A Veldt Official: A Novel of Circumstance

Cool though he was, however, the incident had disturbed him not a little. How had this thing come about? Who there could know anything of his past? He saw in this the beginning of the end.

Was it with design, too, that throughout breakfast Chandler should so persistently keep dragging round the conversation to the year 1868? It looked like it. Nor was there any mistaking, either, the constraint in the manner of others. Well, if they intended that sort of annoyance they should learn that they might just as well spare themselves the trouble.

Thus musing he went down to the office. A few Court cases had to be disposed of, during which from his seat in front of the bench he could see Tasker, the agent, who bore him no goodwill either, ostentatiously sketching a gallows on his blotting pad. Darrell was absent, having returned to the Main Camp.

“Would you mind stepping this way, Mr Musgrave?” said Mr Shaston, when the court had risen, leading the way into his private office. “Sit down, please. There is a matter of very serious moment on which I should like a little conversation with you. Perhaps it will save a great deal of explanation, and beating around the bush, if we come to the point at once. In a word, this has come under my notice – no matter how – and if you have any explanation to offer I shall be glad to hear it.”

“This” being the file of the Bryonville Sentinel open at the report of the Stillwell’s Flat case. Roden took it, and looked at it hard and earnestly – his own portrait, lifelike at the present day, the sensational headlines, the equivocal verdict, the acquittal.

This, then, was how the matter had been unearthed; for as he glanced at the paper he recalled old Dr Simpson’s hobby. That kindly-natured old man would not have stirred a finger to harm him. It was Lambert who had unearthed this, Lambert whom he had to thank. Ten long years ago! and now here, in another hemisphere thousands and thousands of miles away, this blood-spectre sprang up once more, hideous and blighting.

“Well?” said Shaston, as he handed it back.

“I have no explanation to offer.”

“Do I understand then that you admit your identity with the – er – the person, whose trial is here reported?”

“You will please understand that I admit nothing. I do not feel in the least called upon to make either admissions or explanations. I will, however, just add this remark. The person, whoever he may be, whose trial is there reported, appears to have been acquitted. That means, I take it, that he has been cleared of the charge.”

“All very well as a legal fiction, Mr Musgrave,” was the icy rejoinder; “but you and I know perfectly that the manner of a person’s acquittal makes all the difference in the world.”

“Then, if a man is once under suspicion, he is always under it, no matter how completely or publicly he may have been cleared? Is that your deliberate opinion, Mr Shaston?”

The other turned white with rage as he glared blankly and furiously at his imperturbable subordinate, whose countenance betrayed no sign of purpose underlying his rejoinder. Yet the latter contained about as hard a hit as could have been dealt, for rumour darkly hinted that Shaston in his younger days had been badly mixed up in some defaulting transaction; and although exonerated, on inquiry, from anything more culpable than gross negligence, the circumstance had placed a black mark against his record, materially retarding his advancement in the Service. As a matter of fact, however, the shaft was an accidental one, Roden being entirely unaware of such an occurrence.

“That may be why I afforded you the opportunity of making an explanation,” said Shaston as soon as he had recovered himself; “for I have considered the matter very carefully, and deem it my duty to bring it to the notice of the Government; unless, of course, you would prefer to resign of your own accord, and thus avoid unnecessary scandal and publicity. In that case I shall be willing to stretch a point.”

“I shall certainly do nothing of the kind, Mr Shaston. And allow me, with great respect, to recommend you to consider the matter yet more carefully; for any step you may take in it as regards myself will be taken at your own serious risk. The same holds good concerning others.”

“As you refuse explanation, I may tell you, sir, that I have no doubt whatever as to your identity with the Roden Musgrave mentioned here. Moreover, I am informed that the inhabitants of this place are preparing a strong memorial on the subject. I have even reason to fear that you may become the object of a most unpleasant popular demonstration. All this means scandal to the Service, and serious detriment to the efficiency and smooth working of my establishment. Wherefore you must see, I am sure, that in bringing the matter officially under notice, I am discharging a most necessary though painful duty.”

