THE “WORD IN PRIVATE.”

“I want to have a word with you in private, Wyvern.”

“In private?”

“Yes. I was going to yesterday but left it till now. Business matters are best talked about in the morning.”

Thus Le Sage, as the two met over their early coffee. Lalante had not yet appeared.

“All right,” assented Wyvern, who had a pretty straight inkling of what was coming. “Where shall we hold our council of war?”

“Out in the open. Nothing like the open veldt if you want to talk over anything important. If you do it in a room ten to one a word or two gets overheard, and a word or two is often quite enough to give away the whole show.”

“There I entirely agree. Well lead on.”

Le Sage did so. Hardly a word was exchanged between the two as they walked for about half a mile, first along a bush path, then over the veldt. One was turning over in his mind how he should put the case to the other. The other, anticipating their bearing, had already made up his as to how he should meet the arguments advanced.

Le Sage came to a halt. They had reached the brink of a krantz, of no great height and railing away now in slabs, now in aloe-grown boulders, to the Kunaga River, the swirl and babble of whose turgid waters they could hear, as it coursed between its willow grown banks could hear but not see, for a morning mist hung over the land, shutting out everything beyond a radius of twenty yards.

“We shall be all right here,” said Le Sage, seating himself upon a stone. Then he relapsed into silence, and proceeded to fill his pipe. Wyvern did the same. Decidedly the situation was awkward. When two men who have been friends are about to embark on a discussion which the chances are fifty to one will leave them enemies in short, is bound to culminate in a quarrel, and that a bitter one why the preliminaries are sure to be awkward. Wyvern was the one to force the situation.

“Look here, Le Sage. We didn’t come here to smoke the pipe of silent meditation, did we? You said something about business matters you wanted to talk over with me. Now drive ahead.”

“Yes. How are you getting on?”

The words came out jerkily.

“Wish I could answer `Pretty well, thanks. How are you?’” said Wyvern with a rueful laugh. “I’m not getting on at all.”

“No. And I don’t suppose you ever will.”

Wyvern stiffened. The other had never used that tone towards him before.

“That sounds nice, and friendly, and cheering,” he answered coldly. “May I ask why you happen to hold that opinion?”

“Because you haven’t got it in you,” rapped out Le Sage. He was nettled at a certain spice of hauteur that the other had infused into his tone and manner. Moreover, he was nervous, and a commingling of nervousness and irritation is a very bad equipment indeed for the starting upon a difficult and delicate discussion. Wyvern, for his part, was the more sensitive to the bluntness of the statement, in that at the back of his mind lurked a misgiving that the speaker might be stating no more than the truth. Nothing he had ever touched had succeeded. He was no fool in the matter of intellect, but somehow he had never quite managed to “get there,” and the consciousness of this was the secret canker of his life. He was disappointed, but not yet soured. In time he might come to be that.

“Are you quite sure of your ground in making that flattering statement?” he said, mustering great self-control for this sort of talk was not at all what he was used to. Decidedly Le Sage was straining his privileges as father-in-law elect to a dangerous point.

“Well, I don’t know. Only that events seem to bear it out most remarkably. Got rid of that mortgage on your place yet?”

“You know I haven’t.”

“Well, they were going to foreclose, weren’t they? And if they do, it’s tantamount to selling you up. Oh, I know. Of course, it would be no damn business of mine under ordinary circumstances. Under existing ones it is. I’m thinking of Lalante.”

“Great minds jump together then, for so am I. In fact, I’m thinking of her every day, every moment of my life.”

“If you were to think a little more of her interests, then, it would be better all round. For instance I don’t say it with any wish to be inhospitable, mind! but by the time you get back you’ll have been about twenty-fours hours away from home, and that quite unnecessarily. That’s not the way to run a farm and especially one like yours. I don’t wonder your people get `slaag-ing,’ and all the rest of it.”

This was not a fair hit, thought Wyvern to himself. A decided case of “below the belt.” But he said nothing. He merely puffed away at his pipe, looking straight in front of him. The mist seemed lightening a little above the river.

“Well, then, if the worst comes to the worst, and you have to leave Seven Kloofs, what then? How will you stand? The sale of your stock won’t amount to anything like a fortune I take it.”

“No, but it’ll amount to something. After that I have an idea.”

“An idea. Pho! That for an idea. One plan’s worth all the `ideas’ in the world.”

Le Sage, you see, had got into his element now. His nervousness had quite left him.

“Call it a plan then. And as to it I am hopeful. Why should a man’s luck always be bad, Le Sage. Why the deuce shouldn’t good times dawn for him? Ah! Look there.”

Even as he spoke the mist, which had been lightening over the river, parted with a suddenness that was almost startling, and from a widening patch of vivid blue the newly risen sun poured down his life-giving beams. It was as an instantaneous transition from darkness to light to bright, beautiful. Nature-awakening light and with it the birds began to pipe and call with varying note from the surrounding bushes, while a troop of monkeys gambolling upon a sandspit down in the river-bed, were amusing themselves by leaping its channel, to and fro, as though in sheer gladness of heart. Further and further the mist rolled back, unfolding a dewy sparkle upon bush and veldt, a shroud as of myriad diamonds.

“Look where?” queried Le Sage, shortly.

“Why, at how suddenly it became light, just as I was talking about my plan and luck changing. I’m not superstitious, but I’ll be hanged if I won’t take that as an omen and a good one.”

Le Sage grunted, and shook his head in utter disgust.

