Renshaw Fanning's Quest: A Tale of the High Veldt

“But look here, Violet,” he went on. “Talking of Fanning, you were almost – well, carrying on with him last night. I began to get quite angry. You mustn’t make a fool of the poor chap – if you haven’t already, that’s to say.”

Violet laughed – her old, heartless, mocking laugh.

“Fancy being jealous of Mr Fanning!” she said scornfully.

“That be hanged!” cried Maurice, gaily, “But, darling, I grudge seeing you talking too much to any one.”

Thus, womanlike, secure in the possession of her own heart’s desire, she spoke contemptuously of one for whom she really entertained a great and deep-laid respect. Her own love, outside its special object, had not availed to render her more considerate, more tender, towards the man whose heart she had made a plaything of.

Returning through the garden they came upon Renshaw himself, who, with Marian and Effie, was strolling around. Now, the latter, for all her tender years, knew quite as much as was good for her, and in the present instance was prompt to recognise a case of “spoons,” as her abominably precocious young mind did not hesitate to define it. It happened that she disliked Violet, so she fixed her eyes maliciously upon the pair, and her mouth expanded into a knowing grin – which made Violet ardently desire to box her ears soundly there and then – and resolved to store up the incident for future use; in fact, to improve upon the discovery.

“Hallo, Fanning,” cried Sellon, as they met, “you’re looking rather seedy, old chap. Been legging it around too much all the morning.”

“Not I. I feel all right. You won’t have to do doctor again, Sellon – no fear,” was the genial reply.

Now, Sellon’s words had caused Marian to steal a very quick and anxious glance at her companion’s face, which at that moment was certainly destitute of its normal healthy colour.

“Renshaw, you have been overdoing it,” she said warningly. “You have come here to be set up, not to be made ill again. So luckily it’s just dinnertime, and we must all go in.”

So the parties fused, and, merged into one, retraced their steps towards the house, chatting indifferently. But that glance of Marian’s had drawn, as it were, a curtain from before Violet’s eyes. She, too, thought she had made a discovery, and she, too, resolved to turn it to future account – should the necessity arise.

“I say, Renshaw,” said Selwood, sotto voce, and with a characteristic nudge, as they entered the passage a little way behind the rest of the party, “that chum of yours is a knowing dog, eh? Miss Avory has soon managed to cure his headache. Ho – ho – ho!”

Thus did everybody combine to turn the steel, already sticking deep enough, in this unfortunate man’s heart.

Dinner over, the heat of the afternoon was got through in delightfully easy and dawdling fashion. Christopher Selwood, in a big armchair, sat in a cool corner absorbed in the ill-printed columns of the local sheet, the Fort Lamport Courier, which set forth how brandziekte had broken out in one end of the district, and how a heavy hailstorm had peppered the other, and how “our esteemed townsman, Ezekiel Bung, Esquire, the genial landlord of the Flapdoodle Hotel,” had, “we deeply regret to say, fallen off the stoep of his house and injured his leg,” the fact being that the said Bung, Esquire, had walked straight into space while as drunk as a blind fiddler, and intent on kicking out a Fingo who had contumaciously reckoned on quenching his thirst at the public bar, instead of among his compatriots in the canteen. This and other news of a like interesting and intellectual nature, Selwood scanned. Suddenly an exclamation escaped him.

“By Jingo! This is good!” he cried. “I say, Marian, you remember those two black chaps who were round here with all that stock two or three weeks back? That one-eyed cuss who was inclined to be so cheeky?”

“Yes. What about them?”

“You remember the names on their pass?”

“Perfectly. Muntiwa and Booi.”

“All right. The whole of that stock was stolen, and they’ve been run in at Fort Lamport and committed for trial at the Circuit Court, which’ll be held in a week or two.”

“That’s good business,” said Renshaw. “How were they nobbled?”

“Why, a Dutchman spotted them just outside Fort Lamport, and recognised some of the cows as belonging to his uncle or somebody. He said nothing at the time, but just trotted up to the court and swore an affidavit, and they were all run in.”

“But didn’t you say they had a pass?” said Renshaw.

“Of course they had. But therein lies the cream of the whole situation. The pass turns out a forged one, cooked up by a mission-station Kafir, and well done it was, too. So much for educating the niggers. It turns out, too, that the police have discovered these chaps’ hiding-place, away up among the thick bush and caves in Slaagter’s Hoek. It was a regular vultures’ nest, chock full of bones of stolen stock. They must have been at it for years. And then to think of them marching openly through the country on the strength of that forged pass. Let’s hope they’ll get it stiff now they are quodded.”

“Who’s the circuit judge this time?” asked Renshaw.

“Van Reneen, I expect. Judge Sherrington was round on circuit last time, so we are sure to have the other man; and a good thing, too. Old Sherrington loves a black fellow as if he was his father, and lets him down about as lightly as he comfortably can, and that’s very lightly indeed.”

“You are sure to be subpoenaed to give evidence, Chris,” said Marian, mischievously.

“Eh! By Jingo, I never thought of that. I hope not, though!” cried Selwood, in dismay at the prospect of an enforced absence from home, involving, moreover, two long and tiresome journeys, and Heaven knew how many days of kicking up his heels in Fort Lamport, in hourly expectation of being called. “Well, likely enough they’ll have plenty of evidence without mine. Sellon – Renshaw – how about a stroll round? it’s turning cool now. But we’ll do a glass of grog first.”

Chapter Twelve.

“He does not Ring True.”

