CHAPTER IV

THE GUARDIANSHIP OF CAROL MAYNE

"These mothers are too dreadful!" --ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING.

Millie sat before the cold hearth in the stale, stuffy _sitkamer_, which always smelt of dirty dish-cloths and unwashed humanity. Her lips were pressed tightly together, her face was white as wax. In its repose, one could see signs of the inner strength, the unnameable charm which had captivated Bert and Amurrica, beyond question the two cleverest men of the place. No young Boer would have looked twice at her.

Her father was dead. The doctor had come and gone, and told the orphan what she knew before. The death had been quiet and painless, only Millie there. But now, the Boer widow was beside the corpse, noisily weeping and wailing, and the girl was shut out.

It was perhaps a fortunate thing for Arnold Lutwyche that his inherent vacillation of character had been joined to a feebleness of constitution which released him, at the age of forty-two, from the burden of the flesh. He had passed beyond reach of the Boer woman's tongue, and of the complications presented by those lumpish Boer children who bore his name. His difficulties were over; but what of his child?

His first wife--his own love, and Millie's mother--had been the earthly stay of the weak soul. Everyone had always called him weak; but he had had the wisdom to love the strong, the fortune to be loved by her again. While she lived, his own lack of stamina had hardly been apparent to him. He had never quite lost his sense of having a grudge against God since her death.

What he had been through since! From the moment when the handsome, courteous Englishman, with the dark-blue eyes, presented himself in answer to an advertisement from the buxom Boer heiress for a competent man to manage her farm, his misery had increased, his bonds had tightened. But it was over at last. He had slipped through Tante Wilma's coarse fingers, and gone flying home to her, his love, his stronghold.

Their child was left behind.

She had apparently no tears for him. The look on her tense features was more triumphant than grieving.

A smart tap on the door aroused her. She looked up in languid surprise. The old Dutch clock pointed to three o'clock in the morning. With a resigned shrug, she lifted her aching limbs, dragged herself to the door, and opened it. Mr. Mayne stood outside, and stepped in without speaking, closely followed by Bert Mestaer. Millie drew back, a look of anything but welcome on her expressive face.

"Go back!" said she to the young farmer. "I don't want you round here, nor any of your lot."

"I--I came to see if I couldn't help, Millie." stammered he humbly.

In dialogue with the girl he seemed always to become a different creature. To-night there was some apparent difficulty in articulating, as his eyes rested on the untamed fire of the glance, and the droop of the small, exhausted frame.

"Let him come in and rest a minute, Miss Lutwyche," said Mr. Mayne gently. "He came all the way to the Mission to let me know."

"How'd he hear, I should like to know?" she demanded.

"Amurrica told me," stammered Bert, staring at the ground.

She gave a short laugh.

"Trust him to know other folks' business," she sneered. "He's the old woman's candidate, he is."

"Candidate? What for, Millie?" asked Mayne anxiously.

She had turned away, and Bert had fastened the door. She sank on a chair, leaning an arm on the table, the slenderness of her wrist, as it lay there, making a dumb appeal to all the manliness in Bert.

"For taking me off her hands," she said, with perfect calmness. "I'm on offer, didn't you know? Either o' you two in the running? Amurrica's given her ten quid on account; you'd better bet on his chances, unless you can go higher."

"That's not the way to talk," said Mayne sternly. "What do you mean by it? You are far too young to think of marriage."

"Who said I was thinkin' about marriage?" she flashed back. "Am I the old woman? Am I to answer for her dirty bargains?"

"Then tell us what you mean," said Mayne. "Is it true that Otis wants to marry you?"

Otis was Amurrica's patronymic.

"I don' know," said Millie casually. "I only know he's pretty thick with the old woman; an' she doesn't mean to let me go for nothing; all of you can bet on that."

"But why talk this nonsense?" urged Mayne reprovingly. "Mrs. Lutwyche couldn't dispose of you against your will, even if you were a Kaffir."

Milly laughed--one clear, liquid note.

"No, of course she can't," said she. "That's where the joke comes in. Think I'd go along o' that sort o' scum?"

She indicated poor Bert with a slight wave of that fragile wrist.

"Then what are you goin' to do, Millie?" burst out the young man in anguish. "If she turns you out, where're you goin'--eh?"

"What's it matter to you?" asked Millie sullenly.

"'S the only thing that does matter to me!" cried Bert desperately. "Look here!" He flung his hat on the table, and stepped in front of her with a sudden manliness which filled Mayne with admiration. "You don' know the sort of home I've got to offer you, Millie. I'm a rich man, as things go round here. I'd give yer pretty well anything you set your heart on. I'd take care of yer--yer shouldn't set them bits of hands to no rough work. I love you, Millie, and well you know it. Let the parson here marry us, an I'll--I'll do anything you want!"

