The vast rain cloud went whooping along the river-bed, gleaming in starry sparkle as the lightning beams stabbed it, but not a drop fell upon us. The storm had passed us by.
Chapter Twenty Five.
The Witch Doctor Again.
From the moment that Aïda Sewin and I had become engaged life was, to me, almost too good to live. As I have said, I was no longer young, and now it seemed to me that my life up till now had been wasted, and yet not, for I could not but feel intensely thankful that I had kept it for her. I might have been “caught young,” and have made the utter mess of life in consequence that I had seen in the case of many of my contemporaries, but I had not, and so was free to drink to the full of this new found cup of happiness. And full it was, and running over.
Of course I didn’t intend to remain on at Isipanga. The trading and knockabout days were over now. I would buy a good farm and settle down, and this resolve met with Aïda’s entire approval. She had no more taste for a town life than I had myself. The only thing she hoped was that I should find such a place not too far from her people.
“The fact is I don’t know how they’ll ever get on without you,” she said one day when we were talking things over. “They are getting old, you see, and Falkner isn’t of much use, between ourselves. I doubt if he ever will be.”
This made me laugh, remembering Falkner’s aspirations and the cocksure way in which he had “warned me off” that night in Majendwa’s country. But I was as willing to consider her wishes in this matter, as I was in every other.
Falkner had accepted the situation, well—much as I should have expected him to, in that he had sulked, and made himself intensely disagreeable for quite a long time. I was sorry for him, but not so much as I might have been, for I felt sure that it was his conceit which had received the wound rather than his feelings. Which sounds ill natured.