“We are alone, I believe, Mr Shaston,” answered Roden, and there was a look in his face which the other had never seen there before and did not half like now. “That being so, we may as well talk with a little more plainness. I would ask you, therefore, to glance at that report; and granting, for the sake of argument, that your theory as to my identity is correct, to say whether you think it likely that the man whose record is there given is the man to be bullied into anything, let alone cowed by such a threat as that of a ‘popular demonstration,’ on the part of the runaway swindlers and fraudulent bankrupts and forgers and ex-convicts who form such an important element in the population of this highly moral village? Do you really share such an opinion?”

The other stared. He simply did not know what answer to make. Roden continued —

“It might be as well, if I may respectfully say so, before undertaking the grave responsibility of branding me or anybody else as a murderer on the strength of a report in so authoritative an organ as the Bryonville Sentinel, to ascertain first, that there is such a place as Stillwell’s Flat; secondly, that a murder actually was committed there; and, lastly, that I ever was there in my life. And now, have I your permission to return to my work, sir?”

“You have, sir. It’s only fair to tell you that my opinion and the course of action I have decided upon in consequence of this – er – of this revelation, remains unchanged.”

But, after his subordinate had withdrawn, Shaston felt horribly uncomfortable. That last bolt had gone right home. What if the whole thing should turn out a fiasco after all?

Chapter Twenty Seven.

“Thou shouldst have known me true.”

In hinting that a public demonstration, hostile to his subordinate, was preparing, Mr Shaston was so far right in that it was no fault of Sonnenberg, and one or two others of like kidney, that something of the sort did not come off. Even then the tender conscience of collective Doppersdorp, whose main ingredients Roden Musgrave had not inaccurately defined, was wounded to the extent of expressing its feelings in a series of petty manifestations of spite and malice. Thus the disfigurement of his front door was repeated, with the difference that this time a gallows, with a man hanging on it, was substituted for the axe. Or, if he passed a knot of youthful loots loafing at a street corner, his ears could not fail to catch some deft allusion followed by a yahoo bray of laughter. And although once or twice reference would be made to tar-and-feathers, still no act of overt hostility was attempted. It might have been, indeed, that upon this virtuous crowd was forced home the same consideration which Roden himself had suggested to his official superior – that, granting the identity, a man with his fighting record was not one to be roughly handled with impunity; especially as during that brief expedition into the Gaika location, he had given substantial guarantee that the record might be a true one. And if in any way this consideration influenced the virtuous public of Doppersdorp, why, it only showed that, among that agglomeration of mischievous turnip-heads, there lingered even yet a stray grain or so of wisdom.

Still his position was an unpleasant one, and grew daily more so. Here and there would be somebody not ill-disposed towards him, but, beyond a feebly apologetic defence when he was out of hearing, they did not care to say so, let alone to parade their sympathy, fearing public opinion or their own women-kind, who in turn feared Mrs Shaston; for of such are the wheels which revolve within each other in the small community.

Now the tongue of Mrs Shaston wagged oft and freely enough to have laid her open to any number of distinct actions for slander. But although Roden had asserted his intention to “take it fighting,” he was growing more and more sick of the whole position every day. This wretched poky little hole-and-corner village, where people grovelled away their lives by the score of years at a time; what was it to him? What was this handful of shopkeepers and pettifogging practitioners, whose main ambition was to squeeze a few extra shillings out of the unwary native, or the wooden-headed Boer, on some pretence just falling short of legally fraudulent, and not always that? Why, nothing, of course – less than nothing. A month after leaving it he would have forgotten that such a place ever existed, have forgotten it utterly and entirely.

All but for one consideration; and that he owned to himself, both in sorrow and in wonder, would never suffer him to forget this passage in his life as long as that life should last. In sorrow, because unaccountably he had a chill presentiment that even that stay would fail him in the hour of need. In wonder, because it seemed little short of miraculous that, having left the cream of life behind him with the capacity for faith and warm trust, he should have been required to take up that life again almost, as it were, from the very beginning – should be called upon to suffer the ordeal of trust and feeling, even after losing all belief in the genuineness and durability of any such transitory illusions.

