Chapter Twenty Two.

What the Hills Hid.

“Life is not a speculation. It is a sacrament. Its ideal is love. Its purification is sacrifice.”

“Death is a great price to pay for a red rose. But love is better than life.”

Brown cotton stockings from Salzar’s General Stores fell into holes before one had worn them twice: yet they cost four and sixpence a pair! Almost as much as spun silk ones at home, I reflected, as I sat mending mine under the thorn tree. But was it possible that I had ever worn silk ones? Could it be true that I had once worn diamonds on my garters, and done many other absurd things! Had I really ever been Deirdre Saurin, the petted and pampered and bejewelled heiress who had announced to her mother, showering laughter:

“Life shall never make a tragedy of me!”

I smiled a little idle smile, that at least was free of regret, for the petted and bejewelled part of the story; but I could find it in my heart to sigh for the girl who came to Fort George and was scratched by all the cats, and scratched them cheerfully back. I should like to have been that girl again, for half an hour, just to see how it felt to be care-free and insouciant, with the whole beautiful world made expressly for one!

“Give me again all that was there,
Give me the sun that shone—”

Ah, that hurt! Better leave that—think of something else quickly. How far off those days were! And the people in them all passed away or passed on! Judy in Australia, happy with her cad. Mrs Rookwood settled in Johannesburg—George had got rich in the mining world and was now a king of finance, and she a leader of society. Elizabeth Marriott was still in England with her boy; gold had been discovered on her property in Matabeleland, and a brother had come out to look after it for her until the boy was old enough to come into his own. Other Fort Georgites were scattered far and wide. I heard sometimes from Colonel Blow, in Buluwayo, and Gerry Deshon at Umtali; but people in Africa are always too busy with the interesting people round them to have much time for remembering those who have passed on elsewhere. Annabel Cleeve’s husband had died in England a few months after their marriage, and left her a rich widow. Mrs Valetta was still living in Mgatweli.

I had never been to call on her, for I made few calls except the official ones required of me. Even if I had not heard that she was too ill to receive visitors, I could not suppose her anxious to renew so painful an acquaintance as ours had been. She had never been well since the Fort George days, they said. Fever! Malarial fever covers a multitude of ills in Rhodesia. Would she get better when—Ah! that hurt—think of something else quick!

But I could not think of anything else for long. Back, back, my thoughts came always to that as my eyes went always back to the hills. Maurice had been gone a week. No news yet. But sometimes when all was still I seemed to hear the beating of horse’s feet over the soft veldt grass.

I missed Makupi’s red blanket against the blaze of the zinias, where he was wont to sit, expelling the melancholy of his soul with the throb of his weird tom-tom, and hiding in his heart through all these months a secret that changed the face of life for three people!

Down in the camp a trooper, sitting outside his hut, was at the same business as myself—darning his foot-wear—and save for his idle song there was no other sound to break the hot, tranquil silence of the afternoon. Along the town road a boy with a letter held aloft in a cleft stick was approaching, with the peculiar rhythmical motion affected by letter-carriers. Everything was very still. The world had a pregnant, brooding look to me.

The boy with the letter had reached the camp and given his letter to the trooper, and the trooper had given it back, pointing to me. Carefully the boy replaced it in his stick, as though he had still many miles to go, and resuming his rhythmical step came up the winding path to me.

I did not know the straggly writing upon the envelope, nor at first the signature at the foot of the brief note—Annunciata Valetta.

“Will you come and see me. I am too ill to come to you. I have something to tell you.”

At last I realised that Nonie was short for so beautiful a name as Annunciata, and that it was the woman I had been thinking about who had written to me. It is strange how often these coincidences occur! While the boy sat patiently on his heels at the door I scribbled a note to say I would come.

I cannot tell what instinct made me beautifully arrange my hair, and put on my loveliest gown that night. I am very sure it was not vanity. Many waters cannot drown love, but there are fires in life that can burn out of a woman the last root of vanity; and I had been through those flames. Some vague idea possessed me, perhaps, of hiding from the cynical eyes of Nonie Valetta the scars the furnace had left on me. I had always felt it to be due to Maurice, as well as myself, to cover up the hollowness of our life from curious eyes, and I think no one had ever suspected what we hid under our pleasant manner to each other in public. In the last few months, especially, I believe ours had been cited as a very happy marriage. But I feared the probing glance of Nonie Valetta.

