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"And is the outlook still as bad as it was?" "Worse. However, we must hope it'll go better." "I hear that you and that queer man, Mr. Hazon, have become such friends, Mr. Stanninghame." This was the sort of remark with which Laurence had scant patience, the more so that it met him at every turn.
But Tyisandhlu seemed to have forgotten his existence, for he bestowed no further word upon him; however, he was taken charge of by Ngumúnye, who assigned him a large hut within the royal kraal. The next few days were spent by the Ba-gcatya in dancing and ceremonial and by Laurence Stanninghame in trying to find out all he could about the Ba-gcatya.
Laurence Stanninghame, striving to kill the few hours remaining to him on African soil, was strolling listlessly along Adderley Street. A shop window, adorned with photographic views of local scenery and types of natives, mostly store-boys rigged up with shield and assegai to look warlike for the occasion, attracted his attention, and for a while he stood, idly gazing at these.
"Man alive, but we were talking about her! About her, and she heard it! Don't you understand?" "Perfectly; still I don't care a hang. A hang? No, nor the rope, nor the drop, nor the whole jolly gallows do I care. Will that do?" Holmes gasped. This fellow Stanninghame was a lunatic. Mad, by Jove!
It was more than a passing thought, nor from that moment onward could Laurence ever get it entirely out of his mind. "Fill your pipe, Stanninghame," said Hazon, breaking into this train of thought, which, all unconsciously, had entailed a long gap of silence.
If anyone had told Laurence Stanninghame but an hour earlier that he was about to commit so rash and suicidal an act as to beg the life of another at the hands of a grossly insulted despot, and in the face of an enraged nation, he would have scouted the idea as too weakly idiotic for words. Yet, in fact, he had just committed that very act.
Then, for upwards of an hour, the pair talked together; and when the luncheon bell rang, and Laurence Stanninghame took his seat at the table along with the rest, to talk scrip in the scathingly despondent way in which the darling topic was conversationally dealt with in these days, he was conscious that he had turned the corner of a curious psychological crisis in his life.
There were other phases of nocturnal excitement, more or less of a stimulating nature frequent rows, to wit, culminating in a nasty rough-and-tumble, and now and then a startling and barbarous murder. Now, to Laurence Stanninghame not any of the above forms of diversion held out the slightest possible attractiveness.
Yet the remembrance of that sleeping vision shut him in, surrounded him as with a very halo, sweet, fragrant, enthralling, rolling around his soul as a cloud of intoxicating ether. Upon a temperament such as that of Laurence Stanninghame the life of the past two years was bound to tell.
That would counteract any passing effect that might be inspired by a vacant chair, thought Laurence Stanninghame, amid the roar of the mail train speeding through the raw haze of the early morning. Sentiment? feelings? What had he to do with such? They were luxuries, and as such only for those who could afford to indulge in them. He could not.
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