Текст книги "The Angels Weep"

Автор книги: Wilbur Smith

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Ralph had two of his troopers set it up with the thick water jacketed barrel just clearing the lip of the don ga There were 2,000 rounds of ammunition in the oblong boxes, stacked beside the weapon. While Harry Mellow cut branches of thorn brush to screen the Maxim, Ralph paced off the ranges in front of the don ga and set up a cairn of loose stones beside the footpath.

He came scrambling back up the slope, and told Harry, "Set the sights for three hundred yards." Then he went down the length of the don ga giving his orders to each man, and making him repeat them to ensure there was no misunderstanding.

"When Jan Cheroot reaches the cairn, the Maxim will fire. Wait for the Maxim, then open up on the back of the column, and move your fire forward." Sergeant Ezra nodded, and levered a cartridge into the breech of the Winchester. He screwed up his eyes, judging the wind-deflection by the swaying of the gras stops and the feel of it against his face. Then he settled his elbow on the earthen parapet -of the gulley, and laid his scarred cheek against the butt.

Ralph retuffied along the don ga to where Harry Mellow was preparing the Maxim. He watched while Harry twisted the elevation screw to raise the barrel slightly to the 300 yard setting, and then swung the gun left and right in its tripod to make certain that the traverse was free and clear.

"Load one," Ralph ordered, and Taos, who was loading, fed the brass tag of the cartridge-belt into the open breech. Harry let the loading handle fly back and the mechanism clattered harshly.

"Load two!" He pumped the handle a second time, pulling the belt through, and the first round was extracted from the belt and fed smoothly into the breech.

"Ready!" Harry looked up at Ralph. "Now all we have to do is wait." Ralph nodded, and opened the pouch on his hip. From it he took the strip of brown mole-skin and bound it carefully about his right arm above the elbow. Then they settled down to wait.

They waited in the sunlight, and it beat down upon their greasy naked backs, until their sweat oozed from clogged pores and the flies came swarming gleefully to it. They waited while the sun made its noon, and then began to slip down the farther side of the sky.

Abruptly, Ralph raised his head, and at the movement a little stirring rippled down the row of marksmen lining the lip of the don ga

There was a sound of many voices at a distance, and they woke echoes from the lichen-stained cliffs that guarded the entrance to the gorge.

Then there was singing, sweet children's voices, the sound of it rose and filled with each fluke of the wind and each turn in the rocky passage.

From the entrance to the gorge a diminutive figure came dancing.

The weird pattern of red and black and white paints disguised Jan Cheroot's flat pug-like features, and the buttery yellow of his skin, but there was no mistaking his sprightly step, and the way he carried his head at a birdlike angle. The sack of pretties that he had used as bait was long ago empty and had been discarded.

He scampered down the path towards the stone cairn which Ralph had built, and behind him came the Matabele. So eager were they that they crowded three or four abreast, and jostled each other to keep pace with the Pied Piper that led them.

"More then I had hoped," Ralph whispered, but Harry Mellow did not look at him. The coating of black fat covered the pallor of his face, but his eyes were stricken as he stared fixedly over the sights of the Maxim.

The long column of Matabele was still emerging from the gorge, but Jan Cheroot was almost level with the cairn. "Ready," Ralph grated.

Jan Cheroot reached the cairn, and then with a miraculous twinkling movement, he disappeared as though a pitfall had sucked him in.

"Now!"said Ralph.

Not a man in the long line of riflemen moved. They were all staring down into the valley.

"Now!" Ralph repeated.

The head of the column had stopped in bewilderment at Jan Cheroot's abrupt disappearance, and those behind pushed forward.

"Open fire!" Ralph ordered.

"I can't do it," whispered Harry, sitting behind the gun with both hands on the grips.

"Damn you!" Ralph's voice shook. "They slit Cathy's belly open, and tore my daughter out of her womb. Kill them, damn you!" "I can't," Harry choked, and Ralph seized his shoulder and dragged him backwards.

He dropped down behind the gun in his place, and grabbed the double pistol grips. With his forefingers he hooked the safety-locks open, and then pressed his thumbs down on the cheque red firing-button.

The Maxim gun began its hellish fluttering roar, and the empty brass cartridge-cases spewed in a bright stream from the breech.

