ON a January night in 1898, Charles Bramham was smoking and writing in the dining-room of Sea House.

All the doors and windows were open: his coat was off: his white silk shirt gaped at the neck and the sleeves were turned up. Mosquitoes in vicious clouds proclaimed with shrill, treble voices their intention to make a dash for his throat and hands as soon as they could find a way through the tobacco smoke.

It had been a pitiless day—the sun a ball of brass, and the thermometer at eighty-five degrees—but the evening sea-breeze had reduced the temperature by five degrees. Flying ants and gnats of every description were flinging themselves at the electric lights, and a bat circled monotonously round the ceiling. But Bramham wrote and smoked placidly on. A little stack of a dozen or more finished letters stood at his elbow, and he was busy on his last now—one to his brother in England.

"Read the Field for December 16th. There are two letters about American cartridges for shot-guns—they've impressed me very much, and for long shots at grouse, and driven partridge, I am certain they'll be better than anything we've had yet."

As he made his period voices and steps advanced upon him, and he blew an opening through the smoke to get a view of the doorway. Entered Carson and Luce Abinger with scowls upon their brows.

"Ah, you great, lazy hulk!" growled Abinger amiably. "Sitting here in your shirt sleeves, and neglecting the decencies of civilised life." They distributed themselves upon chairs and proceeded to add to the density of the atmosphere.

"Yes, I know," said Bramham, pushing back his chair and regarding them—"a boiled shirt with a flopping front to it like yours, and poker with a lot of perpetual growlers. What made you leave the delights of the Club to come and spoil my mail-night?"

"Capron," said Abinger laconically.

"What! again? A repetition of last night?"

Bramham shot a glance at Carson, but the latter's face expressed nothing more than ennui: he had put his head far back in his chair, and was smoking ceilingwards, following the gyrations of the bat with a contemplative eye.

"A repetition of every night until he gets knocked on the head by some fellow whose temper isn't so sweet as mine." Abinger's smile was not seductive. "He as good as told me that I had an ace up my sleeve, and later, he suggested that Carson had better not play for such high stakes in case he shouldn't find it convenient to pay. We discovered that we had a pressing appointment with you: but we left him Ferrand to insult."

Bramham got up and went to the sideboard, bringing glasses and decanters to the table.

"Capron isn't built for too much corn," he remarked. "Water-gruel is his tack, and he ought to be put on to it before somebody hurts him."

They all drank and smoked again in reflective concord.

"It is a pity," continued Bramham, with a dreamful Socratic air, "that some fellows' tastes and appetites are not matched by their physical abilities. There's an odd jumble of material in our construction! It would be an advantage and make life much more interesting, now, if all our anatomical parts were standardised, so that every weak or worn portion could be taken out and renewed from a stock controlled by the highest power, who would only replace the affected piece if one had made a decent effort to retain one's mind and body in a healthy condition."

"Oh, get out!" said Abinger. "Is your name Max Nordau, perhaps?"

"Or are you Mr. Lecky?" derided Carson.

"Ah, well, you fellows can laugh, but it would be a good scheme all the same. Capron, now——"

Without warning of either foot or voice the last-named person at this moment appeared in the doorway with a debonair smile upon his lips, the figure of Ferrand behind him.

"Capron, now—is thirsty," said he. "And what was the interesting remark you were about to make, Brammie, my dear?"

"Only just that," Bramham responded serenely. "That you were probably thirsty—as usual. Help yourself—and you, Ferrand."

They drank and were seated, and all smoked, less peacefully now, but more reflectively. Capron appeared to be the only person afflicted with gaietÉ de coeur.

"What do you men think?" he demanded. "I went with Ferrand to see his patient at the Royal—he's actually got a patient!—and what do you suppose I saw while I was waiting for him in Ulundi Square?"

The others remained calm and incurious.

"A stunning girl. Just arrived by to-day's mail-boat I found, upon discreet inquiry, in the office. You fellows ought to see her. She swung herself through that square like a yacht in full-rig. The funny part of it is that I saw her in Durban a year or two back, and she was pretty then; but now, by Gad! she has a face that would set any man's blood on fire."

"Indeed!" said Abinger dryly; and Bramham virtuously remarked: "We are not all so inflammable as you."

"Ah, I forgot! You're all saints and celibates here."

Capron's loose lips took a sardonic twist. "Quite a mistake for the women to call you and Abinger and Eve the three bad men, isn't it? I asked the beautiful Mrs. GruyÈre only yesterday why it was—and what do you think she said, my dears?"

No one seemed anxious to learn, but Capron sprightfully proceeded:

"—Because one's wife wouldn't live with him, and another wouldn't live with his wife, and the third has a penchant for the wife of his neighbour."

