Renshaw Fanning's Quest Part 7

"Scott!" he burst forth at last. "Well, we are quits now, at any rate.

But that's something like a nightmare."

This, then, was the interpretation of his bloodcurdling dream. The terrible eyes, the frightful riveting spell, the shrill hiss, the poisoned arrow. He felt clean knocked out of time.

"Green cobra--and a big un at that," said Renshaw, throwing the carcase through the open house-door. "See how it was? The beggar knew a big rain was coming, and sneaked in here for shelter. It's never altogether safe to sleep with open doors. And now, unless you can sleep through a shower-bath, it's not much use turning in again. This old thatch will leak like a sieve after all these months of dry weather. Better have a 'nip' to steady your nerves."

The storm broke in all its fury; every steel-blue dazzling flash, in unintermittent sequence, lit up the darkness with more than the brightness of noonday, while the thunderclaps followed in that series of staccato crashes so appalling in their deafening suddenness to one belated in the open during these storms on the High Veldt. Then came a lull, followed by the onrus.h.i.+ng roar of the welcome rain. In less than five minutes the dry and shrunken thatch was leaking like a shower-bath, even as its owner had predicted, and having covered up everything worth so protecting, the two men lit their pipes and sat down philosophically to wait for the morning.

It came. But although the storm had long since pa.s.sed on the rain continued. No mere thunder-shower this, but a steady, drenching downpour from a lowering and unbroken sky; a downpour to wet a man to the skin in five minutes. The drought had at length broken up.

Too late, however. The rain, as is frequently the case under the circ.u.mstances, turned out a cold rain. Throughout that day all hands worked manfully to save the lives of the remnant of the stock--for the Angora is a frail sort of beast under adverse conditions--and as it grew bitterly cold, packing the creatures into stables, outhouses, even the Koranna huts, for warmth. In vain! The wretched animals, enfeebled by the long, terrible drought, succ.u.mbed like flies to the sudden and inclement change. Save for about two score of the hardiest among the flock, by nightfall of the following day Renshaw Fanning was left without a hoof upon the farm.

CHAPTER NINE.

TWO "SELLS."

"Heard anything of Renshaw?" said Christopher Selwood, coming in hot and tired from his work, for a cup of tea late in the afternoon.

"Not a word," answered his wife, looking up from the last of a batch of letters that had just come in with the weekly post. "Why--you don't think--?" she began, alarmed at the grave look which had come over her husband's face.

"Well, I don't know," he replied. "I hope there's nothing seriously wrong. How long is it since you wrote?"

"More than a fortnight now."

"Ah, well. I dare say it's all right. Now I think of it, they've had big rains up that end of the country. Big rains mean big floods, and big floods mean all the drifts impa.s.sable. The post carts may have been delayed for days."

"You think that's it?" she said anxiously.

"Why, yes. At first, I own, I felt a bit of a scare. You see, the poor chap was desperately ill when he wrote--though, to be sure, he must have got over the worst even then--and I've been feeling a little anxious about him of late. Well, he'll come when he can, and bring his friend with him, I hope. It'll liven the girls up, too. Miss Avory must be getting properly tired of having no one to flirt with."

The soft afternoon air floated in through the open windows in balmy puffs, bringing with it a scent of flowers, of delicate jessamine twined round the pillars of the _stoep_, of rich roses now bursting into full bloom. A long-waisted hornet rocketed to and fro just beneath the ceiling, knocking his apparently idiotic head against the same, and the twittering of finks darting in and out of their pendulous nests above the dam in all their habitual fussiness, mingled with the melodious whistle of spreuws holding contraband revel among the fast-ripening figs in the garden.

For a few minutes Mrs Selwood plied her sewing-machine in silence, then--

"Talking of Violet, Chris, did it never occur to you that she had flung her net over poor Renshaw?"

"Flung her net--Renshaw! No, by Jove, it never did! Why, he's the most sober-going old chap in the world. Confound it, he must be past that sort of thing--if he ever went in for it. Why, he's only two or three years my junior."

"And what if he is?" was the reply of calm superiority. "He needn't be Methuselah for all that. And then remember the hard, struggling, solitary life his has been. He's just the man to fall over head and ears in love at middle age."

"Pho! Not he! What matchmakers women are. Bryant and May are nothing to them. But, I say, Hilda, supposing it is as you say, why shouldn't he go in and win, eh?"

"Do you think Violet is the sort of girl to go and end her days in a wattle-and-daub shanty away in the wilds of Bushmanland? Come now. Do you think for a moment she's that sort?"

