Kitabı oku: «Hilda Wade, a Woman with Tenacity of Purpose», sayfa 12
“And you could not see him?”
“Crept near waggons, close. Fellow himself inside. Heard his voice; spoke English, with a little Matabele. Kaffir boy who was servant at the mission interpreted.”
“What sort of voice? Like this?” And I imitated Sebastian’s cold, clear-cut tone as well as I was able.
“The man! That’s him, Doctor. You’ve got him down to the ground. The very voice. Heard him giving orders.”
That settled the question. I was certain of it now. Sebastian was with the insurgents.
We made our way back to our laager, flung ourselves down, and slept a little on the ground before taking our turn in the fatigues of the night watch. Our horses were loosely tied, ready for any sudden alarm. About midnight, we three were sitting with others about the fire, talking low to one another. All at once Doolittle sprang up, alert and eager. “Look out, boys!” he cried, pointing his hands under the waggons. “What’s wriggling in the grass there?”
I looked, and saw nothing. Our sentries were posted outside, about a hundred yards apart, walking up and down till they met, and exchanging “All’s well” aloud at each meeting.
“They should have been stationary!” one of our scouts exclaimed, looking out at them. “It’s easier for the Matabele to see them so, when they walk up and down, moving against the sky. The Major ought to have posted them where it wouldn’t have been so simple for a Kaffir to see them and creep in between them!”
“Too late now, boys!” Colebrook burst out, with a rare effort of articulateness. “Call back the sentries, Major! The blacks have broken line! Hold there! They’re in upon us!”
Even as he spoke, I followed his eager pointing hand with my eyes, and just descried among the grass two gleaming objects, seen under the hollow of one of the waggons. Two: then two; then two again; and behind, whole pairs of them. They looked like twin stars; but they were eyes, black eyes, reflecting the starlight and the red glare of the camp-fire. They crept on tortuously in serpentine curves through the long, dry grasses. I could feel, rather than see, that they were Matabele, crawling prone on their bellies, and trailing their snake-like way between the dark jungle. Quick as thought, I raised my rifle and blazed away at the foremost. So did several others. But the Major shouted, angrily: “Who fired? Don’t shoot, boys, till you hear the word of command! Back, sentries, to laager! Not a shot till they’re safe inside! You’ll hit your own people!”
Almost before he said it, the sentries darted back. The Matabele, crouching on hands and knees in the long grass, had passed between them unseen. A wild moment followed. I can hardly describe it; the whole thing was so new to me, and took place so quickly. Hordes of black human ants seemed to surge up all at once over and under the waggons. Assegais whizzed through the air, or gleamed brandished around one. Our men fell back to the centre of the laager, and formed themselves hastily under the Major’s orders. Then a pause; a deadly fire. Once, twice, thrice we volleyed. The Matabele fell by dozens—but they came on by hundreds. As fast as we fired and mowed down one swarm, fresh swarms seemed to spring from the earth and stream over the waggons. Others appeared to grow up almost beneath our feet as they wormed their way on their faces along the ground between the wheels, squirmed into the circle, and then rose suddenly, erect and naked, in front of us. Meanwhile, they yelled and shouted, clashing their spears and shields. The oxen bellowed. The rifles volleyed. It was a pandemonium of sound in an orgy of gloom. Darkness, lurid flame, blood, wounds, death, horror!
Yet, in the midst of all this hubbub, I could not help admiring the cool military calm and self-control of our Major. His voice rose clear above the confused tumult. “Steady, boys, steady! Don’t fire at random. Pick each your likeliest man, and aim at him deliberately. That’s right; easy—easy! Shoot at leisure, and don’t waste ammunition!”
He stood as if he were on parade, in the midst of this palpitating turmoil of savages. Some of us, encouraged by his example, mounted the waggons, and shot from the tops at our approaching assailants.
How long the hurly-burly went on, I cannot say. We fired, fired, fired, and Kaffirs fell like sheep; yet more Kaffirs rose fresh from the long grass to replace them. They swarmed with greater ease now over the covered waggons, across the mangled and writhing bodies of their fellows; for the dead outside made an inclined plane for the living to mount by. But the enemy were getting less numerous, I thought, and less anxious to fight. The steady fire told on them. By-and-by, with a little halt, for the first time they wavered. All our men now mounted the waggons, and began to fire on them in regular volleys as they came up. The evil effects of the surprise were gone by this time; we were acting with coolness and obeying orders. But several of our people dropped close beside me, pierced through with assegais.
