Men of Men - Smith Wilbur (книги бесплатно без txt) 📗

When he shook his head, she tightened her grip to gag his words of denial.

"So fret not, like an idle girl, That life is dash'd with flecks of sin."

She whispered the quotation, with quivering voice. "Give me the chance, dear Jordan, please give me the chance to prove that I can love and cherish you more than any other woman in all the world. You will see how this other woman's love pales to nothing beside the flame of mine."

He took her wrist and lifted her hand from his mouth, and his head bowed over hers with a terrible regret.

"Salina," he said, "it is not another woman."

She stared up at him, both of them rooted and stricken, while the enormity of his words slowly spread across her soul like hoar frost.

"Not another woman?" she asked at last, and when he shook his head, "Then I can never even hope, never?"

He did not reply, and at last she shook herself like a sleeper wakening from a dream to deathly reality.

"Will you kiss me goodbye, Jordan, just one last time?"

"It need not be the last-" But she reached up and crushed the words on his lips so fiercely that her teeth left a taste of blood on his tongue.

"Goodbye, Jordan," she said, and turning from him she walked down the length of the verandah as infirmly as an invalid arising from a long sick-bed. At the door of her bedroom, she staggered and put out a hand to save herself, and then looked back at him.

Her lips moved, but no sound came from them. "Goodbye, Jordan. Goodbye, my love."

Ralph Ballantyne carried up the rifles, one thousand of them, brand new and still in their yellow grease, five in a wooden case, and twenty cases to a wagonload. There were another ten wagonloads of ammunition, all for the account of De Beers diamond mines, another three wagonloads of liquor for his own account, and a single wagon of furniture and household effects for the bungalow that Zouga was building for himself at Gubulawayo.

Ralph crossed the Shashi river with a certain thousand-pound profit from the convoy already safely deposited in the Standard Bank at Kimberley, but with a nagging hollow feeling in the pit of his stomach.

He had no way of knowing whether Bazo had reported him to Lobengula as the abductor of the stone falcons, or whether one of Bazo's warriors had recognized him and, despite the king's warning, had told a wife, who had told her mother, who had told her husband. "Nothing moves in Matabeleland but the whole nation knows of it," Clinton Codrington had warned him once. However, the profits on this run, and the prospect of visiting Khami Mission again, were worth the risk.

On the first day's march beyond the Shashi, that risk was vindicated, for it was Bazo himself at the head of his red shields who intercepted the convoy, and greeted Ralph inscrutably.

"Who dares the road? Who risks the wrath of Lobengula?" And after he had inspected the loaded wagons, as he and Ralph sat alone by the camp fire, Ralph asked him quietly: "I heard that a white man died in the bush between great Zimbabwe and the Limpopo. What was that man's name?"

"Nobody knows of this matter, except Lobengula and one of his indunas," Bazo replied, without lifting his gaze from the flames. "And even the king does not know who the stranger was or where he came from, nor does he know the site of the grave of the nameless stranger." Bazo took a little snuff and went on. "Nor will we ever speak of this matter again, you and me."

And now he lifted his eyes at last, and there was something in their dark depths that had never been there before, and Ralph thought that it was the look of a man destroyed, a man who would never trust a brother again.

in the morning, Bazo was gone, and Ralph faced northwards, with the doubts dispelled and his spirits soaring like the silver and mauve thunderheads that piled the horizon ahead of him. Zouga was waiting for him at the drift of the Khami river.

"You've made good time, my boy."

"Nobody ever made better," Ralph agreed, and twirled his thick dark moustache, "and nobody is likely to, not until mister Rhodes builds his railroad."

"Did mister Rhodes send the money?"

"In good gold sovereigns," Ralph told him. "I have carried them in my own saddle-bags."

"All we have to do is get Lobengula to accept them."

"That, Papa, is your job. You are mister Rhodes" agent."

Yet three weeks later the wagons still stood outside Lobengula's kraal, their loads roped down under the tarpaulins while Zouga waited each day from early morning until dusk in front of the king's great hut.

"The king is sick," they said.

"The king is with his wives."

"Perhaps the king will come tomorrow."

"Who knows when the king will tire of his wives," they said, and at last even Zouga, who knew and understood the ways of Africa, became angry.

"Tell the king that Bakela, the Fist, rides now to Lodzi to tell him that the king spurns his gifts," he ordered Gandang, who had come to make the day's excuses, and Zouga called to Jan Cheroot to saddle the horses.

"The king has not given you the road." Gandang was shocked and perturbed.

"Then tell Lobengula that his impis can kill the emissary of Lodzi on the road, but it will not take long for the word to be carried to Lodzi. Lodzi sits even now at the great kraal of the queen across the water, basking in her favour."

The king's messengers caught up with Zouga before he reached Khami Mission, for his pace was deliberately leisurely.

"The king bids Bakela return at once, he will speak with him at the moment of his return."

"Tell Lobengula that Bakela sleeps tonight at Khami Mission and perhaps the night after, for who knows when he will see fit to talk with the king again."

Somebody at Khami must have put a spy-glass on the dust raised by Zouga's horses, for when they were still a mile from the hills, a rider came out to meet them at full gallop, a slim figure with long dark plaits streaming behind her lovely head.

When they met, Zouga jumped down from his saddle and lifted her from hers.

"Louise," he whispered into her smiling mouth. "You will never know how slowly the days pass when I am away from you."

"It's a cross you make us both carry," she told him. "I am fully recovered now, thanks to Robyn, and still you make me loiter and pine at Khami. Oh, Zouga, will you not let me join you at Gubulawayo?"

"That I will, my dear, just as soon as we have a roof on the cottage, and a ring on your finger."

,"You are always so proper." She pulled a face at him.

"Who would ever know?"

"i would," he said, and kissed her again, before he lifted her back into the saddle of the bay Arab mare which had been his betrothal gift to her.

They rode with their knees touching and their fingers linked, while Jan Cheroot trailed them discreetly out of earshot.

"We shall have only days longer to wait," Zouga assured her. "I have forced Lobengula's hand. This matter of the rifles will be settled soon and then you can choose where you will make me the happiest man on earth, the cathedral at Cape Town perhaps?"

"Darling Zouga, your family at Khami has been so kind to me The girls have become like my own sisters, and Robyn lavished care upon me when I was so ill, so burned and desiccated by the sun."

"Why not?" Zouga agreed. "I'm sure that Clinton will agree to say the words."

"He has already, but there is more to it. The wedding is all planned, and it is to be a double wedding."