Wild Honey—Part II. (continued 5)

But before they met again much was to happen. During the next few weeks, the old man’s cause was clearly lost though litigation still dragged on, and orders came to Braddon to commence operations at Jackalsfontein. The political situation provided a further complication for it was 1899 and there were rumours of war in the air. The relation between Boer and Briton had long been acutely strained, but the strain was now approaching cracking-point. Negotiations between England and the Transvaal were still going forward, but it was clear that a break-down in them could be expected at any time, and the Boers, fighters by nature and inclination, and longing for another turn-up with the ancient enemy, were praying for that break-down to come. A feeling of hostility between the two races exhibited itself all over the country and in every relation of life. Braddon was aware of it when he went into Piquetberg or had any dealing with the farmers, and it betrayed itself in constant rows between his men, who though they were mostly “coloured,” took sides, and were prepared to fight for their opinions. The skilled mechanics were white men and all Britishers except for a couple of half-Dutch colonials.

Braddon was a good deal worried about Chrissie, and what attitude her father would take up in the event of his being required to accept an Englishman as his son-in-law; but fate postponed the problem for him, for a time at least, by laying her hand (with typhoid fever in it) upon him and tucking him safely away in hospital for a couple of months. Now he was back. Chrissie had not seen him with her eyes, but she knew very well that he was there.

The door opened now and she came out and stood looking sadly at her father. She too had subtly changed. Some of the bubbling youth was gone out of her; the shadows in the gay forget-me-not eyes had grown deeper; her lips tipped downwards at the corners.

The coming war between Boer and Briton had already thrown its shadow on her spirit; and too, the gloom of her father’s lost law-case enveloped her as it did all else at the farm. She knew he was a ruined man, with nothing in the world but a couple of hundred pounds, and the farm reduced to half its value. She was no longer the catch of the neighbourhood from a marriageable point of view. The two thousand pounds to which, as her father’s only living child, she had been heiress was gone in litigation, leaving her just like any other poor back-veld farmer’s daughter, a girl who must take the best husband she could get. Not that that worried her. It was her father’s changed habit and appearance that frightened her. She looked at him now with sorrowful eyes.

“Ach! my lieber fader, don’t let it turn your blood like that, then!”

She often made that remark to him, and he never took any notice, never even removed his eyes from the land, though his hand would sometimes mechanically search in his coat pocket for the stumpy roll of tabac and penknife.

“Won’t you come in, Poppa? The sun is toch so hot out here for you!”

The front of the house in fact lay bathed in the full flood of noon-day heat. No shade of flickering blue-gum leaves sheltered it now, for the old man had cut down the row of trees level with the stoep so that no obstacle should impede a clear vision of the dirty work going forward.

“No what, I am maar better here,” he said slowly. “I can maar see the scoundrels.”

“Fi! my poor Poppa! what does it then do for you, but? Only makes your blood turn more and more.”

“Chrissie,” he said solemnly. “My blood is turned already. I feel strange in the stomach and in the head since that Judge—” He shook a great fist in the direction of the railway workings. It seemed to her that ever since that morning his hand had strangely increased in size.

“Poppa you are swelling up!” she said in awestruck tones.

“Ja, I am not myself,” he muttered dully. “It is those stink-machines—and that cursed Judge.”

She sighed. It was nearly two months since the final edict had been given against him, yet here was his mind still travelling back and forth on the thing as though it had happened yesterday! The world had stood still for him! She let her gaze follow the same direction as his, putting up her hand to shelter her eyes from the glare. At the camp not more than four hundred yards away the men could be seen moving about. Some trolley loads of machinery had just come in, and the gangers were swarming over them like ants; pulling at and handing down sleepers, rails, and great steel girders. A figure dressed in white ducks came out of a tent and directed the scene. At the sight of his straight back and easy walk a little wave of colour curved into the girl’s cheek. Suddenly as if moved by machinery the red-shirted, grey-legged men all ran together, converging in a cluster about one spot. Some of them stooped down, others leaned over the stoopers to look at what lay on the ground. Chrissie held her breath until she saw the white-clothed man waving the others off. It was one of the red-shirted labourers who lay so still on the ground.

