“I’ll dress your wound first,” she said. “That is something I can do for you better than Butter Tom.”
“You dressed it before?” he asked. “I wondered. I thought possibly I owed that to you. Honor...” He looked at her appealingly. “You are not going to let us part with a sense of ill will between us? I want to believe that when I am gone you will sometimes think kindly of me.”
Honor did not at once reply. She stood With the empty cup in her hand, the sunlