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

Mitford Bertram

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

Prologue

“Just consider! You would soon get to hate me. I should be the ruin of you.”

Thus the owner of the bright, sparkling face which was turned, half mockingly, half ruefully, upon that of her companion. Looking out killingly from under the broad-brimmed hat, the dark, lustrous eyes seemed to melt into his.

“How can you say such a thing?” was the reply, in the deep, half-tremulous tone of a man who is in dead earnest. “How can you say such a thing?” he repeated involuntarily, driving a spur into his horse’s flank with a dig that made that spirited animal curvet and prance beneath the restraining curb.

“Oh, take care! you are making my horse restive. And I am such a bad rider, as you know!” And the lithe, graceful figure in the well-fitting habit was thrown into the relief involved by a real physical effort. “How can I say so?” she went on; “how can I say so? Why, it is only candid on my part. Do you seriously think a butterfly like me is cut out for a life on the High Veldt?”

The man’s bronzed features faded to a ghastly paleness. He averted his head for some moments, as though with a wild instinctive idea of breaking the spell that was upon him. Overhead towered the stately cone of a great mountain, soaring aloft in the summer haze. Around, in undulating sweep, the bushclad slopes shut in the tortuous, stony road. Birds piped and called to one another in the lustrous sunlight, and the rich sensuous air was alive with the drowsy boom of bees and the metallic plash of the river in its rocky bed beneath.

“There are other and pleasanter places in this country than the High Veldt,” he said at last, but in the tone of an advocate pleading a hopeless cause, and that cause his own.

“But even then,” she rejoined, her voice softening as though in compunction over the final stab she was about to inflict, “even then – no one is less qualified to make you happy than I am, believe me. Why, you don’t really know me as I am! Sometimes I think I hardly know myself.”

“You do yourself injustice,” he said. “Give me the opportunity of proving it.”

A curious passing spasm – a kind of a stormy look – shot across the beautiful face.

“You are too generous,” she replied vehemently, “and far too good to be made miserable for life by such a little wretch as I am. Better, far, feel a little sorry now than that.”

“And you are underrating yourself. But I will not hurry you. Take time; but oh, my darling, don’t tell me that what you said just now is your final answer.”

“I must tell you that very thing. It cuts me to the heart to give you pain; and that is more than I have been able to say before to any man living. But – there are reasons – if you only knew. There. Forget that I ever said that. But I know that with you anything I may say is as safe as death itself.”

This time he made no reply. For one brief instant their eyes met, and in that instant he understood her; understood, too, that her first answer was final.

Yet he was goodly to look upon, this man, with his splendid physique, and refined, noble countenance. Many a feminine heart, we trow, would have beat quicker – but with vivid joy – at such words as he had addressed to his present companion. Many a pair of eyes would have brightened gladsomely into a quick love-light. Many another would have desired no better protector and stay until her life’s end than this man now riding by the side of her who had rejected him.

To propose on horseback is the very worst place a man can choose wherein to propose, says some one or other, by reason of both the proposer and proposee being in a measure subject to the precarious whims of one or a pair of wholly unreliable quadrupeds. He who now rode there had either never heard that salutary axiom or had forgotten it for the occasion; but now he was made to feel its force by a male voice, some little distance ahead, hallooing —

“Now, you two good people, spur up, or we shall never get there to-night!”

And a bend in the road brought into view other horsemen – other “habits” – stationary, and obviously and provokingly awaiting the arrival of the two laggards.

And the equestrians, now merged into one group, rode on their way in the golden sunlight of that lovely afternoon, rejoicing in the exquisite glories of the wild and romantic mountain road. But, in the prevailing mirth, one among them bore no part, for he carried within his breast the dead burden of a sore and aching heart.

Chapter One.

Thirst-Land

The heat was terrible.

Terrible, even for the parched, burning steppes of the High Veldt, whose baked and crumbling surface lay gasping in cracks and fissures beneath the blazing fierceness of the African sun. Terrible for the stock, enfeebled and emaciated after months of bare subsistence on such miserable wiry blades of shrivelled grass as it could manage to pick up, and on the burnt and withered Karroo bushes. Doubly terrible for those to whom the wretched animals, all skin and bone, and dying off like flies, represented nothing more nor less than the means of livelihood itself.

Far away to the sky-line on every side, far as the eye could travel, stretched the dead, weary surface of the plain. Not a tree, not a bush to break the level. On the one hand a low range of flat-topped hills floated, mirage like, in mid-air, so distant that a day’s journey would hardly seem to bring you any nearer; on the other, nothing – nothing but plain and sky, nothing but the hard red earth, shimmering like a furnace in the intolerable afternoon heat; nothing but a frightful desert, wherein, apparently, no human being could live – not even the ape-like Bushman or the wild Koranna. Yet, there stands a house.

A house thoroughly in keeping with its surroundings. A low one-storied building, with a thatched roof and walls of sun-baked brick. Just a plain parallelogram; no attempt at ornamentation, no verandah, not even a stoep. No trace of a garden either, for in this horrible desert of drought and aridity nothing will grow. Hard by stand the square stone kraals for the stock, and a little further on, where the level of the plain sinks into a slight depression, is an artificial dam, its liquid store at present reduced to a small patch of red and turgid water lying in the middle of a surrounding margin of dry flaky mud, baked into a criss-cross pattern of cracks, like a huge mosaic.

On a low, stony kopje, a few hundred yards distant from this uninviting homestead, sits its owner. Nobody but a Boer could dwell in such a place, would be the first thought succeeding that of wonder that any white man could be found to inhabit it at all. But a glance would suffice to show that he now sitting there is not a member of that dogged and pachydermatous race. The face is a fine – even a noble – one, whose features the bronzed and weatherworn results of a hard life have failed to roughen. A broad, lofty brow, and pensive dark eyes stamp their owner as a man of intellect and thought, while the peculiar curve of the well-formed nostrils betokens a sensitive and self-contained nature. The lower half of the face is hidden by a dark silky beard and moustache.

One brown, sinewy hand grasps a geologist’s hammer, with which it chips away listlessly at the ground. But, although the action is now purely mechanical, it is not always so, as we shall see if we use our story-teller’s privilege and dip into his inner thoughts. Briefly rendered, they run in this wise:

“Oh, this awful drought! When is it going to end? Not that it much matters, either way, now, for there’s hardly a sound hoof left on the place; and, even if a good rain did come, it would only finish off the whole fever-stricken lot. Well, I’ll have to clear out, that’s one consolation. I’ve held on as long as any man could, and now I’ll just have to go.”

His gaze wanders over the arid plain. Far away through the shimmer it rests on a multitude of white specks – a flock of Angora goats, striving in desperation to pick up what miserable subsistence it may.

“There’s nothing to be done with the place – nothing,” he muses, bringing his hammer down upon a boulder with a despairing whack. “It won’t sell even for an old song – no one will so much as touch land now, nor will they for a long time to come, and there isn’t a ‘stone’ (‘Diamond’ in digger parlance) on the whole farm, for I’ve dug and fossicked in every likely place, and unlikely one, too. No; I’ll shut up shop and get away. The few miserable brutes left are not worth looking after – not worth their brand ziek (Scab-affected) skins. Yet I’ll have one more search, one more crazy fool’s errand, after the ‘Valley of the Eye,’ before I trek. This ’ll make the fifth – but, no matter. One may as well make an ass of oneself five times as four. I can’t exactly believe old Greenway took all that trouble to dictate an infernal lie on his death-bed; and, if his yarn’s true, I’m a rich man for life – if I can only find the place, that is,” he adds bitterly. “And I’ve had four shies at it. Well, perhaps the fifth is going to be lucky.”

With which consoling reflection the thinker rises from his stony resting-place, revealing as he does so a tall, straight figure, admirably proportioned. Suddenly he starts, and a sallow paleness comes over the bronzed, handsome features. For he is conscious of a strange giddiness. A mist seems to float before his eyes, shutting out completely the glare of the burning veldt.

“Never that cursed up-country fever again?” he murmurs, to himself, in real alarm.

