Story 1.

A Tale of the Kimberley Coach.

Chapter One.

The coach to the Diamond Fields was just starting from the Beaufort West railway-station, and the passengers who were destined to travel over hundreds of miles of burnt-up veldt together, to be jolted over water-courses, choked in dust-storms, and suffer the many discomforts and annoyances of South African travel in each other’s society, were eyeing one another distrustfully.

The feeling uppermost in the minds of several of them was that they were very likely to become not a little tired of one another before they reached the iron town of Kimberley.

With one or two exceptions they were old residents on the Diamond Fields, returning after a trip home to Europe or to the Colony, and therefore they knew each other very well, at least by sight. Their acquaintanceship as a rule made them look forward with all the more distaste to the idea of spending some days in the same coach.

There were ten passengers, and Kate Gray, a soft, refined-looking English girl who was travelling by herself, and whose black dress suggested that she was equally alone in her journey through life, shrunk into the corner of the coach with a half shudder, and thought that her fellow-passengers were a singularly unprepossessing lot. She had tried to make light in anticipation of the annoyances in store for her; but now they were forced upon her, and she felt uncomfortable and out of heart. She had lived for two years in South Africa, and though she had had great sorrow, none of those rougher experiences of colonial life had come in her way which it now seemed likely enough that she was destined soon to meet with. She was the daughter of a retired army officer, who, believing much in his business capacity and power to make money, had put his all when he left the army into an ostrich farm in the Cape Colony, and had taken his daughter out with him. Their life had been a pleasant one enough for some time. The farm was a pretty place. They were not very far off Capetown, and they had pleasant neighbours within reach.

Unfortunately the farm was not suited to ostriches. The wretched birds refused to thrive and increase. They showed a wayward ingenuity in hunting poisonous plants and shrubs, on which they succeeded in committing suicide. Colonel Gray, when his birds died, borrowed money and bought more; then they died, and he bought sheep, which did the same. Then he died himself—more of sheep and ostriches than anything else; and after his death it was found out that he had lived long enough to ruin himself, and to leave his daughter without a penny. She at first thought of going home, but the long list of girls placed as she was, who advertised their willingness to teach, or act as companion only for a home, made her think that she was fortunate to be out of England. Then she heard of some Cape Dutch people up country near the Diamond Fields who wanted an English governess, and she took the place. She was plucky and capable, as well-bred English women are as a rule, and she had determined to think little about the discomfort of the journey, but as she noticed one of her fellow-passengers, a peculiarly aggressive specimen of the Diamond Field Jew, trying to stare her out of countenance, with an impudent leer of admiration in his coarse face, she realised that her position was an unpleasant one. This gentleman was a rather well-known character at Kimberley—a certain Mr Joe Aarons, who had bought many stolen diamonds during his sojourn on the Fields, and was represented to be very rich and prosperous. Unfortunately for his fellow-travellers, Mr Aarons, in the circle in which he moved, was considered a neat humourist, and already he had made one or two remarks which gave his audience a foretaste of the comfort he would likely be to them. Two meaner Jews, men of the Aaron type, but less distinguished characters, appeared to be highly delighted at Joe’s wit; and so was the only other representative of the fair sex, a lady known on the Diamond Fields, where she kept a canteen, as Mother Hemp—the prefix being added to her name rather in a spirit of sarcasm than affection. Probably this good lady had realised that it was quite useless to expect the arts of her toilet to withstand the strain of a coach-journey of almost a week, so she had not even taken the trouble to start fair, and already the coating of paint and powder was cracking and curling away from her yellow old cheeks, which looked curiously shrunk. Also, to be more comfortable on the journey, she had packed away her false teeth. The rest of the company, however, looked upon Mr Aarons with anything but favour. A big, important-looking man, Mr Bowker, the great Kimberley claim-owner, who was just returning from the Cape House of Assembly, felt somewhat disgusted at the idea of having to travel up to the Fields in the company of Mr Aarons. He had perhaps had in his time a little more to do with that person than he would like every one to know, and he was afraid that he might become too familiar on the journey. Then there was a young gentleman who was going to practise in the High Court of Kimberley, and who having had the advantage of three years of home education, was horribly disgusted with the land of his birth to which he had returned, and lost no opportunity of railing at all things connected with Africa. A colonial attorney, on his return from a trip home as he called it—though in England he was strangely abroad—made up the aristocratic element. The two other passengers were river-diggers, partners, and in a way great friends, though men of somewhat different character, and curiously unlike experience. One of them, Jim Brawnston by name, was as good a specimen as one might wish to meet with of the South African born Anglo-Saxon—a brawny giant, of about twenty-eight, with a bushy beard, a pleasant honest look in his light blue eyes, and a laugh like a lion’s roar. In his time he had followed most of the callings which are open to a Cape colonist who has a disposition to rove about rather than to settle down anywhere. He had been a digger when the Diamond Fields first broke out, then had gone a trading trip up country, then had taken a turn at transport riding, and had for a time returned to his old business and become a digger on the banks of the Vaal.

Kate thought, as she caught a glance of the face of the other, a man some half dozen years older than his companion, that he was the most interesting of her fellow-travellers. Though his get-up was rough enough—he wore a flannel shirt, a pair of Bedford cord trousers, and an old shooting coat, which, though an expert would recognise it as having been the work of a good maker, was curiously faded and worn—Kate felt certain that he was an English gentleman. And there was an expression in his tanned face and sad-looking eyes—eyes which seemed to tell that he had had in his time a good deal of trouble—which made her feel that his presence in the coach would make the journey less distasteful to her. He was listening with an expression of grave amusement to the two limbs of the law as they swaggered about England, what they had done when they were at home, where they had been, and whom they had known.

His expression altered to one of anger and disgust when he caught some of Aarons’ conversation, and noticed how horrified and frightened Kate looked. “Surely she can’t be travelling with that old hag,” he thought to himself, as he looked at Mrs Hemp.

“And are you going up to the Fields, my dear?” said that lady to Kate, with a sham smile on her evil old face.