Cynthia Stockley (continued 5)

“With the first glint of dawn we saddled up and rode down to the King’s waggon again, and Major Wilson called in a loud voice to Lobengula to come out and surrender. Immediately we were answered by the rattle of guns, and a heavy fire! They had evidently been ‘laying’ for us. We dismounted and returned the fire, but as soon as the natives began trying to get round us we mounted and retreated about six hundred yards, when we again dismounted and returned the fire from behind our horses. Then as they began to take to the bush round us we rode off again. Two of our horses had been shot, so two horses had to carry double.

“We rode slowly down the spoor made by the King’s waggons the night before, Major Wilson and Captain Borrow behind us consulting as to what to do. Major Wilson then called me and asked me to ride back and get the main column to come on at once with the Maxims. I rode off with two other men, and we hadn’t gone a hundred yards when hordes of Matabele rushed out on us from the bush ahead, waving their assegais and yelling. We galloped to the left where the river lay, and by hard riding got away through a shower of bullets.

“When we got to the river we found it in flood, and we had to swim over. Of course, it was too late then for the main column to cross.

“Immediately after we got away from the last lot of natives we heard Wilson and his party come up to them, and heavy firing commenced. I looked back just before we got out of sight and saw that our fellows were surrounded.

“There must have been thousands... our men in an open space without cover of any kind... surrounded by those shouting, ferocious devils mad for revenge!

“They were the pick of our forces—the very flower—thirty-four of the finest fellows in the country—in the world!”

He paused a little while, and his throat moved in a curious way that fascinated my eyes, so that I could not think about his news, but only about what was choking him.

“It is still hoped that some of them escaped. But I don’t think so... It is true that some of them might possibly have got away—if they had tried. By hard riding those with the best mounts might, but they were not the kind of men to leave their chums. No: you can take it from me they fought it out there—side by side—to the bitter end.

“But before that end came you can believe that they put up a fight that the natives of this country will never forget. I guess they showed those devils how brave men can die.”

After a long time some one spoke. Some one had the fearful courage to stammer from twisted lips a question:

“Who were they? Tell us the names.” Robert Burney’s steady glance passed from face to face, and he gave us the names.

“Alan Wilson,” he repeated lingeringly, as though he loved the sound of those two words; and there is indeed something gallant-sounding, something intrepid and chivalrous, in the rhythm of that man’s name whom other men so much loved—that dauntless leader who instilled the spirit of courageous adventure and loyal comradeship into every one with whom he came in contact; whose comrades so loved him that it is certain they followed him to death as gaily as they would have ridden by his side to victory.

“Alan Wilson—Borrow—Kirton—Judd—Greenfield—” Sometimes he paused for a moment, but he never repeated a name twice and he gave us every one of the thirty-four. Some one checked them off, slowly and relentlessly, like a clock ticking and bringing us at each tick nearer to some dreadful doom. When he had finished a sigh passed over us like a ghostly wind.

Some of them were names we knew well; some we had never heard before; all were names to be thereafter written in our memories, and in letters of scarlet and gold across the deathless page of Fame. In other places many a woman’s head would be bowed to the dust, many a bereaved heart torn and broken, while yet it thrilled with pride for the glorious “Last Stand” of those thirty-four dauntless men.

But for most of us standing there, hanging upon the words of Robert Burney, breathing heavily after every name as from a deathblow escaped, all that it seemed possible to feel at that moment was a savage joy; a joy so painful that it seemed as if it must burst the heart that felt it.

God knows we grudged Fame to none for their noble dead. We mourned with them, and would weep for them. But at first, just at first, in that great pain of relief, we could not help that little ghostly sighing wind of relief and thanks that escaped from our dry lips—thanks to God for the omission of the special name we loved from that terrible roll-call of Honour.

Alas! for one among us who could not so thank God—for the wife of one of the only two married men who fell with that heroic band. When we realised what had befallen her we gathered round her. We could do nothing to comfort her. No one tried to beguile her from her grief with words. But it seemed a kind thing to do to shelter her stricken eyes from the gay and flaunting sunshine.

All was not yet told. There had been other engagements. After the loss of the Wilson patrol the main column had retreated down the Shangani River to Umhlangeni, and all the way were continuously attacked. Moreover, they had run short of food and been forced to eat some of their horses; their boots had given out; many of them were obliged to march with their broken feet thrust into the regulation leather wallets; fever also had attacked them. Another list of casualties was necessarily attached to this retreat. One of the nice cheeky boys had been killed; Mrs Shand’s husband wounded; Dr Marriott—

When Burney came to this name his eyes rested for a moment on Mrs Marriott’s listening face, and by something that came into his expression I knew that his news for her was of the worst. God knows if she too read his look aright, but she was the first to speak:

“What news of my husband, Mr Burney?” For a moment Robert Burney’s voice stuck in his throat; then he spoke out clearly, looking at the fragile, ashen-faced woman with actually the glint of a smile on his face, for as a brave man he had a kind of joy in saying what he did.

“He died a splendid death, Mrs Marriott, saving Dick Saurin’s life.”

Elizabeth Marriott showed that she was made of the material of which heroes’ wives should be made. She smiled too—a proud, bright, almost a gay smile. Then she turned to me and said softly so that no one heard but I:

“That is my gift to you, Deirdre Saurin.” I kissed her, and my tears streamed down my face, falling upon hers; but suddenly they were dried in my eyes, and I could weep no more. Some fateful words, spoken almost brokenly by Robert Burney, had fallen upon my ears: “Tony Kinsella is missing.” It was as though some one had thrust a sword into my heart and I could feel the life-blood ebbing away from me, leaving me cold—cold as some frozen thing in the Arctic Sea. Though the sun shone so gaily upon us there I shivered with bitter cold.

It was a desolate home-coming. As soon as the sun went down a mass of slate-coloured clouds that had been crouching in the south-west like some stealthy winged monster waiting to pounce, spread itself out swiftly and enshrouded us in grey, misty rain.

The men hurriedly inspanned and urged us into the shelter of the waggons, then started to walk ahead in silent, gloomy groups. No woman walked, except Mrs Burney; we could see her far behind, clinging to her husband’s arm, gazing into his face, caring nothing for rain—why should she? Mrs Rookwood, proud to have been asked to do so, minded the Burney baby and tried to hide the gladness of her eyes from those who had little enough cause to rejoice. Her news had been good; George Rookwood had done well and was returning on some special errand in a day or two.

The children were bunched together in a little scarlet cluster at the end of the waggon, watching silent and wide-eyed two of their number who were weeping huddled against their mother. She sat between them with a white, thoughtful face on which there was no sign of tears, though her news had been bad enough to wipe all hope and joy from her life.

“Hush, children,” she kept gently repeating. “We don’t know for certain... Mr Burney said there might be... that some thought there was still hope... we can’t be sure... but if it is—if he should be—he would like us to take it bravely—not to—not to make a fuss... but I don’t think it can be true... surely it can’t be true.” Her afflicted eyes searched our faces for some gleam of hope. But we had none to give. We were fighting each our own devils of despair.

The mental exaltation that had sustained Mrs Marriott had given place to physical exhaustion and she lay against my shoulder with a strange heaviness, still as a stone, her eyes closed. Annabel Cleeve fainted quietly, twice, before we reached home, and Mrs Skeffington-Smythe and Mrs Valetta did what they could for her. But the latter’s pale, haunted face was not one in which to seek comfort. Once her glance crossed mine like a rapier flash, but I was sick and cold with pain, and had neither pity nor disdain in my heart for her. My mind was busy with its own misery. I was striving to “rear the changeling Hope in the black cave of Despair.” My thoughts set me in torment, and I could remember nothing but the words of Robert Burney:

“He was last heard of out scouting with two other men near the Shangani River. They were surrounded and attacked by a party of twelve natives armed with rifles and assegais. One of them, Britton, managed to get away and ride to the main column for help, and when he got back with a patrol an hour later the other fellow, Vincent, was lying there wounded, surrounded by the bodies of dead natives, but Kinsella was nowhere to be found—and has never been heard of or seen since. Vincent could tell nothing but that just before he became unconscious Kinsella was still standing over his body shooting—”

Not to know! Not to know! Torturing visions stole upon me; visions of men lying wounded to death; parched with bitter thirst; waiting, waiting for reinforcements that never came; for help that would never come!

Then the terrible yet merciful remembrance that it was all so long ago! Many, many days had passed since it happened. If those splendid, heroic men lay there still they must be of the great, noble company of the dead. I looked up at the grey arch above me, blurred and dim with rain, and thinking of the unsheltered dead, lying with eyes wide open to the skies, was thankful that it fell so gently and pityingly down.