I wore a white silk gown, and threw about my bare shoulders, for the night air was dewy, a long theatre-coat of black satin that was lovelier within than without, for it was lined with white satin, upon which had been embroidered, by subtle, Parisian fingers, great sprays of crimson roses. So skilfully had the work of lining been done that every time I took a step a big red rose would peep out somewhere, and if I put out my arms I seemed to shower roses. I had designed it myself in the blithe long ago. Betty used to call it my passionate cloak.

After my marriage she had gone to our various homes and gathered up all my belongings—stacks of gowns, cloaks, kimonos, embroideries, and laces that I had forgotten I ever possessed; together with pictures, china, music, draperies, and curios; all the things I had collected in happy-go-careless days and thought little of, but which were now something in the nature of treasure trove. She had despatched them in case upon case, and they had arrived within the last few months. The huts were crammed with odd and lovely things, and I boasted a wardrobe the like of which no other woman in Rhodesia, perhaps in Africa, possessed. I had reason to be thankful that my taste had always run to the picturesque rather than to the chic. Most of my gowns and all of my wraps could never go out of fashion, for they had never been in it. They would be useful and picturesque until they fell into shreds.

I went down through the zinias, which now I did not hate any longer. Like the hills, they had become part of my life. I should take the memory of them to Australia with me, and wherever I went they would go too. In the moonlight their garishness was dulled to a uniformity of pallor. They looked like armies and armies of little dreary ghosts.

I did not have to ask the way to the big thatched house the Valettas had taken possession of. In a small town like Mgatweli one knows where every one lives even though one does not visit them.

As I came to the deep, chair-lined verandah a man with the air of one of Ouida’s guardsmen threw away his cigarette and came forward looking at me curiously. He seemed surprised when I asked for Mrs Valetta.

“My wife? Yes, but she is ill,” he answered hesitatingly, evidently knowing nothing of her note to me.

“I heard so, and have come to see her,” I said. “She and I knew each other long ago in Fort George. I am Mrs Stair.”

“Ah! Will you come in? I’ll tell her.”

He led the way into a sitting-room, and in the light gave me another enveloping stare full of the bold admiration men of a certain type imagine appeals to women, not knowing that really nice women very much resent being admired by the wrong men.

After one glance at him I turned away a little wearily. Early in a girl’s life these handsome, dissolute faces have their own special allure. But I knew too much. Africa had educated me, and my mind asked for something more in a man’s face now than much evil and a few charming possibilities for good.

Men who have reached the Rubicon boundary, which lies between thirty and forty, should have something more than possibilities stamped upon their faces.

“Is that Mrs Stair, Claude?” a very weary voice called from the next room; the weakness, the terrible slow lassitude of it horrified me.

“Is she so ill?” I asked in a low voice, after he had called back:

”(Yes: coming, dear.) It is only a matter of days with her now,” he answered laconically.

And when I saw Nonie Valetta lying there, her pallid hands plucking at the blue and white stripes of her coverlet, I knew that he had spoken truth. Her hours were numbered. Pale as ashes, she lay there watching me with her strangely coloured eyes, the old weary bitter curve still on her lips. She too had eaten of the aloes of life.

I took her hand, and for a moment or two, as long as the nurse was in the room, we murmured the little conventional things that always lie ready on women’s lips while the eyes are probing deep, deep for the unspoken things. But as soon as we were alone she smiled her twisted smile at me and said:

“I see why they call you Ghostie.”

“It is very impertinent of them if they do,” I responded, smiling a little too.

“But it is true. You are the ghost of your old self when you came to Africa. You were very lovely then. I knew the moment I saw you that my life was over.” I felt myself paling.

“Do not speak of those days. That is past grief and pain. We are all much older and wiser now.”

“You do not look a day older—only as though you had been burnt in a fire, and there is nothing but the white ashes of you left. Yet if anything you are more beautiful—there is something about you no man could resist—something unwon—they’ll lay down their lives and burn in hell for the unwon. I am glad Tony Kinsella cannot see you to-night looking like a white flame among red roses—What are all those red roses? Yes—I am glad he cannot see you to-night.”

I put my hand to my heart.

“What was it you wanted to say to me?” I asked. I felt that I could not bear too much.

“Why did you marry Maurice Stair?”

The unexpected question bewildered me. But she was too ill to be told that my reason was one I would discuss with no one. I said at last, for I had a part to play in life, and meant to play it to the end:

“He is a good fellow. We are very happy.”

“So I hear—and I want to know how you dare be happy—you whom Tony loved—with a knave like Maurice Stair?”

My heart hurt. Oh! how my heart hurt. I wanted to get away from this cruel dying woman whose pale hands dug up old bones from their graves and strewed them in the path. I wished to go, but I could not. I had to stand there listening.