And for the latter there is reason – reason in the abnormal and unhealthy heat of the terrible drought – reason in his utter isolation, the vast distance between himself and a fellow-countryman – let alone such considerations as medical aid.

Recovering himself with an effort, he strolls on towards the house. There is no sign of life about the place as he approaches, unless a couple of miserable, fever-stricken sheep, panting and wheezing in the shade of the kraal wall, constitute such. But, dead and tomb-like as it looks outside, there is something refreshing in the coolness of the inner room as he enters. A rough tablecloth is laid, and a knife and fork. The walls are papered with pictures from illustrated prints, and are hung with swinging shelves containing a goodly number of books of all sorts. A few chairs and a couch, the latter much the worse for wear, constitute the furniture; and, on the whole, what with pipes, stray bits of saddlery, and miscellaneous odds and ends of every description, the place is about as untidy as the average bachelor abode is apt to be within the pale of civilisation, let alone away on the High Veldt. The floor is of hardened clay, and there is no ceiling – nothing between the inmate of the room and the bare and ragged thatch, one drawback to which arrangement being that a fine, lively tarantula will occasionally drop down upon the head or shoulder of the said inmate.

A call of “Kaatje. Dinner bring,” is soon productive of that meal, in so far as the remnant of a half-starved and wholly unnutritious chicken, dressed up with so insipid an ingredient as some plain boiled rice, can be said to constitute dinner. It is productive, simultaneously, of an extraordinary specimen of humanity.

A creature of mahogany hue and parchment hide, the latter hanging in flaps around her perspiring and scantily-attired person. A creature of the hideosity of one of Bunyan’s fiends – a frightful grin, horn-like ears, and a woolly skull – waddling on the abnormal hip-development of the native Bushman or Koranna. A nice sort of being to bring in one’s dinner, not of itself over-inviting! But one gets used to queer things on the High Veldt, and this hideous and repulsive object is only a harmless Koranna woman, and according to her lights a good old soul enough; and she officiates as cook and general factotum to this rough and ready household of one.

The swarming flies buzz around. The windows are black with them; the table is black with them; the air is thick with them. In they sail through open windows and open doors, fresh from the foetid stew-pans of the kitchen; fresh from the acrid, pungent dust of the goat kraals; fresh from the latest garbage, which they have been sharing with carrion birds, in the veldt. They light on the diner’s head, crawl about his face, crowd over plates and dishes and tablecloth – mix themselves up with the food, drown themselves in the drink. Everywhere flies.

The South African house-fly is identical with the British, but he is a far greater pest. He is more aggressive, and he brings to bear upon his victims the solid weight of numbers. Go where you will, you cannot shake him off. If you fit up a waggon, and dive into the far interior, there also will the common fly be with you – and with you in swarms.

Renshaw Fanning looks disgustedly at his uninviting meal, and plays with it rather than eats. Then he pushes back his chair. He has no appetite.

Again he seeks the open air. A restless mood is upon him, and broiling, stifling as the heat is outside, he cannot remain in the house. Suddenly a winged object appears fluttering in the sunlight. A quick exclamation escapes him, as he shades his eyes to watch it.

“Ha, of course! The last straw! Locusts. Here they come, by Jove! thicker and thicker to put the finishing touch on what the drought has begun. By this time to-morrow there won’t be a blade of grass left on the place, nor a hoof either.”

He stands watching the flying insects. Barely five minutes after the discovery of the first one, the air is thick with them. They seem to spring out of nowhere. Thicker and thicker they come, their gauzy wings fluttering in the sunlight, blundering into the spectator’s face, colliding with the walls, falling to the ground. It is an ill wind that blows nobody good. A few starved fowls at the back of the house perk up into new life as they rush forth to fill their emaciated carcases with this unlooked-for and abundant dainty. But the watcher withdraws indoors again, as if to shut out all sight and sound of these new and fatal intruders, and, as he does so, he is conscious of terrible shooting pains in his limbs.

