Chapter Thirty Three.
The sunlight flooded the rondavel and played in a golden radiance about Honor’s figure. The gleam of it was in her hair; it shone dazzlingly on her white dress, and sparkled with a hard brilliance on the plain gold circlet on her finger. Matheson caught the glint of the ring, and from that moment it seemed to him that all the light in the room became contracted and centred in that narrow band, darting forth its refracted rays with a fiery challenge that hurt the eyes.
He put up a hand to shut out the sinister gleam of it, and lay quiet and in silence. Honor had risen and moved away from the bed. She stood with her face partly averted, watching the beauty of the sunrise through the uncurtained open window. An immense embarrassment held her, an embarrassment that made itself felt and in which the man shared. A sense of wrongdoing robbed them both of all pleasure in that long caress in the dawn, when their lips had met and lingered in the first kiss they had interchanged. He had kissed her once before on the brow; that kiss had been one of renunciation; the kiss he had given her that morning held the quality of passion in its eager warmth, a passion to which the woman was not insensible, to which she had in a measure responded. It had been the act of a moment in obedience to the impulse of the moment, and it left them both a little overcome and excited and enormously self-conscious.
Honor was startled. There was an expression akin to fear in the eyes that looked out at the sunlight, a warm colour in the beautiful face as if the rosy light in the sky had caught and flushed her cheeks. Her breathing was hurried, and the hand hanging at her side, the hand with its shining circlet, clenched and unclenched itself nervously. What had she done?—she, the bride of a few weeks. It was her fault, entirely her fault; she had always known that he loved her—had realised when she kissed him that she was touching fire. And yet after all what harm was there in what had passed between them? Why should she deny him that small satisfaction? She turned impulsively towards him, and stood transfixed, surprised and disconcerted at the sight of him lying with his eyes shielded by his hand. Why did he lie like that? Why would he not lode at her?
“Mr Matheson!” she said softly.
He uncovered his eyes immediately and met her inquiring gaze.
“Oh, hang it all!” he exclaimed. “Why don’t you call me Guy? We’ve got beyond formalities.”
He turned on his elbow.
“Come here,” he said. “I can’t talk to you from a distance. It’s all right. I’ll not forget again. I’ve been seeing that damned ring on your finger till I’m wellnigh blinded by it. It stands between us. I’m not likely to forget that. And there’s something else between us—something... I ought to have remembered sooner. But the sight of you...”
He broke off with jerky abruptness. Honor, observing him wonderingly, drew nearer in obedience to his wish, and seated herself in the chair near the bed. She folded her hands in her lap, and the ring was hidden from him. He noticed that, and wondered if she concealed it intentionally.
“I want to get away,” he said. “You must help me. I want some kind of conveyance... You’ll see to it? ... It doesn’t matter about this morning... After I leave I shall never see you again. I wish I had not seen you—ever. I wish I could forget you, but I know that is out of the question. I’ll never forget... your face... your voice... these will live in my memory. I am going to be married almost immediately, to the best little girl who ever loved a man not worthy of her. I’ve a warm affection for her—a warm affection, and an immense respect... but I have given the best of myself to you. That fact I am afraid is going to spoil life for both of us—for her and for me, I mean.”
“Need she know?” Honor asked quickly, in a voice that was not quite steady.
“She knows already. I had to tell her that before asking her to be my wife.”
“I’m sorry,” she said. “Oh! I’m sorry.”
She was silent for a moment; then she burst forth with a sudden soft vehemence that surprised him. He fell to listening, wondering, while he watched her working face, as expressive of the emotion that swayed her as the full rich tones giving voice to the flow of resentful thoughts that expressed their owner’s discontent with life, why this complicated business of life and love should be dependent upon infinitesimal human needs; why the disconnected individual existence should act and interact upon each separate existence it came in contact with until certain lives became interwoven with its own and, in adding to its completeness, divorced it from its former state of comfortable detachment? To love much is to suffer much; to love not at all is to remain unacquainted with happiness. And it is never a matter of choice: the lover is fashioned by circumstance; he is not his own creator.
