Chapter Thirty Three.The sunlight flooded the rondavel and played in a golden radiance about Honor’s figure. The gleam of it was in her hair; it shone dazzlingly on her white dress, and sparkled with a hard brilliance on the plain gold circlet on her finger. Matheson caught the glint of the ring, and from that moment it seemed to him that all the light in the room became contracted and centred in that narrow band, darting forth its refracted rays with a fiery challenge that hurt the eyes.He put up a hand to shut out the sinister gleam of it, and lay quiet and in silence. Honor had risen and moved away from the bed. She stood with her face partly averted, watching the beauty of the sunrise through the uncurtained open window. An immense embarrassment held her, an embarrassment that made itself felt and in which the man shared. A sense of wrongdoing robbed them both of all pleasure in that long caress in the dawn, when their lips had met and lingered in the first kiss they had interchanged. He had kissed her once before on the brow; that kiss had been one of renunciation; the kiss he had given her that morning held the quality of passion in its eager warmth, a passion to which the woman was not insensible, to which she had in a measure responded. It had been the act of a moment in obedience to the impulse of the moment, and it left them both a little overcome and excited and enormously self-conscious.Honor was startled. There was an expression akin to fear in the eyes that looked out at the sunlight, a warm colour in the beautiful face as if the rosy light in the sky had caught and flushed her cheeks. Her breathing was hurried, and the hand hanging at her side, the hand with its shining circlet, clenched and unclenched itself nervously. What had she done?—she, the bride of a few weeks. It was her fault, entirely her fault; she had always known that he loved her—had realised when she kissed him that she was touching fire. And yet after all what harm was there in what had passed between them? Why should she deny him that small satisfaction? She turned impulsively towards him, and stood transfixed, surprised and disconcerted at the sight of him lying with his eyes shielded by his hand. Why did he lie like that? Why would he not lode at her?“Mr Matheson!” she said softly.He uncovered his eyes immediately and met her inquiring gaze.“Oh, hang it all!” he exclaimed. “Why don’t you call me Guy? We’ve got beyond formalities.”He turned on his elbow.“Come here,” he said. “I can’t talk to you from a distance. It’s all right. I’ll not forget again. I’ve been seeing that damned ring on your finger till I’m wellnigh blinded by it. It stands between us. I’m not likely to forget that. And there’s something else between us—something... I ought to have remembered sooner. But the sight of you...”He broke off with jerky abruptness. Honor, observing him wonderingly, drew nearer in obedience to his wish, and seated herself in the chair near the bed. She folded her hands in her lap, and the ring was hidden from him. He noticed that, and wondered if she concealed it intentionally.“I want to get away,” he said. “You must help me. I want some kind of conveyance... You’ll see to it? ... It doesn’t matter about this morning... After I leave I shall never see you again. I wish I had not seen you—ever. I wish I could forget you, but I know that is out of the question. I’ll never forget... your face... your voice... these will live in my memory. I am going to be married almost immediately, to the best little girl who ever loved a man not worthy of her. I’ve a warm affection for her—a warm affection, and an immense respect... but I have given the best of myself to you. That fact I am afraid is going to spoil life for both of us—for her and for me, I mean.”“Need she know?” Honor asked quickly, in a voice that was not quite steady.“She knows already. I had to tell her that before asking her to be my wife.”“I’m sorry,” she said. “Oh! I’m sorry.”She was silent for a moment; then she burst forth with a sudden soft vehemence that surprised him. He fell to listening, wondering, while he watched her working face, as expressive of the emotion that swayed her as the full rich tones giving voice to the flow of resentful thoughts that expressed their owner’s discontent with life, why this complicated business of life and love should be dependent upon infinitesimal human needs; why the disconnected individual existence should act and interact upon each separate existence it came in contact with until certain lives became interwoven with its own and, in adding to its completeness, divorced it from its former state of comfortable detachment? To love much is to suffer much; to love not at all is to remain unacquainted with happiness. And it is never a matter of choice: the lover is fashioned by circumstance; he is not his own creator.“I think you were unwise to tell her,” Honor said, speaking low, and looking away from him, gazing abstractedly at the golden path that stretched from the doorway to her feet with wide unseeing eyes. “Your confidence only aggravates the wrong. Life hurts enough.” She pressed her hands the one upon the other tightly in her lap, and her face was sad. “Life has its beginning in pain; it struggles painfully through the years to the inevitable end. We regard life dishonestly; we’re afraid to face the truth. We speak of the beauty of Nature, her kindliness and compassion; and we look about us and behold the drought, and the beasts dying of hunger and thirst; that is not beauty, it is ugliness: we see men striving in a hated rivalry, competing always—killing one another; that is not kindliness; kindliness is not born of the lust of hate. Throughout creation, from the meanest organic life to the highest, one thing preys upon another and kills in order to live; that is not compassion. Beauty and serenity exist only in inanimate objects. Perhaps that is why inanimate nature endures while we pass away.“I love this land,” she added, in soft impassioned accents, “as a woman loves her child. I wish I were a man that I could fight for it. Your country in annexing ours tears my child from my arms. And you talk to me of the futility, the wrong, of my wish to reclaim it... Go back to the girl who loves you, marry her, and have children of your own; and then perhaps you will understand. She will forget when her first child lies in her arms that its father’s love was ever given elsewhere. And you will forget too. No human passion is so acute that time cannot dim its keenness. I want you to forget. I want you, if you ever think of me, to think of me kindly as a friend.”“Friend!” he ejaculated scornfully.“It’s the sweetest word in all the English language,” she returned gently, “when it is applied sincerely.”“That may be,” he admitted, and thought how ill the term applied in his case.It incensed him that she could talk in that dispassionate manner about friendship with his burning kisses hot upon her lips. He believed that she was dissembling for the purpose of hiding from him her real feelings. He had never really understood her. She was capable of an immense reserve; not once in their most intimate moments had she permitted herself to be entirely frank with him.“Perhaps in the future,” he said, “I may come to regard this thing with the same cool detachment as yourself; but I can’t think of you as a friend—yet. And it is dishonourable for me to think of you in any other way. I hadn’t heard of your marriage. I can’t get used to the idea. It seems to me fantastic and unreal I met Herman Nel in Cape Town; he never mentioned it.”“I doubt whether he knew of it,” she answered. “Herman has not been to Benfontein for some months. Freidja is away nursing. She has quarrelled with him.”“Is she going to spoil her life and his?” he asked with sharp impatience, recalling Nel’s face with its slightly wistful smile when the Dutchman had spoken to him of the rupture of his engagement.Honor looked surprised.“No,” she said. “After the war she will marry him. She loves him. Herman is a good man, and he is Dutch. They will live here.”“And you?” he asked. “Are you going to forsake Benfontein?”She smiled at the question. The farm on the Karroo was more precious to her than the fairest places of earth. She had come to Benfontein as a child. Every tree and kopje, every flower that blossomed in the veld, was dear to her with the priceless value of long familiar things. To quit Benfontein would be to tear herself up by roots too deeply set to bear such ruthless transplanting.“Heinrich is working the farm for Andreas in his absence,” she explained; “he rents half the farm. We shall build a house for ourselves on the land, and I shall live near my mother. When Andreas marries, she will come to us.”“You make plans,” he said, surprised at her confidence in the future. “One cannot think beyond the present these days. I do not look so far ahead.”“I forgot,” she said, glancing at him swiftly. “You are going to fight—against us...”“I am going to join Botha’s force as soon as I am married,” he answered.“You’ve talked with Herman... He has persuaded you?”Her tone held a note of suspicion. For all his talk of love for her, he had not been ready to yield to her persuasions. He was even prepared to fight against her people, to look upon her people and herself as rebels. That was not consistent with love.“Herman has persuaded you,” she said again.“He helped to convince me, I admit.”“I tried to convince you,” she said quickly. “I did my utmost to prove to you the justice of our cause... Why couldn’t you at least have kept out of it? Why must you strike at me?”“Oh! Honor,” he protested. “You look at this thing so differently. It isn’t a personal question at all.”“It is,” she cried passionately—“between you and me.” She leaned towards him, her face quivering, and flushed with angry shame. “No one knows better than you do all this means to me. I’ve told you so much. I’ve trusted you. And in return—in return you take up arms against me. You talk of love—you, who cannot be true either to the woman you profess to love, or to the woman you are pledged to marry! Your love is not worthy any woman’s acceptance.”“I’ve deserved that,” he replied, with a quick change of colour, and averting his gaze from the stormy reproach in her eyes. It came to him in a swift illuminating flash that intense natures such as Honor’s were not only difficult to understand, they were difficult also to deal with; possibly they would be difficult to live with.He found this fresh mood disconcerting and distressing. And the reproach to his honour came ill from her. He felt suddenly very tired. He needed food. In her excitement she had forgotten the nourishment that stood ready for him on the table, slowly cooling while they talked.“It isn’t altogether my fault,” he asserted with almost sullen insistence. “I’m not myself. I’m unnerved. You come to me when I’m altogether unprepared, and—my God! how the sight of you tempts me! But you are hard, Honor. All that is gentle in your nature has been deliberately suppressed.”“I’ve been tutored in a hard world,” she replied oddly. “It is well, perhaps, that I am hard. A woman needs an armour of steel to protect herself from the selfishness of men’s love I believed in you once... I cared... You know I cared. But you wanted everything, and would give nothing. That is your way. For men like Beyers and Christian de Wet I would die, if it would benefit them at all. They are brave men with a single purpose in life. You call them rebels; we regard them as heroes. Had you joined us, I would have done anything for you. Instead, you side with the men who are trying to defeat our cause. Can you wonder that I am bitter when you speak to me of love and strike with the other hand?”She got up abruptly, and stood for a moment irresolute, looking down at him, the anger dying slowly out of her eyes.“It isn’t any use—it isn’t any use at all to speak of these things now. You will go your way, I mine. But it might have been so different. Last year, when you went away, I hoped you would change your mind and come back. I didn’t know then of this girl. Heinrich told me about her. You went back to her, and my influence ended.”So Holman had enlightened her about Brenda. Doubtless he had done so in order to prosper his own suit. It was a card he would not have scrupled to play.“I could never have embraced your cause,” he said gently. “I know what you have suffered, and I feel for you. But the affairs of nations are outside individual grievances. One has to accept a broader outlook. I shall never forget that I owe it to you that I learnt to see your point of view so clearly that I look upon this movement less as a rebellion than the persistence in a righteous if mistaken cause by a people who have never known discipline. In relying upon Germany you rely upon a ruthless enemy; the protection of the British flag alone secures your independence. This Colony is governed largely by the Dutch, in the interests of the Dutch collectively with the British, and for the good of the native community. You cannot improve on that. Let well alone, Honor, and heal old wounds. Herman Nel’s method of winning is the better and surer way.”“Ah, Herman!” she said, and smiled. “Herman is a dreamer.”“He dreams sanely,” he answered with conviction.“Which means that he thinks as you do.”She moved away to the table and took up the neglected food.“See what a bad nurse I make,” she said, assuming a lighter manner. “I would starve you while I attempt to show you the error of your ways. It would appear that where you are concerned I must fail in everything.”She brought the cup to the bedside. He took it from her hand and drained the contents eagerly.“You were famished,” she said reproachfully. “Yet you wouldn’t ask me for food.”“I hate to give so much trouble,” he answered. “If you wouldn’t mind calling Butter Tom presently, I will get up and dress with his assistance. It’s all humbug, my lying here, and taking slops. I could eat an ox.”“I’ll dress your wound first,” she said. “That is something I can do for you better than Butter Tom.”“You dressed it before?” he asked. “I wondered. I thought possibly I owed that to you. Honor...” He looked at her appealingly. “You are not going to let us part with a sense of ill will between us? I want to believe that when I am gone you will sometimes think kindly of me.”Honor did not at once reply. She stood With the empty cup in her hand, the sunlight warming her face, shining on the white surface of the vessel into which she gazed in thoughtful abstraction, brightening her whole figure, and the room which formed a quaint and fitting background for this girl who belonged to the wilds, and whose beauty suggested always to the man who watched her sunlit spaces and warmth and the scent and the winds of the veld. She lifted her gaze suddenly and met hiseyes.“Don’t let us talk of these matters,” she said. “It is wiser with the coming of morning to cease to dwell on the dreams which belong to the night that is past. I’ve dreamed my dreams—you too. We are awake now, and the day calls us to other activities. Just for a moment while sleep drugged our senses we forgot. But we are neither of us people who forget for long the path of honour.”His gaze fell before her steady eyes. She was right. Their paths in life were no tractless ways; they stretched straight ahead, clearly defined and mile-stoned with duties, leading always in opposite directions to the accepted goal—the goal of individual endeavour which contributes its effort to the unending scheme of life.
