Part 4 (2/2)

”What's your name?” the man had demanded.

”Antony Gray.”

”Not Richard Gray's son?”

”Yes.”

The man had burst into a shout of laughter.

”Where is your father?”

”In London.”

”Well, tell him his son is a chip of the old block, and Nicholas Danver says so. Ask him if he remembers the coach road from Byestry to Kingsleigh. Good-bye, youngster.”

And Nicholas had ridden away.

It was astonis.h.i.+ng in what detail the scene came back to him. He could smell the hot aromatic scent of the gorse and wild thyme. He could hear the humming of the bees above the heather. He could see the figure on the black horse growing speck-like in the distance as he had gazed after it.

The whole thing pieced itself together. He remembered that he had gone to that cottage on the moorland with his nurse to recover after measles. He remembered that his father had said that the air of the place would make a new boy of him. He remembered his father's laugh, when, later, the tale of the meeting had been recounted to him.

”Good old Nick,” he had said. ”One loses sight of the friends of one's boyhood as one grows older, more's the pity. I must write to old Nick.”

There the incident had closed. Yet clearly as the day on which it had occurred, a day now twenty-five years old, it repainted itself on Antony's brain, as he sat on the stoep, gazing out into the African night.

It never occurred to him to wonder why Nicholas should have left him his money and property. That he had done so was marvellous, truly; his reasons for doing so were not even speculated upon. Antony had a childlike faculty for accepting facts as they presented themselves to him, with wonderment, pleasure, frank disapprobation, or stoicism, as the case might be. The side issues, which led to the presentation of the facts, were, generally speaking, the affair of others rather than his own; and, as such, were no concern of his. It was not that he deliberately refused to consider them, but merely that being no concern of his, it never occurred to him to do so. He walked his own route, sometimes singing, sometimes dreaming, sometimes amusedly silent, and always working. Work had been of necessity from the day his father's death had summoned him hurriedly from college. A quixotic, and, it is to be feared, culpable generosity on Richard Gray's part had left his son penniless.

Antony had accepted the fact stoically, and even cheerfully. He had looked straight at the generosity, denying the culpability, thereby preserving what he valued infinitely more than lands or gold--his father's memory, thus proving himself in very truth his son. He had no ties to bind him; he was an only child, and his mother was long since dead. He set out on his own route, a route which had led him far, and finally had landed him, some five years previously, on the African veldt, where he had become the owner of the small farm he now occupied.

After all, there had been compensations in the life. All unconsciously he had taken for his watch-word the cry: ”I will succeed in spite of ...” rather than the usual old lament: ”I could succeed if....”

Naturally there had been difficulties. He had considered them grave-eyed and silent; he had tackled them smiling and singing. Inwardly he was the same Antony who had conquered the gorse-stick on the moorland; outwardly--well, he didn't make the fight so obvious. That was all the difference.

And now, sitting on the stoep with the silence of the African night around him, he tried to shape his plans, to bring them forth from the glamour of the marvellous which had enshrouded them, to marshal them up into coherent everyday form. But the glamour refused to be dispelled.

Everything, the smallest and most prosaic detail, stood before him bathed in its light. It was all so gorgeously unexpected, so--so stupendously mysterious.

And through all the glamour, the unexpectedness, and the mystery, there was sounding an ever-repeated chord of music, composed of the notes of youth, happiness, memory, desire, and expectation. And, thus combined, they struck the one word--England.

CHAPTER III

QUOD SCRIPTUM EST

The _Fort Salisbury_ was cutting her way through the translucent green water. Cape Town, with Table Mountain and the Lion's Head beyond it, was vanis.h.i.+ng into the increasing distance.

Antony had taken his pa.s.sage on the _Fort Salisbury_ for three reasons: number one, she was the first boat sailing from Cape Town after he had dispatched his momentous cablegram; number two, he had a certain diffidence regarding the expenditure of other people's money, and his pa.s.sage on the _Fort Salisbury_ would certainly be lower than on a mail boat; number three, a curious and altogether unaccountable impulse had impelled him to the choice. This reason had, perhaps unconsciously, weighed with him considerably more than the other two. He often found instinct throwing itself into the balance for or against the motives of mere reason. When it was against mere reason, matters occasionally complicated themselves in his mind. It had been a comfort to find, in this case, reason on the same side of the scale as instinct.

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