Download Drifta Trek Poverty Mp3
Elvira Mu
She was not oblivious of the music. Her heart beat faster because ofit; and a temperament adjustable to every mood and turn of humanfeeling was answering to the poignancy of the opera; yet her youth,child-likeness, and natural spontaneity were controlled by an elateconsciousness. She was responsive to the passionate harmony; but shewas also acutely sensitive to the bold yet deferential appeal to heremotions of the dark, distinguished, bearded man at her side, with thebrown eyes and the Grecian profile, whose years spent in the ForeignOffice and at embassies on the Continent had given him a tact and aninsinuating address peculiarly alluring to her sex. She was well awareof Ian Stafford's ambitions, and had come to the point where shedelighted in them, and had thought of sharing in them, "for weal or forwoe"; but she would probably have resented the suggestion that hiscomparative poverty was weighed against her natural inclinations andhis real and honest passion. For she had her ambitions, too; and whenshe had scanned the royal box that night, she had felt that somethingonly little less than a diadem would really satisfy her.
Looking at her visitor with a new sense of observation alive in her,Jasmine saw the inherent native drowsiness of the nature, the love ofsleep and good living, the healthy primary desires, the striving,adventurous, yet, in one sense, unambitious soul. The very cleft in thechin, like the alluring dimple of a child's cheek, enlarged andhardened, was suggestive of animal beauty, with its parallel suggestionof indolence. Yet, somehow, too ample as he was both in fact and bysuggestion to the imagination there was an apparent underlying force, acapacity to do huge things when once roused. He had been roused in hisshort day. The life into which he had been thrown with men of vasterambition and much more selfish ends than his own, had stirred him toprodigies of activity in those strenuous, wonderful, electric days whengold and diamonds changed the hard-bitten, wearied prospector, who haddoggedly delved till he had forced open the hand of the Spirit of theEarth and caught the treasure that flowed forth, into a millionaire,into a conqueror, with the world at his feet. He had been of those who,for many a night and many a year, eating food scarce fit for Kaffirs,had, in poverty and grim endeavour, seen the sun rise and fall over theMagaliesberg range, hope alive in the morning and dead at night. He hadfaced the devilish storms which swept the high veld with lightning andthe thunderstone, striking men dead as they fled for shelter to theboulders of some barren, mocking kopje; and he had had the occasionalwild nights of carousal, when the miseries and robberies of life andtime and the ceaseless weariness and hope deferred, were forgotten.
There was also De Lancy Scovel, who had become a biggish figure in theRand world because he had been a kind of financial valet to Wallsteinand Byng, and, it was said, had been a real unofficial valet to Rhodes,being an authority on cooking, and on brewing a punch, and a master ofcommissariat in the long marches which Rhodes made in the days when hetrekked into Rhodesia. It was indeed said that he had made his firstten thousand pounds out of two trips which Rhodes made en route toLobengula, and had added to this amount on the principle of compoundmultiplication when the Matabele war came; for here again he had acollateral interest in the commissariat.
"What did Krool do? He tell Oom Paul how the thieves would to come inthe night to sold him like sheep to a butcher, how the t'ousand wolveswould swarm upon the sheepfold, and there would be no homes for thevoortrekker and his vrouw, how the Outlander would sit on our stoepsand pick the peaches from our gardens. And he tell him other thingsgood for him to hear."
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