This was a command there was no gainsaying. Old Ephraim gave a dry chuckle, reached for his pipe, and obeyed without a word. Harley Greenoak likewise. But Dick Selmes said —
“Do let me stay and help you, Miss Brandon. Why, it’ll be like a jolly picnic.”
She hesitated a moment.
“No,” she said. “We don’t want any men.” Then he followed the others.
When they returned they found she had been as good as her word. This was a surprise indeed. Dick Selmes, the only one given to expressing that emotion outwardly, was metaphorically rubbing his eyes. Where, for instance, was the soiled, coarse-textured old cloth, covering one end of the bare table – where the camp-kettle, handed from one to the other from its usual resting-place on the floor, as more coffee was needed? Where the weather-beaten enamel ware, the tin pannikins holding the milk and sugar, the cloudy spoons? Where, too, the dark-brown bread, and the mess badly and indifferently cooked in a frying-pan? Gone – wholly gone. Instead, a snowy cloth, bright, hissing urn, patterned china, roester-koekjes steaming white within. Chops, too, hot from the gridiron, juicy and crisp, and a great honeycomb reposing in a sparkling cut-glass dish. The metamorphosis was complete indeed.
“We’ll come to believe in fairy tales again soon,” said old Hesketh as he gazed upon this. “You haven’t let the grass grow under your feet – eh, Hazel?”
“No, Uncle Eph. I’m going to civilise you a bit, now that I’m here. You men get into shockingly careless ways. What’s the good of having all these nice tablecloths and tea sets if you don’t use them? So the first thing we did was to dig them out of the boxes where they were stowed away. Then we disestablished the old Hottentot cook – ‘cook’ indeed! – and behold the result!”
“It’s great – great!” cried Dick Selmes with enthusiasm. Then, becoming guiltily aware that he might be seeming to disparage his host’s normal arrangements, he added lamely, “Er – of course, we do get – er – as you say, Miss Brandon, with nobody to take care of us. And – you’ve done it, and no mistake.”
Then old Hesketh put a few of his terse, laconic questions as to the welfare of those she had left at home, and characteristically dismissed the subject from his mind. Harley Greenoak, normally taciturn, said little; but Dick Selmes was a host in himself, and soon the conversation became a dialogue between these two young people. They were chattering away as if they had known each other all their lives.
Soon after breakfast the Cape cart was inspanned.
“I’m hopin’, sir,” said Elsie McGunn, just before she climbed to her seat, “that ye’ll nae be takkin’ it ill onything A may have said.”
“Not a bit of it, Elsie,” cried Dick, shaking her heartily by the hand. “Not a bit of it. Why, you’ve given us a thundering big laugh or two. What better could one say? Good-bye.”
“Ay, but yander’s a braw laddie,” whispered the Scotswoman to her charge, as they bade each other good-bye. “A braw laddie, and a guid one. Mind your hairt, lassie; mind your hairt.” And flicking her whip, she sent the cart jolting off down the winding stony road.
Chapter Six.
Harley Greenoak has Misgivings
The coming of Hazel Brandon effected something like a revolution at Haakdoornfontein, for she was as good as her word, and at once set to work to reform the interior of that easy-going, happy-go-lucky establishment out of all recognition. The table department she kept going on the same lines as the initiation we saw her make, and the same extended to the rooms. No more dust, no more makeshifts. From all sorts of unsuspected places she fished out hidden things. Dick Selmes, for instance, coming in after a long day’s hunt, stared to find what magic had been wrought in his room. Snowy sheets and pillow-cases on the bed, things his host despised as feminine superfluities, equally snowy towels instead of the one cloudy one he had been forced to make shift with; the rickety three-legged washstand with its rusty tin basin had given way to a neat chintz-covered packing-case and patterned crockery – and the empty-bottle candlestick had been disestablished in favour of a brass one. On the same lines had the quarters of the other two been reorganised, except that old Hesketh drew the line at sheets. Blankets were good enough for any man, he declared, and flatly refused to court rheumatism at his time of life by sleeping between cold, glazy stuff like that.
Our friend Dick now began to overhaul his kit, and was conscious of searchings of heart as he realised that it was so limited. He had brought little more than absolute necessaries in the way of clothing. Greenoak had warned him that he would have to do without luxuries at Haakdoornfontein, and, by Jingo, Greenoak had been right up till now; but Greenoak, of course, had not been able to foretell the sudden irruption of a bright, refined, and exceedingly pretty girl upon their rough and ready mode of living.
And Hazel Brandon was all that. Such sunshine did her presence and merry spirits and winning ways create in this sober male household, that the two older members of the same felt almost uneasy, so incongruous did it seem to the quiet and somewhat sombre life of the place. The younger – well, he was in something of a whirl. One thing about the girl puzzled him, and that was how she could be so nearly related to his host. The latter he was very taken with. He was a dear old chap, as he was wont to say; but with all his sterling qualities, old Hesketh was certainly not quite his equal from a social standpoint. Yet this girl looked absolutely thoroughbred; was, too, in all her ways and ideas. She must have got it on her father’s side, conjectured Dick, perhaps correctly.
There was one thing about her that appealed to him if only that he believed he had encountered it in her for the first time. She was so absolutely natural and devoid of self-consciousness. True he had seen the counterfeit of this in other girls of his acquaintance, but it had not seemed to ring true. He had felt sure – again perhaps correctly – that they were doing it for effect; “crowding it on,” as he more tersely put it. But here he detected no trace of any such thing.
“Do you think I am such a feeble tottering creature, Mr Selmes, that I can’t even turn a door handle for myself?” she said one day, when he had bounded across the room – upsetting one chair and barking his shin against another in his anxiety to perform that onerous undertaking for her.
The words were said with a bright smile. Dick mumbled something.
“Well, I can, then. I’m not one of your helpless English girls who can’t even stick a stamp on a letter for themselves.”
“Oh, you’ve been in England, then?”
“Haven’t I! For three years. Not long, but still I went about a good deal.”
“Where?” he asked eagerly.
She named several places; one at which he himself had stayed on the occasion of a shooting party. Here was an additional link in common.
“Has our young buffalo hunter shot all the game on the farm, Greenoak?” said old Hesketh, one day as the two sat smoking on the stoep.
“Why?”
“Because he don’t seem over keen on going after it these days. His gun’ll get rusty if he don’t mind,” chuckled the old man, reaching a handful of tobacco out of his pocket and cramming his pipe.
“The young folks seem to have cottoned to each other,” he went on, between puns. The other had no need to follow the glance – for “the young folks” aforesaid had been visible to him for some time away down the kloof, and the sight, even before his companion’s remark, had set Harley Greenoak thinking.
So far his charge had given him no trouble. Twice he had got him out of a situation which would certainly have cost him his life; in other words, had saved his life twice. That, however, was all in the bond. He thought nothing of that. But here loomed a complication which neither himself nor Sir Anson had foreseen. Both had only taken into consideration mere difficulties or dangers of field and flood; but here was a new side to his responsibility. With his keen insight into character he had sized up old Hesketh’s niece on very short acquaintance; and his private opinion was that whoever succeeded in winning