“And you think it insolence on my part to ask so much?” His voice had gone back to reverie and his eyes to the dying fires. “Do not think that, Miss Saurin. Insolence has no place near you in my mind and memory. It was no business of mine I suppose whether you refused Herriott, or why. In any case I should have left Ireland at once as I did. Only—I wish to God I had known in all these years.”
I had to realise at last that this man was making love to me, and that the fact aroused in my heart neither anger nor indignation. I felt not the slightest disposition to reprove him, but rather to go on sitting there for ever listening to his strange burning words and vibrating voice. It seemed to me suddenly that I was listening to an old song I had known all my life, but had never before heard set to music. My heart began to flutter like a wild bird in my breast and a trembling thrilled me unlike any trembling I had known through the past hours of darkness and fear. A faintness stole over my senses. I, too, had kept my gaze straight before me while we talked, but now, while I felt myself growing pale to the lips with some strange emotion, I turned my eyes his way and found him looking at me. Glance burnt glance. His blue, intent eyes searching in mine as if for something that was his. Mine reading in his—I know not what—something I had long known dimly but dared not recognise. In that moment I realised why I had come to Africa. I knew why I had refused Herriott. It was for the sake of seeing again this strange man with the voice that pulled at my heart-strings and the burning eyes that searched in mine as if for something that was his. And now, alone with him in this wild and desolate spot, where conventions and all the superficialities of life fell sheer away, and left us just simple man and woman, I was afraid of the poignant sweetness and wonder of it. I was afraid for my immortal soul.
For the second time that night, and half unconsciously, I put up my hand, and as do all good Catholics in the supreme moments of life, crossed myself. I hardly knew what I had done until I found my right hand touching the shoulder nearest him and almost as if in answer to my action, which he could not have failed to observe, he lifted his hand, which still lay upon my left hand, and pushed back from his eyes the fallen streak of hair. Afterwards he did not replace it, though mine still lay where he left it.
“You are a Catholic?” he said abruptly.
“Yes, the Saurins have always been Catholics,” I answered. Then a silence fell between us that I feared. For some reason I did not understand, I began, in a voice at first a little strained and uncertain, to tell him of the love there had always been in my family for the beautiful old faith, of how much its forms and ceremonies meant to even the most irreligious of us. I told him legends of long-dead rakes and scamps among my paternal ancestors who, forsaking their sins, had gone from their own country to fight for the faith they loved in other lands. How never a Saurin for three centuries had died without a scapular about his throat and a De profundis on his lips. I told him how my mother, coming of a rigid Protestant American family, had yet, for love of my Irish father, embraced his faith with all the fervour of the convert, and taught me to love it as she did herself. I told him things, I knew not why, that had never been told out of my family before. Whether he was interested in my facts or the soft and even flow of my voice I cannot say, but the sweet and dangerous silence was dispersed, and a kind of fragrant peace fell around us, cooling our hands and quieting our hearts.
“Catholicism was the faith of my fathers, too,” he said at last, “but I suppose we fell away from it through wandering far from our own land. I have never practised Catholicism or anything else. What religion the love of my mother put into my heart is there still, and I recognise it in great moments—at this moment—but oh, Lord! Where do these things go? The clean, fair dreams of our youth, the fine visions we began to fight with, the generosity wide as the horizon! All lost in the scuffle, buried under the mud and scum. Do you know that tag of verse—
“‘In the mud and scum of things
Something, something always sings?’
“It is something, I suppose, in the end, if we still can hear the singing. There is some rag of grace left in us, perhaps, if we can recognise a man like Rhodes when we see him, and, leaving all, go after him into the wilderness to do or die for a man with bigger dreams than our own—but it isn’t much, by God! considering what dreams we ourselves set out with!”
He seemed for the moment to have forgotten me, and to be communing with the desolation of his own soul. I offered him no word. Something told me then, that no woman can quite comfort a man for his lost dreams. At the best she may be able to create others for him; but surely they are never quite the same as those first dreams that had the freshness of the morning on them. Even as I mourned for him his mood changed, and he laughed with a laugh that turned him into a joyous boy.
“Listen to the river!” said he, laughing. “Listen to the jackals chanting their dirge of the empty stomach! Smell the rolling leagues of emptiness! Look at that beauty lying there in the grass! Oh, I tell you, this is good enough for a man! One can get back some of the old fair visions here. One might even go back to the ‘gold for silver’ creed that Whyte Melville put into some of us long ago!”