Chapter Twelve.
Farewell!
Warren it was who broke the awkwardness of the meeting.
“Hullo, Le Sage,” he sang out as they dismounted. “I lugged this chap over to say good-bye to you. He’s just going to clear. I told him he couldn’t clear without saying good-bye, just because you had a bit of a growl at each other.”
This in his most breezy way. Le Sage put out a hand to Wyvern, though not particularly cordially.
“Oh, you’re really going, are you?” he said.
“Yes. Day after to-morrow. My sale comes off next week, but I shan’t wait for it.”
The air was still and clear, and, upon such, voices travel afar. The above conversation, taking place at the stables, had been heard by Lalanté, who therefore felt exceedingly friendly towards Warren, whose words implied that the other would not have come over but for his persuasion. She knew, of course, that Wyvern would not leave without managing a farewell meeting between them—just as she knew what her father did not—that he was on the eve of departure. Yet, here he was, and he should not leave her that day if she could help it. There was parting at the end of it, but all its precious hours in between were theirs.
The anxiety which had at first overclouded her face cleared, as she knew by the conversation of the three men drawing near the house, that her father had kept his word. If his tone was somewhat constrained, why that was only to be expected.
“Well, Miss Lalanté,” cried Warren, in his breeziest way as she came to meet them. “I hope we haven’t invaded you too unexpectedly.”
“Not at all,” she answered cordially. “It was good of you to come over.”
In secret Wyvern somewhat resented this way Warren had of using the girl’s own name, even though not omitting the formal prefix. It was quite unnecessary, and formal prefixes are prone to lapse on occasions. But this little jealous twinge was allayed with her greeting of him—all in the old way. He appreciated, too, Warren’s tactful thought in turning Le Sage’s attention right in the other direction.
Then the small boys came in, hot and dusty after their ramble, and it behoved Lalanté to go and superintend the process of making them presentable for dinner—for which it was nearly time.
In process of that festivity assuredly Wyvern’s reputation with the two youngsters as a spinner of “such ripping good yarns” did not suffer as they listened open-mouthed to his narrative of shooting the big leopard in the Third Kloof. The more startling incident of that night he did not narrate for their benefit.
“Man, Mr Wyvern, but I’d like to have been there,” said Charlie.
“Do take us with you some night, Mr Wyvern,” supplemented Frank.
“There won’t be any ‘some night’ again, Frank. I’m going away.”
“What?” cried both youngsters. “No. It’s not true.”
“But it is,” answered Wyvern, with a tinge of sadness. “The day after to-morrow. I’ve only come to-day to say good-bye.”
“But you can’t go. Lala, tell him he’s not to. He’ll stop if you tell him to.”
These two youngsters were actually beginning to feel “choky,” in proof whereof a plateful apiece of one of their favourite puddings seemed in danger of being left untouched.
The whole-souled affection of the two little boys—Lalanté’s brothers—went to Wyvern’s heart.
“Never mind, old chappies,” he said. “We shall meet again some day, and then you’ll be big fellows, and will want to patronise me because I don’t bring down a bushbuck ram at four hundred yards when only his head is showing round a spek-boem bush, as you’ll do. Here, stop that,” he added, as Charlie, the smallest of the pair, began to sniffle ominously, then giving up the effort, broke into a genuine howl. “Men don’t cry—and, this last day we most be all jolly together. See?”
“If you’re going in for the Zulu trade, Wyvern, I’m afraid you’ve hit upon the wrong time,” struck in Le Sage. “I hear they’re all unsettled in the Zulu country over the return of Cetywayo. There’ll be a lively war up there among themselves I’m told.”
“Got to chance that, like most things in this sad and weary world.”
“Man, Mr Wyvern, but they’ll kill you if you go up there,” remarked one of the small boys in round-eyed consternation. “Why you fought against them in the war”—some of his Zulu war experiences being among the “ripping good yarns” he had the reputation for spinning.
“Oh, no they won’t. Besides, you don’t suppose they know who fought against them or who didn’t—and even if they did they’d only respect me the more for it.”
“There’s a little matter I want to talk over with you, Le Sage,” said Warren, as they got up from table, “if it isn’t trenching on your Sabbath rest.”