All at once, as if a panic had burst over them, the Matabele, with one mind, stopped dead short in their advance and ceased fighting. Till that moment, no number of deaths seemed to make any difference to them. Men fell, disabled; others sprang up from the ground by magic. But now, of a sudden, their courage flagged—they faltered, gave way, broke, and shambled in a body. At last, as one man, they turned and fled. Many of them leapt up with a loud cry from the long grass where they were skulking, flung away their big shields with the white thongs interlaced, and ran for dear life, black, crouching figures, through the dense, dry jungle. They held their assegais still, but did not dare to use them. It was a flight, pell-mell—and the devil take the hindmost.
Not until then had I leisure to THINK, and to realise my position. This was the first and only time I had ever seen a battle. I am a bit of a coward, I believe—like most other men—though I have courage enough to confess it; and I expected to find myself terribly afraid when it came to fighting. Instead of that, to my immense surprise, once the Matabele had swarmed over the laager, and were upon us in their thousands, I had no time to be frightened. The absolute necessity for keeping cool, for loading and reloading, for aiming and firing, for beating them off at close quarters—all this so occupied one’s mind, and still more one’s hands, that one couldn’t find room for any personal terrors. “They are breaking over there!” “They will overpower us yonder!” “They are faltering now!” Those thoughts were so uppermost in one’s head, and one’s arms were so alert, that only after the enemy gave way, and began to run at full pelt, could a man find breathing-space to think of his own safety. Then the thought occurred to me, “I have been through my first fight, and come out of it alive; after all, I was a deal less afraid than I expected!”
That took but a second, however. Next instant, awaking to the altered circumstances, we were after them at full speed; accompanying them on their way back to their kraals in the uplands with a running fire as a farewell attention.
As we broke laager in pursuit of them, by the uncertain starlight we saw a sight which made us boil with indignation. A mounted man turned and fled before them. He seemed their leader, unseen till then. He was dressed like a European—tall, thin, unbending, in a greyish-white suit. He rode a good horse, and sat it well; his air was commanding, even as he turned and fled in the general rout from that lost battle.
I seized Colebrook’s arm, almost speechless with anger. “The white man!” I cried. “The traitor!”
He did not answer a word, but with a set face of white rage loosed his horse from where it was tethered among the waggons. At the same moment, I loosed mine. So did Doolittle. Quick as thought, but silently, we led them out all three where the laager was broken. I clutched my mare’s mane, and sprang to the stirrup to pursue our enemy. My sorrel bounded off like a bird. The fugitive had a good two minutes start of us; but our horses were fresh, while his had probably been ridden all day. I patted my pony’s neck; she responded with a ringing neigh of joy. We tore after the outlaw, all three of us abreast. I felt a sort of fierce delight in the reaction after the fighting. Our ponies galloped wildly over the plain; we burst out into the night, never heeding the Matabele whom we passed on the open in panic-stricken retreat. I noticed that many of them in their terror had even flung away their shields and their assegais.
It was a mad chase across the dark veldt—we three, neck to neck, against that one desperate runaway. We rode all we knew. I dug my heels into my sorrel’s flanks, and she responded bravely. The tables were turned now on our traitor since the afternoon of the massacre. HE was the pursued, and WE were the pursuers. We felt we must run him down, and punish him for his treachery.
At a breakneck pace, we stumbled over low bushes; we grazed big boulders; we rolled down the sides of steep ravines; but we kept him in sight all the time, dim and black against the starry sky; slowly, slowly—yes, yes!—we gained upon him. My pony led now. The mysterious white man rode and rode—head bent, neck forward—but never looked behind him. Bit by bit we lessened the distance between us. As we drew near him at last, Doolittle called out to me, in a warning voice: “Take care, Doctor! Have your revolvers ready! He’s driven to bay now! As we approach, he’ll fire at us!”
Then it came home to me in a flash. I felt the truth of it. “He DARE not fire!” I cried. “He dare not turn towards us. He cannot show his face! If he did, we might recognise him!”
On we rode, still gaining. “Now, now,” I cried, “we shall catch him!”
Even as I leaned forward to seize his rein, the fugitive, without checking his horse, without turning his head, drew his revolver from his belt, and, raising his hand, fired behind him at random. He fired towards us, on the chance. The bullet whizzed past my ear, not hitting anyone. We scattered, right and left, still galloping free and strong. We did not return his fire, as I had told the others of my desire to take him alive. We might have shot his horse; but the risk of hitting the rider, coupled with the confidence we felt of eventually hunting him to earth, restrained us. It was the great mistake we made.