“I think you were unwise to tell her,” Honor said, speaking low, and looking away from him, gazing abstractedly at the golden path that stretched from the doorway to her feet with wide unseeing eyes. “Your confidence only aggravates the wrong. Life hurts enough.” She pressed her hands the one upon the other tightly in her lap, and her face was sad. “Life has its beginning in pain; it struggles painfully through the years to the inevitable end. We regard life dishonestly; we’re afraid to face the truth. We speak of the beauty of Nature, her kindliness and compassion; and we look about us and behold the drought, and the beasts dying of hunger and thirst; that is not beauty, it is ugliness: we see men striving in a hated rivalry, competing always—killing one another; that is not kindliness; kindliness is not born of the lust of hate. Throughout creation, from the meanest organic life to the highest, one thing preys upon another and kills in order to live; that is not compassion. Beauty and serenity exist only in inanimate objects. Perhaps that is why inanimate nature endures while we pass away.
“I love this land,” she added, in soft impassioned accents, “as a woman loves her child. I wish I were a man that I could fight for it. Your country in annexing ours tears my child from my arms. And you talk to me of the futility, the wrong, of my wish to reclaim it... Go back to the girl who loves you, marry her, and have children of your own; and then perhaps you will understand. She will forget when her first child lies in her arms that its father’s love was ever given elsewhere. And you will forget too. No human passion is so acute that time cannot dim its keenness. I want you to forget. I want you, if you ever think of me, to think of me kindly as a friend.”
“Friend!” he ejaculated scornfully.
“It’s the sweetest word in all the English language,” she returned gently, “when it is applied sincerely.”
“That may be,” he admitted, and thought how ill the term applied in his case.
It incensed him that she could talk in that dispassionate manner about friendship with his burning kisses hot upon her lips. He believed that she was dissembling for the purpose of hiding from him her real feelings. He had never really understood her. She was capable of an immense reserve; not once in their most intimate moments had she permitted herself to be entirely frank with him.
“Perhaps in the future,” he said, “I may come to regard this thing with the same cool detachment as yourself; but I can’t think of you as a friend—yet. And it is dishonourable for me to think of you in any other way. I hadn’t heard of your marriage. I can’t get used to the idea. It seems to me fantastic and unreal I met Herman Nel in Cape Town; he never mentioned it.”
“I doubt whether he knew of it,” she answered. “Herman has not been to Benfontein for some months. Freidja is away nursing. She has quarrelled with him.”
“Is she going to spoil her life and his?” he asked with sharp impatience, recalling Nel’s face with its slightly wistful smile when the Dutchman had spoken to him of the rupture of his engagement.
Honor looked surprised.
“No,” she said. “After the war she will marry him. She loves him. Herman is a good man, and he is Dutch. They will live here.”
“And you?” he asked. “Are you going to forsake Benfontein?”
She smiled at the question. The farm on the Karroo was more precious to her than the fairest places of earth. She had come to Benfontein as a child. Every tree and kopje, every flower that blossomed in the veld, was dear to her with the priceless value of long familiar things. To quit Benfontein would be to tear herself up by roots too deeply set to bear such ruthless transplanting.
“Heinrich is working the farm for Andreas in his absence,” she explained; “he rents half the farm. We shall build a house for ourselves on the land, and I shall live near my mother. When Andreas marries, she will come to us.”
“You make plans,” he said, surprised at her confidence in the future. “One cannot think beyond the present these days. I do not look so far ahead.”
“I forgot,” she said, glancing at him swiftly. “You are going to fight—against us...”
“I am going to join Botha’s force as soon as I am married,” he answered.
“You’ve talked with Herman... He has persuaded you?”
Her tone held a note of suspicion. For all his talk of love for her, he had not been ready to yield to her persuasions. He was even prepared to fight against her people, to look upon her people and herself as rebels. That was not consistent with love.
“Herman has persuaded you,” she said again.
“He helped to convince me, I admit.”
“I tried to convince you,” she said quickly. “I did my utmost to prove to you the justice of our cause... Why couldn’t you at least have kept out of it? Why must you strike at me?”
“Oh! Honor,” he protested. “You look at this thing so differently. It isn’t a personal question at all.”
“It is,” she cried passionately—“between you and me.” She leaned towards him, her face quivering, and flushed with angry shame. “No one knows better than you do all this means to me. I’ve told you so much. I’ve trusted you. And in return—in return you take up arms against me. You talk of love—you, who cannot be true either to the woman you profess to love, or to the woman you are pledged to marry! Your love is not worthy any woman’s acceptance.”
“I’ve deserved that,” he replied, with a quick change of colour, and averting his gaze from the stormy reproach in her eyes. It came to him in a swift illuminating flash that intense natures such as Honor’s were not only difficult to understand, they were difficult also to deal with; possibly they would be difficult to live with.
