At the last, de Rivas held out his hand and said hoarsely:
“If you don’t mind shaking, Marie—and saying you forgive me?”
It was the first time since he stole Maryon Hammond’s wife that he had used the name that once in college days was sweet between them. He would hardly have dared now, but somehow he felt he owed it to Hammond’s generosity to dare, if only to let the other man smite him with the just word of wrath. But Hammond took his hand. They were all in the shadow of death.
“And me too, Marie?” whispered the woman through her tears.
“That’s all right, Cara,” he said gently, taking hers in turn. A moment later he had gone upon his way.
In the Salisbury laager, which was the Salisbury prison put into a state of defence, with sand-bags and waggons all round it and machine guns pitched on every eminence, the air was charged with gloom and rage. It was not because of war; Rhodesians after ’93 were inured to war and had learned to accept philosophically its bitters with its sweets. What hurt them now was that this was not war, but black murder. There had been no decent open fighting—only secret, savage murder of men and women in far places. Murder—and worse! Men bit their mouths close on revolting stories that it would do no good for the women to hear; and women came into laager, night after night, white-faced and sick of heart. The whole country was “up” in rebellion, but except in Matabeleland there had been no actual fighting. Overwhelming small isolated bands of men cannot be called fighting—but it was the nearest approach to it that the Mashonas had made. That was what they had attempted in the case of the Mazoë patrol. On hearing that there had been wholesale slaughter at Mazoë, and that the survivors (mostly women and children) were huddled in a house waiting for the end, twenty-six picked men had ridden out from Salisbury to the rescue. They had reached Mazoë just in time—and getting the women, children, and wounded men into a waggon protected by sheets of corrugated iron, set out on the return march to Salisbury. These twenty-six men had had to fight every inch of the way with thousands of natives, but not one dead or wounded man of the gallant band was left by the wayside. As they fell, their comrades picked them up and thrust them into the waggon, and thus in some wise or another came back one and every man of the famous patrol!
Carr with an arm shot off and his horse shot under him, was one of those who had to lie helpless and raging amongst the women—raging because he knew nothing of the fate of his best friend! All that he knew was that the bodies of Girder and Dent had been found on the outskirts of Mazoë. One of the Carissima boys was reported to have stated that Hammond had gone to the help of the de Rivas. But it was now known that de Rivas’ place was burnt to the ground and not a living soul left at the Green Carnation. Small wonder that the bitterness of Carr’s heart was as the bitterness of the heart of Job in the last stage of his torment!
It was now generally believed that everyone in the mining districts who had not managed to escape at the first alarm to Salisbury was of the doomed and dead. Diane Heywood looked into Bernard Carr’s eyes and saw that belief there and her face took a deeper shadow upon it. From the first entry of wounded refugees, she had offered her services to the good nursing nuns, and striven in ardent labour and many a weary vigil to dull her heart’s fierce pain. When once she and Carr had read each other’s misery he forgave her for what she had done to Hammond (though he knew not what it was), and they were friends for ever after. She was often by his bedside, reading sometimes, or talking a little, but more often both were silent, thinking of what they dared not speak.
Oh! to see his eyes again! To know that he was still on God’s fair earth!—not cut down, beaten to his knees with knobkerries, assegaied by foul cowardly brutes whose courage was only in their numbers! Only to know that he had had a fair chance—out in the open with a gun in his hand, not trapped in a hut as so many had been! But all that had happened at the Carissima remained dark and unknown; and the mystery of its fate lay heavy on the hearts of those in Salisbury laager.