He had gained a little by his shots, but we soon caught it up. Once more I said, “We are on him!”
A minute later, we were pulled up short before an impenetrable thicket of prickly shrubs, through which I saw at once it would have been quite impossible to urge our staggering horses.
The other man, of course, reached it before us, with his mare’s last breath. He must have been making for it, indeed, of set purpose; for the second he arrived at the edge of the thicket he slipped off his tired pony, and seemed to dive into the bush as a swimmer dives off a rock into the water.
“We have him now!” I cried, in a voice of triumph. And Colebrook echoed, “We have him!”
We sprang down quickly. “Take him alive, if you can!” I exclaimed, remembering Hilda’s advice. “Let us find out who he is, and have him properly tried and hanged at Buluwayo! Don’t give him a soldier’s death! All he deserves is a murderer’s!”
“You stop here,” Colebrook said, briefly, flinging his bridle to Doolittle to hold. “Doctor and I follow him. Thick bush. Knows the ways of it. Revolvers ready!”
I handed my sorrel to Doolittle. He stopped behind, holding the three foam-bespattered and panting horses, while Colebrook and I dived after our fugitive into the matted bushes.
The thicket, as I have said, was impenetrable above; but it was burrowed at its base by over-ground runs of some wild animal—not, I think, a very large one; they were just like the runs which rabbits make among gorse and heather, only on a bigger scale—bigger, even, than a fox’s or badger’s. By crouching and bending our backs, we could crawl through them with difficulty into the scrubby tangle. It was hard work creeping. The runs divided soon. Colebrook felt with his hands on the ground: “I can make out the spoor!” he muttered, after a minute. “He has gone on this way!”
We tracked him a little distance in, crawling at times, and rising now and again where the runs opened out on to the air for a moment. The spoor was doubtful and the tunnels tortuous. I felt the ground from time to time, but could not be sure of the tracks with my fingers; I was not a trained scout, like Colebrook or Doolittle. We wriggled deeper into the tangle. Something stirred once or twice. It was not far from me. I was uncertain whether it was HIM—Sebastian—or a Kaffir earth-hog, the animal which seemed likeliest to have made the burrows. Was he going to elude us, even now? Would he turn upon us with a knife? If so, could we hold him?
At last, when we had pushed our way some distance in, we heard a wild cry from outside. It was Doolittle’s voice. “Quick! quick! out again! The man will escape! He has come back on his tracks, and rounded!”
I saw our mistake at once. We had left our companion out there alone, rendered helpless by the care of all three horses.
Colebrook said never a word. He was a man of action. He turned with instinctive haste, and followed our own spoor back again with his hands and knees to the opening in the thicket by which we had first entered.
Before we could reach it, however, two shots rang out clear in the direction where we had left poor Doolittle and the horses. Then a sharp cry broke the stillness—the cry of a wounded man. We redoubled our pace. We knew we were outwitted.
When we reached the open, we saw at once by the uncertain light what had happened. The fugitive was riding away on my own little sorrel,—riding for dear life; not back the way we came from Salisbury, but sideways across the veldt towards Chimoio and the Portuguese seaports. The other two horses, riderless and terrified, were scampering with loose heels over the dark plain. Doolittle was not to be seen; he lay, a black lump, among the black bushes about him.
We looked around for him, and found him. He was severely, I may even say dangerously, wounded. The bullet had lodged in his right side. We had to catch our two horses, and ride them back with our wounded man, leading the fugitive’s mare in tow, all blown and breathless. I stuck to the fugitive’s mare; it was the one clue we had now against him. But Sebastian, if it WAS Sebastian, had ridden off scot-free. I understood his game at a glance. He had got the better of us once more. He would make for the coast by the nearest road, give himself out as a settler escaped from the massacre, and catch the next ship for England or the Cape, now this coup had failed him.
Doolittle had not seen the traitor’s face. The man rose from the bush, he said, shot him, seized the pony, and rode off in a second with ruthless haste. He was tall and thin, but erect—that was all the wounded scout could tell us about his assailant. And THAT was not enough to identify Sebastian.
All danger was over. We rode back to Salisbury. The first words Hilda said when she saw me were: “Well, he has got away from you!”
“Yes; how did you know?”
“I read it in your step. But I guessed as much before. He is so very keen; and you started too confident.”