Peering through the drifts of blue gunsmoke, Ralph slowly traversed the gun from left to right, sweeping the pathway from the mouth of the gorge to the stone cairn, and from the don ga on each side of him the repeating Winchesters added their thunder to the din. The gunfire almost, but not quite, drowned out the sounds from the valley below.

Juba could not keep pace with the younger women, nor with the racing children. She lagged further and further behind, with Tungata urging her on anxiously.

"We will be too late, Grandmother. We must hurry." Before they reached the gorge at the end of the valley, Juba was wheezing and staggering, all her rolls of shining fat wobbling at each heavy pace, and she was seeing patches of darkness before her eyes.

"I must rest," she panted, and sank down beside the path. The stragglers streamed past her, laughing and joshing her as they entered the gorge.

"Ah, little Mother, do you want to climb up on my back?" Tungata waited beside her, hopping from one foot to the other, wringing his hands with impatience.

"Oh Grandmother, just a little farther-" When at last the patches of darkness cleared from her vision, she nodded at him, and he seized her hands and threw all the weight of his tiny body into levering her upright.

Now, as Juba hobbled along the path, they were the very last in the file, but they could hear the laughter and chanting far ahead, magnified by the funnel of the gorge. Tungata ran forward, and then drawn by his duty, skipped back to Juba's hand again.

"Please, Grandmother oh please!" Twice more Juba was forced to stop. They were all alone now, and the sunlight did not penetrate the depths of the narrow gorge. It was shadowy and the cold coming up from the dashing white waters chilled even Tungata's high spirits.

The two of them came around the bend, and looked out between the high granite portals into the open sunlit grassy bowl beyond.

"There they are!" Tungata cried with relief.

The pathway through the yellow grassland was thick with people, but, like a column of safari ants on the march that had come against an impossible obstacle, the head of the line was bunching and milling.

"Hurry, Grandmother, we can catch up!" Juba heaved her bulk upright and hobbled towards the welcoming warm sunlight.

At that moment the air around er head began to flutter as though a bird had been trapped within her skull. For a moment she thought that it was a symptom of her exhaustion, but then she saw the masses of human figures ahead of her begin to swirl and tumble and boil like dust-motes in a whirlwind.

Although she had never heard it before, she had listened when the warriors who had fought at Shangani and the Bembesi crossing described the little three-legged guns that chattered like old women. Armed suddenly by reserves of strength that she never believed she possessed, Juba seized Tungata. and blundered back up the gorge like a great cow elephant in flight.

Ralph -Ballantyne sat on the edge of his camp cot. There was a lighted candle set in its own wax on the upturned tea-chest that served as a table, and a half-filled whisky bottle and enamel mug beside it.

Ralph frowned at the open page of his journal, trying to focus in the flickering yellow candlelight. He was drunk. The bottle had been full half an hour before. He picked up the mug and drained it, set it down and poured from the bottle again. A few drops spilled onto the empty page of his journal. He wiped them away with his thumb and studied the wet mark it left with a drunkard's ponderous concentration.

He shook his head, to try and clear it, then he picked up his pen, dipped it and carefully wiped off the excess ink from the nib.

He wrote laboriously and where the ink touched the wetness left by the spilled whisky, it spread in a soft blue fan shape on the paper.

That annoyed him inordinately, and he flung the pen down and deliberately filled the enamel mug to the brim. He drank it, pausing twice for breath, and when the mug was empty, he held it between his knees, with his head bowed over it.

After a long time, and with an obvious effort, he lifted his head again, and re-read what he had written, his lips forming the words, like a schoolboy with his first reader.

"War makes monsters of us all." He reached for the bottle again, but knocked it on its side and the golden brown spirit glugged into a puddle on the lid of the tea-chest. He fell back on the cot and closed his eyes, his legs dangling to the floor and one arm thrown over his face protectively.

Elizabeth had put the boys to bed in the wagon, and crawled into the cot below theirs, careful not to disturb her own mother. Ralph had not eaten dinner with the family, and he had sent Jonathan back with a rough word when he had gone across to the tent to fetch his father to the meal.

