’m going to Natal to look up a former friend of mine. We served together in the Zulu War; in fact, we raced neck to neck off that infernal Hlobane Mountain, through thousands of raging devils, and made rather more than a nodding acquaintance with grim old Death that day.”
“By Jove! I should think so. Who is he, by the way?”
“He’s trading in Zululand. He thinks I might join him with advantage.”
“I see,” said Warren, secretly foiled in that he had not got the name. But he was nothing if not cautious. He could get at that later, while not seeming too curious. “Well, I hope you’ll have luck – and return triumphant. By the way, didn’t you have a bit of a breeze with old Le Sage the other day?”
“Now how the devil did you get hold of that for a yarn, Warren? I haven’t opened my head about it to any living soul – not even a nigger.”
The other smiled knowingly.
“There’s very little I don’t get hold of, old chap. What if Le Sage told me himself?”
“Did he?”
“Yes. He abused you so infernally that I had to tell him to stop – reminding him you were a pal of mine. Then he abused me, but that I didn’t mind. We do a lot of business together. You can stand a good deal from anybody on those terms.”
“I suppose so. I like Le Sage and don’t bear any grudge against him, though for a day or two after I did feel rather sore. He lost his temper a bit, and I felt sorry for him, because losing one’s temper takes it out of one so. I know it does out of me when I lose mine.”
Warren roared.
“When you lose yours! Why, you never do.”
“Don’t I? But it’s a most infernal weakness. You are sure to come out bottom dog if you do.”
“That’s about it. Have another drink? No? Sure? Well, then, old man, come out with me to my place for the night. What do you say? We can have a good old yarn, and we shan’t have many more of them if you’re trekking.”
“All right. I will.”
“That’s good. Now look here. I’ve got about an hour’s business to tackle, then you romp back here, and we’ll ride out together. No. I won’t ask you to take a cut in at écarté. I know you hate the sight of a pack of cards as dourly as any Covenanting Presbyterian ‘meenister.’”
“Well, I do,” laughed Wyvern, “but not for the same reason. The evening isn’t the time for mathematical calculation. It’s the time for yarning and pipes, and conviviality in general. All right. In an hour, then. So long.”
Warren ran a bachelor establishment some seven miles out of Gydisdorp. It was, in fact a fine farm, but he was interested in it mainly as a game preserve; the fanning department he turned over to an overseer “on the halves.” Not that he was ignorant on that side either, for he exacted his full share of what was yielded by the capabilities of the place. Here he was wont to entertain his friends, and comparatively high play was frequently the order of the evening; indeed it was whispered that it constituted a material addition to his store, both in currency and landed estate. He did neither at Wyvern’s expense, however, for the latter declared, once and for all, that he had nothing to lose, and in the next place the whole thing bored him beyond words.
So when Wyvern returned an hour later the two men rode out together, and passed an exceedingly pleasant and convivial evening. Wherein Warren was a paradox. He had a real liking for the other, and would have done anything in the world to do him a good turn, under all other circumstances. Here, however, Wyvern must be sacrificed, for mere friendship was but a featherweight beside Warren’s overmastering but as yet secret passion for Lalanté Le Sage, and have we not said that the sum of Warren’s credo was Number 1!
And of the two portraits, one in Warren’s office, the other in his home, Wyvern, of course, knew nothing.
Chapter Ten.
In the Third Kloof
Wyvern was sitting out on the stoep smoking his first after supper pipe.
The night was still fairly warm, though just a touch of a sharp twinge showed that it was one of those nights whereon it might not be good to sit still in the open – let alone doze in one’s chair – too long. A broad moon, not yet at full, hung in the cloudlessness of the star-gemmed firmament, and he sat listening to the voices of night – the shrill bay of hunting jackals, the ghostly whistle of invisible plover overhead, the boom of belated beetles, the piping screech of tree-frogs, and every now and again an unrestful bark from the dogs lying on the moonlit sward in front. Yet, listening, he heard them not, for his mind was active in other directions. For instance, it was just such a night as this, nearly a month ago, that Lalanté had been sitting here with him, nestling to his side, and the sweet witching hour of enchantment had gone by in happy converse. Yet, since, what transition had taken place. A few stolen meetings, more or less hurried, were all the comfort his weary soul could obtain, and now in a day or two, he would be going forth from here homeless – homeless from this home he loved so well, and, of late, tenfold, in that she was to share it with him.
Then despondency grew apace. His new venture – what was likely to come out of that? Was it indeed as Le Sage had said – that he had not got it in him to do any good for himself? But as though to brace him, came the recollection of this girl, and her sweet presence here, here on the very spot where he now was; this girl, so totally outside his previous experience, so totally unlike anyone he had ever seen before, in her sunny winsomeness, in her brave clear hope, and unconventional decision of character, and, far above all, the unreserved richness of her love which she had poured forth all upon him. Her presence seemed with him now in the distilling fragrance of the sweet calm night – would that it really were – to charm away the despondency that lay upon his soul. Despondency was not strength, she had said in her brave encouraging way. No, it was not; but how throw it off? Suddenly an idea struck him.
