It was a turgid, sun-smitten Sunday afternoon at the Portals' house on the Berea. Through the open French windows of the drawing-room came the c.h.i.n.k of many tea-cups, and a desultory but not unsprightly murmur of conversation. Some one's hand was straying absent-mindedly on the keys of the Bechstein, making little ripples, and sometimes a girl would laugh on two notes--a short, but peculiarly melodious sound like the beginning of a song in a bird's throat. Evelyn Carson, on the west side of the verandah, arguing with Bill Portal about water-fowl in Madagascar, found that laugh curiously distracting. It reminded him of an old dream that he was always trying to forget.

"You're thinking of a Francolin-partridge, my dear fellow," he said to Portal; "very dark feathering ... almost black ... a little bigger than the Natal grey hens." (There was that little tender laugh again! G.o.d!

What a dream that was!)

"Not at all," disputed Portal. "They were grouse, I tell you ...

sand-grouse ... the male bird has dark-brown wings ... very light back and a pencilled head ... rather like English grouse ... with a black neck. I got scores of them at Solarey ... splendid sporting shots----"

He lifted his voice slightly in his enthusiasm, and it was heard round in the east verandah, where Mrs. Portal was sitting with her great friend, Mary Cap.r.o.n, two other women, and Luce Abinger.

"Listen to the blood-shedders!" said Mrs. Cap.r.o.n.

"Yes, one of them is Bill," said Clem, "and I hoped he was looking after people inside! Who is he talking to, I wonder."

Mrs. Cap.r.o.n opened her lips to answer, then closed them again and looked away at the sea. Luce Abinger smiled to himself.

"That's C-Carson," he said. "He c-came up with me."

Abinger's slight stammer arrested people's attention and made them listen to what he had to say. But to do him justice, what he had to say was usually worth listening to. It is always worth while to be amused, and a man's malice is invariably more amusing than a woman's because it is not so small, and is more daring. What Abinger did not dare with his tongue, he made bold to let you know with his eyes, which were as bad as they could be. Not that he looked at all women with the same look Sophie Cornell had once complained of. He was far too clever for that--he had as many sets of expressions for his eyes as he had for his tongue.

But in whatsoever way he looked, he always made the woman he was talking to _tete-a-tete_ feel that she was doing something rather wicked and none the less fascinating because she could not be indicted on it by Mrs. Grundy. And then his appearance was so peculiarly revolting! That frightful scar running all the way down one side of his clean-shaven face, from his eye to his chin, _must_ have been made with a knife; but no one knew how it had been done, and that made it all the more mysterious. Certainly he was not communicative on the subject.

At present he was sitting on the clean, sun-burnt boards of the verandah floor, with his back against the wall and his knees drawn up, peacefully considering the four women arranged in chairs on either side of him.

Mrs. Portal, bunched up with her elbows on her knees and her chin in her hands, was not pretty, but her face bore the marks of race, and her hair and her kind Irish eyes were full of sunshine. Abinger considered that she had less style than any woman he knew, but that it must be distinctly interesting to be Bill Portal. Mrs. Gerald Lace was silent and reposeful, with the inevitable silent reposefulness of a woman with a fourteen-inch waist. Mrs. Gruyere, warm and pink, fanned herself vigorously with an expensive painted fan, and took breath for a fresh onslaught upon the characters of her friends. Mrs. Cap.r.o.n, staring out at the sea with her lovely, golden eyes, was sufficiently beautiful to be forgiven for not saying much. It was enough to look at her.

Durban lay below them in green and white array, but the green was too green, and the white blazed even through the drapery of pa.s.sion-plant leaves that hung and clambered on the verandah and let in the sunshine upon them in jaggling Chinese patterns. The garden was delightfully, raggedly picturesque. Two sloping lawns were divided by a tall hedge of Barbadoes-thorn. There was a grove of orange-trees, and a miniature forest of mangoes. Scattered everywhere, grew golden clots of sunflowers, and away to the right a big Bougainvillea bush flaunted its fearful purple-magenta blossoms against the blue. Far beyond was the sea.

The Portals' house stood so high on the Berea that no sound from the town or the sea reached it on a still day. The peace in the verandah was unbroken, save for the _cheep-cheeping_ of some tame guinea-fowl in a neighbouring garden.

If only Mrs. Gruyere could have ceased from troubling, they would all have been at rest. "Why can she not be calm and still, like Mrs. Lace?"

thought Abinger. Mrs. Lace was not over-burdened with brains, but she could say "Oh!" and "Really?" quite prettily at appropriate intervals, and he much preferred her to Mrs. Gruyere, a most tiresome person, who, if you did not tell her the truth, invented it. She now began to worry Mrs. Portal about a girl inside, whom Abinger, not long arrived and having got no further than his present seat in the verandah, had not seen, but from the venomous tone of Mrs. Gruyere's inquiries he gathered that she must, in some fashion, be worth seeing. Mrs. Portal said in an airy way she had, that she knew nothing of Miss Chard except that she was a Cheltenham College girl, and had pretty ankles--"both highly desirable qualifications, surely?"

Mrs. Gruyere, who had been educated at a Colonial _seminary_, immediately drew her feet, which had been obstructing Abinger's view of the Indian Ocean, into the seclusion of her peculiarly ungraceful, though doubtless expensive, skirt, and pursued the subject with more intense malignity. Abinger was of opinion that Mrs. Portal had probably made a life-long enemy for Miss Chard: which showed that she was hara.s.sed, for he knew her to be the soul of tact and kindliness. As an old ally, he felt that it behoved him to listen and prepare a weapon for the defence.

