Laurette half listened, and forced herself to eat some salad. Gradually, she roused from the sick excitement of knowing that soon she would see the handsome features, the thick dark hair and sea-green eyes of Charles Heron. By the time Bwazi brought coffee she had cooled enough to wonder whether the woman named Maris was still at Mohpeng.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
MOHPENG consisted of a dozen white houses with thatched roofs, and thirty or forty native huts, all ranged over a green and rocky hillside, at the foot of which stretched an orderly row of official buildings. The most imposing of these buildings was the District Commissioner’s office, which was flanked on one side by the police post and on the other by the long, low courthouse. Further along stood the square trading store, which was also a centre for the recruitment of natives for work in the gold mines of the Union.
Seen from a distance, Mohpeng had the quiet, pastoral atmosphere of an Alpine village, for it was backed by steep peaks which, because of the summer mist, looked as if they might be sprinkled with snow. The air, though sun-warmed, was keen and bracing. Their young escort, Philip Nealson, explained that they were now at an altitude of seven thousand feet and might find themselves slightly breathless for a day or two.
They arrived as the sun was sliding down behind the distant Drakensberg. At Nealson’s request they had left Port Quentin while it was still dark. The three hundred miles or so of road was bad practically all the way, he said, and on the mountain passes one had to drop down to ten or fifteen miles an hour for long periods. It had been a tiring, dusty journey, yet when Laurette saw Mohpeng spread before her she wished they might drive on for hours longer. She was suddenly afraid of meeting Charles, and not too sure that she had been wise to come with her father to this tranquil fastness.
But inexorably the car pushed on over the wheel-made ruts in the grass which had been the only signs of civilization for the last fifty miles. Presently they ran on to an earth road and past the official buildings, wound away and gently upwards between scattered houses till finally Nealson brought the car to a halt outside a large white house set in a small but very trim garden.
And here was Charles, emerging into his veranda and dropping down the steps to the path as if this were an agreeable incident to round off his day.
“Hello, there.” He opened Laurette’s door and put a hand to her elbow as she stepped out: “Poor child, you look stiff enough to creak. Never mind, a bath will ease you.” His hand fell and he turned quickly to lend it to her father. “Don’t take risks, John. Use my shoulder.”
It came as a happy little shock to Laurette to hear Charles speak her father’s first name. An omen? she wondered.
Charles said, “You’ve done a good job, Nealson. Thanks.” The young man answered, “Glad to have been of service, sir,” smiled at Laurette and her father, and went on up the road.
In a minute or two she was standing in a modern, pale blue and grey lounge where a white-clad boy dexterously polished glasses and set them back upon a plain silver tray. Charles at once poured whisky and soda for her father; then he looked at Laurette, critically and somewhat quizzically.
“Well, little one, what’s yours ... Martini?”
“Yes, please.”
“Why the tight smile of censure?”
“Have I got one? I was thinking of the casual manner in which you dismissed Mr. Nealson after he’d driven six hundred miles on terrible roads for you.”
Charles was grinning. “What would you have had me do—ask him in for a drink? One doesn’t unbend that far with a junior. He comes here occasionally, with others, to dinner.”
She smiled back at him. “You beastly snob. I might have guessed that you’d be even worse here than at Port Quentin.”
He gave her a glass and flicked a finger at her sleeve. “Nealson’s the perfect cadet and I’m not spoiling him for you or anyone else. One of these days he may be a District Commissioner, and I intend that he shall be a good one. Don’t start teaching me my business the moment you enter the house.”
“I’d forgotten how pleasantly acid you two can be with each other,” complained John Delaney from his chair. “I suppose it’s a chemical reaction.”
“No,” said Charles, “it’s flint upon steel, which is much more elementary. Finish your drink, Laurette, and I’ll show you to your room.”
The boy had carried her case into the white bedroom, and when Charles, with a flourish, led her in there, Laurette was glad to see something of her own installed.
For the room was snowy and soulless, the sole saving patch of color a pale tan bedside rag.
“The sort of room,” commented Charles, as though he divined her slight shrinking from the square white furniture, “which is designed to uplift and ennoble. I took this over from my predecessor a few years ago, but furnished the rest of the house myself.”
“It is rather antiseptic,” she said. “A length of chintz would, improve it.”
“Women and chintz,” he said softly, derisively. “Admit one to your house and you’re bound to be saddled with the other. Wholesale defeat.”
“I hope you’re not already regretting having invited me!”
“No, dear child,” was his patronizing reply. “You’re not so hard to handle. In any case, you may not realize it but you’re brocade, not chintz.” He straightened from the leaning position he had taken in the doorway. “The bath is next door, to the right. Don’t be long. We’re having an early dinner.”
When he had gone Laurette did not, as might have been expected, fly to the window to inspect the darkening view, or set methodically about unpacking and making preparations for her bath. She moved slowly to the foot of the bed and stared, unseeing, at the white linen bedcover. He hadn’t changed, she thought. He was just as aloof and charming; just as impeccably attired and tantalizingly good looking.