The withers of the three bad men were apparently unwrung. If any of them were embarrassed they concealed the fact skilfully behind stony eyes and complexions of varying degrees of tan. Carson seemed to be composing himself for a good night's sleep. It is true that Bramham, whose wife had been dead for less than a year, appeared to swallow something unpleasant before he remarked in an equable manner that Capron and Mrs. GruyÈre were a nice brace of birds.

"Don't say that, Brammie." Capron was possessed of a high-pitched, rather Celtic voice. "I defended you all manfully. 'Oh,' said I, 'you should not be too hard upon them. They have a mot which they respect about gates and girls.' At that she left me so suddenly that I hadn't time to find out from her which of you is which."

"P-per-haps," stammered Abinger softly, "if you ask us we'll tell you."

"Well, y-yes," said Capron, mocking Abinger with the fearlessness of the man of many drinks; "I think p-perhaps I ought to know, seeing that I have a wife myself."

The silence that ensued had a quality in it which made it differ from all the other silences of that evening: and it only lasted a second, for Carson awoke, and he and Bramham rose abruptly and spoke together.

"I am going to bed," said one.

"I must finish my mail," said the other; and added, "Don't go to bed, Carson. I want your opinion about those American cartridges for shot-guns. Would you advise me to have my guns re-chambered?" He put his hand on Carson's shoulder and they walked away together to the end of the room.

"Heum!" commented Capron. "Commend me to a Colonial for good manners and hospitality!" But both Abinger and Ferrand had turned their backs on him and gone into the verandah. In consideration of these things he helped himself once more to Bramham's good whiskey, and presently went home with the rest of his witticisms unsaid, but far from being dead within him.

Insensibly the others presently found themselves once more in their chairs in the dining-room. Desire for sleep had apparently forsaken Carson, and Bramham's mail no longer pressed. They looked at each other with grim, unsmiling faces.

"What did you want to bring him here for?" demanded Carson of Ferrand, but the latter was unabashed.

"I couldn't shake him, and I was tired of his insults. It was indicated that Bram should have a turn."

"Someone ought to do unto him as was done unto the Levite's concubine," was Abinger's graceful contribution.

"Stop talking about the fellow," said Bramham irritably. "He makes me tired. If he hadn't a beautiful and charming wife he would be lynched, and I'd supply the rope."

So they talked about other things, but there was a notable lack of charity, divine or human, about their conversation, for Capron's words had left a bad taste in the mouths of three of them, and the fourth knew it. Indeed, Ferrand, being a doctor, knew most things about his neighbours, and having lived in Africa for a score of years, he could not be expected to be entirely lacking in malice and a touching interest in other people's sins. He presently proceeded to give them a neighbourly dig.

"I caught a glimpse of the girl at the Royal myself. She certainly is a wonder. Let us hope that all Capron's legends are not based on an equally good foundation?" He grinned cynically at the others. It would have been better for all bad men present to have ignored this friendly amenity, but Carson had a raw place and didn't like it flicked.

"Hope is all most of us have to live on in this land of flies and lies," he snarled. "We won't rob you of your income, Ferrand."

"Bite on that!" added Bramham without any polish of manner.

Capron had certainly succeeded in leaving an atmosphere of irritability behind him. Only Abinger remained impassive, and suavely demanded a description of the girl. Ferrand, amongst other things, was something of a poet: fire came into his eye.

"She's pale, but she glows like a rose: she has chaste eyes, but there is diablerie in the turn of her lip. She walks like a south wind on the water, and she has a rope of black hair that she can take me in tow with if she likes."

At the end of this monograph the three bad men laughed rudely, but they avoided looking at each other; for each had a curious, half-formed thought in his mind which he wished to conceal.

Bramham thought: "Part of that might fit one woman ... but it literally couldn't be her ... I wonder if I should go round and——"

"If I could be interested in a girl," thought Carson, "I might.... A rope of black hair! ... anyway, I have to go and look up Nickals at the Royal to-morrow."

"Could it possibly be that devil Poppy?" was Abinger's thought. "I shall go round and see." What he said was:

"She must be a boneless wonder!" and the others derisively agreed. They further advised Ferrand to go and lie in Hyde Park with a sheet of brown paper over him, like all the other poets out of work.

Subsequently other subjects arose. When the clock struck eleven, Ferrand departed, remembering suddenly that his long-suffering man was waiting round the corner to drive him home.

Abinger was the next to make a move. His house on the Berea was still open, and in charge of Kykie, but it knew him no more. When he chanced to come to Durban from Johannesburg, where he now chiefly resided, he slept at the club. As he was making himself a last drink, Bramham said:

"Isandhlwana nineteen years ago to-day, Luce!"

