The Adventures of Miss Gregory. Gibbon Perceval

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СКАЧАТЬ you so? Did n't I?"

      Miss Fraser gave him no answer, and did not look up again.

      "You 'll have to believe me next time," he went on. "We 'll understand each other by and by."

      He glanced over his shoulder with the precaution of a coward. The street, save for themselves, was empty; the houses showed a row of closed shutters to the sun. He made a swift snatch at her arm and drew it through his own.

      Miss Fraser uttered a little cry, a mere gasp, and tore her arm from him. He laughed and caught hold of her again, and they struggled in the foot-clogging sand under the blind eyes of the houses. He had her by the elbows, gripping her in front of him; his breath was on her face. She did not cry out again: half her dread was that she should be seen by some one; but she put out her young strength and fought to get away. She was a healthy girl, and she had not been long enough in the tropics to slack her muscles. The man's cheeks suddenly showed high spots of red as he tried to hold her.

      "Silly little thing," he was saying. "Silly little thing." He tried to speak softly, but he was already breathless. He was without strength as he was without honour, the wreck of a man, foundered and spent. With a last wrench, the girl dragged herself from him and stumbled back against the wall, white and cowering. Her right sleeve was torn where he had gripped it; she smoothed the rent unconsciously with her other hand.

      He stood over her, getting his breath, and at that moment there reached both of them the grating rumble of a trolley. The man edged a pace away as it came round the corner, and his eyes were uneasy. Miss Fraser tried to stand upright; she was faint and dizzy, but she felt no relief in the trolley's approach. There was still the same dread lest she should be marked in the company of this man who haunted her. She would have walked on, but for the time she could not. But here was no rescuer. Under the striped awning of the trolley sat a stout, torpid Portuguese officer, monumentally at his ease while the gaunt Kaffirs paddled in the sun and thrust him along. He had the absorbed and introspective air of a man who digests a good meal at leisure; he did not see Miss Fraser and her fidgety companion till he was close to them. He eyed them both without turning his head, obviously taking in the situation. Then suddenly his big, swarthy face creased into smiles. He was amused; he found it funny. A girl's helplessness was the opportunity of an enterprising man. As the trolley passed them, he leaned out, looking back, a vast mask of easy laughter, till it turned the farther corner and rolled out of sight. Out of her distress and weakness. Miss Fraser found herself gazing after him in sheer amazement and some horror. The man put her feelings into words for her.

      "See?" he said, coming nearer again. "See? That's the way things are in Beira. Now, what do you want to be such a little fool for? You can't get away; why not play the game and let's be friends?"

      Miss Fraser was still fingering the torn cloth of her sleeve, slowly, thoughtfully, almost absently. Still she did not speak.

      "The minute I saw you," he went on, "I said to myself, 'There's the girl for me.' And that's what I say still. Why don't you play the game?"

      Miss Fraser stood up and let her left hand fall to her side. Then she began to run. He snatched at her as she broke past him, but missed her. He snapped out an oath and gave chase. But such hunters need sitting game. Twenty yards over the loose, sliding sand saw him in extremity. He slackened and paused, blowing painfully, and called out to her between his gasps.

      "It's all right," he cried. "Need n't run—any more. I won't—touch you."

      But Miss Fraser did not heed him. She continued to run, a distressful little figure of flight, pelting abjectly on, with lips clenched and eyes that saw the world through a mist of pain and humiliation. Running still, she turned into the one street of Beira that still shows life in the hot hours, abandoning appearances and propriety now in her utter extremity. There was a footpath, at last, to relieve her from the terrible sand. Passers-by and people on verandas turned to stare and exclaim at her passage, but she kept on. The hotel in which she had a room was a shell of a house inclosing a courtyard at the back of the customs shed. She was running still as she turned in at the great gate, threaded her way through the little marble-topped tables in the courtyard, and climbed the stairs to the wooden balcony from which her room opened. With the last of her strength she bolted and locked the door and stumbled to her bed.

      It was an hour before she was able to rise and cool her smarting face with brackish water. There was a need to review her position. She sat in the half-darkness of the bare little room and tried to think, staring hopelessly at its stained walls and cheap, heat-warped furniture. She had no need to count her money; she knew to a penny how she stood in that regard. There was enough for her bill, and a little over, if she could get away at once, and that was the best that could be made of it. The lady in Rhodesia, who had imported her a year ago to serve her as a paid companion, had paid her bare fare home; the rest was what remained out of her exiguous wages. Mrs. Colby—that was the lady's name—had made a point of buying her a first-class ticket.

      "I am disappointed in you," she had said. "You seem to me to be nothing more than a child; but I will send you home first-class."

      And this was the result of it. She had come down to Beira to wait for the boat; and the man, the terror from which she had run through the deadly sunlight, had spoken to her even as she was getting out of the train. He had haunted her ever since; his whispers defiled her loneliness; it was not the first time he had laid hands on her. In all that arid little town, glowing on its spit of sand like a hectic between the mangrove swamps and the shallow bay, there was not a soul to raise a hand for her, not one that she could call upon to aid and defend her.

      There came a knock on her door, and a sound of feet that shuffled. She started upright.

      "Who is it?" she demanded through the closed door.

      "It is a note," came the answer in a flat, guttural voice.

      Miss Fraser unlocked the door and looked out. It was the manager of the little hotel, slippered and in his shirt-sleeves. He knew that Miss Fraser could not leave on the mail-boat, and was presenting his bill without delay. She took the envelop from his brown hand.

      "Veekly settlement," he said. "Eet is de rule."

      Miss Fraser nodded mechanically. "I shall come down at dinner-time," she said. "I will pay then."

      It hardly troubled her at all to find the bill larger than it should have been, with cunning items not to be foreseen or avoided by the economical guest. She could pay it, and there would still be a little money left; but, sooner or later, she must be turned out. That was the broad fact in her consciousness which overwhelmed all lesser troubles—that and the indefatigable man who pursued her. The contemplation of it filled the rest of her afternoon; she was still empty of all resource when the shrill bell tinkled in the courtyard, announcing the hour of dinner. It startled her with a heavy sense of the passing of time; in a few hours more, if she should venture to go out again, she would be able to watch the lights of the big mail-boat moving down to the mouth of the harbour, carrying out of reach all that life held for Margaret Fraser,

      She paid her bill in the little office at the side of the great gate of the courtyard, where the manager sat, under a yellow lamp, at the heart of a strange disorder of papers, old clothes, cases of liquor, and the like. She had herself under command again; she was grave and composed to his shrewd glances as he took her money and achieved the production of a receipt.

      "You vill stay longer?" he inquired, as he took her money.

      "For the present," she replied.

      He had it in mind to require her to pay in advance, but decided that it was not yet necessary. From his seat under the lamp, he had seen very many insolvent СКАЧАТЬ