“Oh, Sabbath rest be hanged,” answered Le Sage, shortly. “Come along.”
“Father, don’t talk in that abominably heathenish way,” laughed Lalanté. “Before your children too!”
She and Wyvern, both, and again, appreciated Warren’s tact, for neither of them believed in the pretext. They had not been alone together yet, and Warren, like the good fellow he was, had resolved that they should be. That was how they read it.
So while the other two adjourned to Le Sage’s business den, these two adjourned to the stoep. The small boys, like their kind, unable to keep still for any length of time, betook themselves off somewhere down in the garden.
“Love, and so you are really going,” began Lalanté with her hand in his.
“Really. But it is going only to return.”
“Yes, I feel that. Yet—it is like parting with one’s very life.”
“That is how I feel it. And yet—and yet—this time somehow I am sanguine. I have a sort of instinct that things are going to mend; that one’s luck cannot always be on the down grade. I can’t tell why, but something—a sort of revelation, perhaps—has come to me telling me I am doing right in going away from here—wrench though it will be. But mere locality—why that’s nothing as long as we have each other. Is it?”
“Darling, you know it is not,” she answered, her head resting in the hollow of his shoulder. “If it were a mere rock island in the middle of the sea and I had you, it would be Paradise.”
He laughed sadly. But it was no time for upsetting her ideals. For a few moments they sat in a happy, if somewhat sad, silence; the same hum of winged insects making its droning lull upon the sunlit air; the sweeping roll of golden green spread out in radiant vista beneath the unclouded sky; the full, seductive beauty of the girl nestling within his arms.
“I was longing for you so,” she said at last. “I was sitting here all the morning going over all the time since we had first known each other. I felt that I would give half my life if you would only come over to-day. And—here you are.”
“But you didn’t think I should go without seeing you again, child?”
“Of course not. But it would have been one of those hurried snatched meetings in the veldt. Well now I have got you all to myself, and I will keep you. Come. We will have a last long walk alone together while they are in there.”
The while the thought was hammering in her brain, that to-morrow at the same time all would be as it was now; no shadow of a difference in anything around but—he would be gone.
“I won’t keep you waiting a moment,” she said, her fingers intertwined in his as she rose. “We will go before they come out.”
Wyvern, left there even for that “moment,” could not help blessing the luck that had brought Warren over to Seven Kloofs the night before, to talk him into coming to bid good-bye to Le Sage as if nothing had happened. As Lalanté had said, they would have managed a final and farewell meeting; but as she had also said, it would have been a snatched and hurried one.
True to her word she reappeared in a moment, looking her best and sweetest; and that was very good to look at indeed. And they went forth, down the way they knew so well, the way they had so often trodden together, and the voices of the gladsome, sunlit veldt made music as they went.
“Oh, darling,” said the girl, as she leaned heavily upon the arm passed through hers, and upon his shoulder. “However am I going to get through the time without you—day after day, week after week, even month after month, and know that you are hundreds of miles from me, after this year—this whole year—when we have been all in all to each other? Tell me—again. No one has ever been to you as I have? Tell me. I will feed on it after you have—gone.”
Her hungry, passionate accents thrilled his every fibre, then his arms were around her in a close embrace.
“Lalanté—my own love—my one and only love, I could go on telling you the same thing. No one has ever been to me as you have been or ever could be. You know how from the time our eyes first met we knew we were made for each other, and it was not long before we proved it to be so.”
“Yes, I know. I was thinking of that all this morning, was bathing myself in a very day-dream of our time together. And now, you are leaving me.”
“Oh, sweet—don’t put that tone—that hopeless tone—into it. I am leaving you only to come back to you. You know that there is no one like you in all the world. I could not imagine anything approaching a duplicate of you if I were to try. But, if ever I find a difficulty it is what on earth you can see in me to love like this: in me—a battered failure all along the line. What is it?”
“What is it?” she answered, slowly, her eyes responding to his straight, full gaze. “What is it? I don’t know. Only a little trick of thought-reading—character-reading rather—and when I had seen you I thought I had seen—the Deity.”
“No, no, child,” he said quickly and reprovingly. “You must not—to put it on the lowest ground—pitch your ideals at such dizzy heights. Only think what a fall it means one of these days.”
