He caught her to him with a mastery that was dearer to her in that moment than any tenderness, swaying her to his will. "Yes—we've got there!" he said, and kissed her again with lips that trembled even while they compelled. "But oh, my soul—what a journey!"
She clung to him more closely, giving of her all in full and sweet surrender. "And oh, my soul," she laughed back softly—"what an arrival!"
And at that they laughed together, triumphant as those who have the world at their feet.
CHAPTER XIII
BY FAITH AND LOVE
The flood went down in the morning, and behind it there sprang into being a new world of softest, tenderest green in place of the brown, parched desert that had been. Mary Ann stood at the door of her hut and looked at it with her goggle-eyes in which the fright of the storm was still very apparent.
Neither she nor her satellites would go near the house of the baas that morning, for a dread shadow lay upon it into which they dared not venture. The baas himself was there. He had driven her into the cooking-hut a little earlier and compelled her to prepare a hot meal under his stern supervision. But even the baas could not have forced her to enter the bungalow. For by some occult means Mary Ann knew that Death was waiting there, and the wrath of the gods was so recent that she had not courage left for this new disaster.
Diamond had brought his burden safely out of the storm, and was now comfortably sheltered in his own stable. But the man who had ridden him had been found hours later by the big baas face downwards on the stoep, and now he lay in the room in which he had lain for so long, with breathing that waxed and waned and sometimes stopped, and eyes that wandered vaguely round as though seeking something which they might never find.
What were they looking for? Sylvia longed to know. In the hush of that room with the light of the early morning breaking through, it seemed to her that those eyes were mutely waiting for a message from Beyond. They did not know her even when they rested upon her face.
She herself was worn out both physically and mentally, but she would not leave him. And so Burke had brought in the long chair for her and made her lie down while she watched. He brought her food also, and they ate together in the quiet room where the ever-changing breathing of the man upon the bed was the only sound.