The sunlight flooded the rondavel and played in a golden radiance about Honor’s figure. The gleam of it was in her hair; it shone dazzlingly on her white dress, and sparkled with a hard brilliance on the plain gold circlet on her finger. Matheson caught the glint of the ring, and from that moment it seemed to him that all the light in the room became contracted and centred in that narrow band, darting forth its refracted rays with a fiery challenge that hurt the eyes.
He put up a hand to shut out the sinister gleam of it, and lay quiet and in silence. Honor had risen and moved away from the bed. She stood with her face partly averted, watching the beauty of the sunrise through the uncurtained open window. An immense embarrassment held her, an embarrassment that made itself felt and in which the man shared. A sense of wrongdoing robbed them both of all pleasure in that long caress in the dawn, when their lips had met and lingered in the first kiss they had interchanged. He had kissed her once before on the brow; that kiss had been one of renunciation; the kiss he had given her that morning held the quality of passion in its eager warmth, a passion to which the woman was not insensible, to which she had in a measure responded. It had been the act of a moment in obedience to the impulse of the moment, and it left them both a little overcome and excited and enormously self-conscious.
Honor was startled. There was an expression akin to fear in the eyes that looked out at the sunlight, a warm colour in the beautiful face as if the rosy light in the sky had caught and flushed her cheeks. Her breathing was hurried, and the hand hanging at her side, the hand with its shining circlet, clenched and unclenched itself nervously. What had she done?—she, the bride of a few weeks. It was her fault, entirely her fault; she had always known that he loved her—had realised when she kissed him that she was touching fire. And yet after all what harm was there in what had passed between them? Why should she deny him that small satisfaction? She turned impulsively towards him, and stood transfixed, surprised and disconcerted at the sight of him lying with his eyes shielded by his hand. Why did he lie like that? Why would he not lode at her?
“Mr Matheson!” she said softly.
He uncovered his eyes immediately and met her inquiring gaze.
“Oh, hang it all!” he exclaimed. “Why don’t you call me Guy? We’ve got beyond formalities.”
He turned on his elbow.
“Come here,” he said. “I can’t talk to you from a distance. It’s all right. I’ll not forget again. I’ve been seeing that damned ring on your finger till I’m wellnigh blinded by it. It stands between us. I’m not likely to forget that. And there’s something else between us—something... I ought to have remembered sooner. But the sight of you...”
He broke off with jerky abruptness. Honor, observing him wonderingly, drew nearer in obedience to his wish, and seated herself in the chair near the bed. She folded her hands in her lap, and the ring was hidden from him. He noticed that, and wondered if she concealed it intentionally.
“I want to get away,” he said. “You must help me. I want some kind of conveyance... You’ll see to it? ... It doesn’t matter about this morning... After I leave I shall never see you again. I wish I had not seen you—ever. I wish I could forget you, but I know that is out of the question. I’ll never forget... your face... your voice... these will live in my memory. I am going to be married almost immediately, to the best little girl who ever loved a man not worthy of her. I’ve a warm affection for her—a warm affection, and an immense respect... but I have given the best of myself to you. That fact I am afraid is going to spoil life for both of us—for her and for me, I mean.”
“Need she know?” Honor asked quickly, in a voice that was not quite steady.
“She knows already. I had to tell her that before asking her to be my wife.”
“I’m sorry,” she said. “Oh! I’m sorry.”
She was silent for a moment; then she burst forth with a sudden soft vehemence that surprised him. He fell to listening, wondering, while he watched her working face, as expressive of the emotion that swayed her as the full rich tones giving voice to the flow of resentful thoughts that expressed their owner’s discontent with life, why this complicated business of life and love should be dependent upon infinitesimal human needs; why the disconnected individual existence should act and interact upon each separate existence it came in contact with until certain lives became interwoven with its own and, in adding to its completeness, divorced it from its former state of comfortable detachment? To love much is to suffer much; to love not at all is to remain unacquainted with happiness. And it is never a matter of choice: the lover is fashioned by circumstance; he is not his own creator.
“I think you were unwise to tell her,” Honor said, speaking low, and looking away from him, gazing abstractedly at the golden path that stretched from the doorway to her feet with wide unseeing eyes. “Your confidence only aggravates the wrong. Life hurts enough.” She pressed her hands the one upon the other tightly in her lap, and her face was sad. “Life has its beginning in pain; it struggles painfully through the years to the inevitable end. We regard life dishonestly; we’re afraid to face the truth. We speak of the beauty of Nature, her kindliness and compassion; and we look about us and behold the drought, and the beasts dying of hunger and thirst; that is not beauty, it is ugliness: we see men striving in a hated rivalry, competing always—killing one another; that is not kindliness; kindliness is not born of the lust of hate. Throughout creation, from the meanest organic life to the highest, one thing preys upon another and kills in order to live; that is not compassion. Beauty and serenity exist only in inanimate objects. Perhaps that is why inanimate nature endures while we pass away.
“I love this land,” she added, in soft impassioned accents, “as a woman loves her child. I wish I were a man that I could fight for it. Your country in annexing ours tears my child from my arms. And you talk to me of the futility, the wrong, of my wish to reclaim it... Go back to the girl who loves you, marry her, and have children of your own; and then perhaps you will understand. She will forget when her first child lies in her arms that its father’s love was ever given elsewhere. And you will forget too. No human passion is so acute that time cannot dim its keenness. I want you to forget. I want you, if you ever think of me, to think of me kindly as a friend.”
“Friend!” he ejaculated scornfully.
“It’s the sweetest word in all the English language,” she returned gently, “when it is applied sincerely.”
“That may be,” he admitted, and thought how ill the term applied in his case.
It incensed him that she could talk in that dispassionate manner about friendship with his burning kisses hot upon her lips. He believed that she was dissembling for the purpose of hiding from him her real feelings. He had never really understood her. She was capable of an immense reserve; not once in their most intimate moments had she permitted herself to be entirely frank with him.
“Perhaps in the future,” he said, “I may come to regard this thing with the same cool detachment as yourself; but I can’t think of you as a friend—yet. And it is dishonourable for me to think of you in any other way. I hadn’t heard of your marriage. I can’t get used to the idea. It seems to me fantastic and unreal I met Herman Nel in Cape Town; he never mentioned it.”
“I doubt whether he knew of it,” she answered. “Herman has not been to Benfontein for some months. Freidja is away nursing. She has quarrelled with him.”
“Is she going to spoil her life and his?” he asked with sharp impatience, recalling Nel’s face with its slightly wistful smile when the Dutchman had spoken to him of the rupture of his engagement.
Honor looked surprised.
“No,” she said. “After the war she will marry him. She loves him. Herman is a good man, and he is Dutch. They will live here.”
“And you?” he asked. “Are you going to forsake Benfontein?”
She smiled at the question. The farm on the Karroo was more precious to her than the fairest places of earth. She had come to Benfontein as a child. Every tree and kopje, every flower that blossomed in the veld, was dear to her with the priceless value of long familiar things. To quit Benfontein would be to tear herself up by roots too deeply set to bear such ruthless transplanting.
“Heinrich is working the farm for Andreas in his absence,” she explained; “he rents half the farm. We shall build a house for ourselves on the land, and I shall live near my mother. When Andreas marries, she will come to us.”
“You make plans,” he said, surprised at her confidence in the future. “One cannot think beyond the present these days. I do not look so far ahead.”
“I forgot,” she said, glancing at him swiftly. “You are going to fight—against us...”
“I am going to join Botha’s force as soon as I am married,” he answered.
“You’ve talked with Herman... He has persuaded you?”
Her tone held a note of suspicion. For all his talk of love for her, he had not been ready to yield to her persuasions. He was even prepared to fight against her people, to look upon her people and herself as rebels. That was not consistent with love.
“Herman has persuaded you,” she said again.
“He helped to convince me, I admit.”
“I tried to convince you,” she said quickly. “I did my utmost to prove to you the justice of our cause... Why couldn’t you at least have kept out of it? Why must you strike at me?”
