'You don't look fine. You look as if you have a belly ache. Better get Jan Cheroot to give you a dose of sulphur and treacle.'
Jan Cheroot, dressed in his old regimental jacket with burnished buttons and his scarlet cap set at a rakish angle, brought in fresh bottles of champagne, the buckets packed with crushed white ice.
'Ice!' Louise clapped her hands with delight. 'I never expected such sophistication here.'
'Oh, we lack very little, madam,' Rhodes assured her.
'My ice-making factory has been in operation for a year or more. In a year or so the railway line will reach Kimherley and then we shall become a city, a real City.'
'And all this on woman's vanity.' Louise shook her long black tresses in mock dismay. 'A lady's baubles, a city built on engagement rings!'
Despite Zouga's best efforts, the focus of attention had shifted again. They were all hanging on her words with that slightly bemused expression which overcomes even the most sensible of men when he looks at a Beautiful woman.' It was the first time Zouga had acknowledged that fact, even to himself, and for some reason it increased his resentment of her.
'Do you know, mister Rhodes,' she leaned across the table confidentially, 'I have been here for five days now, and although I have searched the sidewalks diligently, I have not seen a single diamond, and I was assured the streets of Kimberley were paved with diamonds.'
They all laughed, more heartily than the witticism warranted, and Rhodes murmured a few words to Pickering before turning back to Louise.
We shall do what we can to remedy that, missis Sint John,' and while he spoke Pickering scrawled a note and then summoned one of the Coloured grooms who was lolling and smoking in the shade of the camel-thorn tree.
'Major, may I borrow one of your champagne buckets?' Pickering asked, and when Zouga agreed, he handed the empty bucket and the note to the groom.
Zouga was carving seconds off the roast when the groom returned. He was followed by a nondescript white man with an uncertain seat on his placid steed. He came up on to the verandah carrying the bucket as though it were filled with mister Alfred Nobel's newfangled blasting gelatine.
He placed the bucket on the table in front of Rhodes with a timid flourish, and then seemed to disappear from sight. With his thin colourless hair and myopic eyes behind pebble-lens wire-rimmed spectacles, his dark jacket shiny with wear at elbows and cuffs, he blended like a chameleon with his background.
'Where is young Jordan?' Rhodes asked. 'That boy loves diamonds as much as any of us do., Jordan came from the kitchen in his apron and with his colour high from the heat of his stove. He greeted Rhodes shyly.
'Ladies and Gentlemen, mister Jordan Ballantyne is not only the finest chef on the diggings, but he is also one of the best diamond sorters that we have.' Rhodes was expansive as few of them had ever seen him. 'Come and stand by me, Jordan, where you can have a good view., When Jordan was beside his chair, Rhodes tipped the bucket carefully and even Zouga heard himself gasp with shock, while Louise Sint John cried out aloud.
The bucket was filled to the brim with uncut diamonds, and now they cascaded onto the white tablecloth in a sullenly glowing pyramid from which random darts of light sped to astound the eye.
'All right, Jordan. Tell us something about them,' Rhodes invited. And the boy stooped over the fabulous pile of treasure, his long tapered fingers flying lightly over the stones, spreading and sorting them into piles.
While he worked he talked, and his voice was as lovely as his face, low and melodious. Fluently he explained the shapes of the crystals, pointed out the flaws in one, placed two side by side to compare the colours, twisting one to the light to bring up its smouldering fires.
Zouga was puzzled. This little act was too theatrical to be Rhodes' usual style, and he would never go to such lengths to impress a woman, even a beautiful one; for by jumbling up a bucket of stones he had given his own sorters many days of extra work. Every one of those stones would have to be re-graded and appraised and returned to its own little white envelope.
'Here is a perfect stone,' Jordan picked a diamond the size of a green pea. 'Look at that colour, blue as a bolt of lightning and as full of fire.'
Rhodes took it from him, considered it a moment, holding it between thumb and forefinger, then he leaned across the table and placed it before Louise Sint John.
'Madam, your first diamond. I sincerely hope not your last,' said Rhodes.
'mister Rhodes, I cannot accept such a generous gift,' said Louise, her eyes wide with delight, and she turned to Mungo Sint John. 'Can I?'
'If I agreed with you, you would never forgive me,' Mungo Sint John murmured, and Louise turned back to Rhodes.
'mister Rhodes, my husband insists, and I can find no words to express my gratitude.'
Zouga watched the scene attentively; there was so much happening here, so many nuances, so many undercurrents.
it was on the surface merely a demonstration of the remarkable effect that these bright hard pebbles had upon a woman. That was their true value, perhaps their only value. When he looked at Louise Sint John's face he could see that it was not avarice that lit it so, but a mystical emotion not far removed from love, the love of a living thing, a child, a horse, a man, a warming thing to watch.
Quite suddenly Zouga found himself wishing that he had been the author of such joy. That it had been he and not Rhodes who had made the gift which had transformed her, and it took a moment for him to free himself of that desire, so that he almost missed the glance that Rhodes shot beyond the woman's face.
. Suddenly it was clear to Zouga. Rhodes was not baiting for the woman; he was fishing for the man. That display of treasure was for Mungo Sint John, the man with half a million sterling to dispose of.
Rhodes needed capital. When a man sets out to buy every single claim on the Kimberley field, and when he is