"But, _dear_ Mrs. Portal, desirable qualifications are not always sufficient ones. _Where_ did she come from, and who are her people, I wonder? It seems _strange_ in a small place like Durban, not to have met her before! What does she want here?"

"She paints charmingly," was all Mrs. Portal vouchsafed--"most beautiful little water-colours." After a moment's consideration she added: "She is going to do my miniature."

Thereafter, she looked dreamily into s.p.a.ce, apparently thinking of something else--an old ruse of hers when hara.s.sed about her harum-scarum acquaintances. Abinger began to think it highly probable that she had met the remarkable Miss Chard in a tea-shop, become interested in her face (or her ankles), and gone up and spoken to her; but he quite understood that these illegitimate proceedings must be concealed from such a keeper of seals and red tape as Mrs. Gruyere.

"Indeed! An artist?" that lady insisted abominably. "I wonder if----"

Mrs. Portal removed her charming eyes from blue s.p.a.ce and looked for the hundredth part of a second in the direction of Abinger. He dashed briskly into the conversation.

"Yes; an exceedingly c-clever artist. I saw an exhibition of her pictures somewhere in Bond Street last year. Some of her sunset-effects were brilliant--quite Whistlerian. But," he c.o.c.ked his head meditatively for a second, "if I remember rightly, it was with her miniatures that she made her chief hit--yes, decidedly her----"

"Really?" said Mrs. Gerald Lace, all attention, thinking what a charming miniature her blonde beauty would make.

Mrs. Gruyere said nothing. She was completely knocked out of the ring for five seconds, during which time Mrs. Portal smiled an amazed smile at the sunflowers on the lawn, and Abinger, with the pride of one who has done exceeding well, rose and handed tea-cups and cake from the tray of a neat and pretty maid--Hyacinth's English nurse, to be precise, who was always harnessed-in on Sunday afternoons. Having modestly helped himself to three sandwiches, he reseated himself upon the floor, for time was up: Mrs. Gruyere had got her second wind.

Could it be true, she demanded of him, that there was talk of that odious Sir Evelyn Carson getting a peerage next? Why should he have got the Administratorship of Borapota, when there were so many fine men born and bred in Africa, _much_ more eligible for the post? (Her own brother, in fact--_hinc illae!_) Wasn't it a fact that Carson was exiled to Africa ten years ago because he had been mixed up in a famous divorce suit with Royalty and dared not show his nose in England again? Did Abinger consider it likely that Carson would marry May Mappin, who was still scandalously in love with him and ready to throw herself at him, together with the fortune which her father had made by "running guns" to the Zulus in '76?

"--And was made Mayor, and died!" she finished as though she had been reciting a new kind of creed.

Some portion, at least, of this surprising indictment had made Mrs.

Cap.r.o.n's tinted cheek pale with anger. Clem Portal, too, was disturbed.

She glanced fiercely at Mrs. Gruyere, and remarked with great emphasis and point:

"Rot!"

Mrs. Gruyere looked as if she would have liked to snort at this rude reception of her news; she contented herself, however, with a sniff--a Colonial habit of hers.

Mrs. Lace also roused herself to an effort. She had not Mrs. Portal's pluck to fire boldly in the face of the enemy, but she was inspired to make a little side-attack.

"He would never _dream_ of marrying a Colonial: Gerald told me so."

Mrs. Gruyere's nostrils broadened like a hippo's; she could have tomahawked Mrs. Lace on the spot. For a moment she cast her inward eye back across the trail of Mrs. Lace's past--if she had only been a Johannesburg crow, with three coats of whitewash, _how_ Mrs. Gruyere would have turned the waterspouts of truth on her! But as it happened, Gerald Lace had extracted his blonde bride from a tender home at Kingston-on-Thames--and that was a far cry! And since her marriage, she was known to be what is called "absolutely de-_vo_-ted." What satisfaction can be got out of a woman like that? Mrs. Gruyere was obliged to hide her tomahawk for the time being. Smiling a thin smile with an edge as sharp as a razor to it, she addressed herself to the audience at large.

"At any rate, no one will deny that May Mappin is still throwing herself at his head. Isn't that so, Mr. Abinger? You practically live with him and should know."

Abinger's answers were as various as Mrs. Portal's sandwiches, and as liberally supplied with mustard.

1. Yes; but he didn't live with Miss Mappin.

2. Carson had not asked his advice about the best place to spend a honeymoon.

3. Miss Mappin had not told him that she loved Carson.

4. He did not read Carson's letters.

5. He could not swear that Carson was not already married.

6. All women were in love with Carson, anyway.

At that, Mrs. Gruyere sat back satisfied.

"I knew it," she said triumphantly, "and no good can come of it." She made a hollow in her lap for her cup of tea and began rolling her veil into a thick, black stole across the end of her nose.

No one was quite sure what she meant, and no one particularly cared, but Mrs. Portal thought it quite time poor silly May Mappin was left alone.

Mrs. Portal talked scandal herself and enjoyed it, but she didn't backbite, which is the difference between good and ill nature.

"You ask too much, Mrs. Gruyere," said she, sipping tea from her blue cup, delicately as a bee sips honey from a bluebell. "When you are in love with a man like Evelyn Carson, the only thing you can do is to pray with fasting and tears that no bad may come of it."

"When _I_ am in love!" said Mrs. Gruyere loudly.

"Oh!" cried Mrs. Lace with a shocked little laugh.

"Isn't it true, Mr. Abinger?" Clem asked.

"Oh, Carson is not so black as he's painted," said he with a great air of liberality.

"As he paints, I suppose, you mean," pertly rejoined Mrs. Gruyere.

"There is a form of colour-blindness that makes its victim see everything black!" said Mrs. Cap.r.o.n drily. Mrs. Gruyere sniffed again.