Chapter Thirty Five.
Butter Tom was busy outside the rondavel shaking the dust from the skin mats which covered the floor. He glanced up at Honor’s approach, and smiled with a cautious deference that concealed his vague distrust of her more effectually than it hid his nervousness. The missis with the face of a lily in the moonlight possessed the cunning of a devil. Already she had worked evil towards the baas he served. Her appearance now he believed portended further evil. He was afraid of her with the unreasoning fear of a man who realises his inability to resist a superior will. If she commanded him to do a thing, he would do it because he dared not refuse. He likened her to the fleet-footed powers of evil which outdistanced the chameleon, the tardy messenger of the gods, who failed through its dilatoriness to deliver the World from the ills which afflict mankind. She came towards him swiftly, as evil travels, with the speed of the wind, and halted beside him, warmly flushed and panting for breath. Butter Tom gathered up his mats, and, grinning nervously, prepared to retreat with them; but Honor stayed him with a gesture.
“Put those down,” she said authoritatively, “and go to the stable quickly, and fetch out the old spider which Baas Herman uses. Inspan Baas Matheson’s horse without loss of time. The baas will drive to the town, and you will drive him there and bring the spider back. Do you understand?”
“Ja, missis. Me take the mats inside, then me go.”
For a second it seemed as though she would not permit this delay; then with another gesture she signified her consent to the disposal of the mats, but bade him be quick as she would wait for him.
Butter Tom retired within, and spread his mats carefully on the floor. The baas was attempting to shave himself with the razor grasped in his left hand, and was making a sorry business of it. He looked round at Butter Tom’s entrance to inquire who it was he had heard talking outside the hut.
“Young missis will send Butter Tom to the stable,” the Kaffir vouchsafed, with an appealing look at the baas in the hope that the latter would raise some objection to his obeying the strange behest.
But the baas, letting the razor fall, and receiving it without comment from the dark hand which hastily forestalled his request by returning it to him, merely said:
“If the young missis wants you, go at once.”
Then he resumed the business of shaving himself with a hand considerably less steady than before. What need had Honor for employing Nel’s servant? And why had she returned?
As if in answer to his unspoken questions. Honor entered the rondavel, having satisfied herself that Butter Tom had departed to do her bidding. She entered with a certain hesitation, and seeing Matheson’s occupation, advanced with greater assurance and took the razor from his unresisting hand.
“There isn’t any time for this,” she said. “You can get this done in the town. In a few minutes Butter Tom will have the spider ready. It’s a long drive for one horse, but you must do it, and you must start at once.”
“But why?” he asked, amazed. “It is early. Half an hour can’t make much difference anyway; and I look such a ruffian.”
She closed the razor with a snap. As she did so Leentje’s words recurred to her with a new and more sinister meaning. “She put her hand to the nail, and her right hand to the workman’s hammer.” ... A razor was quite as effective a weapon as a hammer in the hand of jael. Quickly she returned the razor to him, contemplating him with thoughtful anxious eyes. Instinctively she knew that she must not apprise him of his danger. He would not flee before a German, nor even from a modern Jael.
“There is no time to lose,” she said. “They might raise objections to my lending the spider. I am giving you the only chance of a conveyance. If you don’t take it now you will have to wait until you can ride into town; and quite possibly your horse will be commandeered. All the horses on the farm have been taken.”
“Nel’s horses—yes,” he said. “But they can’t take mine.”
“They won’t ask your permission,” she answered. “Please do as I ask you. The spider belongs to Herman; you need not scruple to use it. Butter Tom will drive you... Reward him well; he will possibly be blamed when he returns.”
She did not think it necessary to inform him that Butter Tom would most probably be flogged for obeying her orders. Holman would wreak his vengeance on the Kaffir because he would not dare to reproach her. She had known him flog a Kaffir before; it was his method of enforcing a discipline he could not otherwise maintain.
“But such haste partakes of the nature of flight,” he objected. “I don’t really see the need for it.”
“You wanted to get away before,” she reminded him. “You asked me to help you. This is the only way in which I can help. If you delay it will be embarrassing for me. You are well enough to travel, aren’t you?”
Again she scrutinised him closely, with renewed anxiety in her gaze. He did not look equal to a great deal of fatigue. Never before had he felt so painfully conscious of weakness; but he made light of it.
“I’ll be all right,” he said. “It isn’t that... Of course, if you think it best, I am ready to start at once.”
Her relief at his compliance was manifest. She was nervous and unstrung, and the sudden reaction shook her fortitude. She turned her face aside to hide its emotion from him; but he saw the tears in her eyes, and was immensely disconcerted at the sight of this distress which he failed altogether to understand. He advanced a few paces towards her, hesitated, and stood irresolute, regarding her with an exasperated sense of his own inadequacy.
“I say!” he said awkwardly. “Don’t! ... Please, don’t... I’m awfully sorry that my presence has so upset you. I’ll go. I’ll go at once, Honor.” Then a doubt crept into his mind. He approached quite close to her and put out a hand and touched her sleeve. “You want me to go?” he asked.