“An omen?” he repeated. “Good Lord, Wyvern, what rot. Man, you’ll never be anything but a dreamer, and you can’t run a farm upon dreams no nor anything else. Would you mind letting me into this `plan’ of yours?”

“At present I would. Later on, not now. And now, Le Sage, if you have quite done schoolmastering me, I move that we go back. In fact, I don’t know that it was worth while our coming so far just to say all that.”

“But you’ll think so in a minute. It happens I haven’t said all I came to say, and as it has to be said, I may as well say it at once and without beating around the bush. You must cease thinking of Lalante at all. You must consider your engagement to her at an end.”

Wyvern had felt nearly certain that some such statement constituted the real object of their talk, but now that it was made, it was none the less a blow. He felt himself growing a shade paler under the weather worn bronze of his face.

“What does Lalante herself say about it,” was his rejoinder.

“Say? Say?” echoed Le Sage, angrily. “She has no say in the matter. I simply forbid it.”

“You can’t do that, Le Sage. She is of full age, you know,” said Wyvern quietly, but with a ring of sadness in his tone. “Look here no, wait hear me out,” seeing that the other was about to interrupt with a furious rejoinder. “I’ve set myself out all through this interview never for a moment to lose sight of the fact that you are her father, consequently have sat quiet under a tone I would stand from no other man alive. But even the authority of a father has its limits, and you have started in to exercise yours a trifle too late.”

“Then you refuse to give her up?” furiously.

“Most distinctly. Unless, that is, she herself wished it.”

“Oh, you would then?” said Le Sage, quickly, clutching at a straw.

“Certainly. But I must hear it from her own lips, face to face. Not through a third party, or on paper.” Le Sage’s “straw” seemed to sink.

“I don’t want to irritate you further, Le Sage,” went on Wyvern after a moment’s pause. “But I’m convinced as firmly as that you and I are sitting here that I shall never hear anything of the sort. It is not in Lalante to turn from me in misfortune. Our love is too complete.”

“And I don’t count. I, her father, am to stand aside as of no account at all?”

The unconscious pathos that welled up in the very bitterness of his tone, reflected what had lain beneath his mind since some time back that his child should be so ready and eager to leave him. And Wyvern’s instinct was quick to grasp it.

“I quite see your import and sympathise,” he said. “Yes, I sympathise, thoroughly. But Nature is nothing if not pitiless, and this is a provision of Nature. And look here, Le Sage, my existing run of ill-luck ought to be a recommendation from your point of view in that you will be able to keep the child longer with you, for of course I don’t dream of claiming her until my luck changes.”

“That’ll be never then,” rejoined the other, savagely. “Man, haven’t you more sense of honour than to pin a girl to her contract when you know you haven’t enough to keep yourself, let alone her? She is very young too. I don’t know how I ever gave my consent.”

“She has commonsense and capability far beyond her years, and you know it. Now see here, Le Sage. Be reasonable about this, and give me some sort of a show. If I bring off my plan satisfactorily, I shan’t be the first man whose luck has turned.”

“Oh, damn your `plan’ and your `luck’ too!” retorted the other, now completely losing his temper. “The first’s a fraud and the other’s fudge. Look here, if you weren’t so much infernally bigger and stronger than me, I’d start in now to hammer you within an inch of your life, but as you are, it’s of no use trying.”

“No, it isn’t,” said Wyvern quietly, but not sneeringly.

Le Sage had got up and was pacing up and down feverishly. Wyvern had never moved. Had he known it, he was at that moment in some considerable peril. He was sitting right on the edge of the krantz, and the other was behind him; and Le Sage was one of those men who when they do fairly lose their tempers go nearly mad. Now his face was ghastly, and he snarled like a cornered animal.

“Your plan’s a fraud,” he repeated furiously, “and you’re a fraud yourself. You humbugged me into believing you were a man of solid position, while all the time you were a damned, useless, bankrupt waster. You sneaked my consent under false pretences. Yes, under false pretences,” he bellowed, “and now I withdraw it. D’you hear? I withdraw it unconditionally, you swindler.”

Wyvern had risen now, but with no sort of idea of violence, and stood confronting the infuriated man.

“Now, Le Sage, don’t you think all this is rather cowardly on your part?” he said, in a quiet, expostulatory tone. “I mean because you must know that you’re the one man privileged to say such things to me in fact, to go on all day calling me all the frauds and swindlers you want to, and still remain absolutely immune from retaliation. It’s not fair.”

“Not fair, eh?” snarled Le Sage, infuriated by the other’s coolness, though there was nothing in this that was in the least offensive or taunting. “Well, now, look here. Get away off my place, d’you see? This is my ground. A mile further on is my boundary. Well, get across that as soon as ever you like, and don’t set foot on my place again, or by God, I might even blow your brains out.”

“Then you’d get hanged or shut up for a considerable time, and would that be good for Lalante?”

“Go d’you hear,” stamped the furious man. “Go. There’s the boundary. Go over it to hell or the devil.”

“You don’t expect me to walk ten miles when I’ve got a horse, do you? I left one at your place, and, incidentally, a tooth-brush.”

Le Sage by this time was reduced to exhausted speechlessness. He could only glare helplessly. Not wishing to exasperate him further and needlessly, Wyvern had refrained from saying that he had no intention of going until he had seen Lalante once more. She would be on the look-out for their return, he knew that, would probably come forth to welcome him, Le Sage would have no power to prevent their meeting.

So they walked back these two, as they had come, in silence.