“There has been an accident!” she said aloud, looking at her father.

“There will be many an accident before it is finished,” he muttered darkly. “God is on my side. He will make them pay with blood.”

“Maar, Poppey, it is not the fault of those poor men! They have to earn their living, but,” she expostulated. “Look, they are carrying him to a tent—now they are—” She broke off and stayed watching. It was plain that Braddon was giving certain instructions. He pointed towards the farm, and the men looked that way, but shook their heads and hung back. Then Braddon himself started for the farm with long swinging paces. The colour waned out of Chrissie’s face, leaving her very pale.

“Poppa, the engineer is coming here—you remember him?”

“Ja, I remember the rooi-nek good enough.”

They stayed in silence then, until Braddon reached the stoep. His eyes and Chrissie’s met for a moment as he stood with his hat off, but it was Retief whom he addressed.

“We have had an accident, Oom, and by bad luck not a drop of brandy in the camp. Can you let us have a little? Enough to keep the man going until we get him into hospital.”

“I have brandy but not for you,” was the surly response.

Braddon reddened angrily, but he knew the old man’s trouble, and strove to be patient.

“Oom, it is not for me. The poor fellow’s leg is broken in two places. I ask you in common humanity.”

“That talk is no good here. You will get no brandy of mine.”

“Sis, Poppey, then—” put in Chrissie in soft remonstrance. But Poppey turned on her bellowing like a wounded bull.

“Is this my house or yours? Mastag! Do I keep brandy to pour down the throats of rooi-neks who steal my land?”

Braddon who had been standing with his hat off now replaced it and turned away. It was only too clear that he was wasting time. But he threw one Parthian shot over his shoulder.

“As a matter of fact it is a Dutchman who is hurt. A decent young fellow, too, of the same name as your own.” He walked away.

“How can you be so cruel, Poppa, then?” cried the girl turning fiercely on her father, her eyes bright with tears and anger.

Receiving no answer she ran into the house, emerging three minutes later with a cappie on her head and a bottle in her hand. Defiantly she stood before her father.

“I am going to take him the brandy. You can beat me if you will, but I shall take the brandy.”

The old man looked at her with terrible eyes but spake no word.

“He is one of us—a Retief—a Boer! It would be a shame on us if we let him perhaps die of his sufferings.”

For an instant longer, she paused, her foot on the step, waiting for some relenting word from him, but he spake nothing. So she ran down the steps and across the veld after Braddon. He had already reached the camp before she caught him up, and another man was saddling a horse to ride to Diepner’s, some three miles off.

“Here is the brandy,” said Chrissie breathlessly, touching his arm just as he was about to enter the tent where the injured man lay. She was very white for all her running. Braddon took the bottle from her with grateful words, and would have kept her hand, but she drew back coldly.

“I cannot shake hands with my father’s enemies. It is only because the man is a Boer, like ourselves, that I have come.”

The Englishman, intensely chagrined, stood staring at her a moment. Then he said abruptly:

“Wait one moment while I give Retief a dose. Do not go. I must speak to you.”

While she stood hesitating, he disappeared into the tent, returning almost immediately.

“Come, I will walk back with you.”

“I don’t require your escort,” she said rudely. “I am on my father’s ground.”

Nevertheless, he walked beside her as she moved quickly away.

“Chrissie!” he said quietly. “What has all this trouble about the land and about war to do with you and me?”

She did not answer, only walked faster.

“I am only an employee of the Government,” he continued. “How is it my fault if they take your father’s land?”

“I do not say that it is your fault,” she said. “But it turns you into his enemy—and mine.”

“And yours?” he repeated reproachfully, “I thought you were more just than that!”

“I am the daughter of a Boer.”

“And I am an Englishman. But that does not prevent me from loving you.”

He caught hold of her hands and made her stand still. They had reached a spot where the pomegranates hid them from view of the stoep.

“Do you hear, Chrissie? I love you, and I want to marry you.”

“Marry an Englishman?” she cried violently. “Never. It would break my father’s heart—and mine too.” With a quick movement she wrenched her hands away and fled from him. He turned very pale and stood staring after her, his mouth set in a grim line.