“O loved ones lying far away, What word of love can dead lips send? O wasted dust! O senseless clay! Is this the end? Is this the end? “Peace, peace! we wrong the noble dead To vex their solemn slumber so. Though childless and with thorn-crowned head Up the steep path must England go—”

I could not remember at that moment who wrote those great lines. I only know that I thought there was strange healing in them for mourning hearts. There seemed suddenly something peaceful in the thought of Death; something that lulled and dulled the active burning pain of uncertainty.

There seemed even a kind of mercy in Elizabeth Marriott’s definite tidings, terrible as they were. She knew at least that her man was at rest from torment; suffering was done with him; pain had been defeated.

But—Not to know! Not to know!

Before twelve o’clock that night Maurice Stair came to me and told me that he had determined to leave at once with two good colonial boys, Jacob and Jonas, to find Anthony Kinsella if possible, or at least get definite tidings of his fate.

“If he is alive I’ll bring him back,” he said, in the quiet, modest way I had always found so attractive in him, and kissing the hand I gave him he went on his way.

Chapter Fourteen.

The Witch Calls.

“Pain is the lord of this world, nor is there any one who escapes from its net.”

Within the next few weeks many of our men came home. Not as we had cheered them forth, in a gay band:

Brilliant and gallant and brave!

—But ragged, haggard, footsore, dragged by or dragging half-starved horses; many of them with rheumatism planted for ever in their joints, and malaria staring from their eyes.

Fort George was a busy place again. Wives worn with watching and waiting in suspense, braced themselves afresh to the task of nursing sick husbands, while those who had no men-folk of their own on the spot were hastily spanned-in by the hospital sisters who had more than they could do in the over-crowded little hospital amongst the husbands and sons and lovers of women far away. Most of these were “travellers who had sold their lands to see other men’s,” as Rosalind puts it, and possessed of the accompanying qualifications—“rich eyes and empty hands!” Many of them were just members of that great Legion of the Lost ones always to be found in the advance-guard of pioneer bands—the men who have strayed far from the fold of home and love and women-folk.

“The little black sheep who have gone astray. The damned bad sorts who have lost their way.”

The nursing to be done amongst these cases was of the most difficult kind, for there was no co-operation from the patient. Most of them didn’t care a brass button whether they recovered or not. They were tired, disappointed, blasé men, and their attitude towards life could be summed up in one brief potent phrase that was often on their lips: “Sick of it!”

The war had been a disappointment in many ways. It is true that the work had been accomplished. The Matabele were broken and dispersed, and life in the country was now secure. But the war had not been the glorious campaign anticipated. The quiet honour of having done his duty belonged to every man of them; there was glory for few save those whose ears would never more hear blame or praise. There had been no big, wild, battles, force closing with force: only “potting and being potted” they complained.

“Sniped at from the bush when we weren’t looking! No loot, no sport, nothing but fever and sore feet, and hunger, and disgust, and lost pals!”

Ah! that was the rub! There lay the sting! When they thought of the thirty-four men whose bones lay bleaching in the rain beyond Shangani they turned their faces to the wall and some of them died. The price of the campaign had been too high!

The whole thing was one of Africa’s sweet little mirages, others told me as I sat by their beds—one of her charming little games, and her rotten cotton ways. In changing moods and tenses that varied from raving delirium to a painful clarity of thought their cry was unanimous and unchanging: “Sick of it!”

First and last and always they were sick of Africa, and “on the side” as Mr Hunloke phrased it, they were sick of “bucketting and being bucketted about all over the shop;” of bad whiskey; of no whiskey; of sore feet; of veldt sores; of fever; of mosquitoes; of never getting any letters from home; of getting letters from home that contained plenty of good advice but no tin; of the rottenness of the country; of the whole damned show; of life in general.

“There’s nothing in it,” they said, and uttering that bitter brief indictment more of them died. Others by slow degrees recovered and began to quote bits of, Barrack-Room Ballads and cynical lines from Adam Lindsay Gordon to the nurse in charge.

They are a poetical people—these black sheep and travellers. Nearly all of them carry about, hidden in the deeps of their hearts verses, tag-ends of sonnets, valiant lines from the men’s poets—Byron, Henley, Kipling, Gordon; and I learned to find it not strange that even on profane lips the lines were always of the strong and chivalrous and the pure in heart.

Mrs Valetta and I found ourselves in daily touch with each other at the hospital huts. We were the only ones left of the Salisbury group. Anna Cleeve had gone back, on hearing that her fiancé had arrived in Salisbury ill of fever, and later Mrs Skeffington-Smythe departed in the mail-coach, seated amongst a hundred parcels which she had been obliged to stage-manage herself, as Monty, appearing to think that martial law and marital responsibility ended together, had bestowed the favour of his company upon two strangers who owned a comfortable spring waggon and were bent on getting some sable-antelope shooting.

By the first coach that came down there had been a letter from Judy urging me to join her as soon as possible, but at the time it did not seem the best thing to do. There was no special work for me in Salisbury, while in Fort George there was much. Moreover, I had put out too many roots and fronds to be able to detach myself easily from the place where Anthony Kinsella had left me and told me to wait until he came. Judy’s letters became more pressing after the return to Salisbury of Mrs Skeffington-Smythe and Anna Cleeve. It transpired that with implacable malice they had given to all who cared to listen their version of my parting with Anthony Kinsella. Judy flew to pen and paper to let me know that my “infatuation for Tony Kinsella” was the most interesting topic of conversation in Salisbury, and that the kindest thing any one found to say was: “What a pity he is already married!”

Dick who had returned from Buluwayo wrote that he was coming down as soon as an injured hip and a broken arm would permit to see Mrs Marriott before she left for England, and tell her all he could about her husband’s splendid death. He had some plan to discuss with her, too, about the farm of six thousand acres which was her husband’s share as a volunteer. Each man who went to the front was entitled to a farm of that size, twenty gold claims, and a share of the cattle captured.

Dick’s idea was to take care of this property for Mrs Marriott, and to put all his energy into enhancing its value for the benefit of the woman who had been widowed for his sake. Incidentally, he wrote that he hoped I would return with him to Salisbury. But my sister-in-law, who wrote by the same mail, coldly advocated a return to Johannesburg and the wing of Elizabet von Stohl.

“You can never live down the scandal that is being talked about you,” she said. “There will always be a tale attached to you, and all the fast men in the country will want to flirt with you on the strength of it. Besides, what are you going to do when Tony Kinsella comes back—for he will come back of course.”

I thanked her much for that! Gladly I forgave her all the rest for the sake of that last little sentence that had slipped with such conviction from her pen. It was true that every one felt so about Anthony Kinsella: he was such an alive, ardent personality, it was impossible to believe him dead.

“Of course he will come back,” was what they all said. Claude Hunloke went further.

“Tony Kinsella is a slick guy!” he announced. “I tell you he has got cast-iron fastenings. Nothing can ever break him loose.”

“And I know that it is true,” I said to myself. “He will come back. Then every one will know the truth about us”; and I crushed down doubt and dismay. Africa put her gift into my heart and wrote her sign upon my brow.

I was minding Tommy Dennison at about this time—a jaundiced-coloured skeleton in a very bad way with black-water fever. He was one of the patients who had overflowed from the hospital into a private hut for special nursing. So I tended him under the instructions and supervision of the hospital sisters, though if any one had a few months before described “black-water” to me and told me I should ever nurse a case without blenching and shrivelling at the task I should have announced a false prophet. But it was even so. I sat by him through the wet, hot days, listening to the drip of the rain from the thatch and the little broken bits of an old song that was often, on his lips.

“Lay me low, my work is done, I am weary, lay me low, Where the wild flowers woo the sun. Where the balmy breezes blow, Where the butterfly takes wing, Where the aspens drooping glow, Where the young birds chirp and sing, I am weary, let me go. “I have striven hard and long Always with a stubborn heart, Taking, giving, blow for blow. Brother, I have played my part, And am weary, let me go.”

At intervals he raved, fancying himself back at Buluwayo where he smelt the King’s kraal burning, and heard the kaffir dogs making night hideous by their howling.

“Oh! will some of you fellows kill those dogs?—choke ’em—feed ’em do anything, only let me sleep... How many do you say? six hundred of them starving in the bush, left behind by Loben... Six hundred!... Into the valley of death... rode the six hundred!” Then back again to his old song:

“When our work is done, ’tis best, Brother, best that we should go, I am weary, let me rest, I am weary, let me go.”

Always, always, day after day, sleeping and waking, he muttered those lines with the persistency of the delirious. But one day he varied them to:

“Lay me weary, I am low, I am low—I’ve never done any work!”

and smiling at me with his fever-broken lips, closed his eyes for ever. Just four months after he had sat upon the summit of Anthony Kinsella’s hut playing subtly upon the flute!

