Fated to the Tangled Love free download pdf

THE girl, with a little curling motion, leaned back in the rickshaw and gazed with fascinated eyes at the moving picture before her, seen through the hazy heat of a summer day.

Above the wide main street of Durban the sun blazed and glared like a brazen image of itself in the high ardent blue. Men in loose white ducks and flannels sauntered along, or stood smoking and talking under the shop awnings.

Carriages and rickshaws flew past, containing women in light gowns and big veils, with white and sometimes scarlet sunshades. Black boys at the street corners held out long-stalked roses and sprays of fragrant mimosa to the passers-by, beguiling them to buy. Coolies with baskets of fish on their heads and bunches of bananas across their shoulders, shambled along, white-clad and thin-legged. One, with a basket of freshly-caught fish on his arm, cried in a nasal sing-song voice:

"Nice lovely shad! Nice lovely shad!"

Two water-carts, clanking along in opposite directions, left a dark track behind them on the dusty road, sending up a heavy odour of wet earth which the girl snuffed up as though she had some transportingly sweet perfume at her delicate nostrils.

"I'm sure there is no smell in the world like the smell of wet Africa," she cried softly to herself, laughing a little. Her eyes took on a misty look that made them like lilac with the dew on it.

Her black hair, which branched out on either side of her forehead, had a trick of spraying little veils of itself over her eyes and almost touching her cheek-bones, which were pitched high in her face, giving it an extraordinarily subtle look.

She was amazingly attractive in a glowing ardent fashion that paled the other women in the street and made men step to the edge of the pavement to stare at her.

She looked at them, too, through the spraying veils of her hair, but her face remained perfectly composed under the swathes of white chiffon which she wore flung back over her wide hat, brought down at the sides and twisted round her throat, with two long flying ends.

The big Zulu boy between the shafts, running noiselessly except for the pat of his bare feet and the "Tch-k, tch-k, tch-k" of the seed bangles round his ankles, became conscious that his fare was creating interest. He began to put on airs, giving little shouts of glorification, taking leaps in the air and tilting the shafts of the rickshaw backwards to the discomfort of its occupant.

She leaned forward, and in a low voice spoke a few edged words in Zulu that made him change his manners and give a glance of astonishment behind him, crying:

"Aa-h! Yeh-boo Inkosizaan!" behaving himself thereafter with decorum, for it was a disconcerting thing that an Inkosizaan who had come straight off the mail-steamer at the Point should speak words of reproof to him in his own language.

Presently he came to the foot of the Berea Hill, which is long and sloping, causing him to slacken pace and draw deep breaths.

A tram-car dashed past them going down-hill, while another climbed laboriously up, both open to the breeze and full of people. The road began to be edged with fenced and hedged-in gardens, the houses standing afar and almost hidden by shrubs and greenery.

The girl spoke to the rickshaw-puller once more.

"The Inkos at the Point told you where to go. Do you know the house?"

He answered yes, but that it was still afar off-right at the top of the Berea.

She leaned back again content. It delighted her to be alone like this. It was quite an adventure, and an unexpected one. A malicious, mischievous smile flashed across her face as she sat thinking of the annoyance of the Inkos left behind at the docks. He had been furious when he found no closed carriage waiting for them.

There was one on the quay, but it was not theirs, and on approaching it and finding out his mistake, he stood stammering with anger. But she had flashed into a waiting rickshaw, knowing very well that he could not force her to get out and go back to the ship without making a scene.

Nothing would induce him to make a scene and attract the attention of people to himself. He had indeed told her in a low voice to get out and come back with him to wait for a carriage, but she merely made a mouth and looked appealingly at him, saying:

"Oh Luce! It will be so lovely in a rickshaw. I have never ridden in one like this yet."

"Well, ride to the devil," he had amiably responded, and turned his back on her. She had called out after him, in an entrancingly sweet voice:

"Yes, I know, Luce; but what is the address?"

"It was a shame," she said to herself now, still smiling; "but really I don't often vex him!"

A man and a woman passed, as she sat smiling her subtle smile through her spraying hair, and looked at her with great curiosity.

Afterwards the man said excitedly:

"That girl takes the shine out of Mary--"

The woman, who looked well-bred with a casual distinguished manner, agreed with him, but did not tell him so. She said:

"Her eyes look as though they were painted in by Burne-Jones, and she is dressed like a Beardsley poster; but I think she is only a girl who is glad to be alive. Mary, however, is the most beautiful woman in Africa."

The girl heard the words "Burne-Jones eyes," and knew they were speaking of her.