CHAPTER IX
THE EPISODE OF THE LADY WHO WAS VERY EXCLUSIVE
The Matabele revolt gave Hilda a prejudice against Rhodesia. I will confess that I shared it. I may be hard to please; but it somehow sets one against a country when one comes home from a ride to find all the other occupants of the house one lives in massacred. So Hilda decided to leave South Africa. By an odd coincidence, I also decided on the same day to change my residence. Hilda’s movements and mine, indeed, coincided curiously. The moment I learned she was going anywhere, I discovered in a flash that I happened to be going there too. I commend this strange case of parallel thought and action to the consideration of the Society for Psychical Research.
So I sold my farm, and had done with Rhodesia. A country with a future is very well in its way; but I am quite Ibsenish in my preference for a country with a past. Oddly enough, I had no difficulty in getting rid of my white elephant of a farm. People seemed to believe in Rhodesia none the less firmly because of this slight disturbance. They treated massacres as necessary incidents in the early history of a colony with a future. And I do not deny that native risings add picturesqueness. But I prefer to take them in a literary form.
“You will go home, of course?” I said to Hilda, when we came to talk it all over.
She shook her head. “To England? Oh, no. I must pursue my Plan. Sebastian will have gone home; he expects me to follow.”
“And why don’t you?”
“Because—he expects it. You see, he is a good judge of character; he will naturally infer, from what he knows of my temperament, that after this experience I shall want to get back to England and safety. So I should—if it were not that I know he will expect it. As it is, I must go elsewhere; I must draw him after me.”
“Where?”
“Why do you ask, Hubert?”
“Because—I want to know where I am going myself. Wherever you go, I have reason to believe, I shall find that I happen to be going also.”
She rested her little chin on her hand and reflected a minute. “Does it occur to you,” she asked at last, “that people have tongues? If you go on following me like this, they will really begin to talk about us.”
“Now, upon my word, Hilda,” I cried, “that is the very first time I have ever known you show a woman’s want of logic! I do not propose to follow you; I propose to happen to be travelling by the same steamer. I ask you to marry me; you won’t; you admit you are fond of me; yet you tell me not to come with you. It is I who suggest a course which would prevent people from chattering—by the simple device of a wedding. It is YOU who refuse. And then you turn upon me like this! Admit that you are unreasonable.”
“My dear Hubert, have I ever denied that I was a woman?”
“Besides,” I went on, ignoring her delicious smile, “I don’t intend to FOLLOW you. I expect, on the contrary, to find myself beside you. When I know where you are going, I shall accidentally turn up on the same steamer. Accidents WILL happen. Nobody can prevent coincidences from occurring. You may marry me, or you may not; but if you don’t marry me, you can’t expect to curtail my liberty of action, can you? You had better know the worst at once; if you won’t take me, you must count upon finding me at your elbow all the world over—till the moment comes when you choose to accept me.”
“Dear Hubert, I am ruining your life!”
“An excellent reason, then, for taking my advice, and marrying me instantly! But you wander from the question. Where are you going? That is the issue now before the house. You persist in evading it.”
She smiled, and came back to earth. “Oh, if you MUST know, to India, by the east coast, changing steamers at Aden.”
“Extraordinary!” I cried. “Do you know, Hilda, as luck will have it, I also shall be on my way to Bombay by the very same steamer!”
“But you don’t know what steamer it is?”
“No matter. That only makes the coincidence all the odder. Whatever the name of the ship may be, when you get on board, I have a presentiment that you will be surprised to find me there.”
She looked up at me with a gathering film in her eyes. “Hubert, you are irrepressible!”
“I am, my dear child; so you may as well spare yourself the needless trouble of trying to repress me.”
If you rub a piece of iron on a loadstone, it becomes magnetic. So, I think, I must have begun to acquire some part of Hilda’s own prophetic strain; for, sure enough, a few weeks later, we both of us found ourselves on the German East African steamer Kaiser Wilhelm, on our way to Aden—exactly as I had predicted. Which goes to prove that there is really something after all in presentiments!
“Since you persist in accompanying me,” Hilda said to me, as we sat in our chairs on deck the first evening out, “I see what I must do. I must invent some plausible and ostensible reason for our travelling together.”
“We are not travelling together,” I answered. “We are travelling by the same steamer; that is all—exactly like the rest of our fellow-passengers. I decline to be dragged into this imaginary partnership.”
“Now do be serious, Hubert! I am going to invent an object in life for us.”