“Oh! Honor,” he protested. “You look at this thing so differently. It isn’t a personal question at all.”
“It is,” she cried passionately—“between you and me.” She leaned towards him, her face quivering, and flushed with angry shame. “No one knows better than you do all this means to me. I’ve told you so much. I’ve trusted you. And in return—in return you take up arms against me. You talk of love—you, who cannot be true either to the woman you profess to love, or to the woman you are pledged to marry! Your love is not worthy any woman’s acceptance.”
“I’ve deserved that,” he replied, with a quick change of colour, and averting his gaze from the stormy reproach in her eyes. It came to him in a swift illuminating flash that intense natures such as Honor’s were not only difficult to understand, they were difficult also to deal with; possibly they would be difficult to live with.
He found this fresh mood disconcerting and distressing. And the reproach to his honour came ill from her. He felt suddenly very tired. He needed food. In her excitement she had forgotten the nourishment that stood ready for him on the table, slowly cooling while they talked.
“It isn’t altogether my fault,” he asserted with almost sullen insistence. “I’m not myself. I’m unnerved. You come to me when I’m altogether unprepared, and—my God! how the sight of you tempts me! But you are hard, Honor. All that is gentle in your nature has been deliberately suppressed.”
“I’ve been tutored in a hard world,” she replied oddly. “It is well, perhaps, that I am hard. A woman needs an armour of steel to protect herself from the selfishness of men’s love I believed in you once... I cared... You know I cared. But you wanted everything, and would give nothing. That is your way. For men like Beyers and Christian de Wet I would die, if it would benefit them at all. They are brave men with a single purpose in life. You call them rebels; we regard them as heroes. Had you joined us, I would have done anything for you. Instead, you side with the men who are trying to defeat our cause. Can you wonder that I am bitter when you speak to me of love and strike with the other hand?”
She got up abruptly, and stood for a moment irresolute, looking down at him, the anger dying slowly out of her eyes.
“It isn’t any use—it isn’t any use at all to speak of these things now. You will go your way, I mine. But it might have been so different. Last year, when you went away, I hoped you would change your mind and come back. I didn’t know then of this girl. Heinrich told me about her. You went back to her, and my influence ended.”
So Holman had enlightened her about Brenda. Doubtless he had done so in order to prosper his own suit. It was a card he would not have scrupled to play.
“I could never have embraced your cause,” he said gently. “I know what you have suffered, and I feel for you. But the affairs of nations are outside individual grievances. One has to accept a broader outlook. I shall never forget that I owe it to you that I learnt to see your point of view so clearly that I look upon this movement less as a rebellion than the persistence in a righteous if mistaken cause by a people who have never known discipline. In relying upon Germany you rely upon a ruthless enemy; the protection of the British flag alone secures your independence. This Colony is governed largely by the Dutch, in the interests of the Dutch collectively with the British, and for the good of the native community. You cannot improve on that. Let well alone, Honor, and heal old wounds. Herman Nel’s method of winning is the better and surer way.”
“Ah, Herman!” she said, and smiled. “Herman is a dreamer.”
“He dreams sanely,” he answered with conviction.
“Which means that he thinks as you do.”
She moved away to the table and took up the neglected food.
“See what a bad nurse I make,” she said, assuming a lighter manner. “I would starve you while I attempt to show you the error of your ways. It would appear that where you are concerned I must fail in everything.”
She brought the cup to the bedside. He took it from her hand and drained the contents eagerly.
“You were famished,” she said reproachfully. “Yet you wouldn’t ask me for food.”
“I hate to give so much trouble,” he answered. “If you wouldn’t mind calling Butter Tom presently, I will get up and dress with his assistance. It’s all humbug, my lying here, and taking slops. I could eat an ox.”
“I’ll dress your wound first,” she said. “That is something I can do for you better than Butter Tom.”
“You dressed it before?” he asked. “I wondered. I thought possibly I owed that to you. Honor...” He looked at her appealingly. “You are not going to let us part with a sense of ill will between us? I want to believe that when I am gone you will sometimes think kindly of me.”
Honor did not at once reply. She stood With the empty cup in her hand, the sunlight warming her face, shining on the white surface of the vessel into which she gazed in thoughtful abstraction, brightening her whole figure, and the room which formed a quaint and fitting background for this girl who belonged to the wilds, and whose beauty suggested always to the man who watched her sunlit spaces and warmth and the scent and the winds of the veld. She lifted her gaze suddenly and met hiseyes.
“Don’t let us talk of these matters,” she said. “It is wiser with the coming of morning to cease to dwell on the dreams which belong to the night that is past. I’ve dreamed my dreams—you too. We are awake now, and the day calls us to other activities. Just for a moment while sleep drugged our senses we forgot. But we are neither of us people who forget for long the path of honour.”
His gaze fell before her steady eyes. She was right. Their paths in life were no tractless ways; they stretched straight ahead, clearly defined and mile-stoned with duties, leading always in opposite directions to the accepted goal—the goal of individual endeavour which contributes its effort to the unending scheme of life.
Chapter Thirty Four.There was a thoughtful look in Honor’s eyes when, leaving Butter Tom to the unaccustomed task of valeting the wounded baas, she stepped forth into the sunshine and walked with a certain weary reluctance towards the homestead. She was tired with her overnight vigil, and the emotional scene in the rondavel was succeeded by a feeling of exhaustion and nervous reaction. For the first time within her knowledge the thought of her cause failed to sustain her; and more than once the question formed itself in her mind whether after all this sacrifice of life were justified even in the securing of national independence? She had never doubted before. She had been as positive of the right and the urgency of their cause as she had felt certain of its ultimate success. Despite Herman Nel’s opposition, she had believed, until results proved the error of her hopes, in the whole-hearted co-operation of the entire Dutch community. Heinrich had assured her that the Boers would rise to a man. The treaty of Vereeniging was but another scrap of paper which the Teutonic mind lightly disregarded. Honor had disregarded it also, as a contract signed under compulsion by the leaders against the will of the majority; she felt that it was in no sense binding on the Dutch as a whole. Matheson’s statement that they were a people who had never known discipline stuck in her mind. Broadly it was true. The Boer does not submit readily to being governed, even by his own leaders. It is a nation in the making, without any of the traditions of an older race to guide it, but with sufficiently fine ideals from which to evolve traditions of its own. Clear-sighted men, like Nel, realised that there was nothing to be gained by fighting; the peaceful development of the country would best serve their interests.That morning, in a state of physical and mental fatigue, Honor allowed her thoughts to dwell for the first time on the possibility of failure. Matheson had shaken her confidence; and in reminding her that her own brother’s life might be sacrificed to the cause she so ardently espoused, he had caused her enthusiasm a rude check. She had not considered the toll in human life that would be exacted: the grim ugliness of war had been lost sight of in the dazzling prospect of victory. It did not seem to her possible that Andreas could be killed. If that should happen, the triumph of their cause would prove a hollow mockery, and her mother’s tragic life would end in added sadness. It was too big a price, Honor felt in her overwrought and dispirited mood—too big a price to pay even for victory.As she neared the homestead, coming towards her, she recognised her husband. She was unprepared to meet him there at that hour. He had ridden over from Benfontein. She wondered a little impatiently what brought him. His presence there so early in the morning disconcerted her. Although he was aware that she was sharing with her mother the care of the sick man, and had given her permission to dress Matheson’s wound and aid Mrs Krige with her professional knowledge, his acquiescence had not included sitting up with the patient at night: he had supposed she would sleep beneath Leentje Nel’s roof. It never occurred to him that Matheson’s case called for particular care. The wound was not serious—a flesh wound only; he saw no reason why the women should make a fuss over a mere scratch. In his opinion his own hurt called for greater consideration. His throat was sore and swollen; he had difficulty in swallowing. But Honor had expressed little sympathy with him. She had left him alone all night to care for the man who had injured him. He felt resentful; and he was angry with her because of her concern for the Englishman. What was this cursed Englishman to her that she should feel it her duty to tend him?“You are over early,” she said, when she came up with him. “I didn’t expect you.”“So I supposed,” he answered roughly, and turned and walked back beside her. “I’ve been to the farm. Leentje told me you were at the rondavel. I was going to fetch you. What were you doing there? I don’t choose that my wife should spend the night with any man, sick or well.”She flushed warmly.“Some one had to watch beside him,” she said with immense restraint. “There was no one else to do it.”“Absurd!” he replied angrily. “The nigger is good enough to wait on him. There was no one to look after me.”“You were not so badly hurt,” she returned, in a voice which despite its quiet tones should have warned him of her rising anger. She did not look at him; her eyes searched the landscape ahead of her, and rested with tired satisfaction on the dew-drenched sparse vegetation, cobwebbed with silver threads.“I feel sick enough,” he said savagely. “But that’s nothing to you. Leentje Nel wouldn’t nurse her husband’s murderer.”Honor smiled briefly.“You are very aggressively alive for a murdered man,” she said. She touched his sleeve diffidently. “Don’t be cross, Heinrich. I’m tired—so very tired. And this morning I am racked with anxious fears—fears for Andreas—fears for the cause. The country is not with us.”Holman made an angry gesture and spat upon the ground.“White-livered curs!” he muttered. “Everything was in our hands. They’ve sold us—these pitiful Boers. They’re afraid for their blessed skins.”Her anger flamed forth at this unjustifiable aspersion on the part of a man who was taking only an inactive share in the war. At no period in their history had the Boers earned that reproach—the people who had paid in blood for their right to a place in the dark continent.“That comes ill from you,” she said. “At least, we don’t shirk the fighting. Men who fear for their skins don’t take up arms against one another. There is evidence enough in this district alone to refute your accusation of cowardice. There isn’t a farm within miles of us but some of its men have joined the fighting.”“But they don’t hang together,” he persisted sullenly.“They don’t all think alike,” she allowed; “but they possess the courage of their different convictions, and the courage to fight for them.”“I spoke in the heat of the moment,” he conceded ungraciously. “It makes me sick to see this great opportunity wasted. You have your chance now to secure independence; it may never come again. And men like Botha and Smuts are simply tying your hands. Leentje has received a message from Cornelius; it came through this morning. Colonel Brand has sent an insulting letter to de Wet. Everywhere Botha’s following is superior to our forces. Our commandoes are simply giving way and fleeing before them. It’s a rout, unless they combine and stand firm; but they give way before the opposition they didn’t anticipate. They aren’t putting up anything of a fight.”