Returned to the stoep, Chrissie found Carol Uys seated there talking to her father. It transpired that they had already arranged a deal by which Carol was to take back the pair of bays (with a mule thrown in) at the same price as he had sold. The old man said he no longer needed them to take him to kerk. He would never enter a kerk again he avowed.

Carol and Chrissie shook hands and she went indoors where he presently followed her, for old Retief had fallen once more into absorbed reverie.

“Chrissie,” said the young Dutchman, “the war will soon be on now. Old Oom Paul Kruger has defied the rooi-neks, and we are to fight.”

“Yes, Carol,” said she, listlessly arranging the coffee cups.

“I shall be off on commands, at the first call.”

“You think there will be fighting in this district too?”

“If there isn’t, I shall make for the Transvaal.”

The girl fell into a moment’s brooding silence.

“War is horrible!” she said slowly.

“Horrible, yes, maar afterwards we shall be the baases, and call our country our own.”

“I am not sure, Carol; they say these English are good fighters.”

“Mastag! and what about the Boers? We will show them, you wait a little.”

After another silence, he spoke again in a different voice.

“Chrissie—”

Looking up she saw his bashful purpose in his eyes, and strove to avoid the issue.

“Do you see how sick my Poppa is, Carol?”

“Yes, I am sorry, Chrissie, he is very sick. This trouble with the railway has turned his blood, I’m afraid.”

“God knows what will happen if he does not shake it off! my poor old Poppa, it will kill him.” Tears sprang to her eyes and her hands trembled amidst the crockery. Carol seized one and held it fast.

“Do not fret, Chrissie, I will take care of you, if you will let me. You know I love you and want to marry you. I have already asked Oom Nick and he has given his consent. Will you marry me, Chrissie?”

A bitter little smile twisted her lips. It seemed she had grown suddenly very desirable, since two men, within an hour, should ask her in marriage!

“I do not love you, Carol,” she said quietly. His face fell.

“I used to think, Chrissie—but lately you are so changed.”

“Yes, I am changed,” she answered staring out through the open door, to the tents away by the river. “I am changed, Carol. I wish I were not a Boer maisie.”

He did not understand this, but it sounded like treason, and he rebuked it.

“But you are a Boer maisie, Chrissie. And you must not forget it.”

“No, I shall never forget it,” she said slowly, “and because of it I will marry you, if you still wish it, Carol. I do not love you, but I will be a good wife to you.”

“Oh, thank you, thank you, my Chrissie. I too will be a good man to you. You will see.”

The list of killed and injured on the railway workings continued, and by the time the bridge of the Kat River was nearing completion and the line across Jackalsfontein almost laid, it made heavy reading for some wives and mothers, and a Government whose business it was to compensate them. The annoying part of the matter was that there were no shoulders upon which blame for the chapter of accidents could justly be laid. “Acts of Providence” cannot be quarrelled with. Though why “the Hand of God” should have fallen so heavily upon that special part of the line was incomprehensible to the gangers, who were inclined to insinuate that Lucifer (aided by a certain strange and monstrous-looking old man who sat eternally watching from his stoep) had more to do with the matter.

Nick Retief’s armchair no longer accommodated him. The large oak and leather settle from the kitchen had been brought out and in its broad seat he sat daily, his great head sunk on his breast, staring with blue eyes grown dim. He was now enormously swollen and of an extraordinary vivid colour. Rage and bitter anger had so poisoned his nature that it seemed, even as Chrissie in her simple way expressed it, as if his blood had “turned” or decomposed in his veins. Yet, despite its grotesqueness, there was something heart-rendingly pathetic in the figure of this old-time Boer who had fought to defeat Progress and been defeated instead.

He had to be helped to bed now, with Chrissie on one side and Shangaan Jim, his oldest Kaffir boy, supporting him on the other. But there came a night when they could not lead him to his bed; his bulk had so much increased during the day that it was in vain to try and pass him through the front door. Chrissie burst into tears.

“Oh! foy toch, my poor Poppey, what are we to do now?”

“Bring out my mattress. I will sleep here where I can see my land,” said the old man.