In Mohpeng he held the senior position. Nealson had intimated that he was well liked by the white people and much respected by the Basuto. Everyone who lived in the place was proud of Mohpeng, proud of its isolation, of its peaceful administration for the benefit of the African. It pleased them to think of teeming Johannesburg only two hundred miles to the north, and the sophisticated Natal coastal resorts even nearer to the south, while they themselves occupied an almost inaccessible outpost in the tiny, mountainous Protectorate.
Mohpeng suited Charles. It was remote and grand, like a little kingdom with far-flung native townships as dependencies. She was glad she had come, so very glad.
The three of them were alone all that evening. Laurette had put on a rose-and-white striped frock and brushed her hair till it stood out, shining and silky. They had dined in the pinewood dining-room and chatted over coffee in the extra-ordinarily comfortable lounge. Charles had given her father the news that the local agricultural officer had taken the Sesuto book to headquarters in Maseru. It had eventually been decided to issue it in paper-covered form to the native agricultural officers for distribution to the Basuto farmers.
“So you’ll be receiving a cheque from that department,” Charles told John Delaney, “and not from me. It’s out of my hands now.”
“Will you let me have a copy of the book when it comes through?”
“I’ll send you several.” He laughed. “You’ll be interested to hear that my office boy swears that every figure you’ve drawn is a relative of his.”
“Introduce me to him and I’ll make a sketch of him and present it to him in gratitude for such a compliment.” The Captain expansively tapped ash from his cigar. “Why is it that one’s work gives so much more pleasure than the money one earns for it?”
“It’s only the few who are that fortunate,” returned Charles. “Even here we have men who are taking good-sized salaries and marking time till they can get away to do some wholesale spending. There’s one in particular—Kevin Seymour, our soil conservation expert—who’s just living till he can fling away his all on a glorious binge.” He leaned sideways, towards Laurette. “You may enjoy Ke
vin, and I’m sure he’ll enjoy you. I’ll see that you two meet tomorrow.”
“I’ll look forward to it,” she said. “What about women?”
“There are several. Seymour has a sister you might take to.”
After a while her father went to bed. The journey and the rarefied air had made him sleepy and he was quite willing to postpone further talk till tomorrow. Charles went off with him and Laurette remained in the lounge, leafing through a pile of strange books in many African languages which had apparently been printed in Basutoland. What a queer country this was, where hundreds of thousands of Africans were taught and guided by a handful of white men and their own educated brothers.
She felt Charles at her back and her fingers gripped more tightly over the edge of the book. Without lifting her head she asked, “What language is this?”
“Xhosa. We encourage the more educated Basutos to learn another dialect than their own. Most of them choose Xhosa in preference to Zulu. Our Africans are more advanced than those of the Union and Rhodesia.”
“Is there a school here?”
“Quite a big one. There are fifteen schools in the Mohpeng district, and we try to enforce a certain standard of learning on the new generation.” His tone lowered and became mocking. “What else would you like to be instructed upon before we go out and thrill to the moon?”
She snapped shut the book and dropped it on top of the pile, turned to face him without quite meeting his glance. “No woman could resist that sort of approach,” she said demurely. “Lead me to the moon.”
“Put on a coat, then. Our nights are distinctly nippy.” Out on the veranda she pulled the tweed collar close about her throat. It was so much cooler here than at Port Quentin that she had to quell a violent shiver. There was a freshness, a vital tang in the breeze which reminded her that they were up among the mountains, and the scents were muted and temperate. A slice of moon silvered the crests of the pines and gums, and the peppering of stars had a hard radiance. There were no drums from the native huts, but the inescapable smell of woodsmoke lingered about the hillside.
They stood at the wall, looking out at the trees and at a loftly crag which rose, a grotesque black shape, behind them.
Charles spoke first. “Not a romantic moon, is it? Too diamond-bright. Your coastal moonlight is kinder and more seductive.”
“A seductive moon over Mohpeng would be out of place. Don’t you find it cold sleeping out of doors?”
“One can always add another blanket. Don’t you try it out at Port Quentin, though; it’s much too humid there.”
He offered cigarettes and snapped on his lighter. “You’re nervy. What’s been happening to you?”
“I’m not nervy. It’s the altitude.”
“You’re too young to be affected by the altitude. Do you know what you remind me of?”
“Something infantile and negligible?”
“Stop being smart,” he said crisply, and gave her arm a painful little nip. “I knew the moment you arrived here that you had a problem on your mind.”
“Did you?” Curious and slightly incredulous, she looked up at the dark face, and found it too shadowed to be readable. “How?”
“There were several indications. You’re restless and on the defensive and your smile isn’t spontaneous.” A pause. “Is it Ben Vaughan?”
She shook her head. “It’s a family matter.”
To gain time she flicked away the scarcely-smoked cigarette. For a panicky second she would have given anything to retract the few words, to have told him, nonchalantly, that it might be Ben, or on the other hand it might be someone else. But Charles was difficult to deceive, and she did want his advice, desperately.
“Family?” he echoed, and then by a process of elimination, he added, “Your brother?”