The two men looked at each other with friendly eyes. They were not greatly sympathetic, but brave memories shared make a close bond between man and man. Silently both their glasses went upwards in a wordless toast. In a moment and silently, too, Carson was on his feet. They drank to the men who died on Isandhlwana Day. Afterwards, Bramham and Abinger fell into talk about that year. They had both fought in the Zulu war. Carson listened with glinting eyes, the weariness swept from his face for the first time that night. Bramham's face became like a boy's. Abinger's looks changed, too. His sneers were wiped out, and his scar took on the appearance of one that might have been honourably gained. Once he laughed like a rollicking boy.

"That day we lay above Inyezan, Bram ... do you remember? When you potted the big fellow in the umpas tree!... after he had sniped about ten of our men ... by God! the cheek of that brute to perch himself up there within a hundred yards of us!... and no one knew where the shots were coming from ... it was a miracle you spotted him in that thick foliage ... he came down like a fat, black partridge ... and lay still under the tree ... we went and looked at him after the fight was all over, Carson ... he was an enormous chap ... the biggest Zulu I ever saw ... our natives recognised him—chief Gaarons, one of their best leaders ... a sure shot ... he got ten of our men ... but Bram got him all right."

They sat for two solid hours reminiscing.

"You and Luce have had some times together, Charlie!" said Carson, after Abinger had gone.

"Yes ... it makes one feel old—I suppose we are getting on, Karri, but we were in our early twenties those days ... Abinger rather younger than I was, perhaps ... he was a different fellow then, too—of course, it was years before he met that Spanish devil who slashed his face open.... Do you know, Eve, that when I was in London last I saw her dancing in the old, sweet way at the Alhambra?"

"I thought she was dead?"

"So did I—but she wasn't. She is, now, however ... dropped down one night behind the scenes and passed out in half an hour."

"Tant mieux!" said Carson serenely. "She didn't play according to rules. Well, I suppose, we must turn in, Bram—I've a ton of things to do to-morrow ... those cases of guns and ammunition and stuff are due, aren't they?"

"Yes: I got the advice about them: they'll be in dock to-morrow. We'll go down and look everything over during the week if you like. How long are you going to give yourself before you go back?"

"Well, my leave is six months, you know—one of them gone already, by Jove! I shall be about another three or four weeks fixing up my private affairs on the Rand and getting things sent off from here. Then I propose to give myself a few months at 'home' before I go into exile for five years."

"Five years of solitude and natives and pioneers!" commented Bramham. "Pretty tough on you!"

"Oh, you needn't pity me. I don't mind the solitude. There'll be plenty to do turning that little sixty thousand square miles into a civilised centre, now that we've got the roads open. In five years' time we shall have the rails laid right to the capital, and the mines in full swing. That's the time I shall make tracks for newer scenes. But in the meanwhile it's fine, Bram. The fellows that make pioneers are the right stuff—you know that. It's the people who come up after the work is done who stick in my gizzard."

"I daresay it's all right," said Bramham. "There are bright bits, no doubt. And, of course, you'll get more ribbons to tie your stockings up with and lockets to hang on your breast when you come back. But it seems to me to be a precious lonely life in the meantime, and I'm glad it isn't mine. Why don't you take your wife up with you, Karri?" He spoke with an idle smile, not looking at Carson, but at his hands on the bale before him arranging cigars in a box. Carson gave him a quick glance, but he laughed carelessly.

"Even if I possessed such a luxury I couldn't very well ask her to come up to a wild place like that—for wild it will be for many a year yet, thank the gods! Do you suppose any woman would care about it?"

"I know half a dozen who'd jump at the chance, and I expect you do, too. Women are fearfully keen on adventure nowadays. And then you're an attraction in yourself, Karri."

"Thanks, old chap! You're easily pleased, I'm afraid." Carson's smile was affectionate, but frankly sleepy. He began to yawn. Bramham, caring nothing for hints of weariness, pursued the subject.

"Joking apart—you ought to marry. Why don't you, Karri?"

"For one thing, I can't afford it. You forget that I'm not a bloated millionaire like you. My little excursions into different parts of the interior were never cheap, and the original expedition into Borapota cost me privately as much as it did the Government, and since I've been Administrator I've found it a mighty expensive business, and you know, I've never been a money-hugger, Bram. I suppose I am a thousand or two to the good now, apart from my shares and concerns on the Rand, which wouldn't fetch much with the market in its present condition. But how far would that go towards setting up a mÉnage-À-deux in the desert? Even supposing that I knew someone anxious to share it——"

"You have your salary—two thousand a year," argued Bramham. He did not know what a mÉnage-À-deux was, but he could guess.

"So I have, by Jove! and I need it. If you think I play John the Baptist when I take to the wilderness, Bram, you're mistaken. I do myself remarkably well to make up for the lack of society. If the soul is neglected, the carcase isn't. You come up and visit me some time, old man. You'll find all the blessings of civilisation with me, except woman."

