“I will never let you do that,” she said firmly. “You can only shoot through me. We may be rebels, we aren’t murderers, Heinrich.”
He lowered the gun, scowling at her, and answered nothing. Matheson laid a hand on her arm and pushed her aside. Something in the calm proprietary tones, despite the service she had rendered him, goaded him to fury. There was a quality in her look and manner when addressing the German that roused him to a pitch of jealous bitterness which he was unable to control. Still gripping her shoulder, he stared into her eyes.
“What’s he to you?” he asked harshly. “Why do you interfere? What is this German spy to you, other than an enemy?”
“He has never been my enemy,” she answered proudly. “We Dutch have the virtue of gratitude, and he has served our cause faithfully. Be careful how you miscall my husband to me.”
For a long moment he continued to stare at her, incredulous, angry, amazed; then he seized her left hand and raised it and saw, encircling her finger, the plain gold band which proclaimed her married state.
Without a word he dropped her hand, and turned abruptly and walked unsteadily from the hut out into the warm dusk; and as he went, stumbling and feeling his way like a man suddenly blinded, a sound reached his ears, the sound of a man’s sneering laugh of triumph. A wave of unrestrained passion swept over him. He stood still, hesitated, and looked back: then, still stumbling as he walked, he hurried on into the shadows.
Chapter Thirty One.
What happened to him during his hurried flight from the rondavel Matheson never knew. He was conscious only of walking, walking heavily and unseeingly, forward into the dusk, when night abruptly overtook him and wrapped him in a darkness more complete than anything he had ever imagined. When again it was light he woke, with an unrefreshed feeling and a sense of having been victimised by an ugly dream of extraordinary vividness, to find himself lying comfortably in Herman Nel’s bed in the rondavel, with an utter absence of any knowledge of how he came there. He could not recollect going to bed overnight.