“Now I could laugh. Never mind. We have just so many hours—how many have we? And then—blank—deathlike blank.”
“No—no—no! Not deathlike. It is life—life through absence. See now, Lalanté—what a sweet name that is, for I am perfectly certain nobody else in the world bears it—I am looking at you, now in the full glow of the sun at his best light I am looking into and photographing your dear face—as if it needed that—so that it will remain fixed in the retina of memory through day and night when we are apart. Those eyes—yes, look into mine, so will it burn the picture in more indelibly, if possible.”
“Oh, love, love!” Her accents thrilled in their passionate abandonment. “You are going away from me and you have torn my very heart out with you. Yes, I look into your eyes, and my very first prayer is that they may look at me in my dreams as they do now. Yes. Even parting is bliss beside what I could imagine of dead love.”
“Dead love! My Lalanté, how could such a term occur as between you and me?”
“No—no. Not as between us. My imagination was only running away with me. That was all.”
Thus they wandered on. Half unconsciously their steps turned towards a favourite spot, where even on the hottest of days shade lay, in the coolness reflected by a rock-face never turned to the sun, ever shadowed by an overhanging growth. Birds piped in the brake with varying and fantastic note, while now and again the still air was rent by the lusty shouting of cock-koorhaans, rising fussily near and far, disturbed by real or imaginary cause of alarm. It was an ideal place, this sheltered nook, for such meetings as these.
Hour followed upon hour, but they heeded it not at all, as they sat and talked; and the glance of each seemed unable to leave the other, and the pressure of interlocked fingers tightened. This would be their first parting since they had first met, and it was difficult to determine upon which of the two it fell the hardest Wyvern was a man of deep and strong feeling, in no wise dulled by the fact that he could no longer exactly be called young, and the impending parting had been with him as an all-pervading heart pain to an extent which well-nigh astonished himself—while as for the girl, her passionate adoration of him was as her whole being. It is safe to say that he could have done with her what he chose; and realising this, and how he stood as a tower of strength to her, not as a source of weakness, in his firm unbending principle, the very fact fed and fostered that adoration.
It was here that their real farewell was made, here alone, unseen save by the bright birds that flitted joyously and piped melodiously in the shaded solitude.
“Oh, my own, my own,” whispered Lalanté, her beautiful form shaken by sobs she was powerless to repress. “My adored love, you will come back to me, even if you meet with nothing but ill-fortune—worse even than you have met with up till now. You will come back to me. Promise.”
He could only bend his head in reply. He dared not trust himself to speak.
“Haven’t those two come in yet?” said Le Sage shortly, sitting up in his chair. “Magtig! Warren, I must have been asleep.”
“Well, you were, but why not?” answered Warren easily. “Oh, never mind about them: you were young once yourself, Le Sage.”
The latter looked grim.
“Wyvern’s not so damned young,” he said. “That makes it all the worse, because it shows he’ll never do any good.”
“He may where he’s going.”
Le Sage snorted.
“Where he’s going. Going!—Yes, that’s the only good thing about him—he’s going.”
If only the speaker knew how intensely his listener was agreeing with him. It might be that Le Sage’s hostility was not the most formidable obstacle these two had to reckon with. A sufficiently lurid picture was at that moment passing before the mental gaze of the easy-mannered, elf-possessed lawyer. People who were “going” did not always return.
“Why, here they are,” he said, “and the kiddies with them.”
The two youngsters, whom they had chanced to pick up on the way, were a factor in easing down the situation, which was as well, for Lalanté’s face with all her brave efforts at absolute self-control, was not without some pathetic trace of the strain she was undergoing.
Supper, that evening, was not a particularly convivial institution; in fact, the conversation was mainly sustained by Warren. Even the two small boys were instinctively subdued.
“By Jove, I believe we are going to have a storm,” said Warren, as they got up. “We’d better saddle up and trek before it comes, eh, Wyvern?”
“Well, you might just escape it,” said Le Sage, with alacrity. “I’ll go and see about getting the horses up.”
The sun was setting in gloomy, lurid fire behind an opaque curtain of inky cloud, as they went forth into the open air; which said air was strangely still and boding and oppressive, though now and again a fitful puff would bring dull distant rumblings of thunder. Wyvern went round with his uncordial host to the stables, while the others remained on the stoep to watch it.