My brother arrived the next day—the same old kindly tolerant debonair Dick of old; but yet with some of his gaiety and boyishness wiped from his face and replaced by a heavy look that it saddened me strangely to see, for I had begun to recognise that look and knew that it meant care. His eye had a strained expression, too; and when I saw that his arm hung useless by his side, and that he came limping towards me, I burst out crying.

“Oh, Dicky!” I cried. “They have shot you all to bits!”

But he only grinned.

“Nonsense, Goldie, I’m all right. What’s a chipped arm and a game leg if they’re not the honours of war? Some of the fellows haven’t a thing to show for their trouble. These are my trophies. I’m proud of ’em. I show ’em round.”

“That’s all very well,” I said, still sniffling and mopping up my tears, “but you’ve got a temperature too. I can see it by your eyes.”

“Oh! a little bit slack. A pinch of quinine will put me right with the world. But, Deirdre, I’ve some fierce news for you. What do you think the last mail brought me but an announcement that your solicitor, Morton, had skidooed with every rap of yours. Betty wrote to me in a fearful state about it. You’re bust, my child.”

“Dick!”

“Yes, every red cent! We don’t have a bit of luck about the dibs, you and I. It turns out that he has only been keeping things going for the last year or so, by borrowing money on your securities; then just as things began to look too fishy, and discovery had to come, he scooted with the fragments that remained—about twelve baskets full I don’t think, and Chancery Lane knows him no more. But wait till I get after him! Just wait till I have got things fixed up all right for Mrs Marriott, and you and Judy! I’ll get after him! Not that I suppose I shall get much out of him, but still—”

The cold-blooded American who has been robbed of a dollar gleamed out of one of Dick’s eyes and a red Indian raging for the scalp of his foe glared from the other.

“If he’s got anything left he’ll belch up all right when I get him!” he announced with the conviction of a Nemesis. Presently he regained calmness.

“You must come up and live with me and Judy,” he said. “There are some catamarans of women in the world, Deirdre, and I believe you’ve been up against one or two, but they’re not all like that. There are some jolly nice women in Salisbury, and we’ll put the rest to the rightabout, and make them eat up their silly tales.”

“Dear Dick,” I said, “it takes a real reformed rake like you to be truly generous. But I can’t come to Salisbury.”

“Why not? It isn’t like you to run away from the music.”

“I’m not going to. But I can’t leave Fort George yet.”

He looked troubled and wistful, but asked me more questions. He was too much a believer it the family integrity. But after a day or two, most of which he spent with Gerry Deshon and Colonel Blow, for I was still much engaged at the hospital and had only the evenings for him, his troubled looks disappeared. Eventually, having planned with Mrs Marriott her secure future, he was ready to return to Salisbury.

“I shall have to get back, Deirdre; but you stay on here as long as you think fit, with Mrs Burney. Blow and Deshon will mind you for me; and when you’re ready to come on to Salisbury send me a wire and I’ll fetch you.”

A morning or two later I walked up and down with him in the early dawn, before the post-office, waiting for the mails to be put into the coach that was to carry him away. A few sard-coloured stars lingered regretfully in the pale sky. Not until his foot was on the step of the coach did he say the words I wished to hear from him, but would not ask for.

“Goldie—of course I’ve heard everything, all about it—it seems to be a queer tangle. If it were any other fellow I’d get after him—but Kinsella is straight—as straight a man as there is in Africa. If he has let you believe he is free, then you can take my oath he is.”

I could have kissed his feet for those words, and the way he spoke them—as though it was unquestionable that Anthony was still in the world. I could not speak, my heart was too full. I could only look at him gratefully through my tears. He patted me on the shoulder.

“Dear old girl, don’t fret. He’ll turn up.” I did not have time to fret: there was too much to do. Among other things I had Mrs Marriott to pack up and send away to her English home to those who would tend and love her and bring her safely through her coming trial. Her last words to me from the coach were:

“Deirdre, I know I shall have a son to take up life where poor Rupert laid it down: and I think he can do it under no finer name than Anthony.”

“Thank you, dear,” I cried, “and then you must come back here and give him his father’s heritage. It’s going to be a splendid heritage. Dick will see to that.”

A week later we packed off the little woman whose husband still lay unburied at Shangani. She was taking her small fatherless tribe to her people down-country, and was then coming back to earn her living by nursing. Saba Rookwood and her husband were travelling with the same waggons. They had been married that morning, and were going away for a time to return later and start farming and mining in the Buluwayo district.

In the evening, Gerry Deshon, Colonel Blow, and I rode to their first outspan, about twelve miles out from the town, and had supper with them—a sad, affectionate little farewell supper, sitting round an old black kettle that was propped up by two tall stones over the red embers of the wood and mis fire.

If any one had told me a few months before that I would sit at a camp-fire, my eyes blurred with tears and my heart full of regrets at parting with a dowdy, worn-faced little colonial woman who understood nothing of life as I had known it; and another who had broken the moral code and transgressed against the tenets of my religion, I should have been both deeply offended and incredulous. Even if it could have been explained to me that I should love and reverence the first woman because the great forces of life—Love and Sorrow and Death—had touched and beautified her, revealing to all her strong heart, and courage, and a lovely belief in the mercy and wisdom of God, I should yet not entirely have understood; nor that I could honour the second because I saw in her a gentle, kind, and brave spirit, sweet in humiliation, and free of malice and the small sins that devour the souls of so many women.

Africa had taught me a few things.

I had come out to her stiff with the arrogance of youth and well-being, of pride that has never been assailed by suffering and disgrace; of rectitude that has been untried by temptation; full of the disdainful virtue of one who has known only the bright, beflowered paths of life, and been well hedged and guarded from all that hurts and defiles. But she had opened eyes in my soul that had been blind before, and had shown me lives seared with pain and sin and scorched with the fires of passion that were yet beautiful; of men who could fight down the beasts of temptation and conquer the devils of vice; of men who could forget self-interest to hold out a helping hand to the weak and the stumbling; of men who could die in lone, silent places so that others might live in safety and security; of women who could offer their all for the public good, and lose it with a smile on their lips.

These were things I had read of and heard of and dreamed of perhaps. But in this fierce, sad land they happened. Africa had shown them to me happening in all their naked terror and beauty. In Europe I had known pictures, and sculpture, add music, in all their finished and accepted beauty. But here I had found the very elements of Art—deeds to inspire sculpture, and all the tragedy that a violin in the hands of a master tries to tell.

Riding home between the two men, along the dusty road, silver fretted now under the glancing stars and a moon that hung in the heavens like a great luminous pearl, I realised how changed I was, and how changed was life for me. I think then for the first time it dawned upon me that the claw of Africa was already deep in my heart, but that the throe it caused was not all of pain.

When we got back to the town we found that some waggons we had met on our way out had come in. They were drawn up in the front of one of the shops, and left standing there for the night, but a little of the unloading had been begun, and on one side of the road lay three enormous packing cases. We reined in for a moment to look at them, and read the address painted on each in large black letters. Afterwards we gazed at each other and exchanged sad ironical smiles. Mrs Marriott’s trousseau had arrived!

I think it was just three weeks afterwards that I heard of Dick’s death. The news came as an absolute shock to me, for I had not even known that he was ill. It appeared that he had been suffering from fever ever since his return from Fort George, but he had not allowed Judy, to tell me because he thought it would add to my worries, also he hoped from day to day to have better news to send. Instead, weakened by his wounds and the privations undergone at the front, he suddenly got rapidly worse, and almost before they realised in what desperate case he was, passed quietly out one morning at dawn. When I heard, it was too late even to see his face before they buried him, for the dead do not tarry long with us in Africa, and I could not have reached Salisbury in less than three or four days.

While I was still quivering under the blow, and as though it were not enough, they came to tell me that Maurice Stair had come home—alone. Walking like a woman in a dream I went to the hut where he was resting, and heard the story he had to tell.

After much searching and enquiry among the Matabele who had come in to lay down their arms, but were all averse to telling what part they had taken in the past fighting, or to confess the solitary deeds of horror many of them had committed, he had at last found certain natives willing to lead him to other natives still away in the bush who had knowledge of the disappearance of Anthony Kinsella. By inference, implication, and insinuation—anything but direct information, for fear they should be accused of complicity—these boys had told what they knew of the affair—which was too much!

They said that after Britton had escaped to fetch help from the main column, Anthony had gone on fighting, shooting with his revolver when his rifle ammunition had given out, and attacking the natives with such violence that all had fallen except one, who, wounded in the legs had crawled to the bush, and from there had watched. He reported that Anthony Kinsella had been hit on the head by one of the last bullets, and seemed to have gone mad afterwards for he suddenly threw down his revolver and leaving the body of Vincent (supposed by the natives to be dead) had walked away into the bush, laughing and singing! Afterwards some more natives had come up, and the wounded man had shewn them the direction Kinsella had taken. They had followed his spoor, and come upon him in the bush, unarmed—

Maurice Stair paused there, and turned his face away.