Elizabeth lay on her side under the woollen blanket, and her eye was level with the laced-up opening in the canvas hood, so she could see out. The candle was still burning in Ralph's tent, but, in the corner of the laager, the tent that Harry and Vicky shared had been in darkness for an hour. She closed her eyes and tried to force herself to sleep, but she was so restless that beside her Robyn St. John sighed petulantly and rolled over. Elizabeth opened her eyes again and peered surreptitiously through the canvas slit. The candle was still burning in Ralph's tent.

Gently she eased herself out from under the blanket, watching her mother the while. She picked up her shawl from the lid of the chest, and clambered silently down to the ground.

With the shawl about her shoulders, she sat on the disselboom of the wagon. There was still only a sheet of canvas between her and where her mother lay. She could clearly hear the rhythm of Robyn's breathing. She judged when she sank deeply below the level of consciousness, for her breathing made a soft glottal rattle in the back of her throat.

The night was warm, and the laager almost silent, a puppy yapped unhappily from the far end, and closer at hand a baby's hungry wail was swiftly gagged by a mother's teat. Two of the sentries met at the nearest corner of the laager, and their voices murmured for awhile.

Then they parted and she saw the silhouette of a slouch hat against the night sky as one of them passed close to where she sat.

The candle still burned in the tent, and it must be past midnight by now. The flame drew her as though she were a moth. She rose and crossed to the tent. Silently, almost furtively. She lifted the flap and slipped in, letting it drop closed behind her.

Ralph lay on his back on the steel cot, his booted feet dangled to the ground, and one arm covered his face. He was making an unhappy little whimpering sound in his sleep. The candle was guttering, burned down into a puddle of its own molten wax, and the smell of spilled whisky was sharp and pungent. Elizabeth crossed to the tea-chest, and set the fallen bottle upright. Then the open page of the journal caught her attention, and she read the big uneven scrawl. "War makes monsters of us all!" It gave her a pang of pity so sharp that she closed the leather bound journal quickly, and looked at the man who had written that agonized heart-cry. She wanted to reach across and touch his unshaven cheek, but instead she hitched her nightdress in a businesslike fashion and squatted beside the cot. She undid the straps of his riding-boots, and then, taking them one at a time between her knees, she pulled them off his feet. Ralph muttered and flung the arm off his face, rolling away from the candlelight. Gently Elizabeth lifted his legs and swung them up onto the cot. He groaned and curled into a foetal position.

"Big baby," she whispered, and smiled to herself. Then she could resist no longer and she stroked the thick dark lock of hair off his -forehead. His skin was fever-hot, moist with sweat, and she laid her palm against his cheek. His dark new beard was stiff and harsh, the feel of it sent electric prickles shooting up her arm. She pulled her hand away, and, once more businesslike, unfolded the blanket from the foot of the cot and drew it up over his body.

She leaned over him to settle it under his chin, but he rolled over again and before she could jump back, one hard muscular arm wrapped over her shoulder. She lost her balance and fell against his chest, and the arm pinned her helplessly.

She lay very still, her heart pounding wildly. After a minute the grip of his arm relaxed, and gently she tried to free herself. At her first movement, the arm locked about her, with such savage strength that her breath was driven from her lungs with a gasp.

Ralph mumbled, and brought his other hand over, and she convulsed with shock as it settled high up on the back of her thigh. She dared not move. She knew she could not break the grip of his restraining arm. She had never expected him to be so powerful, she felt as helpless as an unweaned infant, totally in his power. She felt the hand behind her begin to fumble and grope upwards and then she sensed the moment when he became conscious.

The hand slid up to the nape of her neck, and her head was pulled forward with a gentle but irresistible force until she felt the heat and the wetness of his mouth spread over hers. He tasted of whisky and something else, a yeasty musky man taste, and without her volition, her own lips melted and spread to meet his.

Her senses spun like wheels of flame behind her closed eyelids, the sensations were so tumultuous, that for long moments she did not realize that he had swept her nightdress up to the level of her shoulder-blades, and now his fingers, hard as bone, and hot as fire, ran in a long slow caress down the cleft of her naked buttocks and then settled into the soft curve where they joined her thighs. It galvanized her.

