In one of the small, sweet, exquisitely fresh hours before dawn they were set down and left alone on the wide and empty veld. The dusty road along which they had come was beautified by wraith-like rays from a passing moon. Purple rocks had put on a silvery sheen. The white radiant stars burned like jewels in the blue veil of heaven. Far hills and shadowy trees rose silent and salient against the sky. The spot where the waggons lay outspanned was close to de Windt’s old farm, in the same area of brooding peace Vivienne had visited the day before—but with how different a mood! Then, Life had tasted bitterer between her lips than the aloes of Death. Now, her heart was clean of guile as a white rose, and she was a red and glowing rose whose fragrance intoxicated them both with the divine madness of love. Old Africa took them to her breast and they became part of her.
Chapter Three.
Common or Garden Earth.
There always seems to be more ardour and vitality in blue-eyed people than in others, and Diane Heywood and Maryon Hammond were both blue-eyed—with a difference. His were blue as the inner light of a glacier, with something of the ice’s quality in their steady stare—a fighter’s eyes, hard as a rock that you cannot break with an axe; the kind of eyes that women forgive anything to. Indeed Hammond had spent most of his thirty-eight years sinning against women, and they forgave him even unto seventy times seven; and that was as far as the Holy Scriptures entered into the matter. Like Napoleon he was a little fellow when it came to measurements, but so alert, high-headed, and graceful that no one would have guessed him to be something under five-foot eight, and he had the swiftest, most silent feet in Africa, whether for dancing, running, leaping, tracking a lion, or kicking a nigger. A copper complexion bestowed upon him by the land he loved, and a small tan-coloured moustache above a somewhat traplike mouth made up the rest of his equipment. It may be gathered that he was no beauty; but he was “the captain of his soul,” such at it was, and he carried himself as though the gods had elected him to be one of the eternal captains of the earth.
Diane Heywood’s eyes were long and deep and cool with shadows in them like the shadows under far hills on a hot day, and that should have been enough for any woman; but the gods had been good to her and added a slim little nose that grew straight out of her forehead like a Greek woman’s, dragging her upper lip so high that there seemed nothing of it except a red curve above another red curve and a short firm chin with a cleft in it. It was hard to tell what in all these soft curves and dimples should suggest a pride of spirit almost insolent, a scorn of all things that were not high and clear and noble. It might have been something in the tilt of her head, the turn of her mouth, or the unflickering character of the shadows in her eyes; but whatever or wherever its origin it was there for all men to read, and not the least of her attractions when read; for all men, whether they know it or not, love that quality of pride in women, recognising, dimly or clearly according to their natures, that on it is based all fine and great things in the generation to come.
However, if instead of possessing the beauty of a May Day Miss Heywood had been the dullest and plainest of girls she would still have enjoyed, for a time at least, the rather enchanting experience of having all the men in Fort Salisbury buzzing about her like bees round a rose on a June morning, and every woman hanging on her lips as if she were the Oracle of Thebes. For she had come straight from England and the charm of “home” still hung about her even as the colour of “home” stayed in her cheeks. She had seen fields—little square fields with hedges growing round them, and buttercups growing in them—plucked blackberries and cowslips, ridden to hounds in the Black Vale; heard the jingle of hansom bells, and ’busses rumbling on asphalt, and the boom of Big Ben; tasted London fog, smelt the Thames; seen Charles the First riding down Whitehall, and Nelson’s cocked hat lost in the mist. She, the latest comer, had seen and done and heard all or any of these dear and desirable things later than any of the homesick exiles in Salisbury; therefore was she most dear and desirable beyond all things that be.
“She was London, she was Torment, she was Town.”
There were in Rhodesia women whom men loved or reverenced or tolerated or disliked or desired as the case might be, but, for the time being, one and all of these were neglected and forgotten for the society of “the girl from home.”