CHAPTER XIII
POPPY sailed by one of the pleasant small lines that run direct between Natal and England without touching at East London or the Cape.
"If it will amuse you," said Bramham, "to sit down with diamonds at breakfast, and diamonds-and-rubies-and-emeralds at lunch, and the whole jewel-box for dinner, take the Mail-steamer and go by the Cape. And then, of course, there are the scandals," he added seductively. "Personally I like them; but you look to me like a girl who wants rest, and to forget that there is such a place as Africa on the map."
Poppy agreed. She had travelled by the Mail-boats before, and thought them excellent places—for anyone who values above all things a little quiet humour. Also, persons returning from Africa with little else than a bitterly acquired philosophy, find satisfaction in putting their only possession upon the sound basis of contempt for riches. For herself, not only was she able to sustain life for three weeks without scandals and the elevating sight of millionaires' wives lifting their skirts at each other and wearing their diamonds at breakfast, but she longed and prayed with all her soul for peace, and solitude, with nothing about her but the blue sea and the horizon.
The battle before her needed a plan of campaign, and to prepare that she must have time and rest. First, there must be some bitter days spent in wiping from her mind, and memory, Africa and all that therein was. She realised that if the greater part of her thought and force was afar from her, seeking to follow a man who by that time was deep in the heart of Africa, it would be futile to expect anything great of the future. Abinger and his soul-searing words must be forgotten too; and Clem Portal's fascinating friendship, and Charles Bramham's kind grey eyes and generous heart. All these were destroying angels. If she admitted thoughts of them into her life, they would eat her time, and her strength, which must austerely be hoarded for the future.
Courage, resolution, silence—those were three good things, Clem Portal said, to be a woman's friends. And those were the things the girl strove to plant firm in her soul as she watched with misty, but not hopeless eyes, the retreating coast of her beloved land.
She kept aloof from everyone, spending long, absorbed hours of thought and study in some canvas-shaded corner; or swinging up and down the decks, drinking in the freshness of the wind. Before many days were past, care departed from her, and rose-leaf youth was back to her face. Gladness of life surged in her veins, and the heart Evelyn Carson had waked to life, sang like a violin in her breast. Her feet were on the "Open Road" and she loved it well, and could sing with Lavengro:
"Life is sweet, brother ... there is day and night, brother, both sweet things; sun, moon, and stars, all sweet things; there's likewise a wind on the heath."
She had yet to find that the gods love not the sound of women's feet upon the Open Road. Its long, level stretches are easy to the feet of men, but for women it most strangely "winds upwards" all the way, and the going is stony, and many a heavy burden is added to the pack the journey was commenced with. Youth and Love are stout friends with whom to begin the climb, and Poppy knew not that she had a pack at all. Certainly she suspected nothing as yet of the burden which Fate and her own wild passionate nature had laid upon her. So still she went glad-foot. No one who watched her could have believed that she was a girl out in the world alone—a girl breaking away from a past that was a network of sorrows and strange happenings, to face a future that lay hidden and dark.