“I think you were unwise to tell her,” Honor said, speaking low, and looking away from him, gazing abstractedly at the golden path that stretched from the doorway to her feet with wide unseeing eyes. “Your confidence only aggravates the wrong. Life hurts enough.” She pressed her hands the one upon the other tightly in her lap, and her face was sad. “Life has its beginning in pain; it struggles painfully through the years to the inevitable end. We regard life dishonestly; we’re afraid to face the truth. We speak of the beauty of Nature, her kindliness and compassion; and we look about us and behold the drought, and the beasts dying of hunger and thirst; that is not beauty, it is ugliness: we see men striving in a hated rivalry, competing always—killing one another; that is not kindliness; kindliness is not born of the lust of hate. Throughout creation, from the meanest organic life to the highest, one thing preys upon another and kills in order to live; that is not compassion. Beauty and serenity exist only in inanimate objects. Perhaps that is why inanimate nature endures while we pass away.
“I love this land,” she added, in soft impassioned accents, “as a woman loves her child. I wish I were a man that I could fight for it. Your country in annexing ours tears my child from my arms. And you talk to me of the futility, the wrong, of my wish to reclaim it... Go back to the girl who loves you, marry her, and have children of your own; and then perhaps you will understand. She will forget when her first child lies in her arms that its father’s love was ever given elsewhere. And you will forget too. No human passion is so acute that time cannot dim its keenness. I want you to forget. I want you, if you ever think of me, to think of me kindly as a friend.”
“Friend!” he ejaculated scornfully.
“It’s the sweetest word in all the English language,” she returned gently, “when it is applied sincerely.”
“That may be,” he admitted, and thought how ill the term applied in his case.
It incensed him that she could talk in that dispassionate manner about friendship with his burning kisses hot upon her lips. He believed that she was dissembling for the purpose of hiding from him her real feelings. He had never really understood her. She was capable of an immense reserve; not once in their most intimate moments had she permitted herself to be entirely frank with him.
“Perhaps in the future,” he said, “I may come to regard this thing with the same cool detachment as yourself; but I can’t think of you as a friend—yet. And it is dishonourable for me to think of you in any other way. I hadn’t heard of your marriage. I can’t get used to the idea. It seems to me fantastic and unreal I met Herman Nel in Cape Town; he never mentioned it.”
“I doubt whether he knew of it,” she answered. “Herman has not been to Benfontein for some months. Freidja is away nursing. She has quarrelled with him.”
“Is she going to spoil her life and his?” he asked with sharp impatience, recalling Nel’s face with its slightly wistful smile when the Dutchman had spoken to him of the rupture of his engagement.
Honor looked surprised.