Harley Greenoak's Charge

Chapter Five.

Hazel

“A niece of mine’s coming up to-morrow to stay a bit,” announced old Hesketh, a few days later.

“Oh, but – I say, won’t we rather be making a crowd?” protested Dick. “Had no end of a jolly time, you know, Mr Hesketh; but – er – wouldn’t put you out for the world.”

“Don’t you bother your head about that, young buffalo hunter,” answered the old man. “You’re not crowding me any. I’ll tell you when you are. So you’ve had a good time, eh?”

“Splendid,” said Dick, heartily. “The shoot just is good, and as for this air, why, I never felt so fit in my life.”

Old Hesketh nodded, and surveyed the speaker approvingly. The latter certainly looked as he had declared he felt – fit. His face, tanned a fine brown, was the picture of health. Out all day and every day, often having to work hard for his sport, whether for hours among the cliffs and crags stalking klip-springers or reebok, or toiling up to some high ridge on the chance of getting a shot or two into the herd of baboons which usually frequented the other side, or one or other of the varied forms of sport the place afforded, Dick Selmes had attained the pink of hard condition.

“Well, then, don’t be in a hurry to run away,” rejoined old Hesketh. “Though I dare say it’s slow enough of evenings with a couple of old fellows like me and Greenoak.”

“Thanks,” remarked the latter drily, and Dick spluttered.

“Some one young about the place’ll make things more lively, anyhow,” went on the old man. “And there’s room and to spare, and a welcome for all.”

Needless to say, Dick Selmes devoted a good deal of the intervening time to speculation on the subject of the expected arrival. Even as his host had said, “some one young” would be an acquisition, and then he wondered how old Hesketh, who seemed about a hundred, could own a niece to whom that definition applied. A grand-niece perhaps he had meant. Then, too, would she prove an acquisition? And a vision rose up within his mind of some awkward, half-educated girl brought up on just such a place as this, unused to the refinements of life, proportionately without ideas, and possibly given to affectation. Nor was Greenoak in a position to enlighten him upon the point, knowing nothing of old Hesketh’s relations.

The next morning Dick Selmes was up before sunrise, and, taking his gun, went off on foot to a hoek where he knew he should find a troop of wild guinea-fowl. He was successful, too, and as the splendid game birds dropped, one after another – for he had managed to break up the troop, and they were thus lying well – the keen and unmitigated enjoyment of the sport for the next half-hour was such as to leave no room for any outside thought or speculation. Picking up the seven of them he could find – two were runners, and of course without a dog were hopelessly lost – he started back homeward.

Now, seven full-grown guinea-fowl slung round one constitute no light load over three miles of rough and stony ground, and by the time Dick Selmes reached the house he had had more than enough of such exercise. When he did so reach it he became alive to the fact that a Cape cart, outspanned, with its harness hung over the splashboard, stood before the door. Now his curiosity would be satisfied.

Flinging down the birds, he entered the living-room. It was occupied by one person, a female, and she vigorously dusting.

She turned as he entered. Heavens! What was this? Red hair, a broad face thickly sown with large freckles, a wide mouth, and forty if a day! So this was old Hesketh’s niece. “Some one young” had been his definition of her, and it was she who was to make things lively by reason of the said juvenility!

“As ugly as sin,” was his mental verdict. But aloud, politely, “Good morning. I must introduce myself. My name is Selmes; but – I don’t think your uncle was expecting you quite so early.”

The other stared.

“Ma what? Eh, but the laddie’s clean daft – or is it only haverin’ he is? Not but it’s a braw bit laddie too” – with an approving glance at Dick’s handsome face and tall proportions.

“Oh, Lord!” thought the latter, with a mental shudder. So this was the housemate who was to make them all young again with her youth and liveliness. Decidedly he must get Greenoak to invent some pretext for changing their quarters. Then the comic side struck him. Compared with himself, no doubt old Hesketh regarded this weird person, who talked broad Scotch, as “young.”

“You are very energetic,” he said pleasantly, for she had resumed her dusting. “Not at all tired after your trek, eh?”

“A’m never that,” was the decisive reply.

“Well, your uncle will appreciate your energy at any rate. We men, left to ourselves, are sure to let things of that sort slide,” – referring to her undertaking.

“Ma – what?”

“Your uncle, Mr Hesketh.”

“The laddie is daft,” she answered with decision. “Mon – but A have nae ony uncle.”

Dick stared, and was destined to stare more in about a second. A faint rustle behind him, combined with what sounded suspiciously like a suppressed gurgle, caused him to wheel sharply round.

