This was cruel, but she knew that he was "inciting her to riot," and she replied: "That's because you are so secluded--in your kindergarten for misfit statesmen. Abandon knowledge, all ye who enter there!"

It was the old flint and steel, but the sparks were not bright enough to light the tinder of emotion. She knew it, for he was cool and buoyant and really unconcerned, and she was feverish--and determined.

"You still make life worth living," he answered, gaily.

"It is not an occupation I would choose," she replied. "It is sure to make one a host of enemies."

"So many of us make our careers by accident," he rejoined.

"Certainly I made mine not by design," she replied instantly; and there was an undercurrent of meaning in it which he was not slow to notice; but he disregarded her first attempt to justify, however vaguely, her murderous treatment of him.

"But your career is not yet begun," he remarked.

Her eyes flashed--was it anger, or pique, or hurt, or merely the fire of intellectual combat?

"I am married," she said, defiantly, in direct retort.

"That is not a career--it is casual exploration in a dark continent,"

he rejoined.

"Come and say that to my husband," she replied, boldly. Suddenly a thought lighted her eyes. "Are you by any chance free to-morrow night to dine with us--quite, quite en famille' Rudyard will be glad to see you--and hear you," she added, teasingly.

He was amused. He felt how much he had really piqued her and provoked her by showing her so plainly that she had lost every vestige of the ancient power over him; and he saw no reason why he should not spend an evening where she sparkled.

"I am free, and will come with pleasure," he replied.

"That is delightful," she rejoined, "and please bring a box of bons mots with you. But you will come, then--?" She was going to add, "Ian,"

but she paused.

"Yes, I'll come--Jasmine," he answered, coolly, having read her hesitation aright.

She flushed, was embarra.s.sed and piqued, but with a smile and a nod she left him.

In her carriage, however, her breath came quick and fast, her tiny hand clenched, her face flushed, and there was a devastating fire in her eyes.

"He shall not treat me so. He shall show some feeling. He shall--he shall--he shall!" she gasped, angrily.

CHAPTER IX

THE APPIAN WAY

"Cape to Cairo be d.a.m.ned!"

The words were almost spat out. The man to whom they were addressed slowly drew himself up from a half-rec.u.mbent position in his desk-chair, from which he had been dreamily talking into the ceiling, as it were, while his visitor leaned against a row of bookshelves and beat the floor impatiently with his foot.

At the rude exclamation, Byng straightened himself, and looked fixedly at his visitor. He had been dreaming out loud again the dream which Rhodes had chanted in the ears of all those who shared with him the pioneer enterprises of South Africa. The outburst which had broken in on his monologue was so unexpected that for a moment he could scarcely realize the situation. It was not often, in these strenuous and perilous days--and for himself less often than ever before, so had London and London life worked upon him--that he, or those who shared with him the vast financial responsibilities of the Rand, indulged in dreams or prophecies; and he resented the contemptuous phrase just uttered, and the tone of the speaker even more.

Byng's blank amazement served only to incense his visitor further.

"Yes, be d.a.m.ned to it, Byng!" he continued. "I'm sick of the British Empire and the All Red, and the 'immense future.' What I want is the present. It's about big enough for you and me and the rest of us. I want to hold our own in Johannesburg. I want to pull thirty-five millions a year out of the eighty miles of reef, and get enough native labour to do it. I want to run the Rand like a business concern, with Kruger gone to Holland; and Leyds gone to blazes. That's what I want to see, Mr. Invincible Rudyard Byng."

The reply to this tirade was deliberate and murderously bitter. "That's what you want to see, is it, Mr. Blasphemous Barry Whalen? Well, you can want it with a little less blither and a little more manners."

A hard and ugly look was now come into the big clean-shaven face which had become sleeker with good living, and yet had indefinably coa.r.s.ened in the three years gone since the Jameson raid; and a gloomy anger looked out of the deep-blue eyes as he slowly went on:

"It doesn't matter what you want--not a great deal, if the others agree generally on what ought to be done; and I don't know that it matters much in any case. What have you come to see me about?"

"I know I'm not welcome here, Byng. It isn't the same as it used to be.

It isn't--"

Byng jerked quickly to his feet and lunged forward as though he would do his visitor violence; but he got hold of himself in time, and, with a sudden and whimsical toss of the head, characteristic of him, he burst into a laugh.

