CHAPTER XXX.
A DOUBLE EXILE.
Hail, dark mother of wanderers, parched nurse of lions! Amidst thy romantic wildernesses grief and dishonour may forget themselves; with thee man is only man! He leaves that other half of himself, reputation, yonder in the crowd, and in these solitudes becomes a creature of thews and sinews, valuable only for his strength and endurance, for the range of his eye and the truth of his hand. He has done with the outward shows of life, and with all nice differences between good and bad. Here, worth is to be measured by the hunter’s fleetness of foot, and honour by the marksman’s aim. What a man is counts for but little; what he can do for much. In that aching misery which possessed him when he left England, John Vansittart looked to the desert as his best refuge. The hunter’s life in Mashonaland gives scanty leisure for brooding over the ruins of a home in England. The early trek with the waggons, or the start on foot from the skerm; the hard day’s tramp under the blazing sun; the need of providing meat for the boys—the long following on the spoor of giraffe or antelope, with the wild ride or cautious stalk at the end—which that need involves; the charm of the life, its poetry, its absolute novelty, and the ever-recurring vicissitudes which each new day brings forth, leave the head of the expedition briefest time for introspective thought. His slumbers are for the most part dreamless; or his dreams are of lions prowling by the camp-fire, or of the dark forms and wild gestures of those he has last seen dancing by its flickering light; not of the lost faces of home. Best of all, his conscience is at ease, for face to face with man in his most primitive aspect he loses the habit of weighing his past acts and comparing, with futile regret, the things he has done with the things he ought to have done.
For Vansittart there could have been no better refuge than the desert.
Here, if his heart wounds were not healed, his consciousness of sin was deadened. Here, where no exaggerated value was set on human life, he could remember Harold Marchant’s death with less intensity of pain. Here, where the native freely turned his gun or his assegai against his fellow-man, a mischance such as that of Florian’s Caffè seemed a small thing—the fortune of war, a spurt of anger, an unlucky blow, and there an end. Every man must die somehow; and it may not be the worst doom to drop down in the fulness of youth and vigour, knowing not the slow agonies of gradual extinction, the torture of dying by inches.
Vansittart’s thoughts were tempered by his surroundings. His character took new colours in that vivid life, in that lapse backward from the civilized and the complicated to the primitive stage of man’s history. It was as if Time had turned his glass and the earth were young. The wild race of Cain, the outcast, could have been no wilder than these woolly-haired followers of his, who were faithful to him because he was a good shot.
Nature, the great consoler, helped him to forget his grief by forgetting himself. Here, face to face with Nature’s mightiest forces, man’s sense of his own personality dwindles to the faintest shadow in the vastness of his surroundings. Instead of Trafalgar Square he has the Falls of the Zambesi; instead of the languid club lounger he has the elephant and the lion for his companions—the purring growl of the lion instead of the gossip of the smoking-room; the trumpet of the elephant instead of the chatter of the dinner-table. Surely it is good for a man to be alone in the wilderness—alone save for the company of followers to whom, though he be their leader, he is as another being, a white man, a stranger in their land, between whose thoughts and feelings and their own a great gulf is for ever fixed. It is good for him to feel his own insignificance among men who value him only for his powder and shot, and who will lose their reverence for his white superiority with the spending of his last cartridge. Here he must needs forget that pride of place which at home was a part of his being. Here there are no tradesmen to fawn upon him, no servants to touch their hats to him, no women to praise him. Small food for vanity here, where the darkies call his smooth, flat hair dog’s hair, and who liken his hairy arm to a baboon’s arm. Here if the women fawn upon him it is not for his smiles or his favour, but for beads or printed calico, such vivid orange or scarlet fabrics, figured with stars or half moons, as Manchester weaves for the Torrid Zone. Here if the men are true to him it is because he can feed them and pay them. He is in a world of stern facts, where sentiment and sophistication are unknown.
The atmosphere suits him. The primitive interests of this primitive life help to shut off that other life where all is gloom, the life of thought and of memory. Sufficient for the day, that is the motto here: food for the day; safety for the day; wood for the fires, water for man and beast. Beside them, behind them, ahead of them, stalk dangers that Europe knows not. Danger from beasts of prey; danger from men as cruel; fever, starvation, death in many shapes—all the vicissitudes of a life between the desert and the sky.
Fortune favours him in his desolation of spirit. A happier man might have been less lucky. A man more careful of his life, with more to live for, might have hardly escaped scot-free from all thedangers of the hunter’s life in an unknown land. Travellers far more experienced wondered afterwards when they heard the story of this man’s travels, and the impunity with which he had done desperate things.
His daring had been the audacity of ignorance, they said. If he had known the extent of the peril in such unconsidered wanderings, with so small a party, with such inadequate preparation, he would have been a madman to set his life upon such chances. Had he answered them truthfully he would have told them that he was a madman when he turned his face towards the desert; mad with the agony of a life that was blighted; mad with the bitter memories of lost happiness.
