Maurice was delayed in Salisbury, and it was late afternoon before he fetched me at last from my brother’s house.
The pale May sunshine was almost as cheerless as that of an early spring day in England, for the winter was coming on rapidly, and winter in Africa can be very bleak indeed. I was glad to wrap myself in a warm coat and lean back in the shelter of the little tented cart we were to make the journey in. It was only large enough for two, and Maurice, obliged to manage the restive horses, had little time to talk, for which I was curiously thankful. Passing through Salisbury he discovered that he had left his watch at his rooms and asked if I would mind his calling there for it. I made no demur of course, only, knowing that he lived in a row of bachelor chambers almost next door to the Club, I stipulated that he should pull up a few hundred yards away. I had driven and ridden past the Club before, and knew something of the insouciant curiosity of its members, and their happy habit of filling the verandah of sound of a horse or wheels.
“They’re rather fresh,” hesitated Maurice as I took the reins.
“Oh, Maurice! Do you think I can’t manage two old Mashonaland nags?” I smiled.—So he left me, and as I watched him go, tall, nonchalant, and graceful, taking long strides over the knolly ground, I asked myself if it could really be true that I was married, and that—my husband!
Frogs were beginning to croak in the swampy marsh between the Kopje and the Causeway. I could hear far-off voices, and see the smoke of others’ homes against the evening sky. But a terrible soul-sickness crept over me: the sickness of a soul that has lost its mate. At that moment I seemed quite alone in the world. Some words of Gordon’s that a dying man in Fort George had been fond of muttering flitted through my mind:
“Oh whisper, buried Love, is there rest and peace about!
There is little help or comfort here below!
On your sweet face lies the mould, and your bed
is straight and cold—”
Voices and the sound of horses coming along the road broke my dreary reverie. A man’s rather sardonic laugh reached me, and a voice I seemed to know, yet could not recall the owner of. The riders were still a long distance off but sounds travel far on the clear high air of Rhodesia, and I presently heard some words as distinctly and plainly as if they were spoken beside me in the cart.
“He is not a fellow I have ever cared about—I found out long ago that he is not straight. Another thing, he’s too fond of his little quiet tot by himself.—I like a man that drinks with his fellows—not one of your soakers in his bedroom.”
“Well! I’ll tell you what I don’t like about him, Bell, he hasn’t the pluck of a louse—there was a little incident here in Salisbury just after he came up—then again, at Fort George, he played sick with a sprained arm rather than go into Matabeleland with the others. Sprained arm! Sprained grandmother—and I told him so! He slunk out of my office like a dog!”
“It makes me sick to think of him marrying that fine girl.”