Since the bursting of the bomb he had not seen Mona, nor bad he heard either from or of her. The same held good of Suffield’s household in general. It almost looked as if they pointedly refrained from coming into the town. Had they heard about it? Why, of course. How should they not have? When a community such as Doppersdorp fastens on to a scandal of that magnitude, why, it worries it for all it is worth.

Now, Charles Suffield, though an excellent fellow under the ordinary circumstances of life, was not the man to stand by a friend at a pinch, if the said pinch should chance to be of abnormal tightness. He was one of those good, commonplace souls to whom a public scandal is a thing of terror; wherefore it is not surprising that, when he came to learn that the friend with whom he and his had been upon such intimate terms, had stood his trial for murder of a peculiarly brutal and sordid nature, narrowly escaping conviction, and that only on the cleverness and eloquence of his counsel rather than on the merits of the case, it is not surprising, we repeat, that he should have been, to use his own definition, knocked end ways. He remembered that friend’s studied reticence, instances of which were continually cropping up, and how they had all frequently laughed at and over such; now these all stood accounted for. The whole thing was hideous, hideous beyond words; less the actual murder than the motive – the pitiful, paltry robbery which had prompted it. And to think that the man should have been mixing with them all this while upon intimate terms. And Mona – oh, great Heavens! what amount of mischief might not be done there?

Suffield’s mind, being largely diluted with commonplace, floundered about in a panic, landing its owner in rather a contemptible hole. For in his horror of scandal, and disgust for the reputed crime, he was quite ready to condemn his former friend right out of hand. His reasoning was of the feminine order, “Everybody says so, therefore it must be true.” Curiously enough it was from a feminine mind that a little wholesome common sense was brought to bear upon the question – the mind of his wife, to wit.

“I won’t believe it, even now,” said Grace sturdily; perhaps with a vivid recollection of that awful post-cart journey, the flooded river, and the broken cord. “There may be some explanation, but anyhow it seems rather unfair to put a man on his trial again after he has been acquitted.”

“Where there’s smoke there must be fire,” rejoined Suffield, with proud originality. “And here I’m afraid there must be a great deal more fire than smoke.”

“Still I won’t believe it. Looking at only one side of the question is supposed to be a feminine characteristic. It strikes me that our sex has been libelled.”

“That’s all very well, Grace, but we’ve got to be practical. What about Mona? They are engaged.”

“Not actually.”

“Well, as good as. It amounts to the same thing.”

“I don’t know,” was the reply, more thoughtfully given. “Speak to her yourself about it.”

Mona received the news as though semi-dazed with its ominous magnitude, and by some curious and subtle instinct believed it. Yet not quite – not quite the whole of it, that is. The motive was too horrible. In that she would not believe, unless he assured her to the contrary. Still, the other was bad enough, whichever way you looked at it. It was appalling. A gulf, a chasm, seemed to open under her feet, paralysing her faculties, deadening everything.

Such was the state of the family councils when Roden, resolved to know the worst, saddled up his horse and started for Quaggasfontein. It was Sunday morning, so he would have the whole day at his disposal, and as he cantered out along the familiar track – how many times had he been over it before? – it was with a very sure foreboding that he was travelling it now for the last time. And as he journeyed he called to his aid all the iron hardness of his now schooled nature; a hardness which he had suffered to be penetrated, though never dispelled, but which events of late had riveted once more in armour layers. Not upon any softening reminiscence would he allow his mind to dwell now, and the very first glance at Mona’s face would justify his resolve; justify it for all time, or —

He was prepared for the constraint with which the Suffields greeted him – so different to his former welcome – the more marked perhaps because of a certain laboured effusiveness in order to render it equally cordial; for even Grace, her first spirited defence of him notwithstanding, could not quite free her manner from the effect of the distilling canker-drop of suspicion. He was prepared for this, and at the moment thought but little of it as he entered with them.

It was a lovely, cloudless morning, and the scent of flowers with the hum of bees and the chirrup of the cicada wafted in at the open windows of the cool, half-darkened sitting-room. By one of these Mona was standing. She turned, as with an effort, jerkily, constrainedly, and her eyes met his.

All was over.

What her countenance expressed it would have been difficult to define. What it did not express was that loving, eager sympathy, that proud, fearless trust, which should range itself beside him in defiance of the whole world, such as he had scarcely expected, yet still owned a deep-down hope that he might find there.

