The Angels Weep - Smith Wilbur - Страница 108
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"Never mind." Jordan shook his head. "I hope you have a safe journey, Papa." Leaning from the carriage-window as the train pulled out from the platform, Zouga studied the receding figure of his youngest son. He was a fine-looking young fellow, Zouga decided, tall and athletic, his grey three-piece suit in fashion, yet also in perfect understated taste and yet there was something incongruous about him, an air of the lost waif, an aura of uncertainty and deep-rooted unhappiness.
"Damned nonsense," Zouga told himself, and drew his head in and pulled up the window by its leather strap.
The locomotive built up speed across the Cape flats for its assault on the rampart of mountains that guarded the African continental shield.
Jordan Ballantyne cantered up the driveway towards the great white house, that crouched amongst its oaks and stone-pines on the lower slopes of the flat-topped mountain. He was pursued by a feeling of guilt. It was many years since he had neglected his duties for an entire day. Even a year ago it would have been unthinkable for him to do so. Every day, Sunday and public holidays notwithstanding, Mr. Rhodes needed him close at hand.
The subtle change in their relationship was something that increased his feelings of guilt and introduced a darker more corrosive emotion. It had not been entirely necessary for him to spend the whole day with his father, from when the mailship worked her way into Table Bay, with the furious red dawn and the south-easter raging about her, until the northern express pulled out from under the glassed dome of Cape Town station. He could have slipped away and been back at his desk within a few hours, but he had tried to force a refusal out of Mr. Rhodes, an acknowledgement of his own indispensability.
"Take a few days if you like, Jordan Arnold will be able to handle anything that might come up." Mr. Rhodes had barely glanced up from the London papers.
"There is that new draft of Clause 27 of your will-" Jordan had tried to provoke him, and instead received the reply he most dreaded.
"Oh, give that to Arnold. It's time he understood about the scholarships. Anyway, it will give him a chance to use that newfangled Remington machine of his." Mr. Rhodes" childlike pleasure in having his correspondence printed out swiftly and neatly on the caligraph was another source of disquiet to Jordan. Jordan had not yet mastered the caligraph's noisy keyboard, chiefly because Arnold's jealousy monopolized the machine. Jordan had ordered his own model shipped out to him, but it had to come from New York and it would be months yet before he could expect it to arrive.
Now Jordan reined in the big glossy bay at the steps to Groote Schuur's back stoep, and as he dismounted, he tossed the reins to the groom, and hurried into the house. He took the backstairs to the second floor, and went directly to his OWn room, unbuttoning his shirt and pulling the tails from his breeches as he kicked the door closed behind him.
He poured water from the Delft jug into the basin and splashed it onto his face. Then he dried on a fluffy white towel, tossed it aside and picked up the silver-handled brushes and ran them over his crisp golden curls. He was about to turn away from the mirror and find -a fresh shirt when he stopped, and stared thoughtfully at his own image.
Slowly he leaned closer to the glass and touched his face with his fingertips. There were crows" feet at the outer corners of his eyes, he stretched the skin between his fingers but the lines persisted. He turned his head slightly, the light from the tall window showed up the pouches beneath his eyes.
"You only see them at that angle," he thought, and then flattened his hair back from the peak of his forehead with the palm of his hand.
There was the pearly gleam of his scalp through the thinning strands, and quickly he fluffed his hair up again.
He wanted to turn away, but the mirror had a dreadful fascination.
He smiled. it was a grimace that lifted his upper lip. His left canine tooth was darker, definitely a darker grey than it had been a month before when the dentist had drilled out the nerve, and suddenly Jordan was overwhelmed by a cold penetrating despair.
"In less than two weeks" time I will be thirty years old oh God, I'm getting old, so old and ugly. How can anyone still like me?" He bore down hard on the sob that threatened to choke him, and turned away from the cruel glass.
In his office there was a note in the centre of the tooled morocco leather top of his desk, weighted down with the silver ink well.
"See me as soon as possible. C. J. R." It was in that familiar spiky scrawl, and Jordan felt a leap of his spirits. He picked up his shorthand Pad, and knocked on the communicating door.
"Come!" the high-pitched voice commanded, and Jordan went through.
"Good evening, Mr. Rhodes, you wanted to see me?" Mr. Rhodes did not reply at once, but went on making corrections to the typed sheet in front of him, crossing out a word and scrawling a substitute above it, changing a comma to a semi-colon, and while he worked, Jordan studied his face. The deterioration was shocking. He was almost to grey now, and the pouches below his eyes were a deep purple colour.
His jowl had thickened and hung in a dewlap under his jawbone. His eyes were red rimmed and their Messianic blue was blurred and diluted.
All this in the six months or so since Jameson's disastrous raid, and Jordan's thoughts jumped back to that day that the news had come.
Jordan had brought it to him in this same library.
There had been three telegrams. One from Jameson himself was addressed to Mr. Rhodes" Cape Town office, not to the mansion at Groote Schuur, and so it had lain all weekend in the letterbox of the deserted building. It began, "As I do not hear from you to the contrary-" The second telegram was from the magistrate at Mafeking, Mr. Bayes. It read in part, "Colonel Grey has ridden with police detachments to reinforce Dr. Jameson-" The last telegram was from the commissioner of police at Kimberley. "I deem it my duty to inform you that Dr. Jameson, at the head of a body of armed men, has crossed the Transvaal border-" Mr. Rhodes had read the telegrams, meticulously arranging them on the top of his desk before him as he finished each.
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