Three weeks had gone by since the arrival of our two friends at Sunningdale, and yet, although he expected great things – everything – from the change, Renshaw seemed to find it impossible altogether to throw off the effects of his recent illness.

Now, to one member of the Sunningdale household this was a source of great, though secret anxiety. That one was Marian Selwood.

With growing concern she noticed an unwonted dejection settling over him – a kind of physical and mental languor and loss of appetite totally unlike his former self. Sometimes she ascribed it to the baleful witcheries of Violet Avory, at others to the consciousness of his hard, uphill struggle to make headway at all; sometimes, again, to both causes combined. Still there was no getting over the fact that he did not gain in convalescent strength, notwithstanding that his surroundings were in every way favourable and congenial to that end.

They had ever been great allies, these two. It is strange that they had not become greater – even for life; it is possible that this might eventually have come about but for two obstacles – Renshaw’s poverty and – Violet.

We do not commit ourselves to the assertion that Marian was in love with Renshaw. But that, in her opinion, he was absolutely faultless, we do freely admit, and her remarks upon him to Violet Avory earlier in this narrative lifted merely a corner of the curtain which veiled her predilection. Wherefore now she was mightily exercised on his account.

He did too much. For instance, what earthly necessity was there for him to have turned out so early that morning and gone right away up the mountain to look for half a dozen wretched sheep left out overnight, riding back by the vij-kraal to count Umsapu’s flock? Or what business had he toiling hard all day yesterday in the broiling sun, helping to pack a stone wall for a new “land” which was to be laid under cultivation, and he just through a return of a deadly malarial fever? It was too bad of Chris to allow it.

All this and more she took the opportunity of putting before Renshaw himself one hot morning as the two sat together in a delightfully cool and shady corner of the stoep.

“It won’t kill me yet, Marian,” he replied to her expostulations. “But do you seriously think I should get back my old form the sooner by just loafing around all day doing nothing?”

“Yes, I do,” she rejoined decisively. “Yes, I do – even though you put it that way. You do far too much.”

“Pooh! Not a bit of it. Why, it’s quite a treat to be able to do something. Bless my life, on my dried-up old place it’s a case of vegetating day after day – counting out – looking around – counting in. I’m like the jolly nomad moving around with his flocks, except that, mine being stationary, I have less trouble even than he has.”

“You certainly are nomadic in that you are wandering from the point, Renshaw, which is very crafty of you, but useless. As I am continually telling you – we feel bound to see that you get well and strong while you are with us, and how can you do either when day after day you are over-exerting yourself?”

There was just a soupçon of tenderness in her voice – and Marian Selwood had a beautiful voice – as she thus reasoned with him. Her head was partly bent down over her work, throwing into prominence the glorious masses of her golden hair, which, swept up into an artistic coronal, lent an additional dignity to her calm, sweet beauty. Renshaw lounged back in his cane chair, idly watching the supple, shapely fingers plying the needle in rhythmic regularity – every movement one of unconscious grace. The boom of bees floated upon the jessamine-laden air, varied by the shriller buzz of a long, rakish-looking hornet winging in and out of his absurd little clay nest, wedged, like that of a swallow, beneath the eaves of the verandah. Great butterflies flitted among the sunflowers, but warily and in terror of the lurking amantis – that arrant hypocrite, so devotional in his attitude, so treacherously voracious in his method of seizing and assimilating his prey – and a pair of tiny sugar-birds, in their delicate crimson and green vests, flashed fearlessly to and fro within a couple of yards of Renshaw’s head, dipping their long needle-like bills into the waxen blossoms of the fragrant jessamine.

And here we frankly admit losing patience with our friend Renshaw. Had we been in his place, with that exquisitely modulated voice talking to us, and fraught with that tender solicitude for our well-being, we feel sure we should in our own mind have sent a certain outrageous little flirt to the right-about then and there, and have dismissed her from our thoughts outright. But then, after all, we must remember that these two had known each other intimately all their lives, had been almost like brother and sister, which, we suppose, counts for something.

“Well, I’m taking it easy enough this morning, in your sweet society, Marian,” he rejoined, “so you mustn’t be too rough upon me. And – it is Paradise.”

“What is? My society?”

He laughed.

“That, of course. Understood. Didn’t need specifying. But – all this,” with a wave of the arm that caused the sugar-birds to dart away in terror and a couple of flashes of sheeny light, a result he certainly had not intended, “All this. To lounge here at ease like this, literally bathed in the scent of flowers, with a sound of running water in one’s ears, and of bird life, animal life, every sort of life, after the dead, burnt-up, famine-stricken waste, watching day after day, month after month, for the rain that doesn’t come – seeing one’s stock snuffing out like flies with daily increasing regularity. Bah! It’s enough to drive a man mad.”

“Why don’t you give it up, Renshaw? Sell off your place and come and try this part? Chris is always saying you could do much better somewhere down here.”

“And Chris is right. But selling off is easier said than done, let me tell you. No one will so much as look at land investment up there – and – I’m about cleaned out. As soon as I’ve picked up a little more in form I’m off up country again. The interior. It’s the only thing left.”

Marian’s head bent down lower over her work, for her eyes were brimming. Renshaw, busily engaged at that moment knocking the ashes out of his pipe against the post of the verandah, was half turned away from her, and, for good or for ill, the teardrop which fell upon her work escaped him altogether. When he turned round again she had entirely recovered her self-control.

“If that is your idea, you had better follow my advice and do all you can to get strong again,” she said. “For you cannot think of launching out into an undertaking of that sort for some time to come. But – are you going to make another attempt to find ‘The Valley’?”