“I should think Miss Saurin’s heart must be seriously affected,” said Mrs Valetta dryly, but though she smiled her eyes gave me a look like a flash of lightning—so blue and angry and burning it was. I knew at last why she hated me. Judy glanced at me again with a shade of anxiety.
“Oh, I hope not. Do you think you ought to see a doctor, Deirdre? Dr Abingdon here is quite clever they say, though he does look such an old roué. But Jand, in Salisbury, is the best man. Even Dr Jim goes to him when he is ill.”
“I am quite well, Judy.” I got up from the table and looked out of the window. I felt as if I could die of weariness and the sick blankness of life. Across the square near Anthony Kinsella’s hut a group of men stood talking animatedly. I turned away with my hand to my head. I wished I might never see any more men for a thousand years—and yet—
“I am quite well, Judy, but my head aches. I think I will go for a long walk. Perhaps that will do me good.”
“Well, I can’t offer to come with you, my dear. Apparently I am to have the pleasure of doing my own housework to-day—but I shall go out first and see if Colonel Blow can’t spare me one of the Government boys. It is ridiculous to be left like this.”
Mrs Valetta was still standing in the dining-room with that dry smile on her lips when I passed through with my hat on, but she did not offer to accompany me.
I walked and walked and walked—over the stubbly bleached grass, through the township, past the outermost huts, across the rutted dusty main road to the river that wound itself halfway round the town. When the freshness of the morning was long past, and the fierce heat of midday was beating down on me from above, and surging up through the soles of my shoes from the earth, I found at last a place of shelter on the sweeping sunlit plain. Between two upright boulders almost on the river bank there was a little cleft of shadow lined with moss and small, harsh-leaved fern, and there I flung myself down and unburdened my heart of its weight of tears. I wept until I had no more tears, until it seemed that last night’s moonlit madness must be washed away, all Anthony Kinsella’s scorching kisses from my lips, all his treachery from my memory. Only the young know the exquisite tragedy and solace of tears: of broken sobs that come shuddering up from the soul to the lips; that are of the body and yet most terribly of the spirit; that rack and choke and blur out the beauty of life; that afterwards bring a brief but exquisite peace.
Yes, afterwards a certain peace stole over my wretched spirit; I could watch in an impersonal way a tiny purple lizard which lay flat upon a near stone searching me with beady, curious eyes; and I could feel my unprotected feet and ankles which had not found the shade aching and burning in the sun’s heat.
But I knew it to be only the peace of utter weariness—the peace of a twilight hour after the first black, bitter rain of a stormy season that must be faced. The struggle, the pain, the strain would reassert themselves later. Still, I was glad of the respite. It gave me time to think, at least; to consider desperately what I should do, how I should bear myself, how I could best hide my pain from the world.
It seemed to me then that I was very friendless and alone in that wide sun-scorched land of pale grasses and turquoise skies—far from my dead mother and my brother and the friends of my life. Fate had dumped me on the African veldt and suffering had overtaken me. All the things I had known and loved—pictures, books, marbles, dim churches, and magnificent music—seemed useless to help or comfort me. These things do not matter to Africa; and when one is dumped on a burning African plain they do not seem to matter to life.