“You must tell me all,” I said calmly and waited.

“They were ten to one—they killed him by the stream where he was lying—they left nothing by which we could identify him—but the natives took us without hesitation to the spot where the bones lay. We buried them and put up a rough cross.”

It seemed to me then as if my last hold to life was broken: as if the last rock to cling to in a cruel, storm-racked sea had crumbled suddenly away, and I went down for awhile under the waves of that sea; it washed over my head and submerged me.

For three months I lay at the door of death, craving entry into the place that held all I loved. But Africa had not done with me. She dragged me back from the dark, healed my sick body with her sunshine, and cooled my fevers with her sparkling air. She even after a time began to lull my mind with a peace it had never known before. In strange moments a kind of exquisitely bitter contentment possessed me at having paid with the last drop of my heart’s blood the price she exacts from the children of civilisation who come walking with careless feet in her wild secret places. Mocking and gay I had come to the cave of the witch, and now she clawed me to her and held me tight in her bosom with the hands of my dead. And not my dead only: the hands of all those men with whom I had laughed in the moonlight and afterwards waved to, in farewell—they held me too, though they were hands no longer but pale bones on the brown earth; they held me fast like the hands of dead brothers and I could never leave the land where they lay. With the strange prophetic knowledge that sometimes comes to one when the body is weakened by illness, but the spirit’s vision become wonderfully clear, I knew at last that I could never leave this cruel land that had robbed me of those I loved and given me instead a bitter peace and a strange contentment in her wild, barren beauty.

Chapter Fifteen.

Part Two—What Australian Gold Achieved.

“Life has always poppies in her hands.”

“Salisbury lies behind that big brown hill,” said Judy, “about an hour’s drive from here.” She was perched with a certain daintiness upon Dirk Mackenzie’s water fykie, sipping a cup of coffee, her back crêpe draperies spread round her on the scrubby grass. Mrs Shand and I, very sunburnt, wearing print bonnets and our oldest skirts, sat of the ground sharing a striped kaffir blanket with several dozen small brown ants, who were busy collecting the crumbs left from breakfast and hurrying off with them to a neighbouring ant-heap. The ox waggon in which we had taken a fortnight to travel from Fort George was loaded so high with packing cases and Mrs Shand’s furniture that it cast quite a large patch of shade, in which we sat as in some cool black pool while the rest of the world, including the dashing Cape cart in which Judy had just arrived, sweltered in blinding sunshine.

Dirk Mackenzie our transport driver, a big, bearded, Natal man, stood smoking in his shirt sleeves talking to Mr Courtfield, the man who lad driven Judy out, and Maurice Stair in riding-kit with his legs twisted, holding his elbow in one hand and a cigarette in the other, stared reflectively at a group of kaffir boys who at a little distance off were squatting round their three-legged pot of mealie-meal pap.

I looked from them to the big brown hill that hid Salisbury, the road of red-brown dust that led there, the dazzling blue of the morning sky, and back again to the chic and pretty widow sitting upon the fykie with her crêpe skirts spread so daintily about her.

Her grey eyes were sparkling, there was pink in her cheeks, and poudre de riz upon her nose; her blond hair, charmingly arranged, shone softly, and a tiny fair curl lay in the centre of her forehead just under the white crêpe peak of her little widow’s bonnet. Quite the most fascinating widow I had ever seen! I had thought of her all the way up as the languid, passé little woman who left me at Fort George, and had longed to reach her and comfort her as best I might. But any one appearing less in need of comfort than this fresh, smart lady it would be hard to find. She looked as if she had stepped straight out of Jays’s. All her languor and weariness of life had disappeared. She seemed to have gone back to the days of her youth before she married Dick. There was the same pretty, appealing look in her eyes, the same clinging, helpless manner, mingled now with an alluring little air of sadness. As for the small white hand that held her coffee cup, nothing could have been daintier, more eager and alive looking. Certainly a very different Judy to the one I had last seen in Fort George! I suppose I ought to have been glad, but I was not. My heart, with astounding contrariety, yearned after the other little languid, untidy, almost unkempt Judy, as one longs in sorrow for the old scenes and surroundings of happier, dearer days.

“Our cart has had a smash-up, but Mr Courtfield lent me his to come and fetch you, Deirdre,” she was saying, “and would insist on driving me himself. Wasn’t it sweet of him? I find that men are so extraordinarily kind to me in my trouble.” Her sad little air deepened, and my heart stirred to her for the first time. Perhaps after all under that elegant crêpe frock she was just a lonely little miserable creature!

“Of course they would be,” I said. “Any one would be kind to you, Judy; and all men loved Dick.”

“Every one in this country is kind, don’t you think?” ventured Mrs Shand.

“Oh, every one? I’m sure I couldn’t say,” said Judy, and looked away over Mrs Shand’s head in a way that made that little woman realise that after all she was only a mere Fort George frump; a faint red colour stole into her sunburnt face.

“Will you get ready, Deirdre?” continued my sister-in-law. “We ought not to keep Mr Courtfield’s horses waiting in the sun.”

“I don’t think I care to leave Mrs Shand alone, Judy. I would rather stay and come in with the waggon to-night. Couldn’t I do that?”

She was full of remonstrances for this plan, and Mrs Shand would have none of it either, saying that a boy had been sent into town for her husband, and that she expected him out at any moment to stay the day with her.

“Besides,” said Judy, “if you stay out here all day and come crawling in by waggon to-night there will still be the journey to make from Salisbury to our place, nearly twelve miles, and I should not be able to borrow Mr Courtfield’s cart again, as he is going away in it to-night to Umtali. You look a perfect wreck, and ought to get to the end of your journey and rest. Don’t you think so, Mrs Shand?”

“Yes, of course she is tired. We’ve been trekking all night, and the waggon is not a very springy one. Mr Mackenzie hoped to get into Salisbury by the end of this morning’s trek, but there is no grass, and the oxen are poor.”

I was obliged to go and tidy myself up in the waggon tent, and thereafter climb into the Cape cart with Judy and sit behind the short, fat, soft man with the pointed golden beard and confidential eyes, to whom I had taken an unreasonable but nevertheless poignant dislike. I hated to get into the cart Mr Courtfield had so kindly placed at my service, and glanced longingly instead at Maurice Stair’s horse as he slowly mounted and prepared to ride beside us. He looked his best in riding-kit and sat his horse well, swaying in the rather slouchy, graceful way that men who have done stock-riding in Australia affect.

I had long ago learned from him that he had spent several years in Australia before coming to Africa. But it appeared that Mr Courtfield was the real thing from that country—an Australian born and bred, not just a man who had learned to ride there. Judy told me this in a low voice, perhaps to account for the extraordinary accent and bad manners of the man in front of us. I was not very interested. I only wondered vaguely how she could reconcile herself to accept favours from a man who was so obviously not a gentleman. Dick used to say there were some women who had no discrimination about men, and absolutely didn’t know the difference between a gentleman and a cad, even when they had the advantage of knowing and living with gentlemen all their lives. Opportunity had never discovered this trait in Judy; and I vaguely hoped she was not going to develop it now. Life is difficult enough spent among nice men: I could not tolerate the thought of what it might be with a few Mr Courtfields about. Under cover of his talk to Maurice Stair, riding beside us, Judy now addressed me:

“Dearest girl, how awful that you are not in mourning. I suppose you could not get any black in Fort George.”

“I did not try,” said I, looking down carelessly at my grey velveteen coat and skirt, which had certainly seen hard wear and tear in the seven months I had spent in Mashonaland. “I never thought about it, to tell the truth, Judy. Besides, Dick always hated to see people dressed in black.”

“Surely that has nothing to do with it, dear,” said my sister-in-law gently. “One must respect the conventions.”

“I daresay there are some black frocks in my packing cases. They arrived just as we were leaving, so I brought them on.”

“How fortunate!” said Judy, looking cross for the first time, but quickly recovering herself after a searching glance at me. “Still, I don’t suppose you will look well in black, Deirdre. It is such a trying colour for any one but the very blond, and you are so very brown, aren’t you? What a pity you didn’t take more care of your skin on this journey. I never knew anything like a waggon journey to turn one’s complexion to leather!”

“What place is that on the right, opposite the the hill?” I asked. “It seems to be all dotted with white things.”

“That is the cemetery, dear. Poor darling Dick is buried there.”

A grey veil seemed to come down before my face at that, and presently through blurred eyes I saw that the white things were indeed little crosses and headstones.

“I should like to get down,” I said in a low voice, as we reached a wide path that showed the way to the cemetery gate. “But don’t let this man come.”

“Oh, no, he won’t. He buried his wife here a few months ago,” was Judy’s strange answer.

