“You drink this,” she said. “Then go to sleep for an hour or two and we’ll start for Kwabulazi.”
“But I hate spirits—Ugh!” with a shudder.
“So do I; and I hate medicine too; but both are necessary sometimes. Down with it.”
Evelyn obeyed, with more than one additional shudder. But the end justified the means, for, sitting back in a low roomy armchair, she soon felt drowsy and dropped off to sleep.
Edala felt no inclination to follow her example, on the contrary she had never felt more wakeful in her life. She wandered from room to room. There was her father’s library, and his favourite chair and reading lamp. There were his cherished books, and all the surrounding was alive with his presence. She could hardly realise that he was no longer there, but instead was a prisoner—a hostage—in the hands of insurrectionary savages; whose wild mad scheme of rebellion could end in no other way than that utterly disastrous to themselves, and then—?
She looked around the room, and a terrible wave of compunction, or remorse came over her. How hard, how selfish, how unloving she had been towards him. Who was she that she should judge him? Yet she had, and that at every moment of the day.
All the affection and care and consideration he had lavished upon her came back now. It would, when it was too late, he had more than once said in his bitterness—Evelyn too had all unconsciously echoed his words. And it had. Should she ever see him again—ever look upon that loving presence—to whom she had been all in all for the whole of her young life, and whom she had met with ingratitude and repulsion? In the lonely silence of the still midnight the girl who had faced physical danger with a calm front, and rare readiness of resource, broke down.
“Father darling—darling! come back to me,” she moaned. “Only come back to me, to your little one again, and all shall be so different, so different.”
She had dropped upon her knees, her head buried in the chair—his chair. Her heart seemed breaking in her sobs—her great sobs—which hardly relieved it. What if she should never see him again, to tell him how his words had been surely fulfilled—never—never? No, she could not realise it. This room, which more than any other in the house seemed sacred to his presence and—now empty of it. A large portrait of him hung on the wall. Rising she went over and pressed her lips to the cold, not too carefully dusted, glass again and again.
The sound of stirring in the other room now came to her ears. It brought her down to the hard, material side of the situation. She dashed the tears from her eyes, fiercely, determinedly, and went to join her relative. Evelyn was awake again, and was looking around in rather a frightened way.