“What object?”
“How can I tell yet? I must wait and see what turns up. When we tranship at Aden, and find out what people are going on to Bombay with us, I shall probably discover some nice married lady to whom I can attach myself.”
“And am I to attach myself to her, too?”
“My dear boy, I never asked you to come. You came unbidden. You must manage for yourself as best you may. But I leave much to the chapter of accidents. We never know what will turn up, till it turns up in the end. Everything comes at last, you know, to him that waits.”
“And yet,” I put in, with a meditative air, “I have never observed that waiters are so much better off than the rest of the community. They seem to me—”
“Don’t talk nonsense. It is YOU who are wandering from the question now. Please return to it.”
I returned at once. “So I am to depend on what turns up?”
“Yes. Leave that to me. When we see our fellow-passengers on the Bombay steamer, I shall soon discover some ostensible reason why we two should be travelling through India with one of them.”
“Well, you are a witch, Hilda,” I answered. “I found that out long ago; but if you succeed between here and Bombay in inventing a Mission, I shall begin to believe you are even more of a witch than I ever thought you.”
At Aden we changed into a P. and O. steamer. Our first evening out on our second cruise was a beautiful one; the bland Indian Ocean wore its sweetest smile for us. We sat on deck after dinner. A lady with a husband came up from the cabin while we sat and gazed at the placid sea. I was smoking a quiet digestive cigar. Hilda was seated in her deck chair next to me.
The lady with the husband looked about her for a vacant space on which to place the chair a steward was carrying for her. There was plenty of room on the quarter-deck. I could not imagine why she gazed about her with such obtrusive caution. She inspected the occupants of the various chairs around with deliberate scrutiny through a long-handled tortoise-shell optical abomination. None of them seemed to satisfy her. After a minute’s effort, during which she also muttered a few words very low to her husband, she selected an empty spot midway between our group and the most distant group on the other side of us. In other words, she sat as far away from everybody present as the necessarily restricted area of the quarter-deck permitted.
Hilda glanced at me and smiled. I snatched a quick look at the lady again. She was dressed with an amount of care and a smartness of detail that seemed somewhat uncalled for on the Indian Ocean. A cruise on a P. and O. steamer is not a garden party. Her chair was most luxurious, and had her name painted on it, back and front, in very large letters, with undue obtrusiveness. I read it from where I sat, “Lady Meadowcroft.”
The owner of the chair was tolerably young, not bad looking, and most expensively attired. Her face had a certain vacant, languid, half ennuyee air which I have learned to associate with women of the nouveau-riche type—women with small brains and restless minds, habitually plunged in a vortex of gaiety, and miserable when left for a passing moment to their own resources.
Hilda rose from her chair, and walked quietly forward towards the bow of the steamer. I rose, too, and accompanied her. “Well?” she said, with a faint touch of triumph in her voice when we had got out of earshot.
“Well, what?” I answered, unsuspecting.
“I told you everything turned up at the end!” she said, confidently. “Look at the lady’s nose!”
“It does turn up at the end—certainly,” I answered, glancing back at her. “But I hardly see—”
“Hubert, you are growing dull! You were not so at Nathaniel’s.... It is the lady herself who has turned up, not her nose—though I grant you THAT turns up too—the lady I require for our tour in India; the not impossible chaperon.”
“Her nose tells you that?”
“Her nose, in part; but her face as a whole, too, her dress, her chair, her mental attitude to things in general.”
“My dear Hilda, you can’t mean to tell me you have divined her whole nature at a glance, by magic!”
“Not wholly at a glance. I saw her come on board, you know—she transhipped from some other line at Aden as we did, and I have been watching her ever since. Yes, I think I have unravelled her.”
“You have been astonishingly quick!” I cried.
“Perhaps—but then, you see, there is so little to unravel! Some books, we all know, you must ‘chew and digest’; they can only be read slowly; but some you can glance at, skim, and skip; the mere turning of the pages tells you what little worth knowing there is in them.”
“She doesn’t LOOK profound,” I admitted, casting an eye at her meaningless small features as we paced up and down. “I incline to agree you might easily skim her.”
“Skim her—and learn all. The table of contents is SO short.... You see, in the first place, she is extremely ‘exclusive’; she prides herself on her ‘exclusiveness’: it, and her shoddy title, are probably all she has to pride herself upon, and she works them both hard. She is a sham great lady.”
As Hilda spoke, Lady Meadowcroft raised a feebly querulous voice. “Steward! this won’t do! I can smell the engine here. Move my chair. I must go on further.”
