Part 11 (1/2)
More anger melted away.
”I haven't even had my dinner yet.”
Gay sprang up like a whirlwind.
”Oh, how detestable you are,” she said, in a low, furious voice, ”with your dinner and your wretched excuses! Do you think I don't know what you were doing that you forgot? Everyone knows what you are doing when you forget your engagements--playing poker and drinking with a lot of low gambling men, wasting your money and your time and all that is fine in you!”
Druro had stood up, too, and faced her with the first bolt she flung.
They were quite alone, for the trilling notes of a two-step had swiftly emptied the veranda. He still wore a smile on his lips, but its singularly heart-warming quality had gone from it. His red-brown face had grown a shade less red-brown, and his grey, whimsical, good-natured eyes looked suddenly hard as rock. He addressed her as if she were someone he had never met before.
”You are very plain-spoken!”
”You need a little plain-speaking,” she said pa.s.sionately.
”It is a pity to waste wit and wisdom on an object so unworthy.
Obviously, I am past reforming”--his smile had a mocking turn to it now--”even if I wanted to be reformed.”
”_Of course_ you don't want to be reformed,” said Gay. ”No drunkard and gambler ever does.”
Her voice was hard, but there was a pain in her heart like the twist of a knife there. She pressed her hand among the laces of her dress, and all the little paste jewels twinkled. Druro noticed them. They engaged his attention, even while he was swallowing down her words like a bitter dose of poison. He was deeply offended. She spoke to him as if he were some kind of a pariah, and it was unpardonable. If she had been a man, he would have known what to do, and have done it quick.
But what could be done with a slip of a girl who stood there with a folded lace b.u.t.terfly around her and looked like a pa.s.sionate tea-rose twinkling with dewdrops? Nothing, except just smile. But only the self-control gained in many a hard-won and ably bluffed game of life (and poker) enabled him to do it, and to say, with great gentleness:
”I'm afraid that I am as I am. You must take me or leave me at that.”
”I'll leave you, then,” she said burningly, and slipped past him. At the door of the ballroom she looked back and flung him a last word, ”Until you are a different man from the present Lundi Druro.”
Druro, entirely taken aback by her decisive retort and action, stood staring long after she had disappeared.
”Well, by the living something or other!” he muttered at last, and walked away from the hotel, filled with wholesale rage and indignation.
”The little shrew! Who asked her to take me, I wonder? Or for her opinions on my ways of living? Of all the cheeky monkeys! Pitching into me like that--just because she missed her blessed waltz!
_Certainly_ it was rotten of me--I don't say it wasn't. _But I forgot_. I _told_ her I forgot. Didn't I come straight down here and tell her? Left those fellows--left a jack-pot! O my aunt! And that's all I get for it--a decent and reasonable fellow like me to be called such names just because I distract myself with the only one or two things that can delude one into believing that life is worth living in this rotten country! Drunkard and gambler--fine words to fling at a man like bomb-sh.e.l.ls!”
Thus it was with Druro, whom all men hailed as ”well-met,” and all women liked, and all Rhodesia called ”Lundi,” though his Christian names were really Francis Everard. No one had ever called him anything but Lundi since the day he jumped into the Lundi River to save his dog's life. He was on a shoot with half a dozen other men, and they had heavily dynamited a portion of the river to bring up some fresh fish for dinner. Druro's dog, thinking it was a game he knew, jumped in after one of the sticks of dynamite to bring it out to his master, and Druro, like a flash, was in after him and out again, just in time to save himself and the dog from being blown to smithereens. ”The bravest action he had ever seen in his life,” one of the witnesses described it--and he had been through several native wars and knew what he was talking about, just as Druro, who was a mining expert, knew the risk he was taking when he jumped in among the dynamite.
This was the man who was filled with rage and desolation of heart at the words of ”a little monkey of eighteen or nineteen--old dissipated Derek Liscannon's daughter, I thank you! Nice school to come to for temperance lectures! Not that she can help being Derry's daughter, and not that old Derry is a bad sort--far from it--but as hard a drinker as you could find in a day's march. And young Derry hits it up a bit, too, though one of the nicest boys in the world. I've always said that Gay was the sweetest, prettiest little kid in Rhodesia--in Africa, if it comes to that--and now she turns on me like this--blow her b.u.t.tons!”
He strode along the soft, dusty roads that still had a feel of the veld in them, neither looking nor listing whither he went. It was a soft, plaintive voice that brought him to a standstill, and the realization that he was close to the w.a.n.kelo railway station.
”Oh, _can_ you tell whether the Falcon Hotel is far from here?”
”The Falcon Hotel, madam?” His hand went instinctively to his head, but there was no hat upon it. ”There is surely a bus here that will take you to it,” he said, looking about him.
She gave a little laugh.
”Yes; but I don't want my poor bones rattled to pieces in a bus if it is not too far to walk.”
Dimly he could see a slight figure swathed in velvety darkness of furs and veils that gave out a faint perfume of violets, and the suggestion of a pale, oval face. Her voice was low and sweet.
”It is not very far,” said Druro. ”I will gladly show you the way, if you will allow me.”