Of these wedded lovers, parted in the noontide of their love, one carried his wounded heart to the wilderness, and sought for tranquillity of spirit in a life of movement and peril; the other, the weaker vessel, had no such large resources. The life of adventure, the ever-changing horizon, were not for her. She could only creep to some quiet haven and sit alone and brood upon her grief.
She went first to Avranches; then late in the autumn she took a fancy to the solitude of Mont St. Michel, the quaint monastic citadel, the fortress on the rock; and here, when the last of the tourists had gone, and the equinoctial gales were roaring round the Gothic towers, she took up her abode in an apartment specially prepared for her by the cheery patronne of the Inn at the Gate, an apartment upon the ramparts, with windows looking wide over the sea towards Coutances and Jersey.
Benson, who had a constitution of iron, complained bitterly of this wind-swept rock, yet had to own later that her health had never been better. Eve stopped here late into the winter, sketching a little, reading a great deal, wandering on the sands in all weathers, and sometimes wishing that her footsteps would take her unawares to that portion of the bay, where, as in the Kelpie’s flow, sorrow might find a grave.
An imprudent ramble in the marshy fields between Pontorson and the Mount, which left her belated in the mists of a November evening, resulted in congestion of the lungs. She had contrived to lose herself among those salt meadows as completely as ever her husband had lost himself in Mashonaland, and it was eleven o’clock when she and her whimpering attendant tottered along the causeway leading to the gates of the fortress, footsore and weary, their shoes worn out in that long tramp over coarse grass and sandy hillocks.
Benson telegraphed to Miss Marchant at Fernhurst, and Sophy appeared on the scene as quickly as boat and rail, and a wretchedfly from Avranches, with harness eked out by bits of rope, could bring her. Sophy was broken-hearted at this cruel turn which her sister’s bright fortunes had taken, and agonized with remorseful retrospection. It was she, perhaps, whose imprudent tongue had parted husband and wife, had destroyed that happy home. Sophy hated herself for the folly of that revelation. Why could she not have let well alone? Why could she not have left undisturbed that happy state of things by which she herself had profited so richly? Looking back upon her conduct of that fatal week, she saw that it was her own disappointment which had soured her, and her own selfish vexation which had made her so angry with Vansittart.
It was a long time before Eve was well enough for serious talk of any kind. She rallied slowly, and during the monotonous days of her convalescence she was treated as a child, who must only hear of pleasant things; but when she was well again, quite well—save for that little hacking cough which seemed to have become an element of her being—Sophy ventured to approach the subject of her domestic sorrows.
“I have been utterly miserable since the day I left Charles Street,” said Sophy, seated beside Eve’s easy-chair, and resting her forehead on the cushioned arm as she talked, so that her face was invisible. “I have hated myself for speaking of your husband as I did—only upon hearsay. After all, Mr. Sefton might have misinterpreted Jack’s conduct. It might all have been a mistake.”
“It was a mistake, Sophy.”
“Oh, I am so glad. You found out at once that Mr. Sefton was wrong.”
“Yes.”
“Thank God! But then”—looking up at her sister in blank astonishment—“if that is so, why are you parted, Jack and you?”
“That is our secret, Sophy.”
“But why, but why? I can’t understand. There could be only one reason for your leaving him when you loved him so dearly. Nothing but the knowledge of his infidelity would justify——”
“Stop, Sophy,” said Eve, peremptorily. “There is nothing gained by speculating about other people’s business. My husband and I have our own reason for taking different roads. We have never quarrelled; we have never ceased to care for each other. I shall love him with all my heart, and mind, and strength, till my last breath.”
“I guess your reason,” answered Sophy, nodding sagaciously. “He is an Atheist, and you, who have always been a good Church-woman, could not go on living with an unbeliever. You are like poor Catherine in ‘Robert Elsmere.’”
“Oh, Sophy, do you think I should forsake him because he waswithout hope or comfort from God? Why do you tease me with foolish guesses? I tell you again the reason of our parting is our secret. A secret that will go down with me to the grave.”
Sophy’s eager imagination ran riot in the world of mystery. Politics, Freemasonry, Hypnotism, Theosophy, Nihilism, hereditary madness, epilepsy, hydrophobia, a family ghost, a family fatality! That lively mind of hers touched each possibility, rejected each, and flew off to the next; and lastly, with a sigh of relief, she exclaimed—
“I am more thankful than I can say that it was not my imprudent tongue which parted you.”
An hour later, walking alone on the ramparts, she told herself that in all probability this desolate wife was only throwing dust in her eyes, and that Vansittart’s inconstancy had been clearly demonstrated in accordance with Sefton’s story. It would be only like a devoted wife to violate truth in order to vindicate her husband. Pride and love would alike urge Eve to deny her husband’s infidelity.