So they brought out his mattress, and he went to bed on the stoep. Shangaan Jim sat by him through the night, and, long after she had retired, Chrissie could hear his mumbling voice relating with many clicks and ejaculations tales of when he had worked in the mines at the Diamond Fields.

The next day at Nick Retief’s command the big iron and brass bedstead in which his wife had died was set up on the stoep. He slept in it, and again Shangaan Jim stayed by him relating strange stories. The morning after, the old man did not rise from his bed; only called to them to bring many pillows, and prop him up, so that he could see.

“It is nearly finished,” he muttered staring across the blue-gum stumps that now were bursting into great clusters of silvery blue leaves, “and I am nearly finished too.”

The two thin lines of steel glittering under the moonbeams had, in fact, almost reached the eastern boundary-line of Jackalsfontein. Soon the old man’s eyes would be pained no longer by the piles of wood and steel, the tents and paraphernalia of the camp. Shangaan Jim brought the news that all would be removed next day. Chrissie found him whispering by the bedside as the sun went down, and wondered to see a smile on her father’s face for the first time in many months—if that strange distortion of bloated and discoloured flesh could be called a smile?

“Shall I come sit by you to-night for a while, Poppey?” she asked, leaning tenderly over him. “And let Shangaan go to his hut?”

“Yes,” he said, “let Shangaan go.” He looked up at the big Kaffir, and Chrissie fancied she saw a glance of some significance pass between them, but thought she must be mistaken.

At any rate, Shangaan Jim went away, and she sat talking to her father for a long while, listening preciously to every broken muttered word that fell from him, for she was well aware that the end was near.

He spoke of her marriage with Piet. It was not such a marriage as he had hoped for her. One of those pat-looping Uyses! But still, Piet was a good fellow, and the only one of her suitors who had remained faithful, now that the money was all gone! Piet would be a good husband, but she must look after the farm, or he would be robbed and lose it, and have to retire to the back lands and the bad veld like all the Uys clan who were bad managers, though they were good men. He made her promise that she would marry Piet soon, so that when the war broke out she could follow him to the field if need be.

“As your mother would have followed me,” he said, and looked up at the pale still face of his child. For, in proportion to his great increase of colour and stature she had grown whiter and thinner. Grief for his condition and some other secret sorrow brought tears to wet her pillow many a night, underlined her eyes, and carved faint hollows in her cheeks. Bubbling youth was quite gone out of Chrissie.

As the night wore on, the old man, stirring and turning on his pillows, grew more restless. He panted and gasped and some strange excitement seemed tormenting him, making him roll and struggle like a great helpless beetle. And always he strained to keep his head high on the pillows so that he might stare, and stare across the land. Sometimes he held his breath and seemed to be listening.

It must have been near midnight when a tremendous explosion shook the earth, breaking every pane of glass in the windows behind them, rattling the old farmhouse as though it were made of reeds, and crashing and booming across the empty veld like the crack of doom.

Suddenly, down by the workers’ encampment, flames sprang up and cries and groans were heard. Chrissie, recovered from her first shock of terror and amazement, sprang up.

“Father!” she cried, then stood still staring. The old man was sitting up in bed, his eyes alight with a dreadful fire.

“Now, I can die in peace,” he shouted. “Jim knew what to do with their dynamite tent! Good boy, Jim! Didn’t I warn them that I would blow them off, if they came meddling with my land?”

With a great shout of laughter that rang across the veld like a bell, he fell back upon his pillows. There was a terrible gurgling sound in his throat, and all was still.

One long look at the dead face, then Chrissie ran down the steps and sprang across the veld. Men’s forms were moving hither and thither, carrying the dead and wounded away from the raging flames. Groans resounded everywhere, and there were bitter cries for water. To one such cry, in a voice she knew, Chrissie flew like an arrow from a bow.

She found him lying where the explosion had thrown him, far down the river bank, shattered, broken, dying; and when she had given him water, she kissed his lips, and baring her breast let his head lie there, sobbing out his life’s blood against her heart.

Chapter Eight.

The Promise of Life.

“I have been trying to meet you ever since I came to Durban,” said the boy, in a voice that all the world might hear, so young it was and eager.