“Cornelius and Andreas won’t give way,” she said proudly.“Cornelius and Andreas are but two men,” he answered bitterly; “and the voices of two men in a commando are apt to be drowned by the rest.”Honor walked on without speaking; and in her thoughts the phrase beat insistently: “What will it benefit you to hoist your flag over the body of your brother?” Hot tears welled in her tired eyes, her steps dragged wearily. It did not seem to her at the moment to matter much which side won if only Andreas came through.“Oh, this war!” she said sadly... “This war! it tears at the heart-strings. Nothing can make good to a woman for the lives of the men she loves.”“Oh, that!” he returned indifferently. “I didn’t expect to hear such talk from you. That’s the view of the sentimentalist. One doesn’t reckon lives with so much at stake.”So much at stake! What stake could be greater than the flower of the nations’ manhood which was being sacrificed?In the farmhouse when they reached it commotion reigned. Leentje Nel was talking in loud excited tones, and two of the children, who were frightened by the noise and whom their mother had slapped soundly in her anger, added their cries to the uproar which greeted Honor’s arrival. Mrs Krige was doing her utmost to restore peace. When Honor entered she found her mother with one wailing child in her arms and another clinging to her skirt, soothing them as best she could, while Leentje held forth bitterly on the pestilential English—the English who had promised to protect them, and who instead had set English magistrates over them to harass them with fines, and make life intolerable, so that they couldn’t flog a native even without having to pay for it in hard cash. Such a state of things could not be endured. The South African Dutch would not submit to being ruled any longer by the pestilential English. The English would be beaten by the Germans, and then South Africa would belong to the Boers.It struck Honor while she listened as a wholly inadequate and very paltry reason for which to risk valuable lives. It was not any reason at all; it partook rather of the nature of a long-cherished revenge for past wrongs which later events had ceased to justify. Matheson had summed up the situation correctly: the country was governed for the benefit of the white races impartially and for the good of the native community. That state of affairs could not in any event be improved upon.Leentje turned eagerly as Honor entered, followed by her husband, and, confident of her audience, broke forth anew.“Here’s a pretty letter from Cornelius,” she cried, and flourished the paper in Honor’s face. “His commando is retreating. They run like buck before the hunter. Naturally they expected the South African Dutch to stand as one man to crush this unholy scandal. When they find through the ungodly policy of Botha that they are opposed to their own people they give way. The men are surrendering, Cornelius says, individually and in small parties. Pah! May the Almighty desert these cowards in their hour of need. May they die and rot and be prey for the jackals. And those Dutch who won’t give up their horses to them, and everything else they possess, may they rot likewise and die miserably. Our men are short of mounts, short of ammunition, short of everything.” Her voice rose to a shrill scream. “For years we have been planning this, and when the hour strikes nothing is ready. Every horse on this farm is commandeered. There is only the miserable horse the cursed Englishman brought with him. That must be taken. If you had the courage of Jael, Honor, the Englishman would never leave the rondavel to fight against us.”Swiftly, on an impulse, she turned towards Holman, the fire of inextinguishable hate in her eyes.“Why don’t you shoot this English dog for us? We are only women; but if you won’t do this thing, I will.”Holman shrugged his shoulders and turned away.“You will have the English magistrates after you, Leentje,” was all he said, purposely goading her.She smiled grimly.“The English magistrates won’t frighten me,” she said. “They are set over the districts to cow the men.”She folded the letter in her hand and thrust it savagely in her bosom, and stared meaningly at Honor.“‘She put her hand to the nail, and her right hand to the workman’s hammer,’” she quoted softly. “‘Blessed shall she be above women in the tent... The mother of Sisera cried through the lattice. Why is his chariot so long in coming? Why tarry the wheels of his chariot?’ ... There is work here worthy of Jael, the wife of Heber the Kenite.”Slowly, without speaking, Honor left the room. She passed through into the kitchen, and from the kitchen went out into the hot unshaded yard. For a minute or so she waited, as one who expects to be followed, then, with steps as light and fleet as a fawn’s, she sped away in the direction of the rondavel.
There was a thoughtful look in Honor’s eyes when, leaving Butter Tom to the unaccustomed task of valeting the wounded baas, she stepped forth into the sunshine and walked with a certain weary reluctance towards the homestead. She was tired with her overnight vigil, and the emotional scene in the rondavel was succeeded by a feeling of exhaustion and nervous reaction. For the first time within her knowledge the thought of her cause failed to sustain her; and more than once the question formed itself in her mind whether after all this sacrifice of life were justified even in the securing of national independence? She had never doubted before. She had been as positive of the right and the urgency of their cause as she had felt certain of its ultimate success. Despite Herman Nel’s opposition, she had believed, until results proved the error of her hopes, in the whole-hearted co-operation of the entire Dutch community. Heinrich had assured her that the Boers would rise to a man. The treaty of Vereeniging was but another scrap of paper which the Teutonic mind lightly disregarded. Honor had disregarded it also, as a contract signed under compulsion by the leaders against the will of the majority; she felt that it was in no sense binding on the Dutch as a whole. Matheson’s statement that they were a people who had never known discipline stuck in her mind. Broadly it was true. The Boer does not submit readily to being governed, even by his own leaders. It is a nation in the making, without any of the traditions of an older race to guide it, but with sufficiently fine ideals from which to evolve traditions of its own. Clear-sighted men, like Nel, realised that there was nothing to be gained by fighting; the peaceful development of the country would best serve their interests.
That morning, in a state of physical and mental fatigue, Honor allowed her thoughts to dwell for the first time on the possibility of failure. Matheson had shaken her confidence; and in reminding her that her own brother’s life might be sacrificed to the cause she so ardently espoused, he had caused her enthusiasm a rude check. She had not considered the toll in human life that would be exacted: the grim ugliness of war had been lost sight of in the dazzling prospect of victory. It did not seem to her possible that Andreas could be killed. If that should happen, the triumph of their cause would prove a hollow mockery, and her mother’s tragic life would end in added sadness. It was too big a price, Honor felt in her overwrought and dispirited mood—too big a price to pay even for victory.
As she neared the homestead, coming towards her, she recognised her husband. She was unprepared to meet him there at that hour. He had ridden over from Benfontein. She wondered a little impatiently what brought him. His presence there so early in the morning disconcerted her. Although he was aware that she was sharing with her mother the care of the sick man, and had given her permission to dress Matheson’s wound and aid Mrs Krige with her professional knowledge, his acquiescence had not included sitting up with the patient at night: he had supposed she would sleep beneath Leentje Nel’s roof. It never occurred to him that Matheson’s case called for particular care. The wound was not serious—a flesh wound only; he saw no reason why the women should make a fuss over a mere scratch. In his opinion his own hurt called for greater consideration. His throat was sore and swollen; he had difficulty in swallowing. But Honor had expressed little sympathy with him. She had left him alone all night to care for the man who had injured him. He felt resentful; and he was angry with her because of her concern for the Englishman. What was this cursed Englishman to her that she should feel it her duty to tend him?
“You are over early,” she said, when she came up with him. “I didn’t expect you.”
“So I supposed,” he answered roughly, and turned and walked back beside her. “I’ve been to the farm. Leentje told me you were at the rondavel. I was going to fetch you. What were you doing there? I don’t choose that my wife should spend the night with any man, sick or well.”
She flushed warmly.
“Some one had to watch beside him,” she said with immense restraint. “There was no one else to do it.”
“Absurd!” he replied angrily. “The nigger is good enough to wait on him. There was no one to look after me.”
“You were not so badly hurt,” she returned, in a voice which despite its quiet tones should have warned him of her rising anger. She did not look at him; her eyes searched the landscape ahead of her, and rested with tired satisfaction on the dew-drenched sparse vegetation, cobwebbed with silver threads.
“I feel sick enough,” he said savagely. “But that’s nothing to you. Leentje Nel wouldn’t nurse her husband’s murderer.”
Honor smiled briefly.
“You are very aggressively alive for a murdered man,” she said. She touched his sleeve diffidently. “Don’t be cross, Heinrich. I’m tired—so very tired. And this morning I am racked with anxious fears—fears for Andreas—fears for the cause. The country is not with us.”
Holman made an angry gesture and spat upon the ground.
“White-livered curs!” he muttered. “Everything was in our hands. They’ve sold us—these pitiful Boers. They’re afraid for their blessed skins.”
Her anger flamed forth at this unjustifiable aspersion on the part of a man who was taking only an inactive share in the war. At no period in their history had the Boers earned that reproach—the people who had paid in blood for their right to a place in the dark continent.
“That comes ill from you,” she said. “At least, we don’t shirk the fighting. Men who fear for their skins don’t take up arms against one another. There is evidence enough in this district alone to refute your accusation of cowardice. There isn’t a farm within miles of us but some of its men have joined the fighting.”
“But they don’t hang together,” he persisted sullenly.
“They don’t all think alike,” she allowed; “but they possess the courage of their different convictions, and the courage to fight for them.”
“I spoke in the heat of the moment,” he conceded ungraciously. “It makes me sick to see this great opportunity wasted. You have your chance now to secure independence; it may never come again. And men like Botha and Smuts are simply tying your hands. Leentje has received a message from Cornelius; it came through this morning. Colonel Brand has sent an insulting letter to de Wet. Everywhere Botha’s following is superior to our forces. Our commandoes are simply giving way and fleeing before them. It’s a rout, unless they combine and stand firm; but they give way before the opposition they didn’t anticipate. They aren’t putting up anything of a fight.”
“Cornelius and Andreas won’t give way,” she said proudly.
“Cornelius and Andreas are but two men,” he answered bitterly; “and the voices of two men in a commando are apt to be drowned by the rest.”
Honor walked on without speaking; and in her thoughts the phrase beat insistently: “What will it benefit you to hoist your flag over the body of your brother?” Hot tears welled in her tired eyes, her steps dragged wearily. It did not seem to her at the moment to matter much which side won if only Andreas came through.
“Oh, this war!” she said sadly... “This war! it tears at the heart-strings. Nothing can make good to a woman for the lives of the men she loves.”
“Oh, that!” he returned indifferently. “I didn’t expect to hear such talk from you. That’s the view of the sentimentalist. One doesn’t reckon lives with so much at stake.”
