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

"I'm Clinton Codrington," he said. "And I suppose I must count as your uncle, though goodness knows I do not feel that old."

"I would have known you anywhere, sir," said Ralph.

"Would you indeed?"

"I have read Aunt Robyn's books, and I have always admired your exploits as a Royal Naval officer."

"Oh dear." Clinton shook his head in mock dismay. "I thought to have left that all far behind me., "You were one of the most illustrious and courageous officers in the African anti-slavery squadron, sir." Ralph's eyes shone with a still boyish hero worship.

"Your Aunt Robyn's account suffered a dreadful list to port, I'm afraid."

"Daddy is the bravest man in the world," Victoria declared stoutly, and she released Ralph's hand and ran to her father.

Clinton Codrington gathered her up and held her on his hip.

"And yours, young lady, is probably the most unbiased opinion in Matabeleland," he chuckled, and Ralph was suddenly sharply jealous of this palpable aura of deep affection and love which welded the little group, from which he felt himself excluded. It was something beyond his experience, something he had never missed until that moment. Somehow Salina seemed to sense his pang of melancholy, and she took the hand that Victoria had relinquished.

,"come," she said. "Mama will be waiting. And there is one thing you will soon learn, Ralph. in this family, nobody keeps Mama waiting."

They went down towards the church, passing between the beds of growing vegetables.

"You didn't bring any seed?" Clinton asked, and when Ralph shook his head, "Well, how were you to know?"

and he went on to point out with pride his flourishing crops. "Maize, potatoes, beans, tomatoes do particularly well here."

"We divide it this way," Cathy told Ralph, teasing her father. "One for the bugs, two for the baboons, three for the bushbuck, and one for Daddy."

"Be good to all God's creatures." Clinton reached out to niffle her dark hair, and Ralph realized that these gentle people were always touching and kissing one another. He had never experienced anything like it.

Squatting patiently on the shady side against the wall of the church were twenty or more Matabele of all ages and sexes, from a skeleton-thin ancient with a completely white cap of wool on his bowed head and both his eyes turned to blind orbs of milky jelly by tropical oph thalmia to a new-born infant held against its mother's milk-swollen breasts with its tiny dark face screwed up with the terrible colic of infant dysentery.

Catherine tethered Tom beside the church door, and they all trooped into the cool interior, insulated by thatch and thick walls of unbaked brick from the outside heat. The church smelled of homemade soap, and of iodine. The pews of rough-hewn timber had been pushed aside to make way for an operating table of the same material.

There was a girl at work over the table, but as they came in she tied the last knot in a bandage and dismissed her semi-naked black patient with a word and a pat then, wiping her hands on a clean but threadbare cloth, she came down the aisle of the church towards them.

Ralph was certain that she was Cathy's twin, for though she was a little taller, she was as slim and as flat-chested; her hair had the same dark brown colouring, though shot through with tones of russet and chestnut, her skin the same youthful lustre, and her nose and chin the same forceful size and thrust.

Then as she came closer, Ralph realized that he had been mistaken and that she was older than Cathy, perhaps even older than Salina, but not much.

"Hello, Ralph," the girl said. "I'm your Aunt Robyn."

Ralph felt the blasphemy of surprise leap to his lips again, conscious of Salina's hand in his he suppressed it.

"You are so young," he said instead.

"Bless you for that," she laughed. "You turn a prettier compliment than your daddy ever did." She was the only one who made no effort to kiss him; instead she turned to the twins.

"Right!" she said. "I want ten pages of copperplate written out before Evensong, and I don't want to see a single blot., "Oh Mama!

Ralph "Ralph has been your excuse for two weeks. Go, or you will eat in the kitchen hut tonight."

Then, to Cathy: "Have you finished the ironing, young lady?"

"Not yet, Mama." Cathy followed the twins "Salina, your baking."

"Yes, Mama."

Then there were three of them alone in the little church, and Robyn ran a professional eye over her nephew.

"Well, Zouga has bred a likely boy," she gave her opinion. "But I never expected anything else."

"How did you all know I was coming?" Ralph voiced his bewilderment at last.

"Grandpa Moffat sent a runner when you left Kuruman, and Induna Gandang passed here two weeks ago on his way to King Lobengula's kraal.

His eldest son was with him, and Bazo's mother is an old friend of mine."

"I see."

"Nothing moves in Matabeleland but the whole nation knows of it immediately," Clinton explained.

"Now, Ralph, how is your father? I was terribly distressed to hear of the death of Aletta, your mother. She was a lovely person, so good and gentle. I wrote to Zouga, but he never replied."

Robyn seemed determined to catch up on the doings of a decade in the first ten minutes, and her questions were quick and incisive; but Clinton soon excused himself and left the two of them alone in the little church to return to his gardens.

Ralph replied dutifully to all her questions, while he reassessed his first impression of his aunt. Youthful she looked, but childlike she was not. Now at last he could understand the remarkable achievements of this forceful woman. How she had enrolled at a famous London hospital, one which would never accept a female on its student body, by impersonating a man. Dressed in breeches, she had kept her terms and been granted her doctorate when she was twenty-one years of age. The scandal which attended the discovery that a female had invaded an exclusive male preserve had rocked all England.

Then she had accompanied Zouga to Africa, equal partners in the expedition to find their father Fuller Ballantyne, who had been missing in the unexplored interior for eight years. When she and Zouga had fallen out over the conduct of the expedition, she had pushed on, a white woman alone with only primitive black tribesmen as companions, and achieved the main object of the expedition on her own.

Her book describing the expedition, entitled Africa in My Blood, had been a publishing phenomenon and had sold almost a quarter of a million copies, three times as many as Zouga Ballantyne's A Hunter's Odyssey published six months later.

Robyn had signed over all her royalties from the book to The London Missionary Society, and that august body had been so delighted by the donation that they had reinstated her as a society officer, had ordained her husband as her assistant, and had approved her heading a mission to Matabeleland.

Her two subsequent publications had not enjoyed the same success as the first. The Sick African, a practical study of tropical medicine, had contained ludicrous theories that had earned her the derision of her medical peers she had even dared to suggest that malarial fever was not caused by breathing the foul night airs of tropical swamps, when this fact had been known since the time of Hippocrates.

Then her further account of her life as a medical missionary, Blind Faith, had been too homely in style and too prejudiced in championing the indigenous tribes.