All was over.

While this trial and verdict, swift as a lightning flash, was going on, Suffield had been bustling about the room with the blundering, ostentatious tactlessness of a not very clever man under awkward circumstances, who has more than half lost his head; under cover of which bustle Mona slipped away and was gone, but ere vanishing she left behind a whisper:

“Soon. At the willows.”

“Hallo, Musgrave! I thought Grace was here,” cried Suffield, turning. “Have a glass of grog after your ride, eh?”

“No thanks.”

“What? Did you say you wouldn’t? By the way, you haven’t off-saddled,” glimpsing through the open door the other’s horse still standing in front of the stoep.

“I’m not going to off-saddle,” said Roden. “I don’t think I can stay very long.”

Suffield hardly knew what to answer, so he fired off volleys of commonplaces, which, treading on each other’s heels, soon merged into the most drivelling of incoherences. Roden, watching him, felt moved to pity and contempt: pity for the man who could make so gratuitous an ass of himself, contempt for one whose “friendship” thus collapsed at the first knock, and that knock an outside one.

“If you don’t mind, Suffield, I rather want to have a word or two with Miss Ridsdale,” he said at last. “I think I saw her strolling in the direction of the willows.”

“Certainly, certainly; you’re sure to find her there,” assented Suffield effusively. “When you come back you’ll perhaps change your mind about not off-saddling.”

Roden did not hurry as he took his way along that well-known path. His gait to the superficial observer was that of a bored lounger, strolling to kill time; and as he caught the glimpse of a white dress beneath the leafy canopy in front, so far from quickening his pace, he deliberately halted, and affected to pick up and examine a leaf or a pebble which lay in the path. And as he did so he began softly to hum to himself, and the words which he found himself humming were:

“’Twas here we last parted, ’twas here we first met.”

Chapter Twenty Eight.

“Dead Separate Souls…”

She turned as he overtook her. For a moment they thus stood face to face. Then he spoke.

“I have come to say good-bye.”

“To say – good-bye?” echoed Mona, dully, staring at him as though she were walking in her sleep.

“Yes. There is a gulf between us now such as can never be bridged, never. It is not good that you should even so much as speak with a murderer. A murderer, I repeat.”

The faces of both were white as death. The frames of both were rigid and motionless, as they stood confronting each other beneath the willows – there, where they had first met, there, where those passionate words of undying love had been interchanged, there, where those long, long kisses had stamped their seal upon that love. And here they had met again – to part.

“Roden, say it was not true!” she gasped at last. “You were acquitted at the trial. It is not true; it cannot be true! Say it is not; say it is not!”

“But, what if it is?”

The words forced themselves out with something of a snarl. His lips seemed drawn back, and his eyes glowed like those of a cornered wild beast, as he watched her troubled face.

“But it is not! No, you could never have done such a thing – you! You could never have been a cold-blooded midnight murderer, and robber. No, Roden, I will not believe it!”

“But you do believe it. You believed it from the first, because that half-start away from me when our eyes first met this morning meant nothing short of belief. That little act of shrinking fixed my mind irrevocably – reft a gulf between us never to be passed in this life. A cold-blooded midnight murderer – and robber —and robber!” he repeated; and now indeed the expression of his face was more than ever like that of a dangerous animal at bay. “And you believe that!”

“But say it is not true! Oh, Roden, say it! Your bare word will be sufficient to restore me, to restore us both, to the blissful heaven we were in before!” she adjured, her voice quivering with anguish.

“Nothing on earth will ever restore that. You killed the possibility that little lightning-like moment when you half turned away from me, looked at me with doubting horror. Now I will say nothing – nothing, you understand. Form your own opinion and hold it, for henceforth it can be nothing to me. We disappear out of each other’s lives for ever.”