She was silent. A dog yelped in a frenzy of joy somewhere down the road, and straight after that a horse neighed over in the pasture. The night was suddenly full of sounds which, however, offered no escape.
“Is it your brother?” he persisted on a commanding note. “Come on, Laurette. You’ve gone too far to back out now.”
“Well ... it isn’t easy to tell.”
But after a false start she got through it. Charles heard the story without comment, but as soon as her voice tailed off he demanded, “What sort of creature is he, this brother of yours? He sounds like a first-class swine.”
She hastened to Peter’s defence. “You don’t understand. He’s sweet, really, and no more thoughtless than anyone else. The tropics don’t suit him, so he’s let himself go a little. After all, lots of young men do the same.”
He shrugged impatiently. “He has a right to go to the devil if he wants to, but who the blazes does he think he is—asking you to pay for his peccadilloes!”
“I might have had the money—he wasn’t to know.”
Charles waved this away. “The money’s the least of it. I’ll put the right. What makes me hot is the fellow’s consummate selfishness in saddling you, a girl of nineteen, with his debts.”
“Perhaps,” she said clearly, “he regards the age of nineteen differently from the way you do. He’s only twenty-five.”
“So?” with angry sarcasm. “It seems to me that your Peter regards everything in the light which suits him best. I’ve met this sort. He’ll never develop into anything worthwhile unless he’s cast off and left to work out his own future.”
“You’re horribly intolerant,” she said. “Peter hasn’t had quite the same chances as the men he mixes with, and possibly being an adopted son has made him feel less secure.” She leaned her folded arms upon the wall and spoke into the garden. “He was very young when my mother and father took him over, just after their marriage; his own parents died in a plane crash. They had left him in our home while they went off on a pleasure trip; they were that kind, I’m afraid. I think he would have grown up less self-centred if my mother had lived, but we both had to be cared for by an aunt. My father did all he could to show Peter that he belonged and was a Delaney, but I’m sure that for him there was always something missing.”
“He didn’t scruple to take everything the Captain offered,” Charles put in tersely.
“He had no option, and he’s fond of my father. He’d hate him to hear about these debts.”
“That sentiment is hardly prompted by fondness,” he answered, still curt. “Cowardice is the more apt expression; cowardice with a tincture of self-preservation. Were you and he good friends?”
“Of course. We were never really close because we were both away at school, but we had fun together during the holidays. Charles,” she hesitated, “you won’t say anything to my father about it, will you?”
‘There’s nothing to gain by hurting the Captain,” he said. “You must give me your brother’s address and I’ll have the money sent through from Maseru. Altogether it will take about a fortnight.”
After a moment she said quietly, “I don’t know how to thank you. Peter and I will pay it back.”
“I’ll accept whatever Peter’s conscience decides he should send—though I very much doubt whether he has that sort of conscience. But you’re to forget this business, Laurette.”
She stood straight and turned to him. “I can’t! You’re doing this for me, not for Peter, and therefore it’s my debt. I oughtn’t to have told you about it...”
“If you’d closed up against me tonight I’d have got it out of you within the next few days.” His tone softened and he slipped an arm across her shoulder. “I’m thankful you did tell me. Now you can put it out of your mind and settle down to having high times.”
The feel of his jacket against her cheek brought her heart suffocatingly into her throat, and the relief of having shed the burden of Peter lent wings to her spirit. She yearned to be able to tiptoe and press her lip to the hard jaw, she yearned to be held, wordlessly, till this swooning was past.
Perhaps involuntarily she made a small movement to bring them closer, or maybe he did not care
for the inadvertent tickle of her hair against his chin. His mouth momentarily touched her forehead, and then she was free and swaying slightly from the abruptness of her release.
“If you ever make me really kiss you,” he said above her head, “you’ll be awfully sorry. I can be a nasty brute.”
It was a tone she had never before heard from Charles: flinty and savage with warning. Coming directly after his shouldering of Peter’s debt and the laying of his arm about her, it had for Laurette the impact of a blow. She stepped back, averting herself from his unpleasantly set face.
“Good heavens, Charles”—her voice was pitched a shade high—“if I’m ever so misguided as to invite an embrace from the District Commissioner of Mohpeng I shall deserve whatever comes my way.”
She flung him a swift “Good night” and went indoors to her room.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
KEVIN SEYMOUR, debonair and with a suggestion of dissipation in the lines of his thinnish face, reacted in his most sophisticated manner when he met Laurette outside the District Commissioner’s office next morning. He took her fingers, half-bowed, and infused into his voice that soft, caressing quality attained only by men who have diligently studied the pleasing of women. Charles looked on with a satirical smile and lifted brow.
“Laurette’s anxious to inspect the store,” he said. “You might take her along, Kevin. Are you working today?”
“I thought I might, but now I think I might not. My boys are already out on the job.” He slanted a glance at Laurette and disbelievingly shook his head. “You’re not real. Lovely things like you don’t come to Mohpeng.”
“One wouldn’t describe your sister as a ghoul,” Charles said.
“But Maris is only my sister.”
Doctor's Assistant Page 13