“Bit of a funkstick! Pooh! Look at his face, Lucy. How can a man with a face like that have an atom of cowardice in his composition? Why, it’s too ridiculous.” And the whole-souled contempt which Clare infused into this vindication would have inspired wild exultation in the breast of any one of her multifold adorers near and far, had it been uttered in his own behalf. Yet her acquaintance with the object thereof was of the slightest. “Well, you know they say that one evening there was a bit of a row on over at the hotel – horrid, quarrelsome, fighting creatures men are – and someone insulted Lamont, or trod on his toes, or something, and, when he objected, the other wanted him to fight; and he quite climbed down.”
“I don’t believe it – or, at any rate, the motive they put upon it,” said Clare decidedly. “People have a way of piling on to their stories in the most recklessly top-heavy manner. In all probability he was more than the other’s match, and kept out of it on that account.”
“You make an effective champion, Clare,” laughed the other, mischievously. “Well I don’t know the ins and outs of it. Dick knows more about it than I do.”
“Oho! What does Dick know more about than you do?” hailed a voice outside the window, and its owner immediately entered, accompanied by another man. “Anyhow, that’s a big bit of news to start with – that Dick should know more about anything under the sun than you do. Here’s Driffield, and he’s going to stay lunch.”
“Dick, don’t be silly. How do you do, Mr Driffield,” greeting the Native Commissioner. “We were talking about Mr Lamont, and what they say about him. Clare says she doesn’t believe a word of it, and I was saying you knew more about it than I do, Dick.”
“Do you mean the breeze at Foster’s?”
“Yes.”
“Well, he did climb down. There’s no doubt about it. And the funny part of it is, that with the gloves on there’s hardly a man anywhere in these parts who can touch him.”
“There you are, Lucy,” cried Clare triumphantly. “Didn’t I tell you it was because he was more than the other’s match?”
“Well, it hadn’t got a look that way at the time, and that was what struck everybody who saw it. Certainly it struck me,” replied Fullerton. “But the next time you girls start taking away your neighbours’ characters, don’t do it at the top of your voices with window and door wide open. We could hear you all down the road. Couldn’t we, Driffield?”
“Mr Driffield sets a higher value on his immortal soul than you do on yours, Dick,” retorted Mrs Fullerton loftily. “Consequently he isn’t going to back you in your – ahem! – unveracity.”
“No. But he’s dying of thirst, Lucy. So am I.”
She laughed, and took the hint. Then as the two men put down their glasses, Fullerton went on —
“Talking of the gloves – that reminds me of another time when Lamont climbed down. That time he put on the gloves with Voss. It was a beautiful spar, and really worth seeing. Then, just as the fun was at its height, Lamont suddenly turned quite white – as white as such a swarthy beggar can turn, that is – and chucked up the sponge then and there.”
“Yes. I remember that. It looked rum certainly – but all the same I’ll maintain that Lamont’s no coward. He showed no sign of it in the war of ’93 anyway. If anything rather the reverse.”
“Ah!” exclaimed Clare significantly.
“May have lost his nerve since,” said her brother-in-law, also significantly.
“Well, I like Lamont,” said Driffield decidedly.
“I don’t,” said Fullerton, equally so.
“Mind you, he’s a chap who wants knowing a bit,” went on the Native Commissioner. “Then he’s all right.”
“Is he coming to the race meeting, Mr Driffield?” said Clare.
“Yes. He didn’t intend to, though, until I gave him your message, Miss Vidal. We pointed out to him that he couldn’t stop away after that.”
“Message! But I sent him no message.”
“Oh, Miss Vidal! Come now – think again.”
“Really, Mr Driffield, I ought to be very angry with you for twisting my words like that,” laughed Clare. “But – you mean well, so let it pass. You are forgiven.”
“Talking of Lamont,” struck in Fullerton, who had a wearisome way of harking back to a subject long after everybody else had done with it, “there’s a yarn going about that he had to leave his own neighbourhood in England for showing the white feather. And it looks like it, remembering what a close Johnny he is about himself.”
Driffield looked up quickly.
“I believe I know who put that yarn about,” he said. “Wasn’t it Ancram – that new man who’s putting up at Foster’s?”
“Most likely,” said Fullerton. “I never heard it myself till a day or two ago.”
“Why, what a sweep the fellow must be,” declared Driffield. “Lamont has been putting him up since Peters picked him up in the mopani veldt, nearly dead with thirst. Saved his life, in fact. I know it’s Ancram, because he pitched me the same yarn – of course ‘in strict confidence.’ Confidence indeed!”
“What a cur!” pronounced Clare. “Oh, what a completely loathsome cur!”
“Hear – hear!” ejaculated Driffield.
“Cur or not,” said Fullerton, who over and above his dislike of Lamont was naturally of a contradictious temperament, – “cur or not, the story has a good deal of bearing on what we know out here – ”
“If it’s true,” interjected Clare, with curling lips.
” – He left a kid to drown. Said he wasn’t going to risk his life for a gutter kid – and wouldn’t go in after it even when the girl he was engaged to implored him to. She called him a coward then and there, and gave him the chuck. This chap Ancram saw it all. He was there.”
“Then why didn’t he go in after it himself?” suggested Clare, with provoking pertinence.
“Says he couldn’t get there, or something. Anyway Lamont’s girl chucked him then and there. She was the daughter of some county big-wig too.”
“Of course I wasn’t there,” said Clare, “and the man who enjoyed Mr Lamont’s hospitality, as a stranger in a strange land, was. Still, I should like to hear the other side of the story.”
“What if it hasn’t got another side?” said her brother-in-law shortly.
“What if it has? Most stories have,” answered Clare sweetly.
“Anyway,” struck in Driffield, “Ancram’s no sort of chap to go around talking of other people funking. I took him on patrol with me the other day from Lamont’s. Thought he’d like to see something of the country perhaps, and the Matabele. Incidentally, Lamont lent him a horse and all he wanted for the trip. Well, the whole time the fellow was in the bluest of funks. When a lot of the people came to indaba us, he kept asking whether they might not mean treachery, or had arms concealed under their blankets. As to that I told him yes, and legs too.”
Clare went off into a ringing, merry peal.
“Capital!” she cried.
“Oh well – ” said Driffield, looking rather pleased.
“But he was in a terrific funk all through. The acme of it was reached the night we slept at the Umgwane drift. Ames voted him a devil of – er, I mean a superlative nuisance. He kept waking us up at all hours of the night, wanting to know if we didn’t hear anything. We had had a big indaba that day with Tolozi and his people, and this chump kept swearing he heard footsteps, and they must be stealing up to murder us in our sleep. I wonder if Peters had been filling him up with any yarns.