“Perhaps I know that”; the strong unfaltering force still had hold of her and used her voice. “Perhaps it is the wilds I am hungering for—and the strange happiness of a morning on the banks of the Lundi—” Her voice was almost a whisper. He had to draw nearer to hear it, and stayed staring with a fierce moodiness into her eyes.
“Do you mean?—Vivienne?”
“I think you know what I mean.” She lifted her lips to him, to take or leave, and knew that if he left them they would go lonely all life long, which was no more than she deserved who had played fast and loose with love. But he did not leave them. Once more she tasted the strange fragrant flavour of wild honey, and knew at last that this fantastic land of strange flowers and heavy scents, of silence and song, cruelty and beauty, was for her, as he was for her. Africa was wild honey. The love of Kerry de Windt was wild honey, and she could never content herself with any other. It was good to be safe in her own place against his heart. Good to have about her the arms that would never let her go back to a world which ate her heart and made her perform acts that besmirched her soul. But there was still that to tell which might loosen his arms and send them empty away. She held them tight, tight about her while she told him the ugly story.
For a moment there had sprung up in her an almost overwhelming temptation to hide the truth from him (he would never know unless she told him, how she had taken advantage of stolen information to plot against and rob him of his land and gold. No one even guessed the truth).
But the next moment she had torn out that temptation, and thrust it away, ashamed.
“How base I must be if even love cannot purify me!” she cried. “But it shall—it has. Listen Kerry.”
In the end, he kissed the tears from her lips as once before he had kissed them. One more of the little crystal globes of illusion men have about the women they love went smash perhaps, but he hid the pieces from her bravely enough. Only, he held her a little closer, and there were no half measures about his conditions.
“You’ve got to give it all up and come with me—away up North—anywhere I go—and not care where you’re going to—and never look back—nor care if you ever come back. Is that understood? We shall be poor—but by God! we’ll get something out of life that those who live in towns and cities can’t buy with all their gold.”
“But your farm, Kerry?—the land that is rightly yours?”
“We couldn’t touch it after all this buying and selling with borrowed money, Vivienne. Rightly or wrongly it is Montague’s if he wants it—and you bet he will want it—he must get it, together with the ring and that other two hundred pounds.”