“Don’t stop my rhapsodies, but listen. Doesn’t it seem—standing here in this stillness—as if the world lay far beneath one’s feet; that all the littlenesses and prosaic worries of every-day life could not enter such an enchanted realm? Ah-h!”
She uttered a little cry and instinctively drew closer to him as the sudden, yelping bark of a jackal sounded from the bush apparently within fifty yards of them, but really much further off, the stillness and a slight echo adding loudness to the unlooked-for and ill-sounding “bay.”
“Don’t be afraid,” he said, reassuringly. “It’s only a jackal. What would you have done if it had been a wolf?”
“I should have been dreadfully frightened. What a coward I am!”
“At any rate, this time I am not the author of the scare, which is subject-matter for gratulation,” he said.
She laughed. “No; but the interruption came in most opportunely, in time to stay my flights. Here am I, inveighing against, and thinking to rise superior to the prosaic commonplaces of life, when a sound, a mere sound, fills me with an overwhelming impulse to rush headlong back into the despised prose. What a step from the sublime to the ridiculous!”
“I was thinking something of the kind,” replied Claverton, with a half smile; and his voice grew very soft as he looked at her sweet, serious face. “But don’t be in the least afraid. A jackal is about as formidable or aggressive as a tabby cat, though he does make a diabolical row; and as for wolves, they are very scarce, and even more cowardly; and a yet bolder animal would flee from two such unwonted apparitions in the South African bush,” he added, with a laugh, as he glanced at the regulation “evening-dress” of his companion and himself. “Come this way.”
He opened a small gate in the high quince hedge, and they passed out into a narrow bush path which, wound along through the spekboem and feathery mimosa.
“Don’t be in the very least afraid,” he repeated, as they wandered on. “I want you thoroughly to appreciate and enjoy about the most perfect night I ever knew—and I’ve seen a good many—and you can’t do so if you’re expecting a wolf or a tiger to spring out of every bush.”
She laughed. “I’ll try and be less of a coward, and keep my too-vivid imagination under control.” Yet the light hand which rested on his arm seemed to lean there with ever so increased a pressure of trust or dependence, or both.