"Aha!" Mr. Samson returned to the charge. "Rain, eh? Cab-wheels squirting mud at you all along the street, eh? Trees blubbering over the railings like bally babies, eh? Women bunchin' up their skirts and hoppin' over the puddles like dicky-birds, eh? I know, I know; don't I just know! How 'd you like a mouthful of that air, eh, Ford? Bad for the lungs – yes! But good, deuced good for the heart."
The young man in the window raised his head when he was addressed and nodded. From the hearth-rug Dr. Jakes murmured audibly: "Influenza."
"That of course," said Mrs. Jakes indulgently. "Were there many people in town, Miss Harding?"
"People!" Margaret was mystified for the moment. "Oh, yes, I think so."
She was puzzled by the general attitude of the others towards the little doctor; it was a matter into which she had yet to be initiated. It was as though there existed a tacit understanding to suffer his presence and keep an eye upon him. It conveyed to her a sense that these people knew things about him which would not bear telling, and held the key to his manner of one dully afflicted. When he moved or managed to make some small clatter in setting his cup on the mantel-shelf, Mrs. Jakes turned a swift eye upon him, inspected him suspiciously and turned away again. If he spoke, the person addressed seemed to turn his remark over and examine it for contraband meanings before making a perfunctory answer. He was like a prisoner handicapped by previous convictions or a dog conscious of a bad name. When he managed to catch the girl's eye, he gave her weak, hopeful, little smiles, and subsided quickly if any one else saw him, as though he had been caught doing some forbidden thing. The thing troubled her a little. Her malady had made a sharp interruption in her life and she had come to the Karoo in the sure hope that there she would be restored and given a warrant to return finally to her own world and deal with it unhampered. The doctors who had bidden her go had spoken confidently of an early cure; they were smooth men who made a good show of their expert knowledge. She had looked to find such a man at her journey's end, a doctor with the marks of a doctor, his social adroitness, his personal strength and style, his confidence and superiority to the weaknesses of diseased flesh. This little man, dazed and dumb, standing apart like a child who has been put in the corner, did not realize her expectations. If medical skill, the art and dexterity of a physician, dwelt in him, they had, she reflected, fallen among thieves.
"You have only three patients here now?" she asked Mrs. Jakes.
"At present," answered Mrs. Jakes. "It's a convenient number. The doctor, you see, can give them so much more attention than if there were a houseful. Yes, it's really better for everybody."
As she finished, Margaret looked up and caught the eye of the young man, Ford, fixed upon her, as though he watched to see how she would take it. He was a tall youth with a dark impassive face and level brows, and his malady announced itself in a certain delicacy of coloring and general texture and in attitudes which slacked naturally to invalid languors. While the others talked, he sat on the ledge of the window, looking out to the veld prostrate under the thresh of the sun. In any talkative assembly, the silent man is at an advantage, and this tall youth seemed to sit without the little circle of desultory tongues and dwarf it by his mere aloofness. His glance now seemed to convey a hint to her to accept, to pass over, things that needed explanation and to promise revelations at a more fitting time.
"You see," Mrs. Jakes continued, when Margaret had murmured noises of acquiescence; "you see, each patient requires his individual attention. And – " she sank her voice to a confidential undertone – "he 's not strong."
She nodded past Margaret's shoulder at Jakes, who was drinking from his cup with precautions against noise. He caught her look over the rim of it and choked. Ford smiled faintly and turned to the window again.
"The Karoo does n't suit him a bit," Mrs. Jakes went on. "Too bracing, you know. He 's often quite ill. But he won't leave."
"Why?" asked Margaret. The doctor was busy with his handkerchief, removing the traces of the accident from his waistcoat.
Mrs. Jakes looked serious. "Duty," she replied, and pursed her pale lips. "He considers it his duty to remain here. It 's his life-work, you know."
Ford's eye caught Margaret's again, warning and inviting. "It 's – it's very unselfish of him," she said.
"Yes!" said Mrs. Jakes. "It is." And she nodded at Margaret as much as to ask, "And now, what have you got to say?"
The doctor managed the tea stains to his satisfaction and came across the room, replacing the cup and saucer on the table with a hand that was not quite steady. In the broad light of the window, he had a strained look; one familiar with such matters would have known that the man was raw and tense with the after effects of heavy drinking. He looked down at Margaret with an uncertain smile.
"I must have a little talk with Miss Harding," he said. "We must find out how matters stand. Will you bring her to my study presently, my dear?"
"In a quarter of an hour?" suggested Mrs. Jakes. He nodded. Ford did not turn from his idle gazing through the window and old Samson did not cease from looking at him with an arrogant fixity that seemed on the point of breaking into spoken denunciations. He looked from one to the other with a hardy little smile, then sighed and went out.
His going was the signal for the breaking up of the gathering. Old Samson coughed and walked off and Ford disappeared with him.
"And what would you care to do now?" asked Mrs. Jakes of Margaret. "I have some very good views of Windsor, if you like. You know Windsor?"
Margaret shook her head. Windsor had no attractions for her. What interested her much more was the fact that this small, bleak woman was on the defensive, patently standing guard over privacies of her life, and acutely ready to repel boarders who might endeavor to force an intimacy upon her. It was plain in the rigor of her countenance, set into a mask, and in each tone of her voice. Margaret had yet to undergo her interview with Dr. Jakes in his study, and till that was over, and she definitely enlisted for or against him, Mrs. Jakes would preserve an armed neutrality.
"I think," said Margaret, "I 'd like to go out to the veranda."
"We call it the stoep," corrected Mrs. Jakes. "A Dutch word, I believe. By all means; you 'll probably find Mr. Ford there and I will call you when the doctor is ready."
The stone hall held its cathedral shadows inviolate, and from it Margaret went forth to a westering sun that filled the earth with light, and painted the shadow of the house in startling black upon the ground. She stood between the square pillars with their dead and ruined vines and looked forth at a land upon which the light stood stagnant. It was as though the Karoo challenged her conception of it. She had seen it last vague with the illusions of the dawn, hemmed in by mists and shadows that seemed to veil the distances and what they held. Now these were stripped from it to reveal only a vast nakedness, of red and red-brown and gray, all ardent in the afternoon sun. The shadows had promised a mystery, the light discovered a void. It ran from before her yet in a single sweep to a horizon upon which the blue of remote hills was a faint blur, and in all the far prospect of it there was not one roof, no single interruption to its still level. Margaret, quickly sensitive to the quality of her environment, gazed at it almost with a sense of awe, baffled by the fact that no words at her command were pliant enough to fit it. It was not "wild" nor "desolate" nor even "beautiful"; none of the words allotted to landscapes, with which folk are used to label the land they live upon, could be stretched to the compass of this great staring vacancy. It was outside of language; it struck a note not included in the gamut of speech. "Inhuman" came nearest to it, for the salient quality of it was something that bore no relation to the lives – and deaths – of men.
A sound of coughing recalled her from her contemplation of it, and she walked along the stoep towards it. Behind a pillar near the corner of the house, Ford sat on a camp-stool, with a little easel before him, and smudged with his thumb at the paint on a small canvas.
He looked up at her with no token of welcome, but rather as though he withdrew himself unwillingly from his picture.
"Well?" he said, motioning with his head at the wide prospect before