The White Hand and the Black Part 17

"Nearly. Not quite. It is in the air still. _Nkose_, two more would complete the _lobola_, for the girl is fine and much sought after, and her father--_whau_! he is miserly and loves cattle much."

"Yet I think one more will content him. We will talk further about it."

And Thornhill laughing to himself turned away.

"So we have got that beast back again? I thought he had gone for good,"

said Edala, her straight, clear glance full on her father's face.

"Meaning Manamandhla? So did I, but I don't think he'll stay long--no, not long."

Still she kept her glance upon him, and though the words were spoken easily, naturally, and without any outward intonation of significance, it seemed to Thornhill that the girl read his thoughts, his intent.

She, like himself, could school her face, yet not altogether. Its expression now seemed to reveal horror, loathing, repulsion--yet not for Manamandhla. Reading it, something moved him to say:

"I have been thinking things over, Edala, and perhaps, after all, I can see my way towards letting you carry out your cherished wish--that of going to Europe to study art seriously. You'd like that, wouldn't you?"

She made no answer. He had expected her to brighten up at the suggestion.

"You are not happy here, and I--well perhaps I am getting more than a little tired of living in an atmosphere of chronic suspicion and repulse. And yet, child, the time may come--and come too late--when you will bitterly regret the care of a father who has been to you as very few fathers within my experience have ever been to their children--in fact, I can hardly recall the case of one. But there--ingrat.i.tude is only to be expected, in fact nothing else could be under all the circ.u.mstances."

This with intense bitterness. His self control had momentarily broken down. The girl, who had begun to soften, grew hard again.

"I don't know that I've anything to be so thankful and appreciative over--under all the circ.u.mstances," she said, with a scathing emphasis on the echo of his words. He looked at her fixedly, sadly.

"Not now, but that will come. That will come--perhaps when it is too late."

His tone was quiet, and there was a sad conviction of prophecy in the words that again softened her--almost frightened her--as he turned away.

In a moment a huge impulse moved her to go after him and declare that she had no wish whatever to leave him; that she would give no thought in the world to any consideration but himself; that she had been horribly hard and ungrateful and selfish; but a.s.suredly some demoniacal influence was floating in the air just then, for the impulse pa.s.sed. And her father, too, was striving to harden his heart. Why not? A man never ceased to gain in experience of life and human nature even if he lived to a hundred; and he himself was only in his prime. Why then break his heart over that which was only to have been expected?

By an effort he dismissed the subject from his mind. The latter then reverted to the subject of Manamandhla, and the result of his meditations boded no good to that ill-advised Zulu.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN.

A REVELATION--WITH A VENGEANCE.

"Then, it wouldn't have killed him, Vine?"

"I think not. I could not quite locate the stuff. You see I have had no opportunity of making a study of these native drugs. They take precious good care we shan't," answered the District Surgeon.

Elvesdon was conscious of a sense of relief at this verdict. It would save complications at any rate. He would not now be obliged to open up a serious enquiry at a time when the native pulse had to be fingered very carefully.

"But why the deuce should they give him the stuff if it wasn't to get him out of the way?" he said.

"Well, you see, a drug, even of a poisonous nature, may have other uses than to cause death. It may be administered in sufficiently small proportions to cause a sort of waking stupefaction, a semi-consciousness in which the will power lies torpid, and the recipient may be made to do or say anything which others may choose to make him do or say. Now Zavula is an important chief--a very important chief--and respected as a singularly able and level-headed one, consequently his 'word' once uttered would carry more weight than that of upstarts like Babatyana and half a dozen others put together. See?"

"Yes. In other words he'd be of more use to them alive than dead?"

"That's it. But--by the way, Elvesdon, it's a pity I didn't have that bowl a bit sooner. You know traces of some poisons are easier located if investigated early."

"Yes, but we were both of us so infernally busy. And perhaps neither of us took the thing sufficiently seriously."

The two were seated in Elvesdon's inner office, and were, so to say, holding an inquest on the District Surgeon's investigation of old Zavula's drinking bowl. The doctor was a st.u.r.dy, thick-set man, of anything from fifty onwards but probably much more; grizzled and red-faced; very downright in manner, but genial and well-liked. He and the new magistrate had taken to each other at once.

"Think there'll be trouble Elvesdon--over the new tax for instance?"

said the doctor.

"The Lord only knows, and He won't tell. I'm doing all I can, but this business of Zavula's looks more than a bit ugly. I don't mind telling you. Babatyana's an infernal scoundrel, and he's practically chief of the Amahluzi. Poor old Zavula is for all practical purposes only a sleeping partner, I'm afraid."

"M-m," said the other.

"Well I think, as you can't certify that this stuff was enough to const.i.tute an attempt on old Zavula's life, there's nothing to be gained by stirring up any mud over the job. He's cute enough, and obviously able to take care of himself. The jolly old boy sent me quite an affectionate message only the day before yesterday--no--it was the day before that."

The grisly side to this statement lay in the fact that on the day named the said 'jolly old boy' was lying in his unknown grave in the rock cleft--had been for some time--and the whole of the Amahluzi tribe was in a simmering state of incipient rebellion.

"You see a good deal of the Thornhills, don't you, Elvesdon?" said the doctor, changing the subject.

"Yes. I like them too. It's a jolly lucky thing, I reckon, to find a man like Thornhill at one's elbow in a place like this. He's such a rational, level-headed chap--cultured too, and rattling good company."

"And the girl--what do you think of her?"

"She's charming--so unconventional, and high bred to the finger tips, as the French say, or, to put it literally, 'to the ends of the nails.' I don't mind telling you, Vine, that she's clean outside my experience."

The older man smiled queerly.

"Yes. She's a nice girl," he said, "but--peculiar."

Now Elvesdon had just reached that stage with regard to Edala that this d.a.m.ning of her with faint praise rather jarred upon him.

"Well but--isn't she?" he retorted, unwittingly sharply. "Nice--I mean."

"I said so," answered the other.

Still Elvesdon was not satisfied. There was something infernally, provokingly, shut-up-like-an-oyster about the tone. He felt moved to 'draw' the utterer.

"Peculiar, you said," he went on. "Yes, that I can believe. Do you know, Vine, the first Sunday I went over there, I had a queer experience. You know that big mountain on their place just opposite the house--Sipazi it is called?" The doctor nodded. "Well then, they took me up there in the afternoon to show me the view. You'll remember that tremendous krantz that literally overhangs the valley?" Again the other nodded. "Well there's a beast of a tree that grows out from its brink, horizontally at first, then upwards. There's just room for one--fool, I was nearly saying--or one and a half, to sit on it. Well what does the young lady do but climb down and sit on it as if she was in an armchair on the stoep at home. It turned me nearly sick to see her do it, I can tell you."

"I daresay."

"That's not all. She skipped up again, and--invited me to do the same."

"And did you?"

"Well I had to. It was in the nature of a challenge, you see. I tell you squarely and as man to man, I would willingly have forfeited a year's pay to have got out of it--when I got on to the beastly log, I believe I would have forfeited five. But how could I have backed out of doing a thing a girl had just done, and thought nothing of? Ugh! it gives me the cold s.h.i.+vers all down the back even now, to look back on those few moments when I sat, hung out in mid-air, over that ghastly height. And, you must remember the krantz slopes away _inwards_ from the top just there. Ugh!"

Vine sat back in his chair and chuckled. Elvesdon was obviously an imaginative chap, he was saying to himself. Why, as he told the story he was going through the experience again, and part of its horror had taken hold on him.