“He hasn’t changed his mind. I have changed mine about asking him, that’s all. I know it would be no good, anyway.”
He got into the verandah hammock, which was also his bed, propped himself comfortably against a cushion, and lit a cigarette.
From my deck-chair I stared blankly at the surrounding horizon. To say that I was agacée is to say nothing. Even in the face of his recently revealed duplicity I was unprepared for this cool jettisoning of the most solemn part of our compact. It left me breathless. I said at last:
“What is there to prevent you from leaving Africa without your uncle’s consent? You are not an infant—”
“No; I wish I were. Life would be considerably simpler. But the fact is, my uncle is so kind as to pay me five hundred a year to stay out of England, and the country he specifies as my residence, being a nice long way off from him, is Africa. The moment I quit he’ll stop payment, and I shall have nothing to live on but my lordly salary of twenty quid a month.”
What sinister meaning lurked in so strange an arrangement I shrank from asking, but I had an instinct to combat it—an instinct that was roused in me twenty times a day as my husband’s character unfolded itself, and I saw upon what ignoble props and bolsters his life was arranged; how slack were his moral muscles; how low his code of honour. Sometimes, when I realised these things, and that my lot was irrevocably cast for life companionship with a man who so deliberately outraged my ideals of what a man should be, and what life should mean, I felt like a trapped creature, and my instinct was to turn in bitter rage and rend the trap with teeth and nails. But what good in that? And what good in all my fine resolutions if they so quickly dissolved in the face of disaster? I smothered down indignation and disdain, and used a gentleness with him that, knowing my own proud ardent heart, surprised myself. With burning cheeks I might presently have been heard pleading with him to throw off the five-hundred-pound yoke, and strike out on his own account.
“Surely the freedom of your soul is worth more than five hundred a year!” I cried. “You detest your uncle, why take his money under such an ignominious condition? Fling his money into his teeth and take your life into your own hands. Africa is not the only country on the map. There are still Europe, Asia, America, and Australia. Let us go to Canada and start a farm, open a shop, run a hotel—anything, anywhere. I will help you at whatever you put your hand to, Maurice, and I don’t care how poor we are. Only let us be honourable, and let us go away from Africa.”
And all the time my blood was leaping and my heart quivering at the thought of staying on in this land, behind whose silent hills and dense bush the fate of Anthony Kinsella still was hidden. To all my eloquence he puffed at his cigarette and returned a cool stare.
“Jack up five hundred a year and go and look for a chance living in some new country where I don’t know the ropes? Not much, my dear girl! I know my own limitations, thanks, and how likely I’d be to make my fortune or even a bare living in Canada or anywhere else.”
“What of the noble career you were to carve out for yourself,” I flung at him, hoping that scorn might achieve what pleading and reasoning failed to do. But that stone broke no bones. He merely laughed and flung one back at me with a man’s sure aim.