“You won’t tell me why, but I know—it was because he persuaded you with a blue ear-ring that Tony Kinsella was dead. Well! I want to tell you now that—that tale and that proof were both false. He never found the ear-ring, but had it made in Durban from a design with which I supplied him. I have waited until you were happy to tell you this. It is my revenge on you for taking Tony Kinsella from me.”

Her hand picked at the pale blue stripes of her quilt. I stood appalled at the strength of hatred that could reach out at me from a death-bed.

“Ask your husband—ask your reformed character whom you have made a Sunday-school boy of—and see what he has to say.”

I had an instinct to rush from the room, but I overcame it.

“Shall I go now?” I asked presently. She was staring at me with her haunting eyes.

“You are well-masked—or can it be possible that you don’t care!—I misjudged you, then. I thought you honoured honour in men and women above all things—Tony thought so too—he said, ‘she is like a clear stream of water—and I am thirsty for clean water.’ Tell me if those were cruel words to hear from the lips of a man I had loved and given all to, Deirdre Saurin.”

Given all to! Was this what I had come to hear from the arid lips of this cruel woman! Was my faith to be shattered at last! But my heart rejected the thought even before she spoke again.

“Given all that was best in me. He was no saint, but because in long past days on the Rand he was Claude Valetta’s friend he would not steal Claude Valetta’s wife—charmed that wife never so sweetly, and loved he never so deeply. For he did love me—as he never loved any of the others—and in the end I should have won—I saw the day coming—felt it close—when he would have taken me from my wretched life to some other land. Then he went to Ireland—and came back a changed man.”

This again found me gazing at her amazed and bewildered.

“Ah!” she mocked. “You think you were the first girl he loved—it is not so. There was a girl in Ireland—a girl at a ball, who first dragged him from me.”

“A girl at a ball—”

“She took him back to old dreams, he said—her beauty and her purity—but he was married, and she was not—so he came away quick—he went back to his dreams on the veldt for many months after that. Poor Tony! how he loved a woman he could put in a shrine!—his trouble was that they wouldn’t stay there when he was about. And the women out of shrines had their call for him too.—After the girl in Ireland Rhodes got him for awhile with his dreams of Empire—but he was coming straight, straight back to me—I knew it from his letters, when he met you—where did he meet you?—Oh! what brought your feet straying out to Africa to trample on my hopes!”

What could I say? I was bitterly sorry for her and glad for myself—and broken-hearted for myself! What could I say? I was silent.

She was lying back against her pillows now, deadly pale, eyes closed. I made a step to the door to call her nurse, but she detained me with a few more words like shrivelled-up dry leaves blowing through the room.

“His wife died about six months before you came to Africa.” Ah! That was something. Spikenard in that to lay upon an old wound. A streak of gold to embroider in a banner of belief I had always waved in the faces of those who cried him down. I would not even thank her for confirming my faith. She looked in my face and read my thought.

“Oh! yes—your faith was great enough to remove the mountains he had piled up round himself. You weren’t like Anna Cleeve who thought she adored him, yet at the first word of doubt failed. When I told her of his marriage I did not know of his wife’s death—he never told me until you were in Fort George. He came straight to me when he returned from the Transvaal, and told me, and thanked me then, for my ‘kindly offices’ with Anna. Cleeve—for saving him from a woman who had so tawdry a belief in the inherent decency of a man—but, he told me too he would have no more interference—he had found ‘a stream of crystal clear water’—he needed no more ‘friendly offices’ of me. I understood very well what it meant when I saw him looking at you on the tennis-court. Good-bye, Deirdre Saurin. You and I will not meet again.”

I don’t know how I came to be on my knees beside her bed. Perhaps my thought was to cry some prayer for her and myself and for all women who love; but though many words were in my heart none came to my lips. And presently an unexpected thing happened. I felt a hand on my hair, and a voice most subtly different to that I had been listening to, said brokenly, and softly, some words that sounded almost like a blessing.

“Why should I mind that he loved you best? If I had ever had a son I should have wished him to love a girl like you.”

Mr Valetta was waiting for me in the verandah. He said:

“I think I must insist on seeing you home, Mrs Stair. There seems to be some disturbance in the town.”

“What is it?”

“I don’t exactly know—but I have seen men running about in an excited way, and there has been some cheering. I fancy I heard your husband’s name. Is he in the town to-night? At any rate all the ruction has moved over in the direction of the camp. Look at the lights flashing in your huts.”

I looked and saw: and even as we stood there, another wild burst of cheering came echoing across the open. Then I knew.