I hoped she would let me go alone, but she expressed a wish to accompany me, so we stood together by my brother’s grave. There were no trees anywhere, and very few flowers, just one or two sturdy scarlet geraniums and some green runners clambering carelessly over the wooden fence. Lines of dusty graves lying in the brilliant light, coarse veldt grass growing about them, and above them the little white crosses, with the oft-repeated phrase, “Died of fever!”

There they lay, sleeping in the sunshine: Cecil Rhodes’s “boys!” The men who had helped to open up the country, light the first fires, and turn the first sods to let the malaria out of the ground for others to build towns on. Of such as these was written:

“Where are the brave, the strong, the fleet! Where is our English chivalry? Wild grasses are their burial sheet, And sobbing waves their threnody.”

“Let us go quickly,” said Judy. “There is a funeral coming.”

So we went back to the cart, and drove slowly so as not to smother with dust a little cortège that passed us, taking a short cut over the grass. If Judy had not said it was a funeral I should not have recognised one, though I had seen many since I came to Mashonaland. The coffin was placed on a Scotch-cart drawn by two bullocks, and had a black cloth flung over it. But some kind hand had redeemed the sordid loneliness by putting a little bunch of wild flowers and a green branch on the black cloth. Three men followed behind, and a woman on horseback.

“Isn’t it awful?” said Judy. “That is the way they buried my poor Dick too. A Scotch-cart with bullocks! But Dr Jim and every one came to Dick’s funeral. He was one of the ‘old crowd.’ This must be some stranger.”

“Fellow from Lomagundis’, died of the jim-jams last night,” said Mr Courtfield pleasantly. “Anderson’s barmaid was sweet on him. That’s her behind, hanging on to Browne’s grey. The horse will have a raw back before it gets back to Police quarters.” He finished his informing remarks with a cheerful snigger, seeming to take some kudos unto himself for discovering that the bunched-up, red-eyed woman could not ride.

Having at last got round the brown hill we came suddenly upon the town. In a moment we were in the main street, which was called Pioneer Street, and the shops of galvanised iron were blinking and winking at us from either side. There were a few brick buildings, and many thatched roofs. All had the conventional verandah, which at the sound of our cart rapidly filled with the usual brown-faced, shirt-sleeved men. Judy dispensed a number of queenly bows and one or two charming smiles, all gratefully received. I smiled too, sometimes, when I saw a face I knew, for many old Fort Georgians were in Salisbury; but my heart was aching, aching, as the sight of brown-faced, shirt-sleeved men now always made it ache.

It was explained to me that this was the business part of the town, known as the Kopje; the residential quarter was on the other side of a large green swamp, and was called the Causeway. A number of squat-looking houses were scattered far and wide over the veldt.

“How I wish,” said Judy, “that Dick had bought a place in town instead of going so far out. Kentucky Hills is still twelve miles away, on the Mazoe Road.”

Mr Courtfield agreed with her that it was very annoying she should have to ride twelve miles for society, or society for her. My head and heart ached dully. I was thankful when at last Maurice Stair rode up to tell me that Kentucky Hills, my brother’s place, was just round the next kopje.

It looked very homelike as we suddenly came upon it, lying in a wide green kloof with low hills winging away from it on either side—a big square bungalow house, painted green, with verandahs all round, and the beginnings of a charming garden about it. At one side of the house a tennis-court had been laid out, and a summer-house put up. It was certainly far ahead of most of the Mashonaland houses, but Dick had begun to build it as soon as he came up, and having the advantage of a little capital had been able to do more than most people.

The verandahs were blinded and full of ferns growing in native pots, and the inside of the house was charmingly comfortable: big airy rooms and windows looking out on the ever-changing changelessness of the red-brown veldt and the far-off hills. The furniture consisted chiefly of deep, comfortable lounge chairs, and tables of polished brown wood that I took for oak, but was really teak, a wood of the country. Judy had her English things scattered about, and photographs of Dick and home-scenes that brought blinding tears to my eyes. There was also a piano, the first that had come into the country, Judy told me; a hotel-keeper had brought it up to make his bar more alluring, but Dick offered him a hundred and fifty pounds for it, though it was only a simple instrument of no particular make. Since the war plenty of pianos have come into the country, but in those days one in hand was worth ten en route.

Judy had asked the men to stay to lunch, and while they were in the dining-room and we were taking off our veils in her room, a boy brought in little Dickie, a darling wee man of five with his father’s eyes and his mother’s blond colouring.

“This is your Auntie Deirdre,” said Judy, and he lifted a shy face to be kissed. At the touch of his innocent cherubic lips the great loneliness that filled me dispersed a little. My world was not so empty after all. Here was Dick’s son for kinsman!

Later in the day when the men were gone and we were resting in the cool, pretty drawing-room, I broached the subject of the future to. Judy.

“What is there I can do?” I asked. “I want to stay in this country. What can I do to earn my living here?”

“Earn your living, Deirdre? My dear girl, what on earth are you talking about? If you really wish to stay in this country you must live with me, of course. Dick especially wished it. But I can’t think why you should want to stay here. I certainly shall not, if I can strike a good bargain with some one for the property here, and sell Dick’s farms and claims in Matabeleland.”

“Oh, Judy! you surely wouldn’t sell the Matabeleland property that Dick practically paid for with his life?”

She stood looking at me in surprise so plainly mingled with resentment that I swallowed indignation and addressed her with all the gentleness I could at the moment command.

“You know Dick had set his heart on that country. He was full of plans for turning his property there into a beautiful heritage for Dickie and at the same time helping on Mr Rhodes’s great scheme of Empire by developing the land to the utmost. Dear Judy, I implore you to keep that for the boy.”

She turned away from me, answering peevishly:

“That is all very well, Deirdre. But what kind of life is this for a woman? I have, with what Dick settled on me and his insurance, four hundred a year. With that and what the property realises I could be quite snug and comfy in London; but here it is nothing at all; one is poor on it. Besides, what is there to keep one in a place like this?”

Strange that the remembrance of that peaceful dusty grave in the sunlight was not enough to keep her! That any one would rather be snug and comfy in London than live in this wide, open land where you had but to go to your window to see plain and sky touching on the horizon! Ah! well, what was the use of trying to make her feel what she could never feel? I returned drearily to the subject of my own future.

“But what is there I can do, Judy? I can not and will not live on you. How can I earn a living?”

“The only women who earn their living up here are barmaids and domestics, my dear,” she answered dryly. “I don’t know if you contemplate doing anything of that sort. All the rest are busy minding their husbands and their homes. I advise you, if you are really bent on staying here, to do the same as soon as possible.”

“What do you mean, Judy?”

“You must marry, of course. When you have once lived down that scandal about Anthony Kinsella I dare say you will have plenty of offers.”

I did not speak, but perhaps something in my face answered for me, for she flushed a little and when she spoke again it was somewhat apologetically, though her words were of much the same tenor.

“I’m afraid you don’t realise how much you have been talked of, Deirdre. Mrs Valetta and Anna. Cleeve both have terrible tongues, and Mrs Skeffington-Smythe simply doesn’t mind what she says about anybody. Every one is outraged at the story of your infatuation.”

“That will do, Judy,” I interrupted violently. “I refuse to hear another word, and do not ever speak to me on this matter again. Don’t you understand that it is sacred; that the memory of that man is the only thing I have left? Haven’t you eyes to see and ears to hear anything else but gossip? Don’t you realise yet that I have never for one moment believed those lies about Anthony, that nothing can shake my belief in his honour? Dick believed in him too. Thank God Dick believed in him too. I have that at least.”

I spoke so passionately and bitterly that she was abashed for a moment.

“I know that Dick believed in him,” she admitted grudgingly. “But then Dick was one of those curious people who would believe in a man simply because he could ‘stare you clear in the eyes’ or ‘had a straight look about his mouth.’ He would pit those things against the blackest evidence, and expect other people to be similarly impressed—dear, sentimental, ridiculous fellow! But I’m afraid the Saurins are like that.”

“Yes, the Saurins are like that,” I said, “and thank God for it.”

Later, when anger had been put away and we could speak more calmly and dispassionately she said:

“Well, if you must stay here and if you are so set on doing something, why not undertake the care of Dickie for me? He begins to need teaching, and of course it is too far to send him to the little school in Salisbury; then it is very bad for him to be always with the black boys and piccanins; they teach him all sorts of naughtiness; you can’t trust them. It would relieve me of a great worry if you would take entire charge of him.”

“But why not do it yourself, Judy?” It made me sick to think of Dick’s boy being left to the care of natives, but I wanted to be quite certain that she was not inventing a task out of charity. She looked at me, almost indignant.