There was a stir among that portion of the world present in Mrs Carr-Ellison’s drawing-room. The man playing beautiful, desultory modulations on the grand piano struck a passionate chord and quivered off into the treble softly so that he might hear the woman’s answer; several scandalised skirts shivered and seemed to whisper, but the woman on the high-backed, gold satin sofa, did not disturb herself. She sat unsmiling, her head resting against the back of the sofa, her arms stretched wide on either side of her.

She had the despairing, unlighted eyes that tell of a soul’s light gone out, and her mouth drooped bitterly at the corners; but her hair was very beautifully arranged, and her pale gown with its gloomy sleeves and silvery bands must have taken some weeks to design.

“I saw your picture on Le Poer’s table, and I told him to give me an introduction to you; but the beggar wouldn’t,” the boy went on; and the skirts drawn closer, whispered again. Le Poer was the fastest man in the fastest military set in Maritzburg; what was Miss Wilde’s picture doing on his table? Really, these writing women were very queer, one never knew what they were up to, coming from Heaven knows where, and settling down in rooms without a chaperone, writing for newspapers.

“Oh!” the sphinx woman had spoken at last but her voice was very tired and uninterested. She was used to having men try to meet her, and candour did not appeal to her very much. She had long ago worn out her interest in the obvious, and walked through life now with ears only for the silences, and eyes only for the things not seen, unless they were the traces of pain quivering the surface under which she lived. She was always interested in pain.

The boy’s persistence worried her; his words seemed very crude. Yet a certain vigour in his voice drew her eyes up to where, waiting for one or other of the men at her side to move, he stood before her. It occurred to her then that for so tall a man he stood up with remarkable calmness and indifference where everyone was seated.

“The stage,” she thought, then mused as to how, if she were writing of him, she could best describe the young untidy way his hair grew above his forehead.

“Ragged would be too extravagant,” were the words that formed themselves in her mind with a sense of familiarity that puzzled her, until in a flash she remembered that the night before she had seen him on the stage, and had thought the same thought about his hair.

“Ah! the apothecary!” she exclaimed, and sitting up, stared back into his blue, intense eyes.

“She is really a little mad,” thought Mrs Carr-Ellison, who, at first distressed at the girl’s unsociability to a strange guest, was now filled with vague embarrassment to see them staring into each other’s eyes and babbling of apothecaries. She did not appreciate that to Dolores Wilde the boy had changed suddenly into a man—a man who had lived and suffered and understood; and that with the memory of how, in the few lines assigned to him as the starving seller of drugs and potions in Shakespeare’s greatest romance—he had supplied the touch of tragedy that to her made the play real life, her inmost soul leaped out to him as a comrade. While, though she knew it not, her hands were already at his heart-strings.

Mrs Carr-Ellison did not see these things, because they were not to be seen. She only thought that it was very queer and Bohemian of Miss Wilde to behave so, and a very bad example for her daughter Gwen, who was observing the proceedings with all her eyes and ears; so she interrupted that touching of spirit hands with a commonplace.

“Mr Scarlett,” she said, “do take Miss Wilde into the verandah, and get some ices for yourselves.”

They refused the ices earnestly, sharing a smile; but they were glad to go. He followed the trails of her strange gown through the wide dim-lit verandahs, and found her a chair in a far corner where the light from above fell palely into her eyes, and restless shadows of maidenhair fern played about her drooping mouth.

“Your picture spoke to me from Le Poer’s table,” he said, as though there had been no interruption, “and then he told me all about you. Do you mind? Ever since I have wanted to speak to you, and tell you that you shall not always be sad. Look here,”—his expressions were very boyish,—“I have had my life broken up too, and yet I am beginning to be glad again, and you must. You are too sweet and splendid to be always sad.”

“You are very young,” she answered quietly, wondering why she did not resent the first spoken sympathy anyone had dared to offer her in all these years. “For me—I am an old woman.”

He was twenty-eight, and she was a year younger, but he knew how sorrow ages the heart, and understood. He moved a pot of fern away from her feet, because it seemed to blur the picture of her, sitting there, and a crumple it had made in the hem of her gown he smoothed out with the simplicity of a child and the gentle hands of a woman.