He went into the house. Two guns in their covers stood in a corner. One of these he unsheathed, and opening the breech looked down the barrels against the light. They were clear and without a speck. One was rifled, to take the Number 2 Musket ammunition, the other was smooth bore Number 12, and a complete cylinder, guiltless of choke. From a drawer he took half-a-dozen cartridges to fit each; those for the smooth bore being loaded with loepers – three and three and three, in layers, a charge calculated to stop the very devil himself. Then changing his boots for a pair of velschoenen made of the softest of raw hide and quite noiseless, he set forth.
The dogs, lying outside, seeing the gun, sprang up, squirming and whining with delight. It needed quite an amount of persuasion, objurgatory, and running to a mild kick or two, to convince them that their aid and companionship was not in the least wanted upon this occasion. It even required the argument of a couple of stones – flung so as carefully to avoid hitting them – when he reached the outer gate, conclusively to convince them. Then Wyvern took his way along the narrow bush track heading for the entrance to the deep wild kloofs – alone.
He had struck the spoor of a leopard – from the pads an unusually large one – that morning, leading along the bottom of the mazy network of kloofs. Into one of these it had led – the one known as the Third Kloof – and from the passing and repassing of the tracks, now faint, now fresh, he had deduced that the beast was in the habit of using this way as a regular path. Here, then, was a cure for despondency – temporary but exhilarating – but the exhilaration was somewhat dashed by the thought that this was probably the last time he would undertake such a quest here, in what his neighbours characterised by the term of his “vermin-preserve” and voted an unmitigated pest.
Shod in silence he took his way noiselessly along. The bottom of the kloofs was smooth and grassy, which, of course, favoured him. Faint zephyrs of the still night air fanned his face, and here and there a rustling in the black mysterious depths of the bush on either hand, told that his presence was not altogether unknown to its keen denizens. To the dwellers in towns and artificiality there would have been something inexpressibly weird and nerve-stirring in this mystery-suggesting solitude, in the great sweep of the bush-clad spurs, black and gloomy in shadow, silvern and ghostly where the moon reached them, and in the stealthy unknown sounds coming unexpectedly, now on this hand now on that, from the darksome depths of their recesses, but to this man it all brought a strange tightening of the heart. All this mystery of shaggy wood, and sphinx-like krantz looming grey in the moonlight, had been his – his property, his very own – and now it was so no longer. The cloud of despondency was deepening down upon him again.
He had been walking now rather more than an hour, and the moon, mounting higher, was pouring down her pale vertical beams right upon these labyrinthine recesses. Then he struck off from the valley bottom, and ascending, cautiously, noiselessly, the steep and stony hillside, gained a point some fifteen yards higher up.
The position was formed by some small boulders, overhung by spek-boem, and it commanded an ample view of anything passing beneath. He knew the spot well, as indeed he knew every inch of that bushy maze, in parts so thick and tangled and thorn-studded as to be well-nigh impenetrable; many a fine bushbuck ram had he stopped in mid career from this very point when they had been driving out the kloofs, during one of those hunts to which he would from time to time convene his neighbours. Here, as he lay, he scanned the open smoothness of the grassy valley bottom. But upon it there was no sign of any moving life.
The kloof ended in a mass of tumbled terraced cliff, overhung by a row of straight-stemmed, plumed euphorbia; with aloes, gnome-like in the moonlight, caught here and there in crevice or on ledge. Within the face of the rock slanted black clefts, constituting a complete rookery for the denizens of what his neighbours termed “Wyvern’s vermin-preserve.” And it was, from his point of view, the very heart of the surrounding maze, and was known as the Third Kloof.
At the meetings of the Gydisdorp Farmers’ Association, Wyvern’s name was held in evil odour on this account, yet now, lying out in the ghostly, solitary night, he thought of it with glee; for was he not possessor, even if for the last time, of what little there was left of strange, wild Nature, and how many of those who thus decried him, at this hour snoring in bed, would have taken the trouble to turn out under the moon to reduce the “vermin” aforesaid by one? With a lively gathering and dogs, and all that, they were ready enough, but – generally missed what they came out for, and were happy enough to shoot bushbucks instead.
One of these now passed immediately below him as he lay, a fine ram, its dark hide and white belly, and long, straight, slightly spiral horns showing in the moonlight almost as clear as by day. But he never moved. This was not his game to-night. This was not what he had come out for. Then he noticed that the animal began to show signs of uneasiness. It stopped short, raised its head from the grass it had been daintily nibbling, then resumed its nibbling. Then it raised its head again, and seemed to be listening; its full lustrous eye turned towards him showed concern. The head then turned towards the upper end of the kloof, and in the clear light the spectator could even see the working of the nostrils as the graceful animal snuffed in the still night air as though winding something. Then with a couple of bounds it disappeared within the blackness of the further line of bush.
The pulses of the lonely watcher tingled. What had alarmed the buck? All his senses were now concentrated on the point towards which the startled animal had been looking. Ah! This was what he had come out for.