He knelt down by the table as he concluded his appeal, and made a snatch for her hand; but it was sharply withdrawn. He laid his arms down on the rough wood, and hid his face in them, shaken through and through by the intensity of his feelings. Mayne turned away, and walked to the far end of the kitchen. But he heard the girl's short laugh of scorn.

"Tastes differ," she said icily. "I'm an English girl, and if the worst comes to the worst, there's the well in the courtyard. That's better than a drinkin' Boer."

"Millie," said Mayne, in wrath, "I am ashamed of you! Is that the way to answer an honest man, who offers you all he has to give? I am as English as you are, and I beg to say no Englishwoman I ever knew offered insult as a return for honour done her. If you can't feel affection for Bert, surely you could tell him so civilly."

The girl's fragile form quivered with dry sobs; she sprang to her feet.

"Mr. Mestaer, I can't and don't return your affection," she gasped. "I'm brought pretty low, but I've got my pride! I'm thinkin' just now more about funerals than about weddin's, though a black frock for me'll be as hard to fi-f-find as a white one would, I'm thinkin'!"

"There!" cried Bert to Mayne, in hot indignation. "You made her cry now. Millie, my dear, now don't you give it a thought. I didn't know it 'ud vex you! ... Millie!"

But she had staggered blindly down the room, not seeing her way for the streaming tears so long so unnaturally restrained; and as Bert stood hesitating, torn between his pity, his anger, his passion--the door of the kitchen opened slowly, and the new-made widow appeared on the threshold, truly awful in her _déshabille_.

"A clever girl, I'll warrant!" she cried, in high glee. "Her father not cold yet, and two young men in the kitchen at four o'clock in the morning! Well, what offers, gentlemen? Either of you ready to take her off my hands?"

"I am," burst in Bert at once, before Mayne could speak. "Fifty pounds down and a demi-john of the best whisky in Slabbert's Poort, and I'll make her my wife to-morrow."

"Millie!" screamed the virago to the girl, who had reached the ladder leading to her little room above. "Here's a husband for you, my girl! Get your bundle and pack! Off with you! Out of my house! We're all respectable here! Take your English lady-wife, Mr. Bert Mestaer."

Mr. Mayne stepped forwards.

"Perhaps you would be so kind as to listen to me for a moment, Mrs. Lutwyche," he said distinctly. "Your late husband made a will, and left it in my hands. In it I am appointed his daughter's sole guardian, until she reaches the age of twenty-one. The arrangements for her future rest with me, and have nothing whatever to do with you. If she remains with you for a week or two, until her affairs are settled, you will be paid a fixed sum daily, out of Mr. Lutwyche's small estate, as long as you keep her. But you have absolutely no control whatever over her marriage."

Vrouw Lutwyche gave a positive howl of fury. Her face grew purple--almost black; her eyes protruded, her rage was hideous and ungovernable. For so long had she waited for this moment--this coming time when she should have Millie helpless at her mercy--she simply could not realise that all was taken out of her hands.

Millie's tears had ceased. In surprise at what Mr. Mayne was saying, she had halted on her way up the ladder, the drops wet on her cheeks. Now she slowly came back to the ground, and stood with a set smile, showing her row of short, pearl-white teeth, as she gloated over the spectacle of the Boer woman's degradation. He had been weak, that father who had left her; he had disappointed her over and over again; but after all, there had been something in him which Vrouw Lutwyche could not reach. In death he had outwitted her.

Mayne's very soul sickened. He had seen much that revolted him in this wild land of beginnings--of that measure of civilisation which sometimes seems so strongly to plead the fact that utter savagery would be better. But he thought he had never seen anything more awful than the enmity of this girl's face--the hatred, the callous contempt, which showed how often the young eyes had looked upon like scenes.

"If she is left here, she will go mad," he thought; and again he earnestly wished that poor Lutwyche could have held on just another fortnight, until the arrival of certain letters from England. He was at his wits' end. There was not a house anywhere near to which he dare take Millie. He was in sole charge of the Mission, and in that evil place, to take her there, would be to blast her character. He thought of a good-natured old Boer widow woman who lived about a mile away, and stepping up to Millie, he suggested in an undertone, that she should go there.

"You cannot remain here," he urged.

Her refusal was prompt and resolute.

"Leave him alone in the house with her? Never!" she said doggedly. "You don't know what she might do. I'm not afraid of her. She daren't touch me, and she can't go up my ladder. She's roaring drunk now, but she'll be dead drunk presently, and then she's harmless. If you come round in the morning, I shall be able to talk to you; she'll take hours to sleep this off. I wish you'd go now, and take away that Bert. I've got no use for him."