Lilian broke into a peal of laughter. “How absurd you are! You have quite taken the poetry out of them, and now they look like a very commonplace lot of beings. But is that really what they were saying?”
“It is, upon my word. To see a lot of Kafirs talking you would think they were letting off a stream of oratory, what with all their gesticulation and modulation of voice. In nine cases out of ten they are discussing the veriest trivialities.”
“I’m not sure that I’m glad I know that. It spoils the romance of the thing. I shan’t look at them with the same interest.”
“You are given to idealisation, I see,” he said. “It is a delightful pastime, and I must not do anything to shock it. But, look! That, at all events, is entirely free from the commonplace.”
They had reached the brow of an eminence, and before them lay unfolded a panorama which brought a flush of delight to Lilian’s face. Upland and valley lay sleeping in the golden sunshine, a rolling expanse of verdure, now open and grassy, now covered with thick bush, or dotted here and there with feathery mimosas. Wave upon wave of rise and swell, there seemed no end to the wide beautiful plains; and the eye wandered on, over and over it, drinking in a new delight in the far-seeing vision, then turning to refresh itself in the grand mountain chain which bounded its range in front. Stretching afar, in a hundred and fifty miles of stately crescent, rose those lofty mountains with their sunny slopes and beetling cliffs, and black forest-clad sides seen through the dim uncertainty of the summer haze; while, towering above the rest, the Great Winterberg raised his weather-beaten crest to the cloudless bine. The thatch and white walls of a farmhouse or two, visible here and there in the distance, redeemed the spectacle from the utter wildness of a newly-trodden land, but on the other hand added to the peaceful solemnity of the scene. Hard by, the air resounded with the low hum of bees busily gathering their stores from the blossoming sprays of a neighbouring clump of bush; spreuws whistled, and a dainty little sugar-bird—the humming-bird of Southern Africa—flitted across the path, his painted plumage glittering in the sun. Down in the valley two or three pairs of blue cranes roamed about picking in the grass, and every now and then their strange rasping note floated not unmelodiously through the calm.
Lilian, in her intense love of the beautiful, could not restrain a cry of delight as she gazed upon the splendid panorama before them. The exhilarating exercise and the warm balminess of the air had brought the loveliest flush into her clear olive cheeks, and as she sat there lightly reining in her horse, while the sweet eyes sparkled and dilated and a witching smile carved the usually sad mouth, her companion thought he had never seen such a picture in his life.
“A lovely background with a lovelier central figure,” he murmured. “Look at it well,” he added. “Take it all in thoroughly, now; it will never look the same again. Nothing ever strikes us as it does the first time.”
She looked half round at him. “Am I delaying you?”
“Delaying me? Good heavens!” is all the reply he can make just then. Often in the time to come will he remember this day, this moment. Often will he stand in imagination as he does now with one arm over the pommel of his saddle, watching the radiant face of this girl in its almost divine beauty, set in entranced contemplation of the glorious landscape all gleaming with purple and gold in the flooding sunshine. And remembering it he will feel as though he had lost Heaven. A dull, gnawing pain tugs at his heart as a forecast of the future runs darkly through him, but with a great effort he thrusts it aside; he will live in the present, and sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.
“What are those, down there?” cried Lilian. “Bucks of some sort?”