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

It was not the night to bear the weight of a blanket, or even of a sheet, had the latter luxury been among the resources of the establishment. Sellon, after tossing uneasily for an hour, dropped off into a heavy sleep, and dreamed.

He was alone in a deep, craggy gorge. Beetling rocks reared high above his head, just discernible in the gloom, for it was night. It was the “Valley of the Eye.”

Yes; and there was the “Eye” itself – gleaming out of the darkness, seeming to transfix him with the cold stare of a basilisk. Somehow he felt no exaltation on having gained the place – no triumph over treasure trove. Instead of putting forth his efforts to reach the shining stone, his chief desire was to flee from the spot. But he could not – he was rooted to the ground, shivering, trembling, with a chill shrinking of mortal dread. Nearer, nearer, drew that gleaming Eye, and, lo! beside it flashed forth another. There were two – a pair of eyes. Then before them came shadowy hands holding a bow. It was drawn. It was pointed full at him. Still he could not move. The poisoned arrows. Oh, Heaven!

The string twanged. With a shrill hiss the arrow sped – the poisoned arrow. A loud hiss, a deafening hiss, and, lo! the gloom of the valley was lighted up with a blinding glare, and —

“Close shave that, old chap!” said a voice.

The spell was broken – broken by that well-known voice. Starting up in his bed, bathed in the sweat of deadly horror, Sellon beheld a strange sight.

The room was lighted up with a blinding glare. In the middle of it stood Renshaw Fanning, holding up a huge snake by the tail. The reptile was quite dead, its head shattered by the hard oaken table, but its hideous length was still undulating with a convulsive writhe. The glare was the result of a continuous succession of vivid lightning flashes. Just then a mighty rolling peal of thunder shook the house, making the doors and windows rattle like castanets. Then followed pitch darkness.

“Strike a light, if you have any handy, but don’t come too near me in the dark,” said Renshaw. “This joker’s fangs may still be of some account, albeit he’s stone dead.”

As though still dreaming, Sellon obeyed.

“What the very deuce is the meaning of it all?” he said, as by the light of the candle he sat surveying the situation.

“Only this – that you were as near passing on your checks as you ever will be,” was the reply, “And you may thank this thunderstorm for it that you didn’t. The thunder awoke me at once, though it didn’t you, and of course I went outside to look at the weather. Then, by the glare of a flash of lightning, I spotted this brute. He was lying bang across both your legs, with his head against the wall. The flash lasted just long enough for me to lay hold of his tail, and I knew the geography of the room well enough to whirl him up and bring his head down upon the hardest part of the table.”

Sellon stared at the speaker, then at the hideous, writhing body of the reptile, without a word. He seemed stupefied.

“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 onrushing 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 passed 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 circumstances, 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, succumbed 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 impassable. 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 ass. 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 grassy 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.