“My dear girl! what time have I for teaching a child? You forget that now Dick is gone I have simply everything to see about for myself: the care of the property, the accounts, the servants, social duties—such as they are—everything. I haven’t a moment for Dickie. If you won’t undertake him I shall have to send him to Durban again, until I can sell the place. My idea in staying on at all is to improve the property on the lines Dick intended, with the help of his foreman, Mr Stibbert, and presently sell it at a good price to some one of the people who will come pouring into the country now that the trouble with the natives is over.”

After that I consented: but only on the condition that if she sold the Mashonaland property she would at least refrain from parting with Dick’s Matabeleland farms and claims, but keep them for the boy. I had less trouble in persuading her to this on reminding her of the splendid reports that were coming in of the mineral wealth of the country. Experts said that Matabeleland was full of gold.

So it was settled that I should stay, minding and teaching Dickie, and I thanked God for a valid reason to remain in Mashonaland.

The household of Kentucky Hills consisted, I found, of ourselves; Mr Stibbert a clever young German who understood farming on scientific principles and had been engaged to manage Dick’s cattle and land for him; an elderly woman of the same type as Adriana who had brought Dickie up by the East Coast; and a number of native servants. We were not near enough to Salisbury to expect much social life, for it requires some energy in Africa to mount your horse for a twelve-mile ride to pay an afternoon call. Yet I was astonished to find how many people thought it worth while to come galloping along the Mazoe Road for the sake of a cup of tea and a cucumber sandwich. These things were much in request by behabited ladies and begaitered men, in Judy’s cool drawing-room; and Judy was always ready to dispense them, looking very sad and sweet and appealing in her little white crêpe widow’s cap. She told me that she had never had so many visitors before, and that what they came for was to see me, the contravener of bylaws and conventions from Fort George. I thanked them much for that! But if it was true, their object was not attained. I forsook the drawing-room on these occasions and was neither seen nor heard. Judy, a skilful little social politician, told them I had not recovered from my serious illness brought on by overwork among the sick in Fort George, and shock at my brother’s death. She was much too clever to give them any inkling of the vexing arguments she had with me on the subject; of her tart reminders that I was no longer an heiress, nor even a girl with a few hundreds a year, who could go her own way regardless of the opinions of the world; and of her constant injunction to me to try to get the friendship of these women instead of treating them with indifference.

“If you want to live up here you had better propitiate people and make friends,” she advised me, “so that you may at least share such interests as there are in this benighted country.”

But her arguments left me cold. I cared nothing for the interests or the friendships of Salisbury, though I did not doubt for a moment that as Dick had said there were many nice women in the place. All I wanted was to be left alone; to be let roam the veldt; to climb the rocky kopjes with Dickie, and dream up there in the sunshine of the days that had been all too short, when Anthony Kinsella and I lived our brief sweet hour of happiness. I could not bear to meet people who looked upon that dream of ours as outrageous and illegitimate. And I did not want to talk to people who spoke of Anthony Kinsella as one to whom much should be forgiven because he was of the dead. I had outwardly accepted the fact that he was dead and that a monument had been erected where he died. But yet—but yet, why should he seem so alive to me still in my dreams, and my thoughts? Why had nothing been found to identify him? No one could swear to the bones that had been found. Ah, God! what wild hopes and foolish thoughts my heart fed upon. But I wished for converse with none who would rob me of those hopes and I found life easiest to bear with only little gay-hearted Dickie for my companion.

And so, at the first sound of a horse’s hoof Dickie and I were away, scudding up a hill at the back of the house, there to lie hidden among the rocks and sugar bushes until we heard the hoofs once more departing. Sometimes we had a little kettle up there and made a fire for our tea, and afterwards Dickie would climb the rocks pretending they were ship masts while I lay on the short hot grass and dreamed of the days that were no more, talking out my wild hopes—all that I had left, to ponder upon and brood over.

If I had possessed any money I should have fitted out an expedition into Matabeleland over the ground where Anthony had last been seen: and drag-net the whole country for traces of him, or at least for full details of the tragedy, if tragedy there had been. Some one would have had to tell something. Some one should have been made to pay.

It is true that an official inquiry had been made after Maurice Stair’s report, but nothing further had transpired and the matter left for a time had been gradually put aside in a country full of new interests and new men. It is not much use being a dead man, or a missing man, in Rhodesia, or any other country for that matter.

“To us the absent are the dead; The dead to us must absent be.”

The living have the best of it. The dead and the missing are soon forgotten, except by the few who loved them personally.

I felt that if I could have gone out into the wild places penetrating the great Somabula Forest and searching all along the thickly bushed banks of the Shangani I should have found some trace, some news, something to break the aching, mysterious silence, and confirm me in my belief that Anthony was still alive somewhere. But across Africa’s rolling leagues of bush and rocks and empty, rugged, burning land no one can travel without the accessories that only money can buy. Bitterly I regretted my stolen thousands, and bitterly hated the old solicitor Morton, whom we had so well and so unwisely trusted.

Poor Aunt Betty too had been badly hit over his defalcation, losing not only her private fortune but the money she had made at sculpture in years of hard work. Nevertheless, she had written and urged me to come back to Paris and share with her all she had. But I steadfastly resisted her urgent letters. I could not go if I would. Stronger bonds held me fast in Africa than ever Betty van Alen’s love could forge. I had to stay with Judy and Dick’s boy as long as I could be of use to them. They had just claims. But even when the day came that they no longer wanted me I should not leave Africa. The witch had dug her claw in deep. I could not go if I would.

As it was I cost Judy nothing. For clothes and the necessities of life, which since I lost my income had become luxuries, I parted one by one with my jewels, sending them down to Durban to be sold.

And so the months slipped by, until a year had gone since the night I kissed Anthony Kinsella goodbye. Of all the old Fort George friends there was only one left in my life—Maurice Stair. The rest were scattered far and wide in Matabeleland, and the different camps and townships springing up in every part of the country.

That is the way in Africa. People come into your life, live in almost family intimacy with you, learn (very often) the very inmost secrets of your heart, share joys and sorrows with you, then pass on and are lost to you for ever. Only here and there you grasp a hand that you can hold over hills and seas, though darkness hide you from one another and leagues divide, until the end.

Of the Salisbury women I had known in Fort George: Anna Cleeve had married her rich man and left Africa: Mrs Skeffington-Smythe was still, to the fore in Salisbury and might always be found where scandals were rifest and the battle of the tongues wagged hottest: but she did not much afflict Kentucky Hills with her presence.

Mrs Valetta sometimes came riding out with Maurice Stair to visit Judy, but she and I never met, and within the last few months she had gone away with her husband to some new town in Matabeleland. I did not inquire where. I asked nothing better than to forget Nonie Valetta, and that she and I had ever crossed each other’s paths.

Maurice Stair was very kind and gentle and silent always. I often let him come with Dickie and me to the hill-tops. He was so quiet that I could almost forget that he was there. Apparently he asked nothing better than to be with me as often as his work allowed. His duties as an Assistant N.C., which he cordially detested were not very arduous, and often took him away for long spells. But whenever he was in Salisbury he found his way to Kentucky Hills.

I liked him for several reasons. One was because he talked so little in a country where everyone gossiped perpetually. Also, there was a kind of quiet melancholy about him that suggested acknowledged failure, and there is always a pathetic appeal to a woman in that. Certainly a man of his age and education ought not to have been idling away his life at work he hated and in which there was no probable advancement. I often felt that, and apparently he felt it, too, though he made no effort as far as I knew to change the tenor of his life. But really I knew very little about him except what he told me in rare expansive moments. He was a public school man, and had been prepared for the Army, a profession he had set his heart on but had been prevented from entering by the caprice of his guardian. This guardian was his uncle and only relative, Sir Alexander Stair, a distinguished diplomat I had often heard of at home—a very clever, witty, lonely, and sardonic old man, and not at all a lovable character, people said. I half understood the bitterness with which his nephew always spoke of him. But it seemed to me very sad that two men, the last of their family and alone in the world, should be so apart in sympathy. Yes: there were several pathetic, appealing things about Maurice Stair, his gentle, dark eyes and quiet, restrained manners, were in striking and refreshing contrast with those of John Courtfield who was perpetually about the house. The Australian’s common ideas, expressed in common accents, did not offend Judy as they did me. Nor was she outraged by the intimacy of his horrible bulging eyes. I came to look forward to Maurice Stair’s presence as a relief from the colonial’s obtrusive personality.

Not that John Courtfield came to see me. I did not in fact think he came to see any one in particular, but that he simply made Kentucky Hills a convenient stopping place on the way to a mining camp out Mazoe way in which he was interested. But at last it dawned upon me that Judy was the star in his sky. When I realised this I don’t know whether I was more shocked that such an unutterable cad should have the effrontery to aspire to my brother’s widow or that Judy should complacently permit such an insolence; the latter I could hardly bring myself to believe with poor Dick hardly yet part of the brown earth that covered him. But the truth was thrust violently upon me one evening when just after putting Dickie to bed I came into the drawing-room and found Judy and John Courtfield sitting there in the half-light, holding hands and gazing into each other’s eyes like moon-struck sheep. I was so horrified I almost fell upon her then with reproaches, but instead I burst from the room as hastily as I had entered it and going to my own room threw myself on my bed and wept for Dick.