“I don’t seem to like starting in the face of this,” said Warren. “It’s coming up and we shall get it thick about half way.”
“Then don’t start,” said Lalanté decisively. “We can easily put you up. Ah—look!”
A succession of vivid flashes lit up the gloomy murk in the distance, followed immediately by a heavy, detonating roar.
“I believe you’re right,” said Warren, meditatively. “By Jove, it’s coming on at express pace—right for us, too.”
“One thing is certain,” pronounced Lalanté, not even trying to suppress the jubilant ring in her voice, “and that is that you two can’t possibly go: back to-night. It isn’t safe. Look how the storm is working up, right across your road too. No, you can’t. Now, can you, Mr Warren?”
“I’m in Wyvern’s hands,” answered Warren with a laugh, “and he, I suspect, is in yours.”
“Very well. That settles it. Come. We’ll go round and tell them not to bother about getting up the horses, for you’re both going to stop the night. I’m horribly afraid of lightning—for other people.”
The livid, inky cloud was slowly and surely advancing, and as she had said, it was right across the road back to Seven Kloofs. As the two went forth a distant but heavy boom rolled dully to their ears.
“For other people?” repeated Warren significantly. “And for yourself? You are never afraid?”
“No, I don’t believe I am.”
Warren looked at her with warm admiration, and something else—which he succeeded in disguising the more easily that—as we have said—she was in total ignorance of those two portraits which he cherished in secret.
“Here, father,” she called out, as they reached the place where Le Sage and Wyvern were standing, “call those boys back. The horses won’t be wanted till to-morrow. Just look what an awful storm there is working up. Right across the way too.”
“By Jove, so there is,” said Le Sage. “Hope it means real rain, that’s all. You two ’ll have to shake down here to-night.”
The swift glance exchanged between Wyvern and Lalanté did not escape Warren. To those two the coming storm had brought reprieve. Only of a few hours it was true, but—still a reprieve. Their real farewell had been made, still—
Throwing out its dark and jagged streamers in advance, the black curtain of cloud came driving up. A blinding gleam, and one of those awful metallic crashes that are as though the world itself were cleft in twain, and, ever growing louder as it drew nearer, a confused raving roar.
“Hail, by Jove!” pronounced Le Sage. “That’s a nuisance because it means little or no rain. Where are those two youngsters, Lalanté?”
“Indoors.”
“And that’s where we’d better get, and pretty soon,” pronounced Wyvern.
But before they got there a hard and splitting impact caused all to hurry their pace, for it was as though they were being pelted with stones; and indeed they were, for the great white ice-globes came crashing down, as with a roar like that of an advancing tidal wave the mighty hailstorm was upon them; in its terrific clamour almost drowning the bellowing of the thunder.
“We’re well out of that,” went on Wyvern, as they gained the shelter of the house. “By George, if one had come in for it in an open camp, it would have been a case of covering one’s head with one’s saddle. The stones are as big as hens’ eggs. I’ve only seen it like that once before. Look.”
Outside, the enormous hailstones lay like a fall of ice; and as the blue spectral gleams of lightning fell upon the scene the effect was one of marvellous beauty. It was as though a rain of gigantic diamonds was cleaving and illuminating the darkness, while the layer which overspread the ground flashed out a million points of incandescence. Then, with receding roar, the hail cloud whirled on its course, and there was stillness as of death, save for an intermittent roll of thunder.
Lalanté had found herself drawn to a window—the others were crowding the doorway—and as she pressed to her side the arm that encircled her, she gazed forth upon the weird scene of storm and terror with a kind of ecstasy, and, in her heart, blessing it. But for it she would now be alone—alone and heart-wrung. The evil hour was only postponed—but it was postponed—and they stood thus, close together in the darkness, silent in their sweet, sad happiness.
“We’ll be able to ice our grog to-night, Le Sage,” said Warren presently in his breezy way.
“Why, yes. We’d better have some too—and we may as well have some light upon the scene. See to it, Lalanté.”
“All right, father,” said the girl, cheerfully, but inwardly furiously anathematising Warren for breaking up her last solitude à deux. For she instinctively realised there would be no further opportunity of its renewal—either to-night or to-morrow.
Nor—was there.