Though of Irish parentage on one side, Renshaw Fanning is South African born. His life, so far – and he is now thirty-five – has been a hard one. Few, indeed, are the wilder, rougher phases of South African life of which he has not had more or less experience. He has farmed and has ridden transport (Carriage of goods by waggon), he has hunted and traded in the far interior, he has been a treasure-seeker, and has also fought in the border warfare which now and then breaks out between the colonists and their savage neighbours. But profitable as some of these avocations frequently are, somehow or other Renshaw Fanning has never seemed to make a success of anything, and this is mainly owing to the extraordinary unselfishness of the man. He will divest himself of his last shilling to help a friend in need, or even a mere acquaintance – indeed, he owes the possession of his arid and uninviting desert farm to this very failing, in that he has been forced to accept it in satisfaction of a bad debt which would otherwise completely have ruined him. As a matter of course, his friends and acquaintances vote him a fool, but deep down in their hearts lies a mine of respect for the only thoroughly unselfish man they have ever known; and even the unscrupulous ones who have traded upon and profited by his failing did so with compunction.

But with all his soft-heartedness and sensitive and retiring temperament, none who knew him have ever for a moment mistaken Renshaw Fanning for a muff. No cooler brain exists, no steadier hand or keener eye in times of danger or dangerous sport – whether at a critical moment, at the mercy of some treacherously disposed barbarian tribe in the far interior, or with finger on trigger awaiting the lightning-like charge of a wounded and infuriated lion. Or on treasure-seeking enterprise, when physical obstacles combined with failure of water and scarcity of provisions to render advance or retreat a work of almost superhuman difficulty, the post of hardship and privation was that which he unobtrusively assumed; and, indeed, there are men still living who, but for this, would long since have left their bones in the desert – occupants of unknown graves. No, assuredly none who know him can ever mistake Renshaw Fanning for a muff.

Such is the man whom we see, solitary, depressed, and in breaking health, contemplating, on his desert farm, the approach of ruin – which ruin all efforts on his part are powerless to avert.

Chapter Two.

A Friend in Need

Down, down to the far horizon sinks the westering sun, the malignant fierceness of his blazing countenance abating somewhat, for he is within an hour of his rest. Yet the earth still gives forth its shimmering heat, and on every side the red surface of the parched-up plain assumes a hue of blood beneath the golden glow of sunset, which, contrasted with the vivid blue of the heavens, is productive of a strangely weird and unearthly effect.

So thinks, at any rate, a horseman, toilsomely making his way over its inhospitable expanse. His steed, suffering terribly from want of water, as well as from a lack of nutritious food, can hardly drag its limbs along, and more than once has the rider endeavoured to relieve the poor beast by undertaking long spells of walking. But who can indulge in protracted exercise under such difficulties? Consequently the horseman, though of fine and powerful build, is nearly as fagged and used up as his unfortunate steed. Now and again a flying locust raps him in the face as he rides.

“What an infernal country!” he exclaims aloud, wiping his dripping forehead. “Nearly sunset, no sort of habitation in sight, and not even a drop of water in this howling desert. By Jove! the situation is getting serious,” he adds, in a tone bordering on alarm.

His alarm is not without reason. Since quitting last night’s camp beside a nearly dry waterhole, containing a noisome mixture, and that of the consistency of pea-soup, he has found no trace of the indispensable fluid. And he is lost. A worn-out horse under him, foodless, waterless, in the midst of an apparently interminable desert, he has every excuse for beginning to feel excessively concerned.

He is a fine, tall, well set-up man, this stranger. No partiality could define him as handsome. His features have no regularity, and his light-blue eyes are a trifle too small and deep set; but there is a certain power about his countenance, whose square, resolute jaw the short, fair, pointed beard and heavy, sweeping moustache can only half hide. Though his face and hands are burnt red brown, there is a subtle something which tells at a glance he is not colonial born, and that, too, quite apart from the newness of his travelling dress prematurely worn by rough usage, and of the serviceable valise which is strapped in front of his saddle.

A stony kopje, the only eminence for five miles around, rises before the traveller. This he has been using as a landmark, and through its agency steering in a straight line. It, too, having reached, he now ascends, and immediately there escapes him a pretty forcible ejaculation of relief. Away in front, breaking the deadly monotony of this horrible plain, lies a house – a homestead.

