"Oh, I," she answered. "Yes, I like looking at things."
Paul nodded, watching his horses. "I was sure you did when I saw you at the window," he said. He turned to her, and she smiled at him, interested in the strong simplicity with which he spoke.
"I was sure," he repeated, "and yet nobody like you ever came here before, ever. They always went on in the train. I used to wonder if one of them would never get out, but they never did. They just sat still by the window, with their faces tired and sleepy, and went on again."
He loosed the lash of his whip, and it made lightning circles over the off horse, and the tail of the lash slapped that animal reproachfully on the neck. Miss Harding contented herself with a little incoherent noise of general sympathy. "If I say anything," she thought, "I 'll be knocked off my seat with a compliment."
But Paul had only wanted to tell her; it seemed necessary that she should know something of her value. That done, he was content to drive on in dreaming silence, while the pair of them watched the veld grow momentarily lighter, its bare earth, the very hue and texture of barrenness, spreading and widening before them like water spilt on a floor. The stronger light that showed it to them revealed only a larger vacancy, a void extending where the darkness had stood like a presence. Beside the cart, and no more than a dozen yards away, a heavy bird suddenly uttered a cry and spouted up into the air, with laborious wings, flapping noisily. It rose perhaps thirty feet, with an appearance of great effort, whistled and sank again forthwith, girl laughed; it was such a futile performance.
"What was that?" she asked.
"A lark," was the answer, and Paul turned his eyes to the east. "Look!" he bade her, pointing.
Over the horizon which was like a black bar, set rigid against the heavens, stood the upper edge of the sun, naked and red, – a fiery eye, cocked arrogantly over the sky-line. About it, the very air seemed flooded with color, and the veld reflected it in dull gleams of red.
"And there!" said Paul again, pointing ahead.
They were at the top of a gentle slope, so gradual that it had made no break in the flat prospect of ten minutes ago, and before them, and still so far off that it had the appearance of a delicate and elaborate toy, stood the Sanatorium. In that diamond clearness of air, every detail of it was apparent. Its beautiful serene front, crowned by old Dutch gables mounting in steps to the height of the rooftree, faced them, frank and fair, over the shadowy reticence of the stone-pillared stoep. Beyond and behind it, the roof of the farm, Paul's home, stood in a dim perspective.
"Is that it?" asked Miss Harding. "Where I am going, I mean."
"Yes," said Paul.
"It's very beautiful," she said.
He smiled contentedly. "I was sure you would say that," he replied. "I am so glad you have come here."
Miss Harding regarded him doubtfully, but decided that no rebuke was necessary.
"Yes," she said, soberly. "It ought to give my lungs a chance."
Paul flicked the long lash towards the off horse again, and spoke no more till he brought the cart to a stand-still at the foot of the fan-shaped flight of steps that led up to the door on the stoep. The big house was voiceless and its windows blank; he was preparing to call out when the front door opened, uncovering a vista of a stone corridor within, simple and splendid, and there emerged Mrs. Jakes to the glory of the new day. She crossed the stoep, challenging the dignity of smooth cold stone with her little black figure of ceremony and her amiable, empty face of formal welcome.
"Miss Harding?" she enquired. "I scarcely expected you so early. Isn't it charming weather?"
Paul helped the girl to alight, and watched the two women as they stood, before entering the house, and exchanged perfunctory civilities.
"And now, to see your room," said Mrs. Jakes at last, and let her pass. "Isn't it fortunate that the rain has held off so nicely?"
Her small voice tinkled indefatigably, and she worked through all the motions of hospitable politeness. But behind her smile her eyes were haggard and stale, and Paul thought that she looked at the girl, as they went in, with the very hate of envy.
CHAPTER III
In the years of his innocence, when the art and practice of medicine were rich with enticements like a bride, Dr. Jakes had taken his dreams in hand to mold them to the shape of his desire. A vision had beckoned to him across the roofs and telegraph wires of South London, where he scuffled for a livelihood as the assistant of a general practitioner; and when he fixed his eyes upon it, it spread and took shape as a great quiet house, noble and gray, harboring within its sober walls the atmosphere of distinguished repose which goes with a practice of the very highest class. Nothing of all its sumptuous appointment was quite so clear to him as that flavor of footfalls muffled and voices subdued; to summon it was to establish a refuge in which he might have brief ease between a tooth-drawing and a confinement. Kindly people who excused a certain want of alacrity in the little doctor by the reflection that he was called out every night might have saved their charity; his droop, his vacancy were only a screen for the splendid hush and shadow of that great visionary mansion. It was peopled, too, with many dim folk, resident patients in attitudes of relaxation; and among them, delicate and urbane, went Dr. Jakes, the sweet and polished vehicle of healing for the pulmonary complaints of the well-bred. Nor was there lacking a lady, rather ghostlike and faint in conformity with the dreamer's ideal of the highest expression of a lady-like quality, but touched, none the less, with warm femininity, an angel and a houri in one, and answering, in the voice of refinement, to the title of Mrs. Jakes.
She had no Christian name then; she was a haunting mellowness, a presence delicate and uplifting. In the murk of the early morning, after a night spent behind drawn blinds in a narrow, tragic room, where another human being entered the world between his hands, he would go home along empty furtive streets, conscious of the comfort of her and glad as with wine, and in such hours he would make it clear to himself that she, at any rate, should never bear a child.
"No," he would say, half aloud and very seriously. "No; it's not in the part. No!"
That gracious and mild presence – he did not entirely lose it even when its place was assailed by the advent of the timid and amiable lady whom he married. She was a daughter of the landed interest; her father owned "weekly property" about Clapham Junction, two streets of forlorn little houses, which rang day and night with the passing of trains, and furnished to the population a constant supply of unwelcome babies. Dr. Jakes knew the value of property of that kind, and perhaps his knowledge did something to quicken his interest in a sallow, meager girl whom he encountered in the house of his employer. She brought him a thousand pounds in money, means ready to his hand to anchor the old vision to earth and run it on commercial lines; it puzzled him a little that the vision no longer responded to his summons so readily as of old. It had degenerated from an inspiration to a mere scheme, best expressed in the language of the prospectus; the fine zest of it was gone beyond recovery. There was no recapturing its gentle languors, the brooding silence of it; still less was it possible when, by the mere momentum of his plans, he had moved to South Africa and found him a house, to reproduce that reposefulness as the main character of the establishment. Such effects as he gained, during the brief strenuousness that he manifested on taking possession, were the merest caricatures of the splendid original, mocking his impotence. The thousand pounds, too, which at first had some of the fine, vague, inexhaustible quality of a dream, proved inelastic, and by the time the baby came, Dr. Jakes was already buying whisky by the case. The baby was a brief incident, a caller rather than a visitor, so ephemeral that it was scarcely a nuisance before it departed again in search of a peace less dependent on the arrangement of furniture