She drew a sharp breath and faced me drawn up to her full height, looking me straight in the eyes.

"I half expected this," she said. "I only asked you because I feared to worry him. Your refusal is nothing. He will come to me all the same.

You will not refuse to take a letter to him, will you, if I detain you a few minutes longer?"

We were quite close to her little cottage, and as we walked towards it I tried to soften my refusal as best I could. She, however, did not seem to hear me.

She left me seated in the little parlour. There was no light in the room, but she carried in a lamp from an adjoining one; and I have never been so struck by a face as I was by hers when the glow of the lamp lighted it up. The charm of her beauty was not one whit abated--for beautiful she was; and yet there was only one thing to be read in her face, and that was resolution. It lay in her lips, the curve of the nostrils, a peculiar look in the eye, and a certain poise of the head.

In very truth, she looked superb.

I sat waiting while the minutes pa.s.sed, and not a sound broke the perfect silence in the house. Everything was so still that it seemed as if there could be no one within miles of me.

There was a book on the table before me, and I took it up unthinkingly.

It opened where a cabinet-sized photograph had been left in it--as a marker I suppose. The photograph showed the head and shoulders of a man, and the face shown in full was one of the gayest and most resolute that I ever remember to have seen. There was something very attractive about it, and there was, as I thought, a faint suggestion of somebody I had known or seen. It was a _good_ face, splendidly strong and honest, and, from a man's point of view, a right handsome face too.

To look at a photograph uninvited may be an impertinence; to read the inscription on the back certainly is. And yet these are things which one is apt to do unthinkingly and even instinctively. I turned the photograph round and read:

"O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory?" and under that a date. I put it back in the book, feeling that I had been prying into the secrets of a woman's grief.

Presently I heard a chair pushed back in the next room and Mrs Mallandane's step approaching. She handed me a closed note.

"You will give that to him, please," she said politely, but very firmly.

"He will come here if he receives it; but it is possible that he may still be delirious, and if so, I only ask you again if you will be good enough to bring him to me."

With the knowledge which after-events have given me it is difficult to say whether I was concerned only for Ca.s.sidy's health and Mrs Mallandane's good name, or whether I was not p.r.i.c.ked to anxiety by some other feeling. My heart did sink at her suggestion, I don't know whether through selfishness or something better. I felt that I was beginning to yield before her evident purpose, but my answer was evasive. I said I did not see how I could promise anything.

She waved that impatiently aside. I recall the motion of her hand, as though she could literally brush such things away. She came a step nearer to me, the light shone full in her face, on the waves of her hair, on her slightly-parted lips, and glinted and flashed back from her eyes. For half a minute she stood so looking at me, and I was conscious of the grip of her hand on the back of a chair, and of the rise and fall of her breast as she breathed.

"You know him! You have seen him?" she queried in a low, deliberate voice.

"Yes," I answered.

"You know he is disfigured?"

I could barely answer again, "Yes."

"When I tell you, then, that _I am the cause of that_, will you deny me the privilege of any reparation I can make?"

The words met me like a blow in the face. I was crushed! G.o.d knows what I would have done but that I saw the flame of colour that leapt into her face, and the trembling and quivering of her lips. I gasped out:

"No, no! I will do it."

She seemed so upset, so unsteady, that I made a half-step towards her, but she motioned me back, saying:

"Go now--go! Please go, and leave me." A hundred thoughts were surging and churning in my head as I drove down the long, long valley of the Lampogwana River that night. I felt as miserable as man need feel.

Everything seemed wrong--most of it horribly so--but turn as I might from one phase to another, the one thing always recurred, pervading, dominating everything: "I am the cause of that." The words rang in my ears again and again, and the horrible significance shamed me afresh each time, always to be answered by something which said, "No, I will believe! I will trust!"

Poor Ca.s.sidy was very, very bad when I reached him, and his lucid intervals were far between. His appearance was terrible, the ghastly pallor adding, as I had thought nothing could add, to the face from which one eye, the nose, half the upper lip, and portion of one cheek, were gone. It was terrible--truly terrible!

There is no need to dwell on it all. I got him in and he lived for five days. Fever didn't kill him; it couldn't have; he was too strong and too stout-hearted. It was haemorrhage resulting from some old injury received in an accident years before. The doctor told me that when the artery had gone Ca.s.sidy knew he would be dead in a few minutes. He begged the doctor to leave him, and turning to Mrs Mallandane, asked her to cover his face with a handkerchief, and to hold his hand. He said to her, "G.o.d bless you, Molly! Good-bye!" and died like the man he was.

Mrs Chauncey was the real friend in that time of need. It was she who had supplied everything that an invalid could want; it was she who stayed all that long night through with Mrs Mallandane, who went with her to the funeral and stood by her, and stayed with her when all was over.

The day after the funeral I sat in my office dazed and stupefied with worrying and puzzling over many things in connection with these people whose affairs and whose lives seemed to have become suddenly entangled with mine. Not the least of my worries was the doc.u.ment before me, which was Ca.s.sidy's will: "I give everything absolutely to Mary Mallandane," and nominating me as his executor.

I dreaded the first interview--so much so, in fact, that I got Mrs Chauncey to go with me. The tall black figure and the excessive pallor of her face smote very hard on my heart, but I was relieved by the presence of little Molly, who stuck to me from the time I entered the room until Mrs Mallandane sent her away. I had already stated my object in calling when she sent Molly out, and I was about to resume, when she asked me abruptly:

"Do you know anything of his past life?"

"Nothing whatever," I said. "Nor of mine?"

