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

Ralph swallowed his saliva. Jordan's culinary skills were always a source of delight to him.

"All right, I'll eat it."

Jordan licked his brush, leaving a streak of Prussian blue on his tongue, and then looked up at his brother.

"You are going to serve it, not eat it -" Jordan paused portentously, "mister Rhodes is coming to lunch," as though that explained it all.

"Well, if I'm not good enough to sit at the same table as your famous mister Rhodes, I'll be damned if I'll play waiter. You can get Donsela. For a shilling Donsela will spill soup on mister Rhodes, for a shilling Donsela would throw soup on King Lobengula himself. I'm going to bribe him."

However, in the end curiosity and Jordan's promise of the leftovers prevailed and Ralph dressed himself in the ridiculous monkey-jacket that Jordan had designed and tailored for him and carried the tray of Veloute out on the wide verandah of Zouga's camp, and there nearly dropped it.

"Madame, you remind me of the heroine from mister Longfellow's poem," Neville Pickering complimented Louise Sint John, and she smiled back at him from her seat at the centre of the luncheon table.

"Thank you, sir."

Her jacket was in pale creamy buckskin with tasselled sleeves, and the bodice was crusted with bright-coloured beads in bold geometrical patterns. Louise had parted her thick black hair in the centre, braided a blue ribbon into each of the thick tresses, bound them with a band about her forehead, and then let them hang onto her bosom.

The soft tanned buckskin was divided into ankle-length culottes, and her boots were also of soft beaded leather.

Louise was the only woman at the long trestle table on the open verandah of Zouga's camp. The men seated on each side of her were already emerging as the most influential subjects on this continent of an omnipotent queen. Like the men that another English queen had sent out to the corners of the earth, these were the new Elizabethans, most of them already rich, all of them restless and consumed with their lust for power, for wealth, for land. Each with a separate dream that he would follow relentlessly all his life, every one of them driving, ruthless men.

Ballantyne. Beit. Jameson. Rhodes. Robinson. The list of names read like a roll-call for a regiment of filibusters, and yet here they were listening to a discourse on women's fashion as though it were a company report on tonnage treated and cartage recovered.

Only Zouga Ballantyne was not smiling. The woman offended Zouga. Her beauty was too flamboyant, her colouring too vivid. Zouga preferred the pale gold blond hair and the complexion of sugared cream and strawberries. An Englishman's idea of beauty.

This woman's dress was outrageous, the styling of her hair pretentious. Her gaze was too direct, her eyes too blue, her conversation too easy and her style of address too familiar. Of course American women had the reputation of affecting masculine manners, but Zouga found himself wishing that Louise Sint John had kept those manners on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean where they belonged.

it was enough that she had galloped into his camp ahead of her husband, riding astride, and dismounted by freeing both of her narrow booted feet from the stirrups and vaulting lightly to the ground; but then she had come up onto the stoep with an assured stride and smile, her right hand out like a man, and without waiting for her husband to introduce them had said: "You must be Zouga Ballantyne. I'd recognize you anywhere by Mungo's description of you."

Her hand was narrow, the skin warm but dry, but the grip of her fingers was unfemininely firm, the grip of a skilled horsewoman.

These leisurely Sunday luncheons at Zouga's camp were his one extravagance, and they had become one of the traditions of Kimberley, when excellent fare and good liquor and the company of intelligent men made for memorable afternoons.

Women were very seldom invited to these gatherings, and Louise Sint John would not have been there if Zouga had been able to have her husband come alone, but Mungo Sint John had replied pointedly to the invitation, "General and missis Sint John have pleasure in accepting. The friendship between Sint John and Zouga had begun many years previously, and he was the kind of man whom Zouga could admire: a man like himself, hard and determined, one who lived by his own code without compromise. One who expected no preference nor favour, but whose triumphs were of his own engineering and whose disasters were met with fortitude, without plea or excuse, even when occasioned by cruel circumstances beyond his control.

In the late "fifties Sint John had built up a commercial empire, a fleet of trading vessels which had carried the black ivory of slaves from the African continent to that of North America. Legend was that in three voyages, in the course of a single period of twelve months, across the notorious middle passage of the Atlantic, he had transported almost two million dollars" worth of slaves, and with those profits he had acquired vast estates in Louisiana.

It was at this time that Zouga had first met him.

Zouga had travelled as a passenger on Sint John's magnificent clipper Huron out of the Port of Bristol in southern England to the Cape of Good Hope. The irony of that voyage had been that Zouga at the time had not been aware that Sint John was engaged in the trade, and Zouga had been accompanied on the voyage by his only sister, Robyn Ballantyne, a medical missionary whose declared goal in life was the extinction of the trade on the African continent.

When Robyn Ballantyne had discovered that Sint John was not sailing to Africa to barter beads and copper wire for ivory and ostrich feathers, for gumcopal and alluvial gold dust from the kingdom of Monomatapa, but was seeking richer, living black cargo, her hatred was rendered more implacable by her shame at having travelled in company with such a man.

It was Robyn Ballantyne who had called up the avenging spectre of the Royal Navy. She had been the chief instrument in delivering Sint John and his beautiful clipper Huron, with her cargo of five hundred prime slaves, to the gunboats of the British anti-slavery squadron.

Sint John, as was his right as an American captain, had resisted the British boarders, and in the savage action that followed, half his crew had been killed or maimed and his lovely ship so badly mauled that she had to be towed into Table Bay by her captors.

Though after imprisonment in Cape Town castle, the British governor had finally released Sint John and allowed him to sail away, still his cargo of slaves were seized and released from their chains, and the African coast was closed for ever to his ships.

It was then that Zouga had lost contact with him; but after Zouga's book A Hunter's Odyssey had been published, Sint John had written to him care of his London publishers, Messrs Rowland Ward, and since then they had corresponded at irregular intervals. Indeed it was Zouga's description of the diamond fields in one of these letters that was responsible for Sint John's presence here now.

Through the exchange of letters Zouga had been able to follow Sint John's career, and he learned how after his release from the Cape Town castle, Sint John had returned to Fairfields, his cotton and sugar estates near Baton Rouge, only weeks before the first cannon shots were fired at Fort Sumter.

Louisiana had voted for secession from the Union, and when the war began, Mungo raised his own force of irregular cavalry and led them in a brilliant series of hitand-run raids against the supply lines and rear bases of the Federal army. So successful were these depredations that the northeners christened him "Murdering Mungol, declared him an outlaw and placed a reward of fifty thousand dollars on his head. Promoted to major-general, he was later struck in the left eye by a red-hot splinter of shrapnel and dragged over a mile when his horse bolted.