Gathering up with shaking hands the draperies of my cloak and gown I prepared to speed my way home and to my share of the terror and beauty of life waiting there. But before I went I said to the husband of Nonie Valetta:

“Is it true that she is so near death?”

“The doctor holds out no hope. It is not so much the actual fever, as the complications that have set in. And her heart is all to pieces.”

“Well—let her depart in peace. Do not allow any news to reach her that will disturb her at the last. I want you to promise me that.”

“I promise, Mrs Stair, solemnly. Shall I come with you?”

“No, no. Go to her,” I said, and sped away on swift feet.

Long before I reached the camp the cheering and all sounds of exultation had ceased, and a strange stillness supervened. At the foot of the kopje, trampling on the tennis-court and among the zinias, were many men, their faces all turned towards the huts, talking among themselves in low voices. As I passed by a muffled silent figure, I caught a word or two.

“By God! That dirty brute of an Umlimo... Keeping a man like Kinsella—all these months! Nearly two years!”

“The trouble with the natives won’t be long coming now... Stair ought to get the V.C. Who would have thought he had it in him!”

There was no mistake then—Maurice had been successful! But why were these men standing out in the inhospitable night? What was going on in the silent brilliantly lighted huts? What subtle note of regret had my ears caught in the low spoken words?

Dimly, amidst the press of overpowering emotions that surged upon me, I apprehended that something was wrong. Fear crept into me, numbing my limits and detaining my feet: but still I stumbled on up the winding path.

There were lights in all the huts, as though some one had been searching in each. Doubtless Maurice had gone from one to the other looking for me. What an ironical trick of Fate that, after awaiting him every moment of every hour since he left, in the very moment of his triumph I should be absent!

There were men in the dining-room hut; but some instinct guided my feet to the drawing-room, through whose half-closed doors I heard the murmur of voices—and again, in the timbre of those voices, came the suggestion of trouble—pain—loss. I knew full well now that something was wrong. Something had gone hideously awry: and I feared, I feared!

At last I found courage to press open the door.

The heavy odour of a drug came out like a presence to meet me, and mingling with it, piercing through it to my inmost senses, was some other scent that brought terror and dismay. A dimness came over my eyes, so that I could not distinguish any of the faces about me. I saw only the prone figure lying against pillows on the couch that had been dragged to the middle of the room.

It seemed to me there were many red flowers spread about that couch, and on the doctor’s hands, and on his shirt sleeves. It was the scent of them that had met me at the door, piercing my senses—the strange pungent scent of the red flowers of death. Around me in the quiet room I heard some curt words gently spoken.

“It is Mrs Stair... just in time... clear the room... nothing more can be done.”

“Deirdre,”—a faint whisper dragged my leaden feet forward, and I went blindly towards the couch, my arms outstretched. The crimson roses of my cloak joined all the other crimson roses spread everywhere.

All was very still. No sound in the room but the echoes of softly departing feet, and a laboured, puffing sound like the panting of some far-off train climbing a steep hill. Yet there were no trains in Matebeleland. After a little while I knew that the sound was there beside me on the couch. When the mists cleared away from my eyes I looked into the face of the dying man.

It was Maurice.

He was whispering wordlessly to me, and looking up into my eyes with his that were full of chivalrous fires and some other wondrous light that had never been in them before. From his lips came the little panting laboured sound.

Supporting his head—pale and lean, but with the old intent strong glance, the little blue stones in his ears, and a great white scar gleaming along his forehead back into his hair—was Anthony Kinsella.

We took one glance of each other, while the world rocked beneath my feet. Then I gathered my husband’s head to my breast.

“Maurice! Maurice! This is all wrong—what has happened? You must not die!”

A smile of triumph lit his face. He lay there like a dying Galahad with the beauty of death on him: nobler and more gallant than he had ever been before. Like the sad music of old remembered bells I heard Anthony’s voice telling the brief tale.

“He put up a splendid fight with those two Imbezu fellows. I could do nothing to help until he had disabled them and unbound me. We got clear away then, after hard riding. All yesterday we travelled hard, and were certain no one was following. But this afternoon, about two hours’ ride from here, just as we were moving on after a short ‘off-saddle,’ a single shot was fired from behind a bush—it was meant for me of course—a last effort to pot me before we got in. But—God! Stair, what can I say?—You have given your life for mine! What can I say—or do!”

Triumph flickered once more across the death-dewed face of Maurice Stair; and his pale half-smiling lips whispered faintly back:

“That’s all right old man... Kiss me goodbye, Deirdre ... I have told him everything.”

With his hand in Anthony’s and his head on my breast he died.

The End.