"No, Mrs Mallandane."

She laid a hand on one of Mrs Chauncey's, who was sitting near, and said gravely:

"You, who have been my friend, know nothing either. It is right that you should--that you both should."

We were sitting at a table in the parlour; the writing materials were lying on it ready for my use. The two ladies sat close together opposite me.

I cannot give Mrs Mallandane's own words, nor can I convey her manner when telling us the story of her life. Sometimes she would talk in a subdued monotone, telling, with an absence of feeling that was infinitely pathetic, of their troubles. Sometimes she would be roused to a pitch of feeling that left her voice but a husky whisper. Once-- just once--I fancied there was the faintest trace of contempt in her tone when referring to--well, not to Ca.s.sidy. If it was so, it was at any rate instantly lost in a flow of pity.

This is substantially what she told us. Mallandane and Ca.s.sidy had owned claims in the Kimberley or one of the neighbouring mines, and were in fact partners doing business together. They were both young Irishmen, and had come out on the same boat some years before--which were considered sufficient reasons for their entering into partnership.

Ca.s.sidy was the one with the brains, money, and work; and, from what I gathered, there seems to have been no reason, except Ca.s.sidy's good-nature, for the alliance with Mallandane at all. However, they prospered, and Mallandane went home for a trip, and married and brought his wife back to Kimberley.

For a couple of years all went well--in fact, until the firm began to lose money. Reverses only stimulated Ca.s.sidy to harder work and more cheery, indomitable effort. You couldn't beat him. But it was different with Mallandane. All his wife said was that he lost heart; used to go away day after day and night after night to where he could forget his worries--drinking and gambling. When Ca.s.sidy first recognised that his partner was falling, he gave up his own house, suggesting that it would be doing him (Ca.s.sidy) a good turn if they would let him board with them. He gave himself up to a splendid effort to save his partner from ruin.

For a time it answered, but Mallandane, besides being naturally unstable, must have been bitten by drink, for he broke out again, and nothing either wife or friend could do could save him. There came scenes--brutality and insult to the wife, ingrat.i.tude and insult to the friend. She told us nothing except in pity and forgiveness of her dead husband--nothing, that is, that justice to Ca.s.sidy did not require; but it is not difficult to imagine what happened, and, indeed, I know now that it was only the pitiful helplessness of the wife and child, and the knowledge that his presence was food, and even life, to them, that held Ca.s.sidy to his partner; for in his fits of drunkenness Mallandane would have murdered both wife and child.

Ca.s.sidy worked from four in the morning until eight at night, and at times through the day he would run up from the claims to the house, to see that all was well. All he made went to keep the house going, and it was given as a matter of course. No complaint was made, although Mallandane now ceased even the pretence of work and spent the whole day in the canteens.

But the end came when least expected. Mallandane, when he did come home at all, did not get up until hours after Ca.s.sidy was at work. He used to awake drunk and dazed, and wander off at once, unshaven, dirty and half dressed, to the nearest canteen.

One morning, however, there was a change. He was grey-faced, puffy and sodden, it is true, but he fussed about the house briskly, talking to himself. He got out a clean moleskin suit, and told the servant that he could not wait for breakfast, as he had to fire the eight o'clock shots, and the holes were all charged and waiting for him.

Within a quarter of an hour Ca.s.sidy had come up for breakfast. Mrs Mallandane met him on the way and told him what the servant had in the meantime told her; and Ca.s.sidy raced back to stop his delirious partner.

With a madman's cunning and instinct he had slipped down the mine from ledge to ledge and along dangerous slopes until he reached the lowest workings, and when Ca.s.sidy, after some delay in getting a bucket on the hauling-gear to go down in, reached the spot, the boys told him that Mallandane "umtagati" (bewitched) had gone into the drive to fire the charges, and would let no one go near him.

Ca.s.sidy looked at the black mouth of the drive. He did not think of the worthless sodden wretch who had gone in there. He recalled the partner of years, the mate of good times and bad, and he recalled, too, the horror-stricken look on the face of the woman he had just left. He dashed in to the sound of a warning yell from every man in the mine.

When occasion calls there is still no lack of brave men. Heroes spring into recognition from every grade of life, from every cla.s.s of material; and while the half-dozen explosions still echoed and reverberated in the circle of the mine, there were men dashing in to the rescue at the imminent risk of their lives, heedless of the deadly fumes and of possible unexploded charges.

"The firm" lay in one heap--Ca.s.sidy on his back, Mallandane athwart him.

To the only person to whom he ever spoke of the affair, Ca.s.sidy said: "He was stooping to light another fuse when I reached him. I gripped both arms round him as he turned on me and tried to carry him out. It was a wrestling match, for he showed fight. My face was over his one shoulder, as his was over mine; but mine was turned towards the shots."

A piece of the rock that shattered poor Ca.s.sidy's face entered the back of his partner's head, and _he_ never stirred again.

Ca.s.sidy lay for months in hospital, bandaged, blindfolded, barely alive; and the woman he had stood by, stood by him. When he was able to walk about, it was on her arm he leaned. When he was fit to leave, it was to her house he went to be tended for months longer. He never complained nor lost heart, although he knew that one eye was gone and thought he would lose the other.

Some seven or eight months had pa.s.sed, and he was getting well and strong--he was healing. She had always dreaded the effect of the first sight of himself, and for this reason had removed the mirrors from the rooms he frequented; but one day, when she had been out for a while, she found him lying on the sofa, the bandage off his eyes, and a hand-gla.s.s dropped on the carpet close by. It was the only time he had fainted or in any way given in.