“I am not so young. I have tasted the rough of the world and some of its joys, and I still love the joys. You are in danger of loving its sorrows so much that you will not be able to be happy again when you have the chance.”

“I shall never have the chance, boy, not in this world anyhow; the gods will take care of that.”

“Well, in the next then,” he persisted. “I have all sorts of splendid theories about our failures here being our triumphs there, haven’t you? Don’t you—when things go all askew, find yourself building on what comes—after?”

Her lips curved in a wry smile. Truth to tell, this world had treated her so ill that she had but small hope of the next.

He went on speaking with an amazing buoyancy in his voice.

“If death were not so hemmed in with the sickness and horrors that frighten a man! If it would only come to one quickly, out in the open air and sunshine—in a rush of living excitement—how many of us would stay, I wonder?”

“I would,” she cried, with a shiver, “I would.”

“I wouldn’t,” he said fervently. “I am so curious and interested in what is hidden that I—”

“Don’t,” she cried out, half in anger, “you are so young, so full of the joy of life, why do you speak of death? Earth must be very sweet to you yet.”

“So it is,” he assented, quickly; “and there are always ambitions here.”

“Ah, yes!” she said, with the relief of one whose feet have found firm ground. “Our ambitions. What do you want?”

He sat up very straight, and his eyes seemed to grow bluer. He loved his profession.

“I want to be as fine as Ravenhill first. You have seen his Hamlet, and know what that means. I want to be his equal and then—alone. Then—but one want at a time is enough, if you mean to achieve it. What do you want?”

She had wanted many things. Her wants had formed the lever by which the gods had worked their irony upon her; and her portion had been dead sea-apples. So now she “went softly under the stars,” and voiced no want. But oh! to write something good—not the petty drivel of Women and Emancipation—but something alive and true, so that Meredith, and Kipling, and Hardy would some day take her by the hand and greet her “comrade.” Oh! to fill in her life with work, work, work, work, noble work, so that there was never a gap left to remember in. O! for rest from the torment of memory and an empty heart.

Did she tell him these things, or did he simply understand? She never remembered afterwards, but she knew that he knew, on that sweet, tropical summer night.

They sat late talking.

The hostess gave her into his charge, and, like all the other guests, they went away in a ricksha, with the bells tinkling and the Zulu boy’s white suit gleaming in the vapoury, delicate light shed by a slender fragment of moon and a star-splashed sky.

“Doesn’t it appal you sometimes to think how much that little fragment of moon knows about you?” she asked. “She has seen all one’s sins and all one’s sufferings—”

“And knows the reason for both,” he said quietly.

She shivered, and her little lonely hands, lying on the ricksha coverlet like white flowers, trembled, so that he took them up and held them.

“Some day she will see you happy, too,” he said, “for she is a very tender old moon.”

And when Dolores would have laughed her little bitter laugh at the thought of happiness, no sound would come, for the bitterness was all gone, and a great peace had fallen on her heart.

At her door he spoke of a reception which was to be given the next night to a famous singer who was visiting Natal. They were both going to the reception, but he would be late, he said. He was “on” in the last act of Romeo and Juliet. Would she keep him a dance if there was any dancing afterwards? She promised.

When the next night came he was very late, but he came straight to her, and the peace within her deepened as she felt his arm about her.

She did not look up at him, for his eyes had grown so deeply, fiercely blue, that she dared not meet them there, before all the world.

While they danced, and all too soon, the music swerved suddenly from the waltz into “God Save the Queen,” and their evening was over. He was fain to take her to the cloak-room, where a woman friend waited; but in the shadow of the doorway he spoke.

“I find I want something else, besides fame. Will you give it to me, you sweet, sad woman?”

She could not speak, her heart was in her throat; but the droop had gone from her lips, and her eyes were shining in the dark like velvet stars.

“When may I come to you! To-morrow?”

Her heart urged yes, but her brain remembered that to-morrow she must interview the famous singer. She would give it up, she thought swiftly, and let her newspaper go. But no! Perhaps, if she denied herself for a few short hours, the gods would remember, and make her reward the sweeter. She must make some sacrifice for this great happiness.