There had stolen out into the open a shape, a long, cat-like, spotted shape. Well he knew it, and now more than ever did excitement thrill his frame. The beast paused, standing erect, its tail slightly waving, its head thrown upwards and opened into a mighty yawn which displayed its great fangs. There was a water-hole in the hollow of the kloof, usually a mere mass of slimy liquid mud, now, thanks to the recent rains fairly well filled. To this the leopard paced, its massive velvety paws noiseless in their springy gait. Then dropping its head it began to lap, and the disturbance of the water seemed quite loud in the stillness of the night. Cautiously the watcher took aim. The question was should he use the rifle or the shot barrel. At that short distance he could not miss. He decided in favour of the bullet, and had just got his sight well on behind the shoulder, when —
The great leopard raised its speckled head, and suddenly gathered itself together, as though listening intently. This for a fraction of a minute, but sufficiently long to have shifted its position, and the moonlight was uncertain. But before the watcher could get his sights on to the right spot again, in a glide and a bound it had disappeared into the sheltering shadow of the bush.
Wyvern’s disgust will hardly bear describing in words. Why had he not got in his shot while he had the chance, and while it was well-nigh impossible to miss. Now he had let his chance go by, and it was not in the least likely to recur. But, what on earth was it that had alarmed the beast?
Below, like an eye, the water-hole glared dully. Beyond it now something was standing – a something which seemed to have risen out of the very earth itself – and it took the black figure of a man. And Wyvern was conscious of the cold shuddering thrill that passed through his own system, for the hideous pock-marked countenance turned upward towards him with deathlike stare, was that of the big Kafir whom the puff-adder had bitten – had bitten again and again and who was, of course, long since dead.
How could it be otherwise? No human system could survive an hour with all that deadly venom injected into it. He could have sworn to that awful face – it had been too deeply impressed upon his recollection at the time of the ghastly incident for him to forget it. There could not be another like it in the world; and it was fully visible to him now with the moon full upon it as the phantom stood there, huge and black. No – the thing could not be mortal. It was a physical impossibility – and he felt his flesh creep as it had never yet done.
The figure was moving. It had struck a crouching attitude, and was coming straight for where he lay. Instinctively Wyvern grasped the gun – though what was the use of a weapon against a thing not of flesh and blood? For a second it paused, then with a bound like that of the savage animal it had just scared away it alighted where the bush and the open met. There was a momentary and convulsive struggle accompanied by fierce hissing, then the horrible figure sprang upright, and stood, holding aloft, firmly grasped by the neck, a large puff-adder.
In the throes of strangulation the bloated coils of the reptile whipped the air convulsively, smooth and slimy in the moonlight – but it was powerless to strike. Itself of no light weight, yet its destroyer was able to hold it at arm’s length and at the same time never relax that deadly, strangling grip – the while the expression of the repulsive and horrible countenance turned upon the agonising reptile was one of fiendish gloating. At length the furious writhings died down into a faint muscular heave, and the black fiend, relaxing none of his grip of the now dead reptile, glided into the dark shades which had covered the retreat of the leopard.
Not a sound had been uttered – beyond the first hissing of the snake – not a word said; the whole scene had been horrible and eerie beyond the power of words to describe, in its weird setting of moonlit forest, and cliff and rugged spur. What devilish scene was this which had been enacted there, all in so brief a space of time that the witness thereof could hardly believe he had not dreamt it? Though not in the least timid, Wyvern was an imaginative man, and his imaginative powers were largely stimulated and fostered by his solitary life. Now he asked himself whether the wretched savage had really returned to earth – in a word – “walked,” and there in the wild and moonlit solitude the answer seemed very like an affirmative. He recalled Lalanté’s scare when they had been searching for the remains of this very being, and how no trace of any living thing had been apparent, even to Le Sage’s practised eyes. What did it all mean? Well, it need concern him no further, for in a day or two his interest in Seven Kloofs would be a thing of the past. And having thus decided, a sudden and, under the circumstances, strange drowsiness came upon him and he slept.
The Southern Cross turned in the heavens, and the soft breaths of night played around his forehead and still Wyvern slumbered on, and in the midst of that drear but beautiful solitude he dreamed. He was back at Seven Kloofs again, and, once more, it was his very own. All anxieties were wiped away, and they were rejoicing together in the joy of possession, and in their new-found, undimmed happiness – and then, and then – the stars faded in the lightening vault as the chill dawn awoke the sleeper, heart-weary and sick with the melting of the blissful illusion. But – what was this?
A strange sound, terminating in a sort of whine. Keen and alert now, Wyvern peered forth, just as the great leopard halted beneath, finishing his cavernous yawn, and looking inquiringly upward where scent or instinct told him some enemy was lurking. But just a fraction of a moment too long did he tarry, as the bullet sped forth; the thundrous echoes of the report rolling in many-tongued reverberation among the rocks and krantzes. The great spotted cat lay gasping out its life, with a severed spine.
There are compensatory moments in life, and this was one of them. In the keen exhilaration of the successful shot, Wyvern noted that the beast was an abnormally large and fine specimen of its kind. The skin should be a parting gift to Lalanté; a final memento of Seven Kloofs.