“What a fellow you are! Where for? Johannesburg?”
“Yes.” And from thence to the Tuli Road, fast as hoof and wheel could carry him. Now he knew what ailed him, and would shout it from the mountain-tops but that it was too sweet and dear a secret to be shared with all the world—yet. Now he knew what anodyne to seek for healing of his raging wound, what drink for solace of his burning torment. By the broad, dusty road to Tuli ran a stream of clear, cold water and his parched soul was sick to drink from it. Memory suddenly sculptured in his brain a face that all Ireland had not been able to duplicate. Yet all Ireland lay in the dewy, passionate eyes of Frances de Beer, and for him all home, all peace, all future. Now, at last, he acknowledged what he had always known, and gave himself up to the thought of what he had denied so long: she who had given all asked nothing, and let him go without a reproach. He knew now that he had been a knave and a fool and that for the last two and a half years he had been paying with torment of body and soul for it. And still was paying. When he remembered her and all she had been to him—his loneliness was a still small torment that pierced and tortured him like a dart in his vitals.
Throughout that night he paced his room, or stood at his open window, staring out at the silvered slopes of Table Mountain but getting no peace of her stern eternal loveliness. Pacing, and staring, in the small hours, he went over every detail of that brief sweet-madness on the Tuli Road, remembering her face, her voice, her eyes, and the soul of her that had leaped from them to him. And, as always, the thing that stirred him most was the memory of her fluttering hand under his that first night when they sat on the stoep listening to Talfourd’s singing. He remembered how a mist had come over his eyes at the feel of it; his heart had seemed to turn over in his breast; it was as though he had trapped something he had lain in wait for all his life; all the tyranny and tenderness of his nature had been roused in that moment, with something of a boy’s elation when he has caught with his own hands some beautiful wild thing that he has watched for long.
It all came back, like a dream of delirium, only more vividly. He re-lived the moment when a passing chivalrous impulse had bade him kiss her hands and leave her, and that dark hour on the veld when he had fought a battle with his baser self and lost. Then that other mad hour of stolen sweetness, when he had groped for her in the luminous darkness of her room and found first the little, pale, strong hands that smelled like apple blossom—then her lips! He recalled her tears and little broken cries, and how his lips had crushed them down and kissed them away! How all too soon the dawn had come! And with this memory came pain and shame. Bitter shame that he had so debased her whom he loved. She who had only wished to do right, but found her heart and his will too strong for her. Love anointed his cynical eyes at last and he saw and understood the hearts of women as he had never done before, and knew at last how unworthy were most men, and he with them, of the sacrifices women make on the altar of love. Hot, unaccustomed moisture that seemed to be dragged torturingly from the very depths of his being seared his eyes. He flung himself on his bed, ashamed at first of his tears, then of his acts, and, at last, ashamed of his life.
“God forgive me!” he thought. “It shall never happen again.”
But God’s forgiveness was taken for granted and he thought less about that than of the sweetness the future promised.
It was not many nights before his feet were set upon the long white dusty road that wound by kop and kloof and vlei to the haven of his heart’s desire. He had given orders for everything he possessed on the Rand to be sold, and did not mean to return to the Golden City. Waggons were being fitted up and provisioned in Pretoria for his use, and would follow him. For the veld was to be his home now once and for all. He was sick of money-making, politics, and all the little games and intrigues of finance, of artificial women, and conventions. He meant to have done with these things and forget on the brown, kind breast of Mother Africa that he had ever known them.
And she was coming with him; the one woman who fitted into the wild places his soul loved; the woman with dreams of stretching plains and forests in her eyes. Ah! that was a woman with whom to seek the blue mountains, to camp under the stars and forget cities and sins! It was well that old de Beer had disappeared, for Dark Carden meant to take what was his own at last, and swore that all the de Beers in the world, dead or alive, should not prevent him. He was ready to defy Heaven and Hell to prevent him.
His cart drew near the line of grey kopjes at the end of a long day’s run. From his outspan the distance was too great for any but his own keen eyes to distinguish the little ramshackle farm.