Mona made no reply; her face half averted, her lips compressed, her beautiful form erect and rigid. Why was he so terribly strong, with a strength of purpose that was almost appalling, demoniacal, scarcely human in its unparalleled inflexibility? Why did he give no sign of softness, of yielding? She had, as he said, involuntarily, though half-unconsciously, shrunk from him. That was enough. Never again would she see those eyes gladden to the light of hers, never again hear the love tone of that voice. And yet, amid the awful agony of her loss and its realisation, there was still room for that same feeling of shrinking as from the perpetrator of a hideous and sordid crime; and like the mocking whoop of demons in her ears came that cutting, stinging, gibing refrain – the echo of his words, spoken there: —

“Nothing lasts! Nothing lasts!”

She had reached that point where mental anguish becomes physical pain, without in any way losing itself therein. Her brain seemed bursting, her heart refusing to beat. The climax came. She sank down in swooning unconsciousness.

Even then that human being turned to iron repressed the step which he had made towards her – repressed it with a shiver, but still repressed it. Not his the right to touch her – he from whom she had shrunk as from a murderer and midnight robber. Then another thought struck him.

“Yes, it is better so,” he muttered, stepping to the side of the unconscious form, its nobly moulded lines as beautiful as ever in insensibility. “It is better so. Looked at thus for the last time, I can think of her ever as though I had looked upon her in death.”

Then he struggled with himself, fought to restrain the overmastering impulse, for the last time to bend down and press his lips long and hard to her unconscious ones – fought, and conquered, and refrained.

“It would be a murderer’s kiss,” he muttered, between his teeth. Then turning, he lifted up his voice and sent forth a long, loud call.

“Miss Ridsdale has fainted, Suffield,” he said, as the latter came running up. “You had better get her taken to the house. Good-bye, Suffield!”

“Stop, Musgrave, stop!” cried Suffield, who was now supporting Mona’s head. “Don’t go away like that, man. Hang it! after all this time, you know.”

“I won’t shake hands with you, Suffield,” answered Roden without pausing, as he was walking rapidly away to where he had left his horse, still saddled. “You don’t want to take the hand of a murderer —and thief, especially the thief. Good-bye, Suffield.”

He rode away in the broad glare of noontide, the shimmer of heat from the scorching plains rising mirage-like in the distance. The screech of cricket vibrated shrilly upon the burning, glowing atmosphere, to cease abruptly in a silence that was well-nigh as oppressive; then bursting forth again with a strident suddenness which brought back the nerve-racking din tenfold. In the cloudless blue of the heavens, high overhead above the brink of the rock-embattled crest of the mountain range, something black was wheeling and soaring. He looked up, drawn by the distant and raucous cry of the huge bird. It was a dasje-vanger of noble size, like that which he had shot on the eventful day whereon the secret of this new love had been opened to him, and now, in his fierce and hard despair, it seemed that the great eagle was the sprite of the one which he had slain, shrieking forth its hate and exultation.

This then was love! A thing that could take sides with the spiteful clamour of the mob against its object. This then was the Ever Endurable! The first adverse blast had scattered it to the winds. “Mine for ever, throughout all the years,” had been the declaration of that love, yet the course of but a few months had sifted the passionate vow, and had left – a few husks of chaff!

He had gained the “neck” where the waggon road crossed it, and beneath lay the unprepossessing little township. There not a friendly hand would be extended to him, not a friendly voice be lifted in greeting. Those who looked on him would turn their backs, any group he approached would quickly melt away. Yet, for such as these what cared he? Hugging themselves in the security of their sordid daily swindles, in whose very pettiness lay their safety, they would thank God devoutly they were not as he, not as one who had struck down life, sacred life! No, not for the good word, the good fellowship of such as these, cared he. But his mind, seared beyond all further capacity for feeling, reverted to that one heart which was shut towards him, to the pallid death-like face upon whose lips he had refrained from pressing that last kiss, upon those eyes into whose depths he had looked his last upon earth, as surely as though the dull echo of the clods was sounding above a coffin. Yet now – now, while realising the ever-impassable gulf which lay between, he loved her as he had never loved. Yet now he would have given all the world for the one consoling memory of that last kiss, which he had refrained from, had refused. The sterility of those long pent-up springs of love had lent tenfold force to the effort by which at last they should burst their rock-prison – only to end thus. Yet towards the eternal ruling of things it was that all bitterness of feeling was due, not towards her, for had not his uttered premonition from the very first been, “Nothing lasts, nothing lasts?”