It is still three or four miles distant, though apparently nearer. But the horse has espied it as soon as his rider, and, pricking forward his ears, he picks up his head and steps out with something of an approach to briskness.

The first elation – at the certainty of finding necessaries, such as food and drink – over, the traveller’s thoughts turn to considerations of comfort. After all, the welcome haven is in all probability a mere rough Boer homestead, the abode of dirt and fleas, a place wherein comfort is an unknown quantity. And at such a prospect, hungry, thirsty, thoroughly wearied as he is, his spirits droop.

But his musings are interrupted in a sufficiently startling manner, by nothing less than the “whiz” of a bullet unpleasantly close to his head, simultaneously with the “bang” of the piece whence it was discharged.

Looking up, he finds that he has approached within a few hundred yards of the homestead. In the doorway of the same stands a tall man, clad in a shirt and trousers, with a gun in his hand, from which he is extracting the still smoking cartridge shell. Barely has he mastered these details than another bullet sings past his ear, this time nearer than the first, while the report rings out upon the evening air.

To say that the wayfarer begins to feel exceedingly uncomfortable is to express little. Here he is, a perfectly peaceable, unoffending person, about to seek the much-needed hospitality of yonder domicile, and suddenly, and without an iota of provocation, its owner proceeds to make a target of him in the most cold-blooded fashion. True, he has heard that many of the up-country Boers are a wild and lawless set, holding an Englishman in utter detestation. But this open and unprovoked “act of war” surpasses anything he may have been led to expect.

“Here, hallo! You, sir! What are you blazing away at me for?” he sings out, his tone betraying a degree of anger which prudence should have induced him to suppress.

His hand instinctively goes to the revolver slung round him in a holster under his coat. But of what use is a six-shooter against an enemy many hundred yards distant, and armed with a rifle? Therefore, it is with considerable relief that he beholds his unexpected adversary ground his piece, stare at him for a moment, then disappear indoors.

The feeling is but transitory, however, as it occurs to him that the fellow has probably gone in to get more cartridges, and that any moment he may find himself once more raked by the enemy’s fire. He judges it prudent to try the effect of a parley before venturing any nearer.

“Hi! Hallo, friend!” he shouts, “just drop that target practice, will you? There isn’t an ounce of harm about me. I’m nothing but a poor devil of a traveller lost in the veldt, and pretty well dead for want of a drink. D’you understand?”

Then it strikes him that if the inhospitable householder is, as he expects, a Boer, he will probably not understand.

“What is to be done?” exclaims the wayfarer in sheer despair. “Well, here goes. May as well be shot as starve in the veldt; and perhaps the fellow’s only playing the fool – trying what I’m made of – and, if I were only within fifty, or even a hundred yards of him, the ‘trying’ wouldn’t be all on one side.”

Thus musing, he continues his advance upon the homestead, walking his horse, and whistling in an attempt to appear thoroughly unconcerned, although, in point of actual fact, he feels pretty much as the Six Hundred must have done on receipt of the historic and idiotic order. But no more leaden greetings reach him, nor does the enemy appear. All is silent as the grave as he rides up to the house.

The front door stands wide open, exactly as the shooter had left it on retiring therefrom. There is not a sound of anybody moving inside. The place might have been uninhabited. Just then the sun, which all this time has gradually been sinking, and has already touched the horizon, disappears.

Something like a chill creeps over the traveller at the sudden gloom which falls upon the tenement just as he is about to cross its threshold. Standing at the door, he raps it, somewhat impatiently, with the handle of his whip. No answer.

Cautiously, and with hand on his pistol, he enters. There is no passage; the door opens straight into the sitting-room. At the sight which meets his eyes he starts, and involuntarily falls back.

In a corner of the room stands a tall figure. Leaning with one shoulder against the wall, its eyes are fixed upon the intruder, great hollow eyes, which seem to glitter strangely, and the deathly pallor of the face is enhanced by its framing of dark hair and beard. Though otherwise motionless, both hands and lips are working slightly, but no sound escapes the latter. The wayfarer, though not by any means a man of weak nerves, is conscious of something horribly uncanny about this ghostlike figure, so silent and immovable, glowering at him in the shades of the fast-gathering twilight.