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

"Cathy," she called. "Where is that girl! She must set the guesthouse to rights."

"She's gone to it already, Mama." Salina looked up as she stormed into the kitchen.

Then where is your father?"

Within an hour the mission station was prepared to receive guests, and buzzing with anticipation; but they had to wait until midafternoon before a two-wheeled cart of unusually high and heavy construction appeared over the rise before the river. It was drawn by a pair of mules.

The entire family assembled on the front porch of the main building, and all of them had changed their clothing, while the girls had also brushed and dressed their hair with ribbons. A dozen times the twins had to be cautioned for improper comments and unrestrained behaviour, but finally the cart wheeled into the yard.

The woman had put her mule into the traces and now she walked beside the wheel of the cart, which reached almost as high as her head.

There was a coloured servant in ragged cast-off clothes leading the mules, and over the body of the cart was rigged a makeshift sunshade of saplings and stained canvas.

Below the porch the cart stopped, and all of them craned forward as a man's head and upper body appeared above its side. He was laid on a straw mattress on the floor of the cart, and now he lifted himself on one elbow.

He was a gaunt wasted figure; the flesh seemed to have melted from the big bones of his shoulders. His cheeks had fallen in and turned a muddy yellow, the hand on the side of the cart was bony, and the veins were roped under the skin like blue serpents. His hair bushed wildly about his head, coarse dark hair that was shot through with strands of dead white. He had not shaved in days; thick stubble covered his jaws and was salted with the same white as his hair. One eye was sunk into a bruised cavity, and it had that feverish glitter that Robyn recognized instantly. It was the look of mortal illness.

The other eye was covered by a black piratical patch.

There was something dreadfully familiar about the big aquiline nose and the wide mouth, yet it was only when he smiled that old mocking yet somehow tender smile that she had never forgotten that Robyn reeled backwards, one hand flying to her mouth too late to stop her cry.

She caught for support at one of the mopani poles that held the roof.

"Mama, are you all right?" But Robyn pushed Salina's hands away and went on staring at the man in the cart.

Only one memory out of so many rose up like a freak wave out of a storm-swept sea to overwhelm her. She saw again that dark bush of curls, devoid only of its silver lacing, bowing to her naked bosom. She saw above her the beamed roof of the great cabin in the sternquarters of the slave ship Huron, and she remembered as she had a thousand times in the twenty years since then that pain. The deep splitting incursion that rocked her.

Four childbirths since then had not eradicated the memory of it, the agony of passing from maiden to woman.

Her senses wavered, there was a rushing in her ears, she was going to fall, but then Clinton's voice steadied her. The hard fierce tone of it which she had not heard in years.

"You!" he said.

As Clinton drew himself erect, the years seemed to fall away from him. He was once again tall and lithe, stiff with anger as the young Royal Naval officer who had come up onto the slaver's quarter-deck with pistols and a naval cutlass on his hip to confront this same man.

Still clinging to the verandah pole, Robyn remembered the words he had spoken then in that same fierce tone: "Captain Mungo Sint John, your reputation precedes you, sir. The first trader ever to transport more than three thousand souls across the middle passage in a single twelve-month period, I'd give five years" pay to have the hatches off your holds, sir."

Robyn remembered then how it had taken another year for Clinton to get his wish, when off Good Hope he had come back onto Huron's decks, boarding her over the stern in the cannon smoke with his fighting seamen at his back, and how this action had cost him more than a mere five years" pay. He had been court-martialled and cashiered from the Royal Navy and imprisoned for it.

"You dare to come here, to us." Clinton was pale with rage; his blue eyes, so gentle for so long, were bleak and hating. "You, you cruel and bloody slaver, you dare to come here."

Mungo Sint John was still smiling taunting him with that smile and the glitter in his single eye, but his voice was low and rough with his suffering.

"And you, you kind and sainted Christian gentleman, do you dare to turn me away?"

Clinton flinched as though he had been struck across the face, and he took a step backwards. Slowly the litheness and youth went out of his stance, his shoulders slumped into their habitual stoop. He shook his bald head uncertainly, and then instinctively he turned towards Robyn.

With a huge effort Robyn gathered herself, pushed away from the supporting pole. Despite the turmoil of her emotions she managed to keep her expression neutral.

"Doctor Ballantyne," Louise Sint John came to the steps of the verandah.

She took the cap from her head, and the thick black plait tumbled out from under it.

"I find it difficult to beg," she said. "But I am begging now."

"That is not necessary, madam. I gave you my word."

Robyn turned away. "Clinton, please help missis Sint John to put this patient into the bed in the guest-house."

"Yes, dear."

"I shall be there directly to make an examination."

"Thank you, Doctor, oh thank you." Robyn ignored Louise, but when she had followed the mule cart across the yard to the guest-hut, she turned to face her daughters.

"None of you, not even you, Salina, will go near the guest-house while that man is here. You will not speak to him or the woman, you will not answer if they speak to you. You will do your best to avoid seeing either of them, and if you do by error find yourself in their presence, you will leave immediately."

The twins were quivering with excitement, their eyes shone, and even their ears seemed to be pink and pricked like those of a pair of young bunny rabbits. They could not remember a day so wildly exciting.

"Why?" gasped Vicky, forgetting herself sufficiently in this incredible series of events to question her mother's order. For a moment it seemed that she would have to pay for the impertinence with a box on one pink ear, but Robyn's hand dropped back to her side.

"Because-" Robyn said softly, "-because he is the devil the very devil."

He was propped on the iron cot, with a bolster under his shoulders, and Louise rose from the other cot as Robyn entered the guest-hut carrying her bag.

"Madam, will you kindly wait outside," Robyn ordered brusquely and, not deigning to see if she would obey, Robyn placed her bag on the chair beside his cot. Behind her the latch on the door clicked.

Mungo Sint John wore only a pair of baggy white trousers from which one leg had been hacked off high in the thigh. Like his face, his body was wasted by sickness, but there was still the width of shoulder and the solidness of bone that she remembered so well. His belly had sunk in like that of a greyhound, and his ribs stood out in a rack above it, but his skin retained the texture and silkiness of a far younger man, while the body hair that was crimped into curls upon his chest was not marred with silver as was his beard and the hair upon his head.

"Hello, Robyn,"he said.

"I will speak to you only when it is absolutely necessary for your treatment, and you will do the same," she said, without looking at his face.