Framed in the doorway stood a girl – an exceedingly pretty girl. She had a sweet oval face, dark hair, and well-marked brows, and lustrous eyes to match. These now seemed sparkling and dancing with merriment.

“I am Mr Hesketh’s niece,” began this wholly unexpected vision of beauty. “I suppose we are here earlier than we were expected,” and there was a suspicious unsteadiness in the tones, as if the speaker were gulping down an irresistible peal of laughter.

“Eh, but A do believe he’s been takkin’ me for yeerself, Miss Hazel,” spoke the red-haired woman; and poor Dick, now dead certain that the new-comer had overheard the foregoing dialogue, looked and felt about as big an ass as he had ever looked and felt in his life.

“It’s my old nurse, Elsie McGunn,” explained the girl. “We’ve been travelling ever so many hours, and now she’ll be taking the cart home again after breakfast, and even then can’t sit still and rest.”

“Indeed, I was just admiring such a display of energy,” said Dick, pleasantly.

“Deed, laddie, and ye were just admiring nothing at a’ aboot me,” retorted the plain-spoken Scotswoman, but quite good-naturedly.

The answer made opportunity for the girl to express her stifled feelings, and under cover of it she went off into the hearty merry peal of laughter whose main cause was the dialogue she had overheard between Dick Selmes and her unattractive retainer.

“You have been here before, I suppose, Miss Hesketh?” began Dick.

The other stared.

“Oh, I see,” she said. “But my name isn’t Hesketh – it’s Brandon. Mr Hesketh is my uncle on my mother’s side.”

“Of course. But, as you most likely know, your uncle is a man of few words, and, beyond mentioning the fact that you were coming, gave us no further information. He didn’t even tell us your name. Naturally I didn’t like to appear inquisitive.”

“Naturally,” assented the other; and again the laugh struggled in her eyes, evoked by the recollection of the comical situation for which that lack of inquisitiveness was responsible. “But now – as you have the advantage of me – I have told you who I am, suppose you tell me who you are.”

There was a sweet, sunny frankness about this girl, an utter absence of self-consciousness that made Dick stare. Did they grow many like her in this strange, fascinating country, he wondered? As he told her his identity a new interest came into her eyes, but wholly unsuspected by himself.

“Ay, and is yon Dick Selmes?”

The interruption proceeded from the wielder of the duster, in the further corner of the room.

“Elsie!” cried the girl, half horrified, half mirthful. “You are forgetting yourself. You needn’t be quite so familiar, at any rate.”

“Eh! An’ would we be makkin’ a stranger of the laddie?” tranquilly replied the irrepressible Scotswoman.

Dick burst into a hearty roar.

“Quite right, Elsie,” he cried. “I believe we’re going to be jolly good friends, you and I.”

This was a character, he decided – a howling joke. He was almost sorry she was going back again directly, whereas when he had first heard the announcement he had been anything but sorry. Then the sound of voices outside told that the master of the place and the other guest had returned.

Old Hesketh greeted his niece affectionately, but undemonstratively, as was his way.

“This is Harley Greenoak,” he said. “You may have heard of him.”

The girl’s face lit up with interest.

“I should think so,” she said, as she put forth her hand. “Who hasn’t?”

“Oh, about nine hundred million people, I suppose,” tranquilly answered the subject of this implied exordium. “I don’t expect that leaves many more in the world.”

“Well, there’s no one in South Africa who hasn’t, at any rate,” rejoined the girl. And Dick Selmes, confound it, was half ashamed of a sneaking satisfaction that Harley Greenoak’s beard was rapidly turning grey.

“That you, Elsie?” said old Hesketh, shaking hands with the privileged retainer. “Well, and you haven’t managed to pick up a husband yet? Ho, ho!”

“Yan’s the wurrd, Mr Hesketh. They’re to be had for the pickin’ up. But it’ll end in ma havin’ to come and tak’ care o’ yeerself, A’m thinkin’. Yan dust,” designating her recent work, “must have been lyin’ aroound for a yeer at least.”

This retort, naïvely ambiguous, given with perfect equability, raised a laugh among its hearers, who chose to read but one of its two potential meanings.

“Now, Uncle Eph,” said the girl, decisively. “We are going to get the breakfast ready, and it’s nearly ready now – and we’ve got a little surprise for you. I should prefer you all to go outside and amuse yourselves for the next quarter of an hour; in fact, till I call you in.”

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 the affections of this girl – whether Dick Selmes, or anybody else – would be a very lucky fellow. But would Sir Anson be likely to share this opinion? That was the question, and in all probability one to be answered with a negative. He might have other views for his son, or he might object to the latter contracting any tie for the present – or all sorts of reasons. Harley Greenoak realised that he had some cause for anxiety.