She had awakened early, and felt that a walk in the cloudless morning air, before the sun rays developed into an oppressive steaminess, would do her good. Gandela at large had not awakened early. There had been a good deal of late carousing among the rougher spirits there gathered together for the occasion, and a good deal of house-to-house visitation, also late, on the part of the more refined. So Gandela at large slept late proportionately.
The Fullertons’ house was on the very outskirts of the township, and she stepped forth straight on to the open veldt. The dew lay, sparkling and silvery, upon the green mimosa fronds, and made a diamond carpet of the parched burnt-up grass upon which her steps left footprints. How beautiful was the early morning in this fresh open land. The call and twitter of birds made strange unknown melody as she passed on her way, leaving the shining zinc roofs of the straggling township, turning her face toward the free open country. There lay the race-course, away on her left, and her face was set toward the dark bushy ridge of Ehlatini.
Two ‘go-away’ birds sped before her, uttering their cat-like call, as, with crest perkily erect and flicking their tails, they danced from frond to frond. How cool the inviting depths of that bush line looked, billowing down the slope of the hill, challenging exploration of their bosky recesses.
Clare was in splendid physical form, and walked with a straight willowy swing from the hips, rejoicing in the sheer physical exercise of her youth and strength. She looked up at the ridge above her, then back at the scattered township behind. To gain the summit would mean a fine view, also taking in the far, unknown stretch of country beyond. She had never wandered this way before, and it would be a novelty and something to expatiate upon to those lazy people whom she had left behind in a state of prolonged slumber. Slumber! and on such a morning.
The morning air blew balmy and warm, straight down from the Zambesi and beyond; straight down from the heart of the great mysterious continent. Later on it would be hot, oppressive. And in the shade of the mimosa, and wild fig, and mahobo-hobo, birds piped and called to each other.
Clare struck into a narrow path, which wound up, a mere cattle-track, through the thickness of the bush. It was delightful this roaming about a wild land alone. Soon, with no great effort or tax upon her powers of wind and limb, she had gained the summit of the ridge.
And then, on the farther side, other ridges went ribbing away in the distance, like billows of dark verdure; but on the right, where they ended, sloping abruptly to the more even ground of the gently undulating country beyond, far away in a film of light and vista, to lose itself in a hazy blue on the skyline nearly a hundred miles distant, stretched a vast mysterious wilderness. Then she sat down beneath the shade of a large overhanging wild fig, to take it all in.
She was used to wildness, and loved it. Reared in one of the wildest tracts of wild Ireland, she had delighted to go forth on solitary rambles, with trout rod and creel, more than ankle deep in soft bog soil, tramping laboriously to her field of action in high mountain lough, where the shrieking gust of a squall every half hour or so drove her to refuge beneath some great rock, what time the trout sulked, only to rise fast and furious when the rain squall had passed, and the raven croaked from the shining wet crags. And this solemn blue vista, stretching away in its vastness, formed a contrast indeed to the stormy glistening grandeur of her former mountain home; here with its hot, sub-tropical steaminess; yet there was that in common between both of them—that both were the wilds.
In the dreaminess of her reverie she started suddenly. The loud neighing of a horse, together with the violent flapping of an empty saddle as the animal shook himself, caused a sudden inroad upon her meditations that produced that effect. There, hitched to a bush, stood a horse, one moreover that she seemed to recognise. Yes, it was the large, high-withered roan that Lamont had ridden when, at her urgent request, he had entered for the tent-pegging competition and—had not won.
In a moment Clare’s meditations, dreamy and otherwise, were scattered to the winds. There was the horse, but—where was its owner? A strange inclination—impulse, rather—to get away, to return before he should discover her presence, came upon her. Yet—why? Why on earth—why?