"N-o. Perhaps not. But there's no reason why she should. Renshaw might find some farm to suit him somewhere else--down here, for instance. I don't see why it shouldn't be done. He's a fellow who thoroughly understands things, and would get along first-rate at whatever he turned to. If he's come into low water up there it's more the fault of that infernal country than his own, I'll bet fifty pounds.

No, I don't at all see why he shouldn't go in and win, and, by Jove, he shall."

"Who's the matchmaker now?" retorted his wife with a smile of conscious superiority. "But there are several things to be got over. First of all, I believe he must be in very low water; in fact, pretty well at the end of his tether. That drought can't have left him much to the good.

And I am tolerably certain Violet has nothing--at least, nothing to speak of."

"Well, that might be got over--living's cheap enough,--and here we never get any downright bad seasons."

"Then there's the difference in their creeds."

"Pho! That doesn't count for much in these parts, where there's precious little opportunity of running any creed in particular."

"No, unfortunately; but there ought to be," replied Woman, the born devotee. "But the most fatal obstacle of all you seem to overlook. It usually takes two to make a bargain."

"What! Do you mean to say she wouldn't have him? Well, that's another story, of course. But Renshaw's an uncommonly fine follow all round-- and she might do worse."

"That I won't attempt to deny. But I'm afraid the impression left upon my mind is that she doesn't care twopence about him."

"Only making a fool of him, eh?"

"I won't say that. Violet is a girl who has been accustomed to a great deal of admiration, and has an extremely fascinating manner. It is quite possible that poor Renshaw may have walked into the trap with his eyes open."

"Not he. He isn't such an a.s.s. She must have been trying to make a fool of him," growled Selwood, with whom Violet Avory was, nevertheless, a prime favourite. "Just like you women! You're all alike, every one of you."

His wife vouchsafed no reply, and the whirr of the sewing machine went blithely on. Soon the silence was broken by an unmistakable snore. The slumbrous warmth of the afternoon had told upon Selwood. His head had fallen back, his pipe had slipped on to the floor. He was fast asleep.

An hour went by. It was getting nearly time to go to the kraals and count in the sheep. Still he snored steadily on. His wife, drowsy with the continual whirr of the sewing machine, felt more than half inclined to follow his example.

Suddenly there was a sound of wheels on the gra.s.sy plot outside the front garden, then a voice exclaiming in dubious tone--

"Here's a take in. I believe they're all away from home."

The voice proceeded from one of the two occupants of a very travel-worn buggy standing at the gate.

"No, they're not!" cried Mrs Selwood, to whom that voice was well known. "Come--wake up, Chris. Here is Renshaw himself!"

"Eh--what! I believe I've been asleep!" cried Selwood, starting up--"Renshaw--is it! Hallo, old chap. This is first-rate," he added, rus.h.i.+ng out. And the two men's hands wore locked in a close grip.

"Allamaghtag! But you are looking pulled down--isn't he, Hilda?--though not quite so much as I should have expected. How are you, sir? We are delighted to see you," he went on as Renshaw duly introduced his friend.

["Allamaghtag!" "Almighty!" A common e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.i.o.n among the Boers. It and similar colloquialisms are almost equally frequent among their colonial brethren.]

Then Marian appeared--her sweet face lighting up with a glow of glad welcome for which many a man might have given his right hand--and then the children, who had been amusing themselves diversely after the manner of their kind, anywhere outside and around the house, came crowding noisily and gleefully around "Uncle Renshaw," as they had always been in the habit of calling him. To the lonely man, fresh from his rough and comfortless sick-bed, this was indeed a home-coming--a welcome to stir the heart. Yet that organ was susceptible of a dire sinking as its owner missed one face from the group,--realised in one quick, eager glance that the presence he sought was not there.

Violet's room was at the back of the house, consequently she had heard but faintly the sounds attendant on the arrival of the visitors. She instinctively guessed at the ident.i.ty of the latter, but it was clean contrary to Violet Avory's creed to hurry herself on account of any man.

So having sacrificed a few moments of curiosity to this principle, and, needless to say, taken the indispensable look at herself in the gla.s.s, she issued leisurely forth.

Now, as she did so, Selwood was ushering in his stranger guest--was, in fact, at that moment standing back to allow the latter to enter before him. Thus they met face to face.

Then was her self-possession tried in such wise as no member of that household had yet witnessed. She halted suddenly, her face deadly white. A quick e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.i.o.n escaped the stranger's lips.

It died as quickly, and his half-outstretched hand dropped to his side in obedience to her warning glance; for her confusion was but a momentary flash. It entirely escaped Selwood, who was walking behind his guest, the broad shoulders and fine stature of the latter acting as an opportune screen, and all the others were still outside.