Somehow she felt that all hope of personal happiness with Vereker Sarle was over. It was unfit that so clean-souled and upright a man should be involved in the tangle of lies and deceit and tragedy that she and Diana had between them encompassed. He would shrink from her when he knew all, of that she felt certain, and it made her shrink in turn to think of it. So she sent only a little formal line in answer to his note, making no reference to the likelihood of seeing him on deck or anywhere else. It looked cold and cruel enough to her, that note, like a little knife she was sending him; but it was a two-edged knife, with which she also wounded herself.
The stewardess brought her tea and toast, and she stayed in her room all day. Only in the cool of the evening, when everyone else was dining, she crept out for a few moments, and leaned upon the ship's rail, drinking in the air and staring at the moody line of land ahead that meant fresh experiences and trouble on the morrow! She was afraid to look at the sea!
No farewell concert took place that night. People whispered together in little groups for a while after dinner, but all the merriment of the last night at sea was lost in the sense of tragedy that hung about the ship. Almost everyone was oppressed by a feeling of guilty responsibility for what had happened. The inherent decency of human nature asserted itself, and each one thought:
"Why did I not give the poor girl a helping hand instead of driving her to desperation?" It was remembered that "Lady Diana" had stood by her, and everyone yearned to absolve their souls by explanation to the person who (to her great regret) bore that rank and title. But she had put a barricade of stewardesses between her and them, and was invisible to callers. Some few of the younger and more resilient passengers, in an effort to shake off what seemed to them useless gloom, went and asked the Captain to allow the band to play on deck. He consented, stipulating only that there should be no dancing. Of course, no one wanted to dance, but as ships' bands specialize in dance music, the musicians struck at once into a tango, and it happened to be the one Diana had made her own by singing her little French rhyme to it:
"Tout le monde
Au salon
On y tan-gue, on y tan-gue."
It only needed that. Every mind instantly conjured up the picture of a vivid figure in a frock that gleamed blue as sulphurous flames. A hysterical woman sprang up screaming shrilly, and had to be taken away; a solitary sea gull, its plumage shining with a weird blueness in the electric light, chose this moment to fly low along the deck, crying its wailing cry. That was enough. Another woman began to scream; the music stopped, and there was almost a panic to get away from a spot that seemed haunted. In a little while the first-class deck was as deserted as the deck of a derelict, and the ship was wrapped in silence. The personality of the April Fool seemed more imposing in death than it had been in life!
By morning the Clarendon Castle had reached her destined port, and lay snugly berthed in Cape Town docks. April, venturing out at the tip of dawn to get a first glimpse of Africa, found that a great mountain wrapped in a mantle of mist stood in the way. It seemed almost as if by reaching out a hand she could touch the dark sides of it, so close it reared, and so bleak it brooded above her. Yet she knew this to be an illusion of the atmosphere, for between her and the mountain's base lay the streets and little white houses and gardens of Cape Town. It might have been some southern town on the shores of the Mediterranean except for that mountain, which made it unlike any other place in the world. The "Table of the Mass," the Portuguese named it, and when, as now, silver mists unrolled themselves upon the flat top and streamed in veils down the gaunt sides, they said that the cloth was spread for the Sacred Feast.
April thought of all the great wanderers whose first sight of Africa must inevitably have been the same as hers—this mysterious mountain standing like a grey witch across the path! Drake sighted it from afar in 1580; Diaz was obliged to turn back from it by his mutinying sailors; Livingstone, Stanley, Cecil Rhodes, "Doctor Jim," all the great adventurers, and thousands of lesser ones, had looked upon it, and gone past it, to their sorrow. For if history be true, none can ever come out from behind that brooding witch untouched by sorrow. They may grow great, they may reap gold or laurels, or their heart's desire; but in the reaping and the gaining their souls will know grey sorrow. A rhyme of her childhood came unsolicited into April's mind:
How many miles to Banbury?
Three score and ten.
Will I be there by candlelight?
Yes, and back again:
Only—mind the old witch by the way!
She shivered, but the sun burst like a sudden glorious warrior upon the world, dispersing fear, and making her feel as though, after all, everything and everyone was young, and all life decked out in spring array. If only the burden of deceit had not been upon her, how blithe and strong in hope could she have set foot in this new land.