“She is of medium height; her hair is brown. Her worst enemy admits, I believe, that she is pretty. Of course, I am convinced of it.”
“Of course,” replied Jocelyn steadily. “That is as it should be. And I have no doubt that you and her worst enemy are both quite right.”
He nodded cheerfully, indicating a great faith in his own judgment on the matter under discussion.
“I am afraid,” he said, “that I have not a photograph. That would be the correct thing, would it not? I ought to have one always with me in a locket round my neck, or somewhere. A curiously-wrought locket is the correct thing, I believe. People in books usually carry something of that description—and it is always curiously wrought. I don’t know where they buy them.”
“I think they are usually inherited,” suggested Jocelyn.
“I suppose they are,” he went on in the same semi-serious tone. “And then I ought to have it always ready to clasp in my dying hand, where Joseph would find it and wipe away a furtive tear as he buried me. It is a pity. I am afraid I inherited nothing from my ancestors except a very practical mind.”
“I should have liked very much to see a photograph of Miss Chyne,” said Jocelyn, who had, apparently, not been listening.
“I hope someday you will see herself, at home in England. For you have no abiding city here.”
“Only a few more years now. Has she—are her parents living?”
“No, they are both dead. Indian people they were. Indian people have a tragic way of dying young. Millicent lives with her aunt, Lady Cantourne. And Lady Cantourne ought to have married my respected father.”
“Why did she not do so?”
He shrugged his shoulders—paused—sat up and flicked a large moth off the arm of his chair. Then:
“Goodness only knows,” he said. “Goodness, and themselves. I suppose they found it out too late. That is one of the little risks of life.”
She answered nothing.
“Do you think,” he went on, “that there will be a special Hell in the Hereafter for parents who have sacrificed their children’s lives to their own ambition? I hope there will be.”
“I have never given the matter the consideration it deserves,” she answered. “Was that the reason? Is Lady Cantourne a more important person than Lady Meredith?”
“Yes.”
She gave a little nod of comprehension, as if he had raised a curtain for her to see into his life—into the far perspective of it, reaching back into the dim distance of fifty years before. For our lives do reach back into the lives of our fathers and grandfathers; the beginnings made there come down into our daily existence, shaping our thought and action. That which stood between Sir John Meredith and his son was not so much the present personality of Millicent Chyne as the past shadows of a disappointed life, an unloved wife and an unsympathetic mother. And these things Jocelyn Gordon knew while she sat, gazing with thoughtful eyes, wherein something lived and burned of which she was almost ignorant—gazing through the tendrils of the creeping flowers that hung around them.
At last Jack Meredith rose briskly, watch in hand, and Jocelyn came back to things of earth with a quick gasping sigh which took her by surprise.
“Miss Gordon, will you do something for me?”
“With pleasure.”
He tore a leaf from his pocketbook, and, going to the table, he wrote on the paper with a pencil pendent at his watch-chain.
“The last few days,” he explained while he wrote, “have awakened me to the lamentable fact that human life is rather an uncertain affair.”
He came towards her, holding out the paper.
“If you hear—if anything happens to me, would you be so kind as to write to Millicent and tell her of it? That is the address.”
She took the paper, and read the address with a dull sort of interest.
“Yes,” she said. “Yes, if you like. But—nothing must happen to you.”
There was a slight unsteadiness in her voice, which made her stop suddenly. She did not fold the paper, but continued to read the address.
“No,” he said, “nothing will. But would you not despise a man who could not screw up his courage to face the possibility?”
He wondered what she was thinking about, for she did not seem to hear him.
A clock in the drawing-room behind them struck the half-hour, and the sound seemed to recall her to the present.
“Are you going now?” she asked.
“Yes,” he answered, vaguely puzzled. “Yes, I must go now.”
She rose, and for a moment he held her hand. He was distinctly conscious of something left unsaid—of many things. He even paused on the edge of the verandah, trying to think what it was that he had to say. Then he pushed aside the hanging flowers and passed out.
“Goodbye!” he said over his shoulder.
Her lips moved, but he heard no sound. She turned with a white, drawn face and sat down again. The paper was still in her hand. She consulted it again, reading in a whisper:
“Millicent Chyne—Millicent!”
She turned the paper over and studied the back of it—almost as if she was trying to find what there was behind that name.
Through the trees there rose and fell the music of the distant surf. Somewhere near at hand a waterwheel, slowly irrigating the rice-fields, creaked and groaned after the manner of waterwheels all over Africa. In all there was that subtle sense of unreality—that utter lack of permanency which touches the heart of the white exile in tropic lands, and lets life slip away without allowing the reality of it to be felt.
The girl sat there with the name before her—written on the little slip of paper—the only memento he had left her.
XIX
Ivory
’Tis one thing to be tempted, Escalus,
Another thing to fall.
One of the peculiarities of Africa yet to be explained is the almost supernatural