A few moments later I heard John Courtfield’s horse taking him away, and Judy came scurrying to my room. I sat up with the tears streaming down my face, and cried out bitterly to her:

“Oh, Judy! It cannot be true! You cannot have the baseness to think of putting that man in Dick’s place!”

She burst out crying too: called me cruel, heartless, one of those cold-blooded women who do not understand a nature like hers that must have love as a flower the sun—a clinging, helpless nature that must be loved and cared for—that could not live without a man’s love.

“I am so lonely,” she wept. “I feel so helpless—it is sweet to be minded. Of course my heart is buried in Dick’s grave—darling Dick! There can never be any one like him—but I’m sure he would not have wished me to be lonely!”

“He would never have had a cad like that man Courtfield inside his gates,” I raged. But a moment later I was pleading with her, beguiling, begging.

“Oh, Judy! if you must marry again choose some one else; there are lots of nice men here; why should you take one who is not even a gentleman? You know it has been more than hinted to us that he is not honourable. He cannot get in at the Club because of some shady thing he did about money, and because he is so insufferably common that other men detest him. Think how men loved Dick, and how much they think of you as his widow! Do not, for Heaven’s sake, make such a frightful bêtise. You surely cannot love him?”

She looked at me with eyes grown like two little grey stones, and her mouth was a fast-shut trap.

“Haven’t I told you that my heart is buried with Dick? But John Courtfield is clever and rich, though you despise him. He is clever enough to have got very rich. We would never have to worry about money again.”

“We!” said I fiercely. “You surely do not include me in your hateful scheme to forget Dick—to disgrace his memory?”

At that she rose at me white-lipped.

“No, I do not: I am thinking of myself and my boy.”

“Don’t include Dick’s son, either. His father thought of him and provided for him; bought him a heritage with his life. He does not need to live on the bounty of this horrible Australian. No: you are thinking only of yourself, Judy. Oh! how can you? How can you?”

I suppose I had no right to say these things. I did not mean them cruelly either, only pleadingly; and in a just cause they seemed excusable. I could not bear this thing to happen.

But she was furious at my opposition and said even bitterer things than I did; told me that I was jealous because no one loved me enough to seek me out; flung jibes at me about Tony Kinsella; said that I was talked about all over the country, that women would not speak to me, that the scandal reflected on her also who had never had a breath of scandal attached to her. She would be glad to change a name that had been so brandished she finished at last: and I doubt not in that moment I was as white-lipped as herself. But I was not so eloquent. I was cold and still as a stone. When she burst out crying, in weak reaction, and began to mumble apologies, I did not speak but walked away from her out of the room and out of the house. I had no gold to offer there for her tinsel and dross—for the ashes and mud that had been flung at me.

I walked the ground until I was weary, then sat on a rock on the kopje side, wondering dully what further daggers for my heart Africa had hidden in her mantle. While I sat there I heard another horse at the gates, and Maurice Stair’s voice echoing across the garden and up the hill. He stayed some time in the house, but later I saw him coming as I knew he would to look for me. In my white gown I was plainly outlined on the moonlit hill, and he came straight where I sat, but before he reached me I called out abruptly, even rudely, for I was in no mood for companionship:

“Do not come and talk to me to-night.”

“I must,” he answered, and came and sat at my feet. “Oh, do let me, Miss Saurin. I have been talking to your sister-in-law. She was crying, but would not tell me why. Only—I gathered that you and she are not happy together. Dear girl that I love, why will you not let me try and make you happy? Marry me, Deirdre.”

“Do not speak of such a thing,” I said gently. “It is impossible. You don’t know how sorry you make me. But—I can never marry any one.”

“A girl like you cannot live alone, unmarried. By God! you were not made for such a life!”

“God knows what I was made for,” I answered bitterly. “I am beginning to wonder. But I am sure it was not to many you, Maurice. You must not think of this any further.”

“Why not? Ah—but I know why not. You think Kinsella is still alive. I know that is it. My poor child, how can you delude yourself so?”

“You don’t know that it is a delusion,” I said.

“But I do.”

“You do not,” I contended almost violently. “No one knows; no one can know for certain—”

“But I do,” he repeated oddly: so oddly that my attention was arrested. My heart stood still.

“What do you know?” I demanded, in a trembling voice. “What can you know that is not known to every one? And it is not enough. For me at least it is not enough.”

In the long while that seemed to me to elapse before he made an answer I had time to soundlessly cry from my heart in exquisite bitterness and fear:

“Oh, God! spare me this... spare me this... let this pass.”

Maurice Stair looked strangely pale standing there in the moonlight. When he did speak his voice was low and stammering: but I heard his words as clearly as bells.

“I never told you before—it seemed unnecessarily brutal—but now I know that it was a mistake. I ought to have told you. I found something on the spot where the bones lay—something that made me absolutely certain that the man killed there was Tony Kinsella. I have never told any one of it. I—”

“How dared you keep it secret? Oh! how dared you? What was it? But I do not believe you—nothing will ever make me believe you.”

I thought to cry the words in a ringing voice, but I found that I was speaking in a whisper. The ground was slipping away from beneath my feet; Africa was dragging her gift from my heart; my eyes dimmed; I swayed a little, almost falling: but still I whispered:

“I do not believe—I do not believe—”

At last I saw that he was holding something out towards me, and speaking:

“I searched long and well for the other—but—either it was washed away, or the kaffirs took it.”

The thing that lay in the palm of his hand stared up at me like a dull blue eye. I took it with trembling, frozen fingers—a little turquoise ear-ring!

Chapter Sixteen.

What a May Day Saw.

“And are not afraid with any amazement.”

“He is rich,” said Judy for the twentieth time.

“And a clever business man. And he adores me. I do not see how you can think yourself justified in being so hard and unsympathetic about it, Deirdre. I am one of those extremely feminine women who must have some one to look after me. You can have no idea how wretched and lonely I am. It is all very well for you—so self-poised and full of character. Women like you don’t really know what it is to love and suffer. I don’t believe tall women feel things like little women either; and I am so tiny—Dick always said I was like a tiny sweet rosebud.”

“Oh, leave Dick out of it for God’s sake, Judy,” I groaned. “Content yourself with the words of Mr Courtfield now. Let poor Dick rest in his grave.”

“How brutal you are, Deirdre!” A moment afterwards she added vindictively, “It is really the best thing that could have happened for both of us. You and I could not have got on together much longer. And I can see you are beginning to set my boy against me too.”

“Oh, Judy!” I burst out passionately, but the moment after my anger and indignation evaporated, and I felt nothing but the dull aching pain that would never leave me now. What did it matter what unjust, cruel words she spoke? What did anything matter? I did not care. I did not care about anything, nor want anything. Ah, yes! There was one thing I wanted burningly, consumingly, terribly: to leave the pitiless brute of a country that had beaten and broken and robbed me, that had ground me to powder in its cruel maw.

But I did not know how to go, nor where. And I knew not how I should bear to leave Dick’s boy behind. I had no money, either. I must earn it first. And how to do that? In a country where there was nothing for a woman to do who had never been trained to work with her hands!

“What is there I can do?” I said to Maurice Stair. “For God’s sake tell me how I can earn money to leave this country and never see it again.”

“There is no way that a girl like you can earn money here,” he said. “There is only one thing to do, one thing which I am always urging—to marry: to marry me. Be my wife and I will take you away.”

“Oh! don’t, don’t. How can you ask me that? You know I have nothing to give. You know I can never love you.”

“I will make you love me, Deirdre,” he cried, and even in my dull misery a ghostly smile twisted my lips to hear once more that vain-glorious boast so often on men’s lips!

“I don’t care—I will ask nothing of you—until you love me—Until then I want nothing of you, only to be near you, to have the right to take care of you, to give you all you wish for, to do all you desire. Oh! Deirdre, do not turn away from me—I want you—I want you.—I am a failure and a good-for-nothing now, but with you at my side to help and guide me I feel that I could carve out a great career—make a great name for you to bear. I know that I have it in me to do great things, and for your sake and with you beside me I will do them. Why spoil two lives?—mine as well as your own. You say your life is a wasted one! Don’t let it be. Do something with it: make a man of me! Help me to become something, instead of pitching away my youth, a waster and loafer who will never do or be anything. If you refuse me, my life will be over as sure as I am standing here. God knows what will become of me.”