Her breath sobbed in her throat, and she struggled to be free, to escape from the torture of her own wild wanting, of her cruel need for him, and from his skilful insistent fingers. He held her easily, his mouth against the soft of her throat, and his voice was hoarse and tough.

"Cathy!"he said. "My Katie! I missed you so!" Elizabeth stopped struggling. She lay against him like a dead woman. No longer fighting, no longer even breathing. "Katie!" His hands were desperate to find her, but she was dead-dead.

He was fully awake now. His hands left Elizabeth's body and came up to her face. He cupped her head in his hands, and lifted it. He looked at her uncomprehendingly for a long moment, and then she saw the green change in his eyes.

"Not Cathy!"he whispered.

She opened his fingers gently and stood up beside the cot.

"Not Cathy" she said softly. "Cathy has gone, Ralph." She stooped over the guttering candle, cupped one hand behind it, and blew it out. Then she stood upright again in the sudden total darkness.

She unfastened the bodice of her nightdress, shrugged it over her shoulders and let it fall around her ankles. She stepped out of it and lay down on the cot beside Ralph. She took his unresisting hand and replaced it where it had been before.

"Not Cathy," she whispered. "Tonight it's Elizabeth. Tonight and for ever more." And she placed her mouth over his.

When at last she felt him fill all the sad and lonely places within her, her joy was so intense that it seemed to crush and bruise her soul and she said. "I love you. I have always loved you I will always love you." Jordan Ballantyne stood beside his father on the platform of the Cape Town railway station. They were both stiff and awkward in the moment of parting.

"Please don't forget to give my, "Jordan hesitated over the choice of words, "my very warmest regards to Louise." "I am sure she will be pleased," said Zouga "I have not seen her for so long–" Zouga broke off.

The separation from his wife had drawn out over the long months of his trial in the Queen's Bench Division of the High Court before the Lord Chief Justice, Baron Pollock, Mr. Justice Hawkins, and a special jury. The Lord Chief Justice had shepherded a reluctant jury towards the inevitable verdict.

"I direct you that, in accordance with the evidence and your answers to the specific questions I have put to you, you ought to find a verdict of guilty against all the defendants." And he had his way.

"The sentence of the Court, therefore, is that as to you Leander Starr Jameson, and as to you John Willoughby, that you be confined for a period of fifteen months" imprisonment without hard labour. That you, Major Zouga Ballantyne, have three months" imprisonment without hard labour." Zouga had served four weeks of his sentence in Holloway, and with the balance remitted, had been released to the dreadful news that in Rhodesia the Matabele had risen and that Bulawayo was under siege.

The voyage southwards down the Atlantic had been agonizing, he had had no word of Louise, nor of King's Lynn, and his imagination conjured up horrors that were nourished by tales of slaughter and mutilation.

Only when the Union Castle mail boat had docked that morning in Cape Town Harbour were his terrible anxieties relieved.

"She is safe in Bulawayo," Jordan had answered his first question.

Overcome with emotion, Zouga had embraced his youngest son, repeating, "Thank God, oh thank God!" over and over again.

They had lunched together in the dining-room of the Mount Nelson Hotel and Jordan had given his father the latest intelligence from the north.

"Napier and the Siege Committee seem to have stabilized the situation. They have got the survivors into Bulawayo, and Grey and Selous and Ralph with their irregulars have given the rebels a few bloody knocks to keep them at a wary distance.

"Of course the Matabele have an absolutely free run of the territory outside the laagers at Bulawayo and Gwelo and Belingwe. They do as they please, though strangely enough they do not seem to have closed the road to the southern drifts. If you can reach Kimberley in time to join the relief column that Spreckley is taking through, you should be in Bulawayo by the end of the month and Mr. Rhodes and I will not be long in joining you.

"Spreckley will be taking through only essential supplies, and a few hundred men to stiffen the defence of Bulawayo until the imperial troops can get there. As you probably know, Major-General Sir Frederick Carrington has been chosen to command, and Mr. Rhodes and I will be going up with his staff. I have no doubt we will bring the rebels to book very swiftly." Jordan kept up a monologue during the entire meal, to cover the embarrassment caused by the stares and the whispers of the other diners, who were deliciously scandalized by the presence of one of Jameson's freebooters in their midst. Zouga ignored the stir he was creating, and addressed himself to the meal and the conversation with Jordan until a young journalist from the Cape Times, clutching his shorthand pad, approached the table.