He found this fresh mood disconcerting and distressing. And the reproach to his honour came ill from her. He felt suddenly very tired. He needed food. In her excitement she had forgotten the nourishment that stood ready for him on the table, slowly cooling while they talked.
“It isn’t altogether my fault,” he asserted with almost sullen insistence. “I’m not myself. I’m unnerved. You come to me when I’m altogether unprepared, and—my God! how the sight of you tempts me! But you are hard, Honor. All that is gentle in your nature has been deliberately suppressed.”
“I’ve been tutored in a hard world,” she replied oddly. “It is well, perhaps, that I am hard. A woman needs an armour of steel to protect herself from the selfishness of men’s love I believed in you once... I cared... You know I cared. But you wanted everything, and would give nothing. That is your way. For men like Beyers and Christian de Wet I would die, if it would benefit them at all. They are brave men with a single purpose in life. You call them rebels; we regard them as heroes. Had you joined us, I would have done anything for you. Instead, you side with the men who are trying to defeat our cause. Can you wonder that I am bitter when you speak to me of love and strike with the other hand?”
She got up abruptly, and stood for a moment irresolute, looking down at him, the anger dying slowly out of her eyes.
“It isn’t any use—it isn’t any use at all to speak of these things now. You will go your way, I mine. But it might have been so different. Last year, when you went away, I hoped you would change your mind and come back. I didn’t know then of this girl. Heinrich told me about her. You went back to her, and my influence ended.”
So Holman had enlightened her about Brenda. Doubtless he had done so in order to prosper his own suit. It was a card he would not have scrupled to play.
“I could never have embraced your cause,” he said gently. “I know what you have suffered, and I feel for you. But the affairs of nations are outside individual grievances. One has to accept a broader outlook. I shall never forget that I owe it to you that I learnt to see your point of view so clearly that I look upon this movement less as a rebellion than the persistence in a righteous if mistaken cause by a people who have never known discipline. In relying upon Germany you rely upon a ruthless enemy; the protection of the British flag alone secures your independence. This Colony is governed largely by the Dutch, in the interests of the Dutch collectively with the British, and for the good of the native community. You cannot improve on that. Let well alone, Honor, and heal old wounds. Herman Nel’s method of winning is the better and surer way.”
“Ah, Herman!” she said, and smiled. “Herman is a dreamer.”
“He dreams sanely,” he answered with conviction.
“Which means that he thinks as you do.”
She moved away to the table and took up the neglected food.
“See what a bad nurse I make,” she said, assuming a lighter manner. “I would starve you while I attempt to show you the error of your ways. It would appear that where you are concerned I must fail in everything.”
She brought the cup to the bedside. He took it from her hand and drained the contents eagerly.
“You were famished,” she said reproachfully. “Yet you wouldn’t ask me for food.”
“I hate to give so much trouble,” he answered. “If you wouldn’t mind calling Butter Tom presently, I will get up and dress with his assistance. It’s all humbug, my lying here, and taking slops. I could eat an ox.”
“I’ll dress your wound first,” she said. “That is something I can do for you better than Butter Tom.”
“You dressed it before?” he asked. “I wondered. I thought possibly I owed that to you. Honor...” He looked at her appealingly. “You are not going to let us part with a sense of ill will between us? I want to believe that when I am gone you will sometimes think kindly of me.”
Honor did not at once reply. She stood With the empty cup in her hand, the sunlight warming her face, shining on the white surface of the vessel into which she gazed in thoughtful abstraction, brightening her whole figure, and the room which formed a quaint and fitting background for this girl who belonged to the wilds, and whose beauty suggested always to the man who watched her sunlit spaces and warmth and the scent and the winds of the veld. She lifted her gaze suddenly and met his eyes.
“Don’t let us talk of these matters,” she said. “It is wiser with the coming of morning to cease to dwell on the dreams which belong to the night that is past. I’ve dreamed my dreams—you too. We are awake now, and the day calls us to other activities. Just for a moment while sleep drugged our senses we forgot. But we are neither of us people who forget for long the path of honour.”
His gaze fell before her steady eyes. She was right. Their paths in life were no tractless ways; they stretched straight ahead, clearly defined and mile-stoned with duties, leading always in opposite directions to the accepted goal—the goal of individual endeavour which contributes its effort to the unending scheme of life.