"You're a nice sort of pioneer!" Bramham said; but he knew what Carson meant. The best kit, the best guns, and saddlery, and horses, cost money everywhere, and when it comes to transporting them over a few thousand miles of unbroken roads—why, of course, it is expensive!

"I know all about that, Carson—all the same, I think it would be a good thing if——"

Carson interrupted him. "You're beginning to be a nuisance, Bram. But I'll be patient with you, and tell you the truth. I don't want a wife, but the wife, and I haven't met her yet—the woman who could stand the test of five years of wattle-and-daub, and boot-and-saddle, and sleeping under the stars for a change when one gets tired of the wattle-and-daub; with nothing much to contemplate by day but the unlimited horizon and nothing much to hear by night but the dirge of the jackals, and the sound of the wind in forest trees, or the rush of a river. We know that these things are fine, Bram—the best you can get in a passable world. But would they be fine with the wrong woman?—with any woman but the one who——"

He stopped abruptly, got up, and began to walk about the room. In the doorway he stood for a moment looking seawards through the black night. A cool wind was stirring every paper and drapery in the room now, for the tide was full, swirling and rustling on the sands not a hundred yards away with nothing to be seen in the blackness but a skirl of white foam.

"—Who—what?" asked Bramham stolidly in the room behind him. Carson came back and sat on the table with his hands in his pockets. The old discontent was on his face.

"Who can never materialise because she's mostly made up of dreams."

Bramham laughed. "Mrs. Portal once said to me, 'The most wonderful woman in the world could not pass the standard of a romantic Irishman: or come near the perfection of the dream-woman whom every Irishman has secretly enshrined in his heart.' It appears that she was right."

Carson laughed, too: but his face softened.

"Mrs. Portal knows most things about Irish and every other kind of men, I fancy. The wonder is that she can continue to be charming to us in spite of it. She's the most delightful woman in the world."

Bramham gave him a shrewd glance. He would have given half he possessed to say at that moment:

"What about a lovely girl who is drudging away in England to support your child?" But it was not an ordinary promise that same girl had wrung out of him, never to reveal by word or look that he knew her secret. She had bound him by every oath she could think of that had any sanctity for a man.

Something of scorn presently mingled with the shrewdness of the look he cast at Carson. He searched the dark face that had so much in it that was fine and lovable, and yet was marked with sins. But whatever Carson's sins were they did not give him peace. He did not grow sleek on them. He had the weary mouth and haggard eyes of the man with the dual nature, a finer self perpetually at war with a baser, sometimes winning, sometimes losing—but always striving. Scorn left Bramham's look and affectionate loyalty came back.

"You can't hate a fellow like that," he thought.

He presently found a further thing to say in which he was far from imagining himself disloyal to Rosalind Chard, or even prompted by curiosity.

"Carson ... since we've tumbled on to the subject of women, I'd like to know what you think about something I've rather advanced opinions upon ... girls ... girls who've gone over the hard-and-fast line ... not the ordinary demi-semi-quaver, of course ... nor the kind that are bound to slip off the rails even with gold fastenings ... I mean the sort of girl one would be glad and proud to marry, but who, given 'the time, the place, and the loved one altogether,' as some poet fellow says, cuts loose the painter for dear love and sheer love. What do you think of a girl like that, Karri?"

Carson had a distant visionary expression in his eyes. Bramham's words appeared to have driven his thoughts far afield. He might have been a man trying to remember a sweet air that evaded his memory, or to lay hold of something that had no substance.

"It is odd that you should ask me that, Bram," he spoke slowly ... "and you are the only man in the world I would say it to ... but, that was the kind of girl I was speaking of when I said the wife ... the only kind of girl I should ever care about marrying ... I suppose I am alone among Irishmen in holding such an opinion ... for all their wildness they're a conventional lot at bottom, especially on this subject ... and, of course, that's as it should be. But I've lived too long in lonely places, and I'm more woodsman than Irishman now!... I didn't think this way always, either.... But once I had a vision, a dream, something ... about such a girl. The odd part of it is that I was crazy about another woman at the time—had been for years—and it cured me of that.... But, oh, Lord!" (he gave a sort of groan) "there's been plenty of water under the bridge since then ... and it was only a dream, anyway. There may be such girls in the world somewhere ... but not for me, Bram. Some woman will trap me with an antenuptial-contract, some day." He got up, laughing mirthlessly. "Great Tophet! it's two o'clock! I shall never get through with my work to-morrow."

They gripped hands and parted for the night.

Afterwards Bramham mused thus to himself:

"He was lying! He must have been—or else she was. What the deuce is one to make of it? Plenty of water under the bridge since then! I daresay!... Capron's stray shaft went home.... I wonder if there's any truth in that tale!... Well! the longer I live the more I am inclined to agree with that fellow who said there never yet was a game in history or anywhere else played square with a woman in it!"