Chapter XXXVII
Julian Gerard paced impatiently the deck of the steamer on which, for eight miserable days, he had existed without sight of a newspaper. It was early dawn; the outlines of the Goddess of Liberty loomed uncertainly through a thick fog. He remembered how, when he had last seen his native shores, he had been distraught with bitter anger against the woman to whom his heart now turned with an eager longing, a passionate remorse.
For the hundredth time his mind analyzed and condemned that strange whim, the expression of a passing but very real phase of his disappointment and disillusion, which had led him to cut himself off from the world he had left behind. He had no wish to hear from home, to be reminded of home ties, or of the woman whom he had resolved to forget. Beneath his self-repressed exterior there was a strain of adventure in his blood, which made him turn, in a crisis like this, to the primitive resources of uncivilized life.
He had left home with no definite plans; but in London he met a friend, who was about to start for his farm in South Africa. Gerard at once decided to accompany him. South Africa was as good a place as any other, when all one desired was solitude and hardship, and to get away from one's self, and the unsatisfactory tone of the world.
The farm was deep in the interior of the country, many miles distant from railroad or telegraph station. For months the two men saw no one but the natives; they had no connection with the outside world. Gerard rode and hunted and studied, and took notes on the condition of the country. It was not a bad life on the whole, with a certain charm for a man satiated with all that wealth can give. He might even have enjoyed it, if he could have forgotten what had driven him to it, or erased from his memory the one face which haunted him.
The worst of it was, that she always seemed to be unhappy; he always saw her as he had left her, white and sad, with pathetic eyes. The thought of her which he had carried away that night seemed to have entirely effaced his earlier impressions of her, as she had first flashed upon him in the vivid radiance of her fresh beauty, as he had seen her often in a ball-room, a being meant only for smiles. He had never pictured her then as suffering; but now, he could not think of her in any other way.
One evening, as he and his friend sat together smoking, he found himself impelled, as it were, in spite of himself, to tell his story. The doubts, the misgivings which tortured him had grown too strong; it was a relief to put them into words. He spoke low and bitterly, in hurried phrases that were evidently the expression of his constant thoughts; not excusing the conduct of the woman who had deceived him, dwelling upon it rather with some harshness, for the very wish perhaps which he was conscious of to do the reverse. The other man, as he spoke, scanned his face keenly. At the end he made only one comment. "And yet she loved you?"
Gerard stared at him for a moment, the color flushing into his dark cheek. And then his face softened. Yes, it was not his money and position—he could at least do her that justice. "I believe she did," he said at last in a low voice.