“No; Wednesday,” she whispered, and quickly, for fear she should revoke:

“Good-night.”

For a day of general rejoicing, as the twenty-fourth of May always is in the Colonies, Tuesday dawned drab and dreary.

Looking from her window in the early morning, Dolores could see the waves rushing and ravening wildly in the bay, and beating themselves in foamy fury against the embankment.

“They will have a dreadful day for their aquatic sports,” she thought, recalling a typed headline she had seen in the editor’s office the day before, and remembering how, on public holidays, everyone in Durban went on to the bay; but she did not care very much. The wind might blow and the sea might lash from that day forth for evermore, it would not matter to her. Nothing mattered but that the gods had relented. The gods! What gods? There was only one God. Cecil Scarlett’s God, and He was very good. He had forgiven her for her pagan heart, and the years of misery had dropped from her. Cecil Scarlett wanted her, and she was the King’s daughter among women. Life seemed worth the trouble again, and the joy of eventful living came back with the flush and swell of a tide.

She fell to mapping out her day so that every chink of it should be filled up until she saw him again. Her interview with Madame, the singer, at eleven; the afternoon to write it up, and to finish some other work for her editor; then the famous lady’s concert, which she must attend that night and criticise for her paper. And after? The thought came over her that she could not wait till to-morrow, she must see him before. She would go to the theatre after the concert, slip into her place in the stage-box, and he would see her and come to her afterwards. So it would come sooner after all. She would wear her primrose gown—years ago she had been beautiful in yellow—she would be beautiful again to-night for him (a wild-rose flush flew into her cheeks); no more black and white gowns for her. Ah! surely the day would be too long.

As she dressed, words to fit her mood came to her in the lines of Alice Meynell’s Renouncement:—

I must not think of thee; and, tired yet strong, I shun the thought that dwells in all delight— The thought of thee—and in the blue heavens’ height, And in the sweetest passage of a song.

Once during the afternoon she left her work on an impulse and went into the balcony for a moment.

A fresh, strong wind, smelling of the sea, was blowing, and the sun had burst radiantly from behind the clouds.

Suddenly she had a strong impression of Cecil Scarlett.

She closed her eyes involuntarily, and the wind rushed across her parted lips. It was almost as if he had kissed her—the kiss she had seen in his eyes the night before.

“And in the sweetest passage of a song,” she whispered, as, her day’s work over, she sat facing the platform in the crowded concert hall; and she told herself that she would not give up one of the tormented moments that kept her from him.

While the audience waited for the appearance of the woman whose wonderful voice had never before been heard on African shores, not she, but one of her company—a dark, sombre-eyed woman—came on to the platform with music in her hand.

Dolores trembled. Why was this? Who was this sorrowful woman? Had not she, Dolores, done forever with sorrow?

Then Sarah Berry’s tragic contralto at its wildest and saddest rang out and filled the hall with words of Cowen’s Promise of Life. When she had finished, and the whole house was on its feet calling her back, Dolores sat hushed, stricken in her seat by the conviction which had come to her with the song—the conviction that Sorrow had not done with her—that she was Tragedy’s own.

The old cold gnaw was back at her heart; she felt with a terrible sense of premonition that she was waiting to be struck; and, while she waited, a woman’s smooth, superficial voice said behind her:

“Have you heard, Miss Wilde, that one of the Ravenhill Company was drowned in the bay this afternoon? He and some others were going to the rescue of some wrecked people. Quite young, they say. Dreadful, isn’t it? The theatre is closed.”

Someone cried, “Hush!” Sarah Berry had come back, and was singing again the last verse of her song.

There is no life that hath not held some sorrow, There is no soul but hath its secret strife. Still our eyes smile—our hearts pray for to-morrow, Fair in its promise of more perfect Life. Earth is not all. His angels ever hearken Heaven shall make perfect our imperfect life.

Dolores sat ashen-faced and stony-eyed; but peace was in her heart. She could not grieve “as others which have no hope.”

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Chapter 1

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Chapter 2

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Chapter 3

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Chapter 4

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Chapter 5

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Chapter 6

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Chapter 7

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Chapter 8

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