But I could not think of anything else for long. Back, back, my thoughts came always to that as my eyes went always back to the hills. Maurice had been gone a week. No news yet. But sometimes when all was still I seemed to hear the beating of horse’s feet over the soft veldt grass.
I missed Makupi’s red blanket against the blaze of the zinias, where he was wont to sit, expelling the melancholy of his soul with the throb of his weird tom-tom, and hiding in his heart through all these months a secret that changed the face of life for three people!
Down in the camp a trooper, sitting outside his hut, was at the same business as myself—darning his foot-wear—and save for his idle song there was no other sound to break the hot, tranquil silence of the afternoon. Along the town road a boy with a letter held aloft in a cleft stick was approaching, with the peculiar rhythmical motion affected by letter-carriers. Everything was very still. The world had a pregnant, brooding look to me.
The boy with the letter had reached the camp and given his letter to the trooper, and the trooper had given it back, pointing to me. Carefully the boy replaced it in his stick, as though he had still many miles to go, and resuming his rhythmical step came up the winding path to me.
I did not know the straggly writing upon the envelope, nor at first the signature at the foot of the brief note—Annunciata Valetta.
“Will you come and see me. I am too ill to come to you. I have something to tell you.”
At last I realised that Nonie was short for so beautiful a name as Annunciata, and that it was the woman I had been thinking about who had written to me. It is strange how often these coincidences occur! While the boy sat patiently on his heels at the door I scribbled a note to say I would come.
I cannot tell what instinct made me beautifully arrange my hair, and put on my loveliest gown that night. I am very sure it was not vanity. Many waters cannot drown love, but there are fires in life that can burn out of a woman the last root of vanity; and I had been through those flames. Some vague idea possessed me, perhaps, of hiding from the cynical eyes of Nonie Valetta the scars the furnace had left on me. I had always felt it to be due to Maurice, as well as myself, to cover up the hollowness of our life from curious eyes, and I think no one had ever suspected what we hid under our pleasant manner to each other in public. In the last few months, especially, I believe ours had been cited as a very happy marriage. But I feared the probing glance of Nonie Valetta.
I wore a white silk gown, and threw about my bare shoulders, for the night air was dewy, a long theatre-coat of black satin that was lovelier within than without, for it was lined with white satin, upon which had been embroidered, by subtle, Parisian fingers, great sprays of crimson roses. So skilfully had the work of lining been done that every time I took a step a big red rose would peep out somewhere, and if I put out my arms I seemed to shower roses. I had designed it myself in the blithe long ago. Betty used to call it my passionate cloak.