So much at stake! What stake could be greater than the flower of the nations’ manhood which was being sacrificed?
In the farmhouse when they reached it commotion reigned. Leentje Nel was talking in loud excited tones, and two of the children, who were frightened by the noise and whom their mother had slapped soundly in her anger, added their cries to the uproar which greeted Honor’s arrival. Mrs Krige was doing her utmost to restore peace. When Honor entered she found her mother with one wailing child in her arms and another clinging to her skirt, soothing them as best she could, while Leentje held forth bitterly on the pestilential English—the English who had promised to protect them, and who instead had set English magistrates over them to harass them with fines, and make life intolerable, so that they couldn’t flog a native even without having to pay for it in hard cash. Such a state of things could not be endured. The South African Dutch would not submit to being ruled any longer by the pestilential English. The English would be beaten by the Germans, and then South Africa would belong to the Boers.
It struck Honor while she listened as a wholly inadequate and very paltry reason for which to risk valuable lives. It was not any reason at all; it partook rather of the nature of a long-cherished revenge for past wrongs which later events had ceased to justify. Matheson had summed up the situation correctly: the country was governed for the benefit of the white races impartially and for the good of the native community. That state of affairs could not in any event be improved upon.
Leentje turned eagerly as Honor entered, followed by her husband, and, confident of her audience, broke forth anew.
“Here’s a pretty letter from Cornelius,” she cried, and flourished the paper in Honor’s face. “His commando is retreating. They run like buck before the hunter. Naturally they expected the South African Dutch to stand as one man to crush this unholy scandal. When they find through the ungodly policy of Botha that they are opposed to their own people they give way. The men are surrendering, Cornelius says, individually and in small parties. Pah! May the Almighty desert these cowards in their hour of need. May they die and rot and be prey for the jackals. And those Dutch who won’t give up their horses to them, and everything else they possess, may they rot likewise and die miserably. Our men are short of mounts, short of ammunition, short of everything.” Her voice rose to a shrill scream. “For years we have been planning this, and when the hour strikes nothing is ready. Every horse on this farm is commandeered. There is only the miserable horse the cursed Englishman brought with him. That must be taken. If you had the courage of Jael, Honor, the Englishman would never leave the rondavel to fight against us.”
Swiftly, on an impulse, she turned towards Holman, the fire of inextinguishable hate in her eyes.
“Why don’t you shoot this English dog for us? We are only women; but if you won’t do this thing, I will.”
Holman shrugged his shoulders and turned away.
“You will have the English magistrates after you, Leentje,” was all he said, purposely goading her.
She smiled grimly.
“The English magistrates won’t frighten me,” she said. “They are set over the districts to cow the men.”
She folded the letter in her hand and thrust it savagely in her bosom, and stared meaningly at Honor.
“‘She put her hand to the nail, and her right hand to the workman’s hammer,’” she quoted softly. “‘Blessed shall she be above women in the tent... The mother of Sisera cried through the lattice. Why is his chariot so long in coming? Why tarry the wheels of his chariot?’ ... There is work here worthy of Jael, the wife of Heber the Kenite.”
Slowly, without speaking, Honor left the room. She passed through into the kitchen, and from the kitchen went out into the hot unshaded yard. For a minute or so she waited, as one who expects to be followed, then, with steps as light and fleet as a fawn’s, she sped away in the direction of the rondavel.
Chapter Thirty Five.Butter Tom was busy outside the rondavel shaking the dust from the skin mats which covered the floor. He glanced up at Honor’s approach, and smiled with a cautious deference that concealed his vague distrust of her more effectually than it hid his nervousness. The missis with the face of a lily in the moonlight possessed the cunning of a devil. Already she had worked evil towards the baas he served. Her appearance now he believed portended further evil. He was afraid of her with the unreasoning fear of a man who realises his inability to resist a superior will. If she commanded him to do a thing, he would do it because he dared not refuse. He likened her to the fleet-footed powers of evil which outdistanced the chameleon, the tardy messenger of the gods, who failed through its dilatoriness to deliver the World from the ills which afflict mankind. She came towards him swiftly, as evil travels, with the speed of the wind, and halted beside him, warmly flushed and panting for breath. Butter Tom gathered up his mats, and, grinning nervously, prepared to retreat with them; but Honor stayed him with a gesture.“Put those down,” she said authoritatively, “and go to the stable quickly, and fetch out the old spider which Baas Herman uses. Inspan Baas Matheson’s horse without loss of time. The baas will drive to the town, and you will drive him there and bring the spider back. Do you understand?”“Ja, missis. Me take the mats inside, then me go.”For a second it seemed as though she would not permit this delay; then with another gesture she signified her consent to the disposal of the mats, but bade him be quick as she would wait for him.Butter Tom retired within, and spread his mats carefully on the floor. The baas was attempting to shave himself with the razor grasped in his left hand, and was making a sorry business of it. He looked round at Butter Tom’s entrance to inquire who it was he had heard talking outside the hut.“Young missis will send Butter Tom to the stable,” the Kaffir vouchsafed, with an appealing look at the baas in the hope that the latter would raise some objection to his obeying the strange behest.But the baas, letting the razor fall, and receiving it without comment from the dark hand which hastily forestalled his request by returning it to him, merely said:“If the young missis wants you, go at once.”Then he resumed the business of shaving himself with a hand considerably less steady than before. What need had Honor for employing Nel’s servant? And why had she returned?As if in answer to his unspoken questions. Honor entered the rondavel, having satisfied herself that Butter Tom had departed to do her bidding. She entered with a certain hesitation, and seeing Matheson’s occupation, advanced with greater assurance and took the razor from his unresisting hand.“There isn’t any time for this,” she said. “You can get this done in the town. In a few minutes Butter Tom will have the spider ready. It’s a long drive for one horse, but you must do it, and you must start at once.”“But why?” he asked, amazed. “It is early. Half an hour can’t make much difference anyway; and I look such a ruffian.”She closed the razor with a snap. As she did so Leentje’s words recurred to her with a new and more sinister meaning. “She put her hand to the nail, and her right hand to the workman’s hammer.” ... A razor was quite as effective a weapon as a hammer in the hand of jael. Quickly she returned the razor to him, contemplating him with thoughtful anxious eyes. Instinctively she knew that she must not apprise him of his danger. He would not flee before a German, nor even from a modern Jael.“There is no time to lose,” she said. “They might raise objections to my lending the spider. I am giving you the only chance of a conveyance. If you don’t take it now you will have to wait until you can ride into town; and quite possibly your horse will be commandeered. All the horses on the farm have been taken.”“Nel’s horses—yes,” he said. “But they can’t take mine.”“They won’t ask your permission,” she answered. “Please do as I ask you. The spider belongs to Herman; you need not scruple to use it. Butter Tom will drive you... Reward him well; he will possibly be blamed when he returns.”She did not think it necessary to inform him that Butter Tom would most probably be flogged for obeying her orders. Holman would wreak his vengeance on the Kaffir because he would not dare to reproach her. She had known him flog a Kaffir before; it was his method of enforcing a discipline he could not otherwise maintain.“But such haste partakes of the nature of flight,” he objected. “I don’t really see the need for it.”“You wanted to get away before,” she reminded him. “You asked me to help you. This is the only way in which I can help. If you delay it will be embarrassing for me. You are well enough to travel, aren’t you?”Again she scrutinised him closely, with renewed anxiety in her gaze. He did not look equal to a great deal of fatigue. Never before had he felt so painfully conscious of weakness; but he made light of it.“I’ll be all right,” he said. “It isn’t that... Of course, if you think it best, I am ready to start at once.”Her relief at his compliance was manifest. She was nervous and unstrung, and the sudden reaction shook her fortitude. She turned her face aside to hide its emotion from him; but he saw the tears in her eyes, and was immensely disconcerted at the sight of this distress which he failed altogether to understand. He advanced a few paces towards her, hesitated, and stood irresolute, regarding her with an exasperated sense of his own inadequacy.“I say!” he said awkwardly. “Don’t! ... Please, don’t... I’m awfully sorry that my presence has so upset you. I’ll go. I’ll go at once, Honor.” Then a doubt crept into his mind. He approached quite close to her and put out a hand and touched her sleeve. “You want me to go?” he asked.“Yes,” she cried quickly—“yes... Of course.” She moved away. “Drive straight for the town,” she added. “And don’t spare the horse.”Without once looking at him she left the rondavel, hiding her tear-wet face from him, and hurrying away in the sunshine with steps as fleet as those she had used in coming, but followed a less direct route for the purpose of allaying suspicion as to where she had been in the event of meeting any one on the way back. She had done her utmost for him; his safety was now his own affair.Matheson remained for a while inactive, watching her retreating figure. He followed her to the doorway, and stood in the brilliant sunshine, looking after her, as she sped away with never a backward glance, the gold of the sunlight upon her and the morning wind ruffling her hair.Innumerable doubts troubled him while he stood there, doubts which she had set fermenting in his brain. She was not happy. The change in her was very marked. When he had first met her she had been afire with enthusiasm and eager interest in life; now she was a woman, grave and thoughtful, on whom cares and responsibilities pressed heavily. She had sold her birthright of joy, sacrificing it to a long-cherished dream of vengeance; and already she was discovering how unsatisfying was the bargain she had made. Nel was right. There was a predestination in these matters beyond human control.A sense of utter futility gripped Matheson, a sort of sick disappointment more distressing than physical nausea. His passion for Honor assumed a new significance: it became less personal—more of a formal worship of beauty for beauty’s sake than the love of man for woman for simple and primitive ends. He realised that temperamentally they were entirely opposed, as the north wind is opposed to the south, the east to the west. In no circumstance could they have mated with felicitous results. He had loved her beauty and the quick fire of her imagination; she had attracted him as the fierce untamed land she loved attracted him, by reason of its untrammelled freedom, its unconquerable savagery and beauty. But these qualities do not make for the sublime happiness of domestic peace. The human need demands something more satisfying than passionate discords in its relations with life. A man may enjoy climbing to exalted altitudes; but he lives preferably in the valleys among quiet and orderly things.It seemed to Matheson that he saw life clearly for the first time. He was regarding things from the detached standpoint of an unbiassed onlooker—regarding himself, as a person takes note of some acquaintance and determines his place in the scheme of the universe. He had a place, quite unimportant and prosaic, but with certain clearly defined duties and work to perform. Always he came back to that. There was work for him to do—work for every one. He had been idling in the backwaters of good intentions long enough. Too often a man idles away his best years in dreaming, and overcrowds his middle age with much that might have been accomplished during his youth. Youth is the period for activities; and most surely is youth the time for marriage—useful marriage for the raising and rearing of healthy and beautiful children.Then, breaking in sharply upon his musings, came the sound of wheels and the noise of Butter Tom’s guttural exhortations to the recalcitrant bony horse which Matheson had hired at De Aar, and which, accustomed to the saddle, displayed mule-like tendencies between the shafts. Butter Tom sawed at the reins and swore at it in Kaffir, while Matheson looked on with apathetic indifference, thinking drearily of the long drive before him in the heat, with his wounded shoulder and the useless right arm for which Honor had improvised a sling from a scarf of her own.With the moment of departure it occurred to him what a fool he had been to come. He did not know what he had expected from the visit. It had proved a wild, impossible venture. A man may not take the law into his own hands even in Africa. Had he killed Holman he would have found himself placed in an awkward dilemma. It would not have been easy to establish a sufficient reason for the act. He had nothing but circumstantial evidence to produce against Holman, evidence which would have implicated Honor, and which therefore he could not have made use of. He realised clearly that he had been actuated by a strong personal animus, the result of his recognition of the man’s responsibility for the poisoning of Honor’s mind, and the systematic fostering of her brother’s disloyalty. It had never been with him a question of German treachery against England, but of the injury done to himself through the woman he had loved His sense of justice had not sprung from any lofty motive; therefore its failure of accomplishment, though humiliating, was not deserving of many regrets.He climbed into the spider with difficulty and seated himself beside Butter Tom, who, by dint of a vigorous application of the whip, induced the stubborn horse to break into an uncomfortable trot.“This horse bad schelm,” the Kaffir observed critically. “Him got seven debels in him.”Matheson looked back towards the rondavel, remembering now that they were moving the few things he had brought with him and which he had forgotten to pack. He was about to tell the Kaffir to return in order to fetch his possessions when he became aware of Leentje Nel’s figure in the distance, running towards them, and changed his mind. The Dutchwoman gesticulated violently, and shouted to Butter Tom to stop. Butter Tom heard her, and looked back; then, with his whip arm upraised, he glanced inquiringly at the baas’ imperturbable face.“Drive on,” Matheson commanded.The whip fell relentlessly across the animal’s lean flanks. Butter Tom stood up to the business, and narrowly escaped being thrown out on to the veld as the horse, after an indignant plunge and two ineffectual attempts to splinter the splashboard with its hoofs, broke into a furious gallop, bumping the spider behind it like a toy cart over the rough stony ground. Matheson, hanging on with his left hand, watched, with a light of understanding for Honor’s urgency breaking in upon him, Leentje Nel’s pursuing figure pounding after them in futile and angry chase.
