“Why should I bother about a career, since I am never to have any children to pass my glories on to?”
That sealed my lips from further retort. I sat still and stared silently at the passionate blue of the skies, and the radiant sunlit plain. What was the use of struggling against the witch who had me in her toils and never meant to let me go?
“If she loves you, she will keep you, whether you will or no!” Anthony had prophesied on just such a blue-and-gold day, when life went sweetly with us. Well, if this was love, it was a strong, austere passion, hard to distinguish from hate. Under its fierce cold caress I could truly cry with the words of the Hindoo woman to her faithless lord:
“Hadst thou not called it Love—
I had called it a drawn sword!”
A little way off a native boy, whom I had noticed about the place the last day or two, was sitting in the sunshine, with his back against a hut. He wore a brick-red blanket sewn with large blue beads, swathed round him rather gracefully, and a necklace of some wild beasts’ teeth about his neck. He was better looking than the average kaffir—nose less flat, and lips less protruding; with a dreamy, moody air about him, and in his big dark eyes. He had a tiny kaffir instrument in his hands, upon which he was making a soft, sad, monotonous sound.
Tom—brr—torn—brr—tom-tom-tom—
Sometimes he would give a look, in which there seemed to be some significant wistfulness, towards the verandah where we sat.
“Yes, I’ve got a nice little soft billet in the Mounted Police,” pursued Maurice serenely. “The powers that be thought it a pity for a happily married man like me, with an adoring wife, to have to be so much away from home as an N.C. must be, so they laid their heads together to see what they could do for you and me. The result is the offer of a sub-inspectorship in the Police, my service in the N.C. Department to count towards seniority. They’ve given me the camp at Mgatweli.”
Afterwards I learnt, as one learns everything in Rhodesia if one lives long enough, that the whole affair had been arranged weeks before, upon Maurice announcing the news of his approaching marriage. He had accepted the appointment quite a month before he told me anything about it.
But I soon learned that I must take falseness and double-dealing for granted.