He stood there pleading in his low, gentle voice, pale and handsome and chivalrous-looking in the moonlight—the liquid, silver, African moonlight that had tricked and mocked me! And the great, empty woman-land echoed back to me his pathetic pleading words. The scarlet stars hung overhead, and the golden moon that had seen Anthony Kinsella lying dead smiled down her mocking smile. Everything mocked me in this cruel land. How I hated it! How I hated the sun and moon and stars of it!

“If you will take me away from Africa!” I cried at last, hardly knowing what I said in my bitter pain.

“Yes—yes: I will do anything, everything you wish. We will marry and go away immediately afterwards. My uncle has great influence in diplomatic circles and can easily get me into the Consular service. We will go abroad and begin a splendid new life in some other land.”

“You offer me too much,” I said, “for I have nothing to give in return. Do you understand that, Maurice? I can only give you my services as a sister, a companion, some one who will make your interests hers, entertain your friends, help you in your career—”

“I swear to God I will ask nothing more of you, Deirdre—until you love me.”

“And you will take me away from Africa?”

“The minute I can break loose from my billet in the Chartered Company.”

That is how I bartered myself away in marriage to Maurice Stair.

He was of my religion though he had never been what is called “a good Catholic.” All that was going to be altered now he told me, but I did not think very deeply about it. My faith required that I should marry a Catholic, but I had never cared for religious men, being content if those I closely knew were just clean-hearted and generous-minded gentlemen—“steel—true and blade-straight!”

We were married by one of the Jesuit fathers on a May morning a year and ten months after my first coming to Mashonaland. The thought of being married in May did not irk my superstitious soul as once it might have done. It was unlucky every one said: but I knew that luck and I had parted company. She had done her worst, and thrown me over. I laughed with a wry lip when even Judy did not fail to repeat to me the old rhyme:

“Marry in May You’ll rue the day,”

- just in case I might never have heard it before! I told her that rue had been my portion for such a good time now that I was used to the flavour, but it seemed to me the saying came with singular gracelessness from her lips, seeing how much she had to do with my choice of that—or any month in which to marry Maurice Stair.

It was to avoid seeing her marry John Courtfield, or in the alternative to prevent the scandal my absence from her wedding would cause, that I had let Maurice persuade me to be married at once instead of waiting for the end of June when his service as one of the Company’s officials would be at an end. So after all, I should be obliged to stay another month in Rhodesia—and that as Maurice Stair’s wife.

The arrangement was that after a few days on the farm of a friend of his we were to go for the rest of his service to a small new township in Matabeleland, where he would take over the work pro tem of another man on leave. When I first heard of this I trembled and turned sick.

Not only was I to stay longer in this fateful land, but must turn my feet towards the bleak portion of it that had robbed me directly and indirectly of all I held dear in life. In that moment I strove to draw back from the barren promise I had given Maurice Stair, telling him in burning words that he was not keeping faith with me; that I had promised to marry him but that his part of the contract was to take me from the country without delay. I resented and resisted with all the strength left in me; but that was no great amount. Strength of will, and many other things seemed to have died in me on the night I took from his palm that little blue turquoise. So his humble pleadings and arguments prevailed.

I said to myself—why, being so wretched, make another equally so? and sought with prayers and weeping for courage to take up my life afresh and face my empty fate. And in some measure at last I found it, and strength to cry with Stevenson:

“Come ill or well, the cross, the crown, The rainbow or the thunder, I fling my soul and body down For God to plough them under.”

I planned with myself a fine new plan of life. If mine must be empty of the sweet personal passionate love that every girl thinks her rightful due then I would fill it with a big altruistic love for all the world. Like Heine, out of my great sorrows I would make little songs. I would live a life of gentle sacrifice to the exigencies of others, of unselfish devotion to all that was best and most beautiful in the characters of the people with whom I came in touch. Surely that would bring some solace and sweetness in the many years! I thought of faces I had seen with stories of sorrow carved upon them that were yet most noble and beautiful; and I said, mine shall be a face like that when I am old. Of the first few years I expected little but lost battles and “broken hopes for a pillow at night,” but surely in time, in time, after much stumbling and rising again to the fight, victory would come, and peace from the passionate ache of youth. Perhaps in the end that peace of God which passeth all understanding would descend like dew upon my parched soul—and give me rest from the pain of love unfulfilled. I could not die, I would live for others. Gold for silver!

These were the thoughts and plans that I took to the altar, and Maurice Stair, standing by me, so gentle and chivalrous-eyed, so debonair in his khaki and leather, seemed no ill-chosen companion for the path I was setting my feet to.

We were married in travelling-kit. I shrank from putting on all the panoply of a bride, and Maurice, when I asked him, diffidently enough, to let me off white satin and orange blossoms, was perfectly content. I was pleased at the time to find him so careless about outward forms and conventions. Still, I felt it to be only fair to him, and the proper fulfilling of my part of the bargain, to make myself look as charming as possible, so I had a special little white crêpe walking-frock made and a wide wavy hat of white lace and roses.

Judy gave me away: Sore as my heart was with her, I had to remember that she was Dick’s wife. Also there was a concession to be paid for unstintingly; she had promised, that because she must live in Buluwayo for the first year of her married life she would let little Dickie come to me wherever Maurice and I found the lines of our new life laid. I was so thankful to her for this chance of keeping Dick’s boy away from the influence of his step-father that I could almost forget her treason to that big loving heart lying out beyond Salisbury hill. Almost—not quite; but at least for the sake of the dead man’s son I tried to stifle down my resentment of an act I could not prevent.

So I let her take my hand as we drove to church, and babble to me about how sure she was that I was going to be happy—what a nice fellow Maurice was—every one said so—and so handsome—and five hundred a year apart from his salary—very few men had that out here—they all came out to try and make it by hook or by crook—of course he was nothing like some of the matches I might have made at home—but still—etc.

That aspect of the situation had indeed never occurred to me before, and while she talked I considered it musingly, remembering suddenly that there were indeed others I might have married. I wondered, vaguely then for the first time, how I came to be marrying a man I knew so little of as Maurice Stair when there were men at home who, to use their own words, were “always to hand if I should change my mind at any time.”

But Maurice was to hand too! He had in fact been right at hand, with a plan for a useless, broken life at a moment when there seemed to be nothing left to do but die. And there was something almost like a tie between us in the knowledge that we shared of Anthony’s fate; and in the fact that he was the first to go forth to seek news for me. True I could not thank him for such news as he brought; but somehow he seemed almost sanctified to me in being the bearer of that little fateful blue stone I wore against my heart; the last thing Anthony had worn: the last tangible trace of him on earth!

Oh, yes, there were reasons, bitter cruel reasons why I should repay the love and service of Maurice Stair, inasmuch as a loveless wife and the empty shell of a heart could repay him. It seemed a poor bargain for a man of thirty with ambitions for a great career, and all the world before him, to make and be content with; but he never ceased to assure me of his content, so the least I could do was to refrain from the gracelessness of reminding him of it. And indeed I meant to do my part for his career, at least. When his uncle had once launched him in the Consular service well I knew that he would find no wife more able for that kind of life than I who had been practically trained to society: with my upbringing and knowledge of the world and its ways, with a heart empty of any thing but ambition for my husband I could go far and I meant to—in return for being wrenched from the claw of Africa!

Chapter Seventeen.

What a Jeweller Made.

“The truth is rarely pure, and never simple.”

So Maurice Alexander Stair and I were married.

After the ceremony we drove back to Kentucky Hills, and shared with a few friends the pretty breakfast Judy had arranged for us.

Later they all rode away, and Maurice with them, leaving me to pack for our exeunt that afternoon to a little place called Water-lily Farm. It was the home of a fellow N.C. of Maurice’s; he had just prepared it for his wife who was coming out from home, but with the ready good-fellowship so common in Africa had offered it to Maurice for our honeymoon; and we, both anxious that the world should guess nothing of our strange bargain, had accepted it to stay in and spend the first few days of our married life.

Maurice was delayed in Salisbury, and it was late afternoon before he fetched me at last from my brother’s house.

The pale May sunshine was almost as cheerless as that of an early spring day in England, for the winter was coming on rapidly, and winter in Africa can be very bleak indeed. I was glad to wrap myself in a warm coat and lean back in the shelter of the little tented cart we were to make the journey in. It was only large enough for two, and Maurice, obliged to manage the restive horses, had little time to talk, for which I was curiously thankful. Passing through Salisbury he discovered that he had left his watch at his rooms and asked if I would mind his calling there for it. I made no demur of course, only, knowing that he lived in a row of bachelor chambers almost next door to the Club, I stipulated that he should pull up a few hundred yards away. I had driven and ridden past the Club before, and knew something of the insouciant curiosity of its members, and their happy habit of filling the verandah of sound of a horse or wheels.