“Don’t you feel that we have been together before somewhere?”
She did not answer, only smiled. A blue ripple of her gown resting on his grey-clad knee acted like an electric current between them.
The Rhodes Memorial stands a little way out of the town—a rather enchanted-looking Asian Temple, built of sandstone from the Matoppo Hills. They climbed its steep stairs and stood gazing from marble-pillared openings at a great vista of empty veld and a far line of hills. The Boers occupied those hills during the siege, and peppered Kimberley with fifteen hundred shells from their Long Tom, being blithely answered by Long Cecil, the big gun made in the De Beers workshops. Quelch recounted the tragic fate of Labran, the maker of this gun, who was killed by the second response from Long Tom.
Afterward, he fell into silence. It was Loree who talked lightly and incessantly. She had become aware of the danger of silence. When you are loitering on the perilous precipices, where the fire-flowers blow, words are little ropes and holds by which you keep your footing. But Quelch smiled like a man who has his feet on firm ground, and enfolded her always with his bold yet subtle glance.
She was vaguely thankful for the presence of a man reading on a bench, and when Quelch wanted to drive her out into the empty veld, which the sinking sun had flooded with blood-red light, she resisted the adventure, murmuring that she must return and write a letter to catch the night post for Rhodesia.
His face darkened at the words. Pat Temple had never been mentioned between them, but Loree felt no doubt that he knew where her husband was and all about him. One of the first things you learn in Africa is that every one knows your private affairs nearly as well as you do yourself.
So the drive into the veld was renounced, but home was reached only by a route both long and obvious. Loree missed the post for Rhodesia by just ten minutes. There was time for nothing before dinner except a few moments’ secret genuflection at the shrine of a rose-pink idol. And after dinner-time flew past in the same astonishing fashion of the previous evening. Mrs Cork’s headache had evidently persisted, for she did not appear, and they neither missed nor mourned her. Instead of sitting in the verandah, where the rest of the world was liable to note the silence that now held between them, they walked in the garden among the wet roses and languorously scented night-flowers. Playing with danger is fascinating anywhere, but in Africa the mise en scène is always specially arranged for this pastime.
Next morning, by the early post there was news from Pat. He had been down with a touch of malaria, and the Wingates were looking after him. Ethel Wingate was a remote cousin and her husband an old school-friend. They had not much money, Pat wrote, but it was wonderful to see their happiness. They had been married ten years and never parted a day, weathering storms and sunshine together.
“It has made me think a bit (the letter ran) and realise that while one is busy hustling about the earth, piling up a fortune for the future, one may be missing something more important in the present. What do you think, darling mine?”
Loree was disturbed by the question, as a happy dreamer might be disturbed by a shout in the ear. She had closed the door of her thinking mind for the time being, and did not wish to open it, for fear of what was crouching there—a little drab-faced thing called conscience. She desired no communication with that thing, nor with her soul, which was a soul obsessed. The best way to forget Pat’s query was to get out the little idol that lay in her bosom, and lose herself in its sparkling loveliness. But, somehow, it did not look quite so beautiful as before. Its lustre seemed dimmed. Its fires had paled a little. This annoyed her. She felt as if she were being cheated in the value of something for which she had paid a heavy price.