“I shall have to get back, Deirdre; but you stay on here as long as you think fit, with Mrs Burney. Blow and Deshon will mind you for me; and when you’re ready to come on to Salisbury send me a wire and I’ll fetch you.”
A morning or two later I walked up and down with him in the early dawn, before the post-office, waiting for the mails to be put into the coach that was to carry him away. A few sard-coloured stars lingered regretfully in the pale sky. Not until his foot was on the step of the coach did he say the words I wished to hear from him, but would not ask for.
“Goldie—of course I’ve heard everything, all about it—it seems to be a queer tangle. If it were any other fellow I’d get after him—but Kinsella is straight—as straight a man as there is in Africa. If he has let you believe he is free, then you can take my oath he is.”
I could have kissed his feet for those words, and the way he spoke them—as though it was unquestionable that Anthony was still in the world. I could not speak, my heart was too full. I could only look at him gratefully through my tears. He patted me on the shoulder.
“Dear old girl, don’t fret. He’ll turn up.” I did not have time to fret: there was too much to do. Among other things I had Mrs Marriott to pack up and send away to her English home to those who would tend and love her and bring her safely through her coming trial. Her last words to me from the coach were:
“Deirdre, I know I shall have a son to take up life where poor Rupert laid it down: and I think he can do it under no finer name than Anthony.”
“Thank you, dear,” I cried, “and then you must come back here and give him his father’s heritage. It’s going to be a splendid heritage. Dick will see to that.”
A week later we packed off the little woman whose husband still lay unburied at Shangani. She was taking her small fatherless tribe to her people down-country, and was then coming back to earn her living by nursing. Saba Rookwood and her husband were travelling with the same waggons. They had been married that morning, and were going away for a time to return later and start farming and mining in the Buluwayo district.
In the evening, Gerry Deshon, Colonel Blow, and I rode to their first outspan, about twelve miles out from the town, and had supper with them—a sad, affectionate little farewell supper, sitting round an old black kettle that was propped up by two tall stones over the red embers of the wood and mis fire.
If any one had told me a few months before that I would sit at a camp-fire, my eyes blurred with tears and my heart full of regrets at parting with a dowdy, worn-faced little colonial woman who understood nothing of life as I had known it; and another who had broken the moral code and transgressed against the tenets of my religion, I should have been both deeply offended and incredulous. Even if it could have been explained to me that I should love and reverence the first woman because the great forces of life—Love and Sorrow and Death—had touched and beautified her, revealing to all her strong heart, and courage, and a lovely belief in the mercy and wisdom of God, I should yet not entirely have understood; nor that I could honour the second because I saw in her a gentle, kind, and brave spirit, sweet in humiliation, and free of malice and the small sins that devour the souls of so many women.