"Well, I've been stung by a good many kinds of flies in my time, and I oughtn't to mind, I suppose," he growled.... "Oh, well, there," he broke off; "you say you're not welcome here? If you really feel that, you'd better try to see me at my chambers--or at the office in London Wall. It can't be pleasant inhaling air that chills or stifles you. You take my advice, Barry, and save yourself annoyance. But let me say in pa.s.sing that you are as welcome here as anywhere, neither more nor less. You are as welcome as you were in the days when we trekked from the Veal to Pietersburg and on into Bechua.n.a.land, and both slept in the cape-wagon under one blanket. I don't think any more of you than I did then, and I don't think any less, and I don't want to see you any more or any fewer. But, Barry"--his voice changed, grew warmer, kinder--"circ.u.mstances are circ.u.mstances. The daily lives of all of us are shaped differently--yours as well as mine--here in this pudding-faced civilization and in the iron conventions of London town; and we must adapt ourselves accordingly. We used to flop down on our Louis Quinze furniture on the Vaal with our muddy boots on--in our front drawing-room. We don't do it in Thamesfontein, my n.o.ble buccaneer--not even in Barry Whalen's mansion in Ladbroke Square, where Barry Whalen, Esq., puts his silk hat on the hall table, and--and, 'If you please, sir, your bath is ready'! ... Don't be an idiot-child, Barry, and don't spoil my best sentences when I let myself go. I don't do it often these days--not since Jameson spilt the milk and the can went trundling down the area. It's little time we get for dreaming, these sodden days, but it's only dreams that do the world's work and our own work in the end. It's dreams that do it, Barry; it's dreams that drive us on, that make us see beyond the present and the stupefying, deadening grind of the day. So it'll be Cape to Cairo in good time, dear lad, and no d.a.m.nation, if you please.... Why, what's got into you? And again, what have you come to see me about, anyhow?

You knew we were to meet at dinner at Wallstein's to-night. Is there anything that's skulking at our heels to hurt us?"

The scowl on Barry Whalen's dissipated face cleared a little. He came over, rested both hands on the table and leaned forward as he spoke, Byng resuming his seat meanwhile.

Barry's voice was a little thick with excitement, but he weighed his words too. "Byng, I wanted you to know beforehand what Fleming intends to bring up to-night--a nice kind of reunion, isn't it, with war ahead as sure as guns, and the danger of everything going to smash, in spite of Milner and Jo?"

A set look came into Byng's face. He caught the lapels of his big, loose, double-breasted jacket, and spread his feet a little, till he looked as though squaring himself to resist attack.

"Go on with your story," he interposed. "What is Fleming going to say--or bring up, you call it?"

"He's going to say that some one is betraying us--all we do that's of any importance and most we say that counts--to Kruger and Leyds. He's going to say that the traitor is some one inside our circle."

Byng started, and his hands clutched at the chairback, then he became quiet and watchful. "And whom does Fleming--or you--suspect?" he asked, with lowering eyelids and a slumbering malice in his eyes.

Barry straightened himself and looked Byng rather hesitatingly in the face; then he said, slowly:

"I don't know much about Fleming's suspicions. Mine, though, are at least three years old, and you know them.

"Krool?"

"Krool--for sure."

"What would be Krool's object in betraying us, even if he knew all we say and do?"

"Blood is thicker than water, Byng, and double pay to a poor man is a consideration."

"Krool would do nothing that injured me, Barry. I know men. What sort of thing has been given away to Brother Boer?"

Barry took from his pocket a paper and pa.s.sed it over. Byng scanned it very carefully and slowly, and his face darkened as he read; for there were certain things set down of which only he and Wallstein and one or two others knew; which only he and one high in authority in England knew, besides Wallstein. His face slowly reddened with anger. London life, and its excitements multiplied by his wife and not avoided by himself, had worn on him, had affected his once sunny and even temper, had given him greater bulk, with a touch of flabbiness under the chin and at the neck, and had slackened the firmness of the muscles.

Presently he got up, went over to a table, and helped himself to brandy and soda, motioning to Barry to do the same. There were two or three minutes' silence, and then he said:

"There's something wrong, certainly, but it isn't Krool. No, it isn't Krool."