“Yes,” she cried quickly—“yes... Of course.” She moved away. “Drive straight for the town,” she added. “And don’t spare the horse.”
Without once looking at him she left the rondavel, hiding her tear-wet face from him, and hurrying away in the sunshine with steps as fleet as those she had used in coming, but followed a less direct route for the purpose of allaying suspicion as to where she had been in the event of meeting any one on the way back. She had done her utmost for him; his safety was now his own affair.
Matheson remained for a while inactive, watching her retreating figure. He followed her to the doorway, and stood in the brilliant sunshine, looking after her, as she sped away with never a backward glance, the gold of the sunlight upon her and the morning wind ruffling her hair.
Innumerable doubts troubled him while he stood there, doubts which she had set fermenting in his brain. She was not happy. The change in her was very marked. When he had first met her she had been afire with enthusiasm and eager interest in life; now she was a woman, grave and thoughtful, on whom cares and responsibilities pressed heavily. She had sold her birthright of joy, sacrificing it to a long-cherished dream of vengeance; and already she was discovering how unsatisfying was the bargain she had made. Nel was right. There was a predestination in these matters beyond human control.
A sense of utter futility gripped Matheson, a sort of sick disappointment more distressing than physical nausea. His passion for Honor assumed a new significance: it became less personal—more of a formal worship of beauty for beauty’s sake than the love of man for woman for simple and primitive ends. He realised that temperamentally they were entirely opposed, as the north wind is opposed to the south, the east to the west. In no circumstance could they have mated with felicitous results. He had loved her beauty and the quick fire of her imagination; she had attracted him as the fierce untamed land she loved attracted him, by reason of its untrammelled freedom, its unconquerable savagery and beauty. But these qualities do not make for the sublime happiness of domestic peace. The human need demands something more satisfying than passionate discords in its relations with life. A man may enjoy climbing to exalted altitudes; but he lives preferably in the valleys among quiet and orderly things.
It seemed to Matheson that he saw life clearly for the first time. He was regarding things from the detached standpoint of an unbiassed onlooker—regarding himself, as a person takes note of some acquaintance and determines his place in the scheme of the universe. He had a place, quite unimportant and prosaic, but with certain clearly defined duties and work to perform. Always he came back to that. There was work for him to do—work for every one. He had been idling in the backwaters of good intentions long enough. Too often a man idles away his best years in dreaming, and overcrowds his middle age with much that might have been accomplished during his youth. Youth is the period for activities; and most surely is youth the time for marriage—useful marriage for the raising and rearing of healthy and beautiful children.
Then, breaking in sharply upon his musings, came the sound of wheels and the noise of Butter Tom’s guttural exhortations to the recalcitrant bony horse which Matheson had hired at De Aar, and which, accustomed to the saddle, displayed mule-like tendencies between the shafts. Butter Tom sawed at the reins and swore at it in Kaffir, while Matheson looked on with apathetic indifference, thinking drearily of the long drive before him in the heat, with his wounded shoulder and the useless right arm for which Honor had improvised a sling from a scarf of her own.
With the moment of departure it occurred to him what a fool he had been to come. He did not know what he had expected from the visit. It had proved a wild, impossible venture. A man may not take the law into his own hands even in Africa. Had he killed Holman he would have found himself placed in an awkward dilemma. It would not have been easy to establish a sufficient reason for the act. He had nothing but circumstantial evidence to produce against Holman, evidence which would have implicated Honor, and which therefore he could not have made use of. He realised clearly that he had been actuated by a strong personal animus, the result of his recognition of the man’s responsibility for the poisoning of Honor’s mind, and the systematic fostering of her brother’s disloyalty. It had never been with him a question of German treachery against England, but of the injury done to himself through the woman he had loved His sense of justice had not sprung from any lofty motive; therefore its failure of accomplishment, though humiliating, was not deserving of many regrets.
He climbed into the spider with difficulty and seated himself beside Butter Tom, who, by dint of a vigorous application of the whip, induced the stubborn horse to break into an uncomfortable trot.
“This horse bad schelm,” the Kaffir observed critically. “Him got seven debels in him.”
Matheson looked back towards the rondavel, remembering now that they were moving the few things he had brought with him and which he had forgotten to pack. He was about to tell the Kaffir to return in order to fetch his possessions when he became aware of Leentje Nel’s figure in the distance, running towards them, and changed his mind. The Dutchwoman gesticulated violently, and shouted to Butter Tom to stop. Butter Tom heard her, and looked back; then, with his whip arm upraised, he glanced inquiringly at the baas’ imperturbable face.
“Drive on,” Matheson commanded.
The whip fell relentlessly across the animal’s lean flanks. Butter Tom stood up to the business, and narrowly escaped being thrown out on to the veld as the horse, after an indignant plunge and two ineffectual attempts to splinter the splashboard with its hoofs, broke into a furious gallop, bumping the spider behind it like a toy cart over the rough stony ground. Matheson, hanging on with his left hand, watched, with a light of understanding for Honor’s urgency breaking in upon him, Leentje Nel’s pursuing figure pounding after them in futile and angry chase.