At last she arrived at the gates of her destination. Big, green iron gates, that clanged behind her as she walked quickly forward down a winding path into a deep dim garden. There was no more to be seen but trees and tangles of flowering shrubs and bushes and stretches of green grass, and trees and trees and trees. Some of the trees were so tall and old that they must have been growing there when Vasco da Gama first found Natal; but there were mangoes and sweetly-smelling orange arbours, that could only have been planted a mere twenty or thirty years. The magnolia bushes were in bud, and clots of red and golden flowers were all aflare. Cacti, spreading wide prickly arms, and tall furzy grasses. Cool wet corners had grottos frondy with ferns; other corners were like small tropical jungles with enormous palms trailed and tangled over with heavy waxen-leaved creepers and strangely shaped flowers.

At last, deep in the heart of this wild, still garden, she found the house. A tall rose-walled house, its balconies and verandahs, too, all draped and veiled with clinging green. One lovely creeper that clothed the hall-porch was alive with flowers that were like scarlet stars.

She broke one of them off and stuck it in the bosom of her gown, where it glowed and burned all day.

Then she rang the bell.

After a minute, someone came bustling down the hall and the door opened, discovering a stout and elderly coloured woman in a tight dress of navy-blue sateen with large white spots. Upon her head she wore a snowy dook. At the sight of the girl she shrieked, and fell back into a carved oak chair that stood conveniently at hand.

"Poppy!" she cried; "and no carriage sent for Luce! What time did the steamer come, in the name of goodness me?"

"It's no use asking that question now, Kykie," said the girl grimly. "The only thing to do is to send a carriage down at once."

Kykie departed with amazing alacrity, while the girl examined the hall, and opening the doors that gave off it, peeped into several rooms.

"Most of the old furniture from the farm!" she commented with a look of pleasure. Presently she came to a flight of three stairs, and directed by the sound of Kykie's voice, she stepped down them and found herself in a large white-washed kitchen lined with spotless deal tables and broad shelves. An enormous kitchen range, shining and gleaming with steel and brass, took up the whole of one side of the kitchen. Wide windows let in a flood of cheerful sunshine.

Kykie, having loaded three Zulu boys with imprecations and instructions and driven them forth, had sunk into a chair again, panting, with her hand pressed to her heart, and an expression of utter misery on her face.

"Don't be so excited, Kykie," said the girl. "You can't escape the wrath to come; what is the use of making yourself miserable about it beforehand?"

Kykie rolled her big eyes heavenwards; the whites of them were a golden yellow.

"His first day home!" she wailed. "They told me at the shipping office the steamer wouldn't be in before three. May their mothers--"

Poppy walked round the kitchen, looking at everything.

"You've got all the same nice old copper things you had at the farm, haven't you, Kykie? But it is a much bigger kitchen. Which table will you let me have to mix the salads on?"

Kykie's face became ornamented with scowls.

"My salads are as good as anyone's," she asserted.

"Nonsense! you know Luce always likes mine best. Come upstairs now and show me my room."

"Me? With the lunch to get ready!" screamed Kykie, and jumping up she ran to the stove and began to rattle the pots.

"Well, I will find it myself," said Poppy, going towards the door, "and I think you're very unkind on my first day home."

But Kykie gave no heed. As a rule she was of a sociable turn of mind and under other circumstances would have hung about Poppy, showing her everything and bombarding her with questions; but now she was in the clutches of despair and dismay at the thought of her neglect of her adored master, Luce Abinger, and her very real fear of the storm that would surely break over her head when he arrived.

Kykie called herself a "coloured St. Helena lady," but by the fat gnarled shape of her, it is likely that she was more than half a Hottentot. Also the evidence of her hair was against her: it was crisp and woolly, instead of being lank and oily as a proper "St. Helena lady's" should be. However, she always kept it concealed beneath a spotless dook. Her real name, as she often informed Poppy in aggrieved accents, was Celia Frances Elizabeth of Teck Fortune; but Luce Abinger had brutally named her Kykie, and that was all she was ever called in his house. By way of retaliation it was her agreeable custom to address her master and Poppy Destin by their Christian names; but Luce Abinger only laughed, and Poppy didn't mind in the least. The old woman was quite ignorant and uneducated, but she had lived all her life as a servant amongst civilised people, and she spoke correct and fluent English, tacking many curious expressions of her own to the tails of her remarks with an air of intense refinement.

She was often crabbed of temper and cantankerous of tongue, but the heart within her wide and voluptuous bosom was big for Luce Abinger and all that pertained to him. She had served him during the whole of his twenty-five years of life in South Africa; and she was a very pearl of a cook.

Poppy found her room without any difficulty. On opening the first door on the first landing and looking in, she recognised her books, and the faded yellow silk counterpane with the border of red poppies worked by Kykie in past days. She took off her hat and surveyed the room with contentment. Her cushions were in her chairs; her books in their accustomed book-shelves; her long mirror with the slim gilt frame hung between two windows that gave upon the balcony; her writing-table stood opposite the mirror where she could look up and see herself as she wrote. Her brown print of Monna Lisa was above her dressing-table, and her silver cross with the ivory Christ nailed to it hung over her head-

"To keep a maid from harm!"