Butter Tom was busy outside the rondavel shaking the dust from the skin mats which covered the floor. He glanced up at Honor’s approach, and smiled with a cautious deference that concealed his vague distrust of her more effectually than it hid his nervousness. The missis with the face of a lily in the moonlight possessed the cunning of a devil. Already she had worked evil towards the baas he served. Her appearance now he believed portended further evil. He was afraid of her with the unreasoning fear of a man who realises his inability to resist a superior will. If she commanded him to do a thing, he would do it because he dared not refuse. He likened her to the fleet-footed powers of evil which outdistanced the chameleon, the tardy messenger of the gods, who failed through its dilatoriness to deliver the World from the ills which afflict mankind. She came towards him swiftly, as evil travels, with the speed of the wind, and halted beside him, warmly flushed and panting for breath. Butter Tom gathered up his mats, and, grinning nervously, prepared to retreat with them; but Honor stayed him with a gesture.
“Put those down,” she said authoritatively, “and go to the stable quickly, and fetch out the old spider which Baas Herman uses. Inspan Baas Matheson’s horse without loss of time. The baas will drive to the town, and you will drive him there and bring the spider back. Do you understand?”
“Ja, missis. Me take the mats inside, then me go.”
For a second it seemed as though she would not permit this delay; then with another gesture she signified her consent to the disposal of the mats, but bade him be quick as she would wait for him.
Butter Tom retired within, and spread his mats carefully on the floor. The baas was attempting to shave himself with the razor grasped in his left hand, and was making a sorry business of it. He looked round at Butter Tom’s entrance to inquire who it was he had heard talking outside the hut.
“Young missis will send Butter Tom to the stable,” the Kaffir vouchsafed, with an appealing look at the baas in the hope that the latter would raise some objection to his obeying the strange behest.
But the baas, letting the razor fall, and receiving it without comment from the dark hand which hastily forestalled his request by returning it to him, merely said:
“If the young missis wants you, go at once.”
Then he resumed the business of shaving himself with a hand considerably less steady than before. What need had Honor for employing Nel’s servant? And why had she returned?
As if in answer to his unspoken questions. Honor entered the rondavel, having satisfied herself that Butter Tom had departed to do her bidding. She entered with a certain hesitation, and seeing Matheson’s occupation, advanced with greater assurance and took the razor from his unresisting hand.
“There isn’t any time for this,” she said. “You can get this done in the town. In a few minutes Butter Tom will have the spider ready. It’s a long drive for one horse, but you must do it, and you must start at once.”
“But why?” he asked, amazed. “It is early. Half an hour can’t make much difference anyway; and I look such a ruffian.”
She closed the razor with a snap. As she did so Leentje’s words recurred to her with a new and more sinister meaning. “She put her hand to the nail, and her right hand to the workman’s hammer.” ... A razor was quite as effective a weapon as a hammer in the hand of jael. Quickly she returned the razor to him, contemplating him with thoughtful anxious eyes. Instinctively she knew that she must not apprise him of his danger. He would not flee before a German, nor even from a modern Jael.
“There is no time to lose,” she said. “They might raise objections to my lending the spider. I am giving you the only chance of a conveyance. If you don’t take it now you will have to wait until you can ride into town; and quite possibly your horse will be commandeered. All the horses on the farm have been taken.”
“Nel’s horses—yes,” he said. “But they can’t take mine.”
“They won’t ask your permission,” she answered. “Please do as I ask you. The spider belongs to Herman; you need not scruple to use it. Butter Tom will drive you... Reward him well; he will possibly be blamed when he returns.”
She did not think it necessary to inform him that Butter Tom would most probably be flogged for obeying her orders. Holman would wreak his vengeance on the Kaffir because he would not dare to reproach her. She had known him flog a Kaffir before; it was his method of enforcing a discipline he could not otherwise maintain.
“But such haste partakes of the nature of flight,” he objected. “I don’t really see the need for it.”
“You wanted to get away before,” she reminded him. “You asked me to help you. This is the only way in which I can help. If you delay it will be embarrassing for me. You are well enough to travel, aren’t you?”
Again she scrutinised him closely, with renewed anxiety in her gaze. He did not look equal to a great deal of fatigue. Never before had he felt so painfully conscious of weakness; but he made light of it.
“I’ll be all right,” he said. “It isn’t that... Of course, if you think it best, I am ready to start at once.”
Her relief at his compliance was manifest. She was nervous and unstrung, and the sudden reaction shook her fortitude. She turned her face aside to hide its emotion from him; but he saw the tears in her eyes, and was immensely disconcerted at the sight of this distress which he failed altogether to understand. He advanced a few paces towards her, hesitated, and stood irresolute, regarding her with an exasperated sense of his own inadequacy.
“I say!” he said awkwardly. “Don’t! ... Please, don’t... I’m awfully sorry that my presence has so upset you. I’ll go. I’ll go at once, Honor.” Then a doubt crept into his mind. He approached quite close to her and put out a hand and touched her sleeve. “You want me to go?” he asked.
“Yes,” she cried quickly—“yes... Of course.” She moved away. “Drive straight for the town,” she added. “And don’t spare the horse.”
Without once looking at him she left the rondavel, hiding her tear-wet face from him, and hurrying away in the sunshine with steps as fleet as those she had used in coming, but followed a less direct route for the purpose of allaying suspicion as to where she had been in the event of meeting any one on the way back. She had done her utmost for him; his safety was now his own affair.
Matheson remained for a while inactive, watching her retreating figure. He followed her to the doorway, and stood in the brilliant sunshine, looking after her, as she sped away with never a backward glance, the gold of the sunlight upon her and the morning wind ruffling her hair.
Innumerable doubts troubled him while he stood there, doubts which she had set fermenting in his brain. She was not happy. The change in her was very marked. When he had first met her she had been afire with enthusiasm and eager interest in life; now she was a woman, grave and thoughtful, on whom cares and responsibilities pressed heavily. She had sold her birthright of joy, sacrificing it to a long-cherished dream of vengeance; and already she was discovering how unsatisfying was the bargain she had made. Nel was right. There was a predestination in these matters beyond human control.
A sense of utter futility gripped Matheson, a sort of sick disappointment more distressing than physical nausea. His passion for Honor assumed a new significance: it became less personal—more of a formal worship of beauty for beauty’s sake than the love of man for woman for simple and primitive ends. He realised that temperamentally they were entirely opposed, as the north wind is opposed to the south, the east to the west. In no circumstance could they have mated with felicitous results. He had loved her beauty and the quick fire of her imagination; she had attracted him as the fierce untamed land she loved attracted him, by reason of its untrammelled freedom, its unconquerable savagery and beauty. But these qualities do not make for the sublime happiness of domestic peace. The human need demands something more satisfying than passionate discords in its relations with life. A man may enjoy climbing to exalted altitudes; but he lives preferably in the valleys among quiet and orderly things.
It seemed to Matheson that he saw life clearly for the first time. He was regarding things from the detached standpoint of an unbiassed onlooker—regarding himself, as a person takes note of some acquaintance and determines his place in the scheme of the universe. He had a place, quite unimportant and prosaic, but with certain clearly defined duties and work to perform. Always he came back to that. There was work for him to do—work for every one. He had been idling in the backwaters of good intentions long enough. Too often a man idles away his best years in dreaming, and overcrowds his middle age with much that might have been accomplished during his youth. Youth is the period for activities; and most surely is youth the time for marriage—useful marriage for the raising and rearing of healthy and beautiful children.