“If you go on further that way, my lady,” the steward answered, good-humouredly, but with a man-servant’s deference for any sort of title, “you’ll smell the galley, where they’re cooking the dinner. I don’t know which your ladyship would like best—the engine or the galley.”
The languid figure leaned back in the chair with an air of resignation. “I’m sure I don’t know why they cook the dinners up so high,” she murmured, pettishly, to her husband. “Why can’t they stick the kitchens underground—in the hold, I mean—instead of bothering us up here on deck with them?”
The husband was a big, burly, rough-and-ready Yorkshireman—stout, somewhat pompous, about forty, with hair wearing bald on the forehead: the personification of the successful business man. “My dear Emmie,” he said, in a loud voice, with a North Country accent, “the cooks have got to live. They’ve got to live like the rest of us. I can never persuade you that the hands must always be humoured. If you don’t humour ‘em, they won’t work for you. It’s a poor tale when the hands won’t work. Even with galleys on deck, the life of a sea-cook is not generally thowt an enviable position. Is not a happy one—not a happy one, as the fellah says in the opera. You must humour your cooks. If you stuck ‘em in the hold, you’d get no dinner at all—that’s the long and the short of it.”
The languid lady turned away with a sickly, disappointed air. “Then they ought to have a conscription, or something,” she said, pouting her lips. “The Government ought to take it in hand and manage it somehow. It’s bad enough having to go by these beastly steamers to India at all, without having one’s breath poisoned by—” the rest of the sentence died away inaudibly in a general murmur of ineffective grumbling.
“Why do you think she is EXCLUSIVE?” I asked Hilda as we strolled on towards the stern, out of the spoilt child’s hearing.
“Why, didn’t you notice?—she looked about her when she came on deck to see whether there was anybody who WAS anybody sitting there, whom she might put her chair near. But the Governor of Madras hadn’t come up from his cabin yet; and the wife of the chief Commissioner of Oude had three civilians hanging about her seat; and the daughters of the Commander-in-Chief drew their skirts away as she passed. So she did the next best thing—sat as far apart as she could from the common herd: meaning all the rest of us. If you can’t mingle at once with the Best People, you can at least assert your exclusiveness negatively, by declining to associate with the mere multitude.”
“Now, Hilda, that is the first time I have ever known you to show any feminine ill-nature!”
“Ill-nature! Not at all. I am merely trying to arrive at the lady’s character for my own guidance. I rather like her, poor little thing. Don’t I tell you she will do? So far from objecting to her, I mean to go the round of India with her.”
“You have decided quickly.”
“Well, you see, if you insist upon accompanying me, I MUST have a chaperon; and Lady Meadowcroft will do as well as anybody else. In fact, being be-ladied, she will do a little better, from the point of view of Society, though THAT is a detail. The great matter is to fix upon a possible chaperon at once, and get her well in hand before we arrive at Bombay.”
“But she seems so complaining!” I interposed. “I’m afraid, if you take her on, you’ll get terribly bored with her.”
“If SHE takes ME on, you mean. She’s not a lady’s-maid, though I intend to go with her; and she may as well give in first as last, for I’m going. Now see how nice I am to you, sir! I’ve provided you, too, with a post in her suite, as you WILL come with me. No, never mind asking me what it is just yet; all things come to him who waits; and if you will only accept the post of waiter, I mean all things to come to you.”
“All things, Hilda?” I asked, meaningly, with a little tremor of delight.
She looked at me with a sudden passing tenderness in her eyes. “Yes, all things, Hubert. All things. But we mustn’t talk of that—though I begin to see my way clearer now. You shall be rewarded for your constancy at last, dear knight-errant. As to my chaperon, I’m not afraid of her boring me; she bores herself, poor lady; one can see that, just to look at her; but she will be much less bored if she has us two to travel with. What she needs is constant companionship, bright talk, excitement. She has come away from London, where she swims with the crowd; she has no resources of her own, no work, no head, no interests. Accustomed to a whirl of foolish gaieties, she wearies her small brain; thrown back upon herself, she bores herself at once, because she has nothing interesting to tell herself. She absolutely requires somebody else to interest her. She can’t even amuse herself with a book for three minutes together. See, she has a yellow-backed French novel now, and she is only able to read five lines at a time; then she gets tired and glances about her listlessly. What she wants is someone gay, laid on, to divert her all the time from her own inanity.”
