“Where is your mistress?” he asked in Sindabele.
“Gone, Nkose,” was the reply.
“Gone!” he echoed mentally.
So Hermia had taken him at his word, and had decided to retreat to Fort Salisbury. Perhaps though, some disquieting news had arrived since his departure, causing her to take that step. His feeling of depression deepened as he entered the empty house. Ah! What was this?
A letter stared at him from a conspicuous place, a sealed enclosure—and it was directed in Hermia’s handwriting. That would explain, he thought. And it did with a vengeance.
“You will not be astonished, Hilary,” it began, “because even you must have seen that this life was getting beyond endurance. You will not miss me, because for some time past you have been growing more and more tired of me. So it is best for us to part: and you can now go back to your Matabele wives, or bring them here if you prefer it; for I shall never return to this life we have been leading. I warned you that if you did not appreciate me, others did—and now I am leaving, not only this country but this continent. I am going into the world again, and now, you too, will be able to make a fresh start. We need never meet again and in all probability we never shall. Farewell.
“Hermia.”
Twice he read over this communication—slowly, carefully, as though weighing every word. So she had gone, had deserted him. There was truth in what she wrote. He had been growing tired of her—very: for he had long since got to the bottom of the utter shallowness of mind which underlay her winning and seductive exterior—winning and seductive, that is, when laying herself out to attract admiration, a thing she had long since ceased to do in his own case. The sting too, about his Matabele wives, he never having possessed any, was a not very adroit insinuation designed to place him in the wrong, and was all in keeping with a certain latent vulgarity of mind which would every now and then assert itself in her, with the result of setting his teeth on edge.
He smiled to himself, rather bitterly, rather grimly. He was sorry for Spence. The boy was merely a fool, and little knew the burden he had loaded up on his asinine and youthful shoulders, and, as for Hermia, his smile became more saturnine still, as he pictured her roughing it in a prospector’s camp: for he looked upon her statement about leaving Africa as mere mendacious bounce, and of course was unaware of any change for the better in Spence’s fortunes. For her he was not sorry, nor for himself. As she had said, he would now be able to make a fresh start, and this he fully intended to do. Yet, as he stood there, ill and tired and shaken, looking around on his deserted home, it may be that some tinge of abandonment and desolation crept over him. Hermia had chosen her time well, at any rate, he thought, as he busied himself fomenting and bandaging his throbbing and swollen ankle.
The sun had gone down, and the shades of evening seemed to set in with a strange, unaccountable chill, as he limped about, looking after his stock and other possessions. Decidedly there was a lonely feeling, vague, indefinable, which hovered about him. And then those dreadful chills increased. Lying out in that rock-crevice, in fact lying out for several nights insufficiently covered, had sown the seeds. Assuredly no luck had come to him through meddling with the King’s grave. And then, before evening had merged for an hour into dark night, Hilary Blachland lay shivering beneath his piled-up blankets as though they had been ice—shivering in the terrible ague-throes of that deadly malaria—weak, helpless as a child, deserted, alone.
End of Book I.