Then, breaking in sharply upon his musings, came the sound of wheels and the noise of Butter Tom’s guttural exhortations to the recalcitrant bony horse which Matheson had hired at De Aar, and which, accustomed to the saddle, displayed mule-like tendencies between the shafts. Butter Tom sawed at the reins and swore at it in Kaffir, while Matheson looked on with apathetic indifference, thinking drearily of the long drive before him in the heat, with his wounded shoulder and the useless right arm for which Honor had improvised a sling from a scarf of her own.
With the moment of departure it occurred to him what a fool he had been to come. He did not know what he had expected from the visit. It had proved a wild, impossible venture. A man may not take the law into his own hands even in Africa. Had he killed Holman he would have found himself placed in an awkward dilemma. It would not have been easy to establish a sufficient reason for the act. He had nothing but circumstantial evidence to produce against Holman, evidence which would have implicated Honor, and which therefore he could not have made use of. He realised clearly that he had been actuated by a strong personal animus, the result of his recognition of the man’s responsibility for the poisoning of Honor’s mind, and the systematic fostering of her brother’s disloyalty. It had never been with him a question of German treachery against England, but of the injury done to himself through the woman he had loved His sense of justice had not sprung from any lofty motive; therefore its failure of accomplishment, though humiliating, was not deserving of many regrets.
He climbed into the spider with difficulty and seated himself beside Butter Tom, who, by dint of a vigorous application of the whip, induced the stubborn horse to break into an uncomfortable trot.
“This horse bad schelm,” the Kaffir observed critically. “Him got seven debels in him.”
Matheson looked back towards the rondavel, remembering now that they were moving the few things he had brought with him and which he had forgotten to pack. He was about to tell the Kaffir to return in order to fetch his possessions when he became aware of Leentje Nel’s figure in the distance, running towards them, and changed his mind. The Dutchwoman gesticulated violently, and shouted to Butter Tom to stop. Butter Tom heard her, and looked back; then, with his whip arm upraised, he glanced inquiringly at the baas’ imperturbable face.
“Drive on,” Matheson commanded.
The whip fell relentlessly across the animal’s lean flanks. Butter Tom stood up to the business, and narrowly escaped being thrown out on to the veld as the horse, after an indignant plunge and two ineffectual attempts to splinter the splashboard with its hoofs, broke into a furious gallop, bumping the spider behind it like a toy cart over the rough stony ground. Matheson, hanging on with his left hand, watched, with a light of understanding for Honor’s urgency breaking in upon him, Leentje Nel’s pursuing figure pounding after them in futile and angry chase.
Chapter Thirty Six.The dark cloud which had so long overshadowed South Africa, which stretched now blacker than it had ever appeared across the sky of the Union’s prosperity, was none the less surely passing, rolling backward with sullen reluctance before the strong opposing breath of leading opinion.This German organised rebellion owed its defeat largely to the fact that the Dutch in the Colony knew by experience how little reliance was to be placed in German promises. The Boer is beginning to recognise that the word of a German is binding only in as far as it serves his own end. The memories of men who fought in the late Boer war are not all as conveniently short as their German advisers hoped. Brand, in his historical letter to de Wet, emphasised this point in his reply to de Wet’s earnest exhortation to him to depart from the policy he had adopted and join the rebellion, which he insisted arose out of a spirit of deep indignation at the unholy act of the Government in attacking German South-West Africa.“I am satisfied,” Colonel Brand wrote in reply, “of the justice of the standpoint taken up by me. Even better than myself you know how deeply disappointed we were in the people whose case you so arduously espouse to-day. Not only did we receive no help from them in the last war, but the Kaiser even went to the extent of advising the British Government how to attack and destroy us. What an insult to our people when the late State President of the Transvaal personally applied to them and was turned back on the border.”These things are not easily forgotten, and they are less easily pardoned. The good faith of a nation cannot rest upon lies.Matheson knew nothing of the letter Cornelius had written to his wife; but he gathered from what he heard in De Aar, and from the talk of some Dutchmen with whom he travelled to the coast, that the rebellion was half-hearted, that already the men were realising that they had been misguided and were forsaking their leaders and going quietly back to their farms. In a few months it was prophesied Botha would have crushed the rising and restored order in the country. And the men who were now so bitter against him would come to admit the wisdom of his policy, and respect him for the generous nature of his opposition, which followed consistently the principle of suppressing the rebellion with firmness, of sparing life when mercy could be judiciously extended, and of pardoning the offenders. It is possible only for great natures to be generous and for wise natures to be impartial. The Union was fortunate in its time of crisis in having at its head a man in whom both these qualities were combined. The quashing of their carefully planned schemes in South Africa was one of Germany’s bitterest blows.Matheson had sent a telegram to Brenda from De Aar to acquaint her of his return. He believed that she would be at the station to welcome him, nevertheless as an afterthought he had added the words: “Please meet train.” A keen desire to see her welcoming face on the platform on his arrival moved him to send the message. He wanted her, as he always wanted her when he was depressed and out of tune with life. Her bright companionship and ready understanding of his moods, her unwearying patience and kindness, had taught him to lean unconsciously on her. He wanted her with the formless need of the individual for a tried human friendship which in no circumstance could fail in understanding and sympathy. He never analysed his feeling for her; but he knew that she had grown somehow very dear and necessary to him; he also knew that there was no sort of passion in his steadily growing love for her. She was always his dear chum.As he neared his destination a horrible feeling of nervousness gripped him. He was obsessed with the dread that something would prevent her from being at the station. She might not have received his telegram. Such things had happened before. She might have been out when it arrived—it might have been stuck in the rack and forgotten. A dozen such possibilities occurred to him.He stared out of the window at the gathering darkness, watching the black formless shapes flitting by like sinister shadows in the night, dimly illumined by the light of the passing train. And then his gaze came back unwillingly, his musing interrupted by the bustle of his fellow travellers reaching up to the rack for their baggage in preparation for disentraining. Their cheerful energy fretted him. The journey had tired him, and his shoulder felt stiff and uncomfortable. He still wore Honor’s scarf as a sling. It was soiled now and crumpled, but it had been of great service. He glanced down at it and thought of the owner, of how she had tied it for him and pinned the empty sleeve of his coat across his breast, and buttoned the coat with great care for his injured arm. He pictured the beautiful face as it had leaned so near to him, and recalled the scent and the sheen of her bright hair. All that belonged to the past—was a separate chapter in his life—a still-born romance. It was a dream of beauty which had no place in the world of realities. But the dream would live in his memory. In the gold and crimsons of the sunset, amid the vast solitariness of the veld, and the splendour of moonlit nights, he would dream the dream again, would see in imagination a woman’s perfect face with its halo of pale hair shading the mystery of her eyes. She was becoming for him a symbol of womanhood, a symbol of all that was beautiful and strange and moving in nature. The flowers in the veld suggested her; the curve of a hill recalled the graceful flow of her shoulders; the heat of the noontide was as the passionate warmth of her nature; while the remote serene dusk conveyed the remembrance of her gentler moods when she looked into the heart of Africa with pity for its unhealed wounds.He gazed out again upon the darkness, and the picture of Honor faded.The lights of the city became visible and the dark outline of the sea. He sat up straighter and gripped the window with his left hand and peered out at familiar objects looming large in the gloom as the train ran on towards the terminus. Something one of the men in the carriage was saying arrested his attention. It recalled in a measure Herman Nel’s theories in regard to the rising; only the speaker spoke with less restraint than Nel habitually used, and with less sympathy with the rebels.“They boast that they are fighting for the independence of the old Republics,” he was saying. “Perhaps a few of them are. But it is racial prejudice and political jealousy which has maddened the leaders. And for the rest, rebellion is always an easy method of making a living.”A big fair Dutchman, standing in the middle of the swaying compartment, paused in the act of reaching up for a wonderful carpet bag which was serviceable rather than a thing of beauty, to remark with a slow shrug:“Judas was not the only man to take blood-money. They come to a bad end, these men who sell human lives for greed.”Do they? Matheson felt that the speaker generalised over-freely. If Justice were always discriminating and inexorable in her dealings with malefactors, she worked too secretly for the ordinary man to follow her methods. It was altogether a fallacy in regard to this life that the wicked suffer and are punished in proportion to their offence.The train ran into the station. He got out quickly. He had no baggage to concern himself with, and was one of the first to descend from the train. He searched the platform eagerly for Brenda; and when he caught sight of her and saw the light of welcome in her face, he realised how great his disappointment would have been had she failed him.She came forward swiftly, a pleased shyness in her look, love for him shining behind the smiling gladness in her eyes. He stooped and kissed her. It was an unusual demonstration from him in public; but the sight of her welcoming face was good; it surprised him into a betrayal of greater tenderness than she was accustomed to from him. She drew him towards a lamp and scrutinised him attentively, and he saw her quick startled glance directed towards his empty sleeve, and felt unaccountably embarrassed.“It’s nothing,” he said jerkily in an attempt to reassure her. “I’ll tell you about that some other time.”Her eyes lifted from the empty sleeve to his face.“You look very tired,” she said. “You’ve been ill... Youareill.”He tucked his hand within her arm and led her outside the station.“I got hurt,” he said, “and I ought, I suppose, to be resting my arm, but it wasn’t possible. It’s nothing to worry about.”He put her into a cab and seated himself beside her.“It’s good to be back—with you,” he said.She pressed closer against him.“I was surprised to get your telegram from De Aar. Why didn’t you write from Johannesburg? ... All these days, and never a line!”“I wasn’t in Johannesburg,” he answered. “I never got beyond De Aar. The man I wanted was there. Do you remember the man you saw me with on the beach that first morning? ... I went to settle a debt with him.”She turned quickly towards him, a light of comprehension dawning in her eyes.“He did this for you,” she said, and touched the empty sleeve. “I don’t want you to tell me,” she added; and he judged from her voice and from her manner that this journey of his to De Aar with its ugly consequences was associated in her mind with the story he had confided to her at the Monument before their engagement. She wanted him to realise that she trusted him.“I’ve no secrets from you,” he said.“I know. But there are some things one understands without any need for discussing them. I think I guessed when you didn’t wish me to see you off.”“I didn’t suppose...” he began, and broke off and stared at her. “I met her,” he confessed baldly; “but it wasn’t a thing planned. I wanted to see the man. She is married to him; but I didn’t know that when I went there.”Silence fell between them. It seemed to the man and to the girl, seated so still beside him, that the presence of this other and fairer woman intruded between them, was with them, listening to their disconnected talk.“It’s finished anyway,” he said abruptly. “I’m glad you know.”He stole a look at her quiet face.“There is a dark shadow,” he went on presently, “that lies across this land—the shadow of discontent and racial prejudice. That will pass away eventually—from the minds of many it has passed already. I have heard it described as the shadow of the past. Across the lives of numberless people some such shadow falls. They pass, these shadows.”She stretched out a hand and found his advanced to meet it. He pressed her fingers warmly.“It isn’t any sort of use to pretend that it hasn’t mattered to me,” he said; “but it belongs to the past now. I can look ahead to the future with a glad confidence... You aren’t afraid to trust your future in my keeping?”She looked up in his face with a smile lighting the earnest eyes, and answered simply:“I’ve never been afraid of shadows, Guy... And I love you. Love and trust are inseparable.”She drew her hand away from his and leaned back against the cushions and was silent for a while, listening to the hum of the streets and the soft rustle of the night wind as it blew in through the open windows and fanned her face. Hers was not a jealous temperament; but she realised, and felt sad in the knowledge, that in the years that lay ahead she would have her husband’s love to win. The heart which waits and trusts and gives generously reaps a full reward.