"I wonder if you would care to comment on the leniency of the sentences passed by the Lord Chief Justice." Only then did Zouga raise his head, and his expression was bleak.

"In the years ahead they will give medals and knighthoods to men who achieve exactly the same task that we attempted," he said quietly.

"Now will you be kind enough to let us finish our lunch in peace."

At the railway station Jordan fussed over making certain that Zouga's trunk was in the goods van and that he had a forward-facing seat in the last carriage. Then they faced each other awkwardly, as the guard blew his warning whistle.

"Mr. Rhodes asked me to enquire whether you would still be good enough to act as his agent at Bulawayo." "Tell Mr. Rhodes that I am honoured by his continued confidence." They shook hands and Zouga climbed into the coach. "If you see Ralph,-" "Yes?" Zouga asked.

"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.

"I thought I had stopped him," he had kept muttering as he read.

"I thought he understood that he must wait." By the time he had finished reading, he had been pale as candle wax and the flesh seemed to have sagged from the bones' of his face like un risen dough.

"Poor old Jameson," he had whispered at last. "Twenty years we have been friends and now he goes and destroys me." Mr. Rhodes had leaned his elbows on the desk and placed his face in his hands. He had sat like that for many minutes and then said clearly. "Well, Jordan, now I will see who my true friends are." Mr. Rhodes had not slept for five nights. after that. Jordan had lain awake in his own room down the passage and listened to the heavy tread back and forth across the yellowwood floor, and then, long before the first light of dawn, Mr. Rhodes would ring for him, and they would ride together for hours upon the slopes of Table Mountain before returning to the great white mansion to face the latest renunciations and rejections, to watch with a kind of helpless fascination his life and his work crumbling inexorably into dust about them.

Then Arnold had arrived to take his place as Jordan's assistant.

His official title was second secretary, and Jordan had welcomed his assistance with the more mundane details of running the complex household. He had accompanied them on their visit to London in the aftermath of Jameson's misadventure, and remained firmly by Rhodes" side on the long return journey via the Suez Canel, Beira and Salisbury.

Now Arnold stood attentively beside Mr. Rhodes" desk, handing him a sheet typed upon the caligraph, waiting while he read and corrected it, and then replacing it with a fresh sheet. With the rancid taste of envy, Jordan recognized, not for the first time, that Arnold possessed the clean blond good looks that Mr. Rhodes so much admired. His demeanour was modest and frank, yet when he laughed, his entire being seemed to glow with some inner illumination. He had been up at Oriel, Mr. Rhodes" old Oxford college, and it was more and more obvious that Mr. Rhodes took pleasure and comfort in having him near by, as he had once taken from Jordan's presence.

Jordan waited quietly by the door, feeling strangely out of place in what he had come to think of as his own home, until Mr. Rhodes handed the last corrected sheet to Arnold and looked up.

"Ah, Jordan," he said. "I wanted to warn you that I am advancing the date of my departure for Bulawayo. I think my Rhodesians need me.

I must go to them." "I will see to it immediately," Jordan nodded.

"Have you decided on a date, Mr. Rhodes?" "Next Monday." "We will take the express to Kimberley, of course?" "You will not be accompanying me," said Mr. Rhodes flatly.

"I do not understand, Mr. Rhodes. "Jordan made a helpless little gesture of incomprehension.

"I require utter loyalty and honesty in my employees." "Yes, Mr. Rhodes, I know that." Jordan nodded, and then slowly his expression became uncertain and disbelieving. "You are not suggesting that I have ever been disloyal or dishonest-" "Get that file, please, Arnold," Mr. Rhodes ordered, and when he fetched it from the library table, he added, "Give it to him. Arnold silently came across the thick silk and wool carpet, and offered the box-file to Jordan. As he reached for it, Jordan was aware, for the first time ever, of something other than openness and friendly concern in Arnold's eyes, it was a flash of vindictive triumph so vicious as to sting like the lash of a riding-whip across the face. It lasted for only a blink Of time, and was gone so swiftly that it might never have been, but it left Jordan feeling utterly vulnerable and in dreadful danger.