The dark cloud which had so long overshadowed South Africa, which stretched now blacker than it had ever appeared across the sky of the Union’s prosperity, was none the less surely passing, rolling backward with sullen reluctance before the strong opposing breath of leading opinion.
This German organised rebellion owed its defeat largely to the fact that the Dutch in the Colony knew by experience how little reliance was to be placed in German promises. The Boer is beginning to recognise that the word of a German is binding only in as far as it serves his own end. The memories of men who fought in the late Boer war are not all as conveniently short as their German advisers hoped. Brand, in his historical letter to de Wet, emphasised this point in his reply to de Wet’s earnest exhortation to him to depart from the policy he had adopted and join the rebellion, which he insisted arose out of a spirit of deep indignation at the unholy act of the Government in attacking German South-West Africa.
“I am satisfied,” Colonel Brand wrote in reply, “of the justice of the standpoint taken up by me. Even better than myself you know how deeply disappointed we were in the people whose case you so arduously espouse to-day. Not only did we receive no help from them in the last war, but the Kaiser even went to the extent of advising the British Government how to attack and destroy us. What an insult to our people when the late State President of the Transvaal personally applied to them and was turned back on the border.”
These things are not easily forgotten, and they are less easily pardoned. The good faith of a nation cannot rest upon lies.
Matheson knew nothing of the letter Cornelius had written to his wife; but he gathered from what he heard in De Aar, and from the talk of some Dutchmen with whom he travelled to the coast, that the rebellion was half-hearted, that already the men were realising that they had been misguided and were forsaking their leaders and going quietly back to their farms. In a few months it was prophesied Botha would have crushed the rising and restored order in the country. And the men who were now so bitter against him would come to admit the wisdom of his policy, and respect him for the generous nature of his opposition, which followed consistently the principle of suppressing the rebellion with firmness, of sparing life when mercy could be judiciously extended, and of pardoning the offenders. It is possible only for great natures to be generous and for wise natures to be impartial. The Union was fortunate in its time of crisis in having at its head a man in whom both these qualities were combined. The quashing of their carefully planned schemes in South Africa was one of Germany’s bitterest blows.
Matheson had sent a telegram to Brenda from De Aar to acquaint her of his return. He believed that she would be at the station to welcome him, nevertheless as an afterthought he had added the words: “Please meet train.” A keen desire to see her welcoming face on the platform on his arrival moved him to send the message. He wanted her, as he always wanted her when he was depressed and out of tune with life. Her bright companionship and ready understanding of his moods, her unwearying patience and kindness, had taught him to lean unconsciously on her. He wanted her with the formless need of the individual for a tried human friendship which in no circumstance could fail in understanding and sympathy. He never analysed his feeling for her; but he knew that she had grown somehow very dear and necessary to him; he also knew that there was no sort of passion in his steadily growing love for her. She was always his dear chum.
As he neared his destination a horrible feeling of nervousness gripped him. He was obsessed with the dread that something would prevent her from being at the station. She might not have received his telegram. Such things had happened before. She might have been out when it arrived—it might have been stuck in the rack and forgotten. A dozen such possibilities occurred to him.
He stared out of the window at the gathering darkness, watching the black formless shapes flitting by like sinister shadows in the night, dimly illumined by the light of the passing train. And then his gaze came back unwillingly, his musing interrupted by the bustle of his fellow travellers reaching up to the rack for their baggage in preparation for disentraining. Their cheerful energy fretted him. The journey had tired him, and his shoulder felt stiff and uncomfortable. He still wore Honor’s scarf as a sling. It was soiled now and crumpled, but it had been of great service. He glanced down at it and thought of the owner, of how she had tied it for him and pinned the empty sleeve of his coat across his breast, and buttoned the coat with great care for his injured arm. He pictured the beautiful face as it had leaned so near to him, and recalled the scent and the sheen of her bright hair. All that belonged to the past—was a separate chapter in his life—a still-born romance. It was a dream of beauty which had no place in the world of realities. But the dream would live in his memory. In the gold and crimsons of the sunset, amid the vast solitariness of the veld, and the splendour of moonlit nights, he would dream the dream again, would see in imagination a woman’s perfect face with its halo of pale hair shading the mystery of her eyes. She was becoming for him a symbol of womanhood, a symbol of all that was beautiful and strange and moving in nature. The flowers in the veld suggested her; the curve of a hill recalled the graceful flow of her shoulders; the heat of the noontide was as the passionate warmth of her nature; while the remote serene dusk conveyed the remembrance of her gentler moods when she looked into the heart of Africa with pity for its unhealed wounds.
He gazed out again upon the darkness, and the picture of Honor faded.
The lights of the city became visible and the dark outline of the sea. He sat up straighter and gripped the window with his left hand and peered out at familiar objects looming large in the gloom as the train ran on towards the terminus. Something one of the men in the carriage was saying arrested his attention. It recalled in a measure Herman Nel’s theories in regard to the rising; only the speaker spoke with less restraint than Nel habitually used, and with less sympathy with the rebels.
“They boast that they are fighting for the independence of the old Republics,” he was saying. “Perhaps a few of them are. But it is racial prejudice and political jealousy which has maddened the leaders. And for the rest, rebellion is always an easy method of making a living.”
A big fair Dutchman, standing in the middle of the swaying compartment, paused in the act of reaching up for a wonderful carpet bag which was serviceable rather than a thing of beauty, to remark with a slow shrug:
“Judas was not the only man to take blood-money. They come to a bad end, these men who sell human lives for greed.”
Do they? Matheson felt that the speaker generalised over-freely. If Justice were always discriminating and inexorable in her dealings with malefactors, she worked too secretly for the ordinary man to follow her methods. It was altogether a fallacy in regard to this life that the wicked suffer and are punished in proportion to their offence.
The train ran into the station. He got out quickly. He had no baggage to concern himself with, and was one of the first to descend from the train. He searched the platform eagerly for Brenda; and when he caught sight of her and saw the light of welcome in her face, he realised how great his disappointment would have been had she failed him.
She came forward swiftly, a pleased shyness in her look, love for him shining behind the smiling gladness in her eyes. He stooped and kissed her. It was an unusual demonstration from him in public; but the sight of her welcoming face was good; it surprised him into a betrayal of greater tenderness than she was accustomed to from him. She drew him towards a lamp and scrutinised him attentively, and he saw her quick startled glance directed towards his empty sleeve, and felt unaccountably embarrassed.
“It’s nothing,” he said jerkily in an attempt to reassure her. “I’ll tell you about that some other time.”
Her eyes lifted from the empty sleeve to his face.
“You look very tired,” she said. “You’ve been ill... Youareill.”
He tucked his hand within her arm and led her outside the station.
“I got hurt,” he said, “and I ought, I suppose, to be resting my arm, but it wasn’t possible. It’s nothing to worry about.”
He put her into a cab and seated himself beside her.
“It’s good to be back—with you,” he said.
She pressed closer against him.
“I was surprised to get your telegram from De Aar. Why didn’t you write from Johannesburg? ... All these days, and never a line!”
“I wasn’t in Johannesburg,” he answered. “I never got beyond De Aar. The man I wanted was there. Do you remember the man you saw me with on the beach that first morning? ... I went to settle a debt with him.”
She turned quickly towards him, a light of comprehension dawning in her eyes.
“He did this for you,” she said, and touched the empty sleeve. “I don’t want you to tell me,” she added; and he judged from her voice and from her manner that this journey of his to De Aar with its ugly consequences was associated in her mind with the story he had confided to her at the Monument before their engagement. She wanted him to realise that she trusted him.
“I’ve no secrets from you,” he said.
“I know. But there are some things one understands without any need for discussing them. I think I guessed when you didn’t wish me to see you off.”
“I didn’t suppose...” he began, and broke off and stared at her. “I met her,” he confessed baldly; “but it wasn’t a thing planned. I wanted to see the man. She is married to him; but I didn’t know that when I went there.”
Silence fell between them. It seemed to the man and to the girl, seated so still beside him, that the presence of this other and fairer woman intruded between them, was with them, listening to their disconnected talk.
“It’s finished anyway,” he said abruptly. “I’m glad you know.”
He stole a look at her quiet face.
“There is a dark shadow,” he went on presently, “that lies across this land—the shadow of discontent and racial prejudice. That will pass away eventually—from the minds of many it has passed already. I have heard it described as the shadow of the past. Across the lives of numberless people some such shadow falls. They pass, these shadows.”
She stretched out a hand and found his advanced to meet it. He pressed her fingers warmly.
“It isn’t any sort of use to pretend that it hasn’t mattered to me,” he said; “but it belongs to the past now. I can look ahead to the future with a glad confidence... You aren’t afraid to trust your future in my keeping?”
She looked up in his face with a smile lighting the earnest eyes, and answered simply:
“I’ve never been afraid of shadows, Guy... And I love you. Love and trust are inseparable.”
She drew her hand away from his and leaned back against the cushions and was silent for a while, listening to the hum of the streets and the soft rustle of the night wind as it blew in through the open windows and fanned her face. Hers was not a jealous temperament; but she realised, and felt sad in the knowledge, that in the years that lay ahead she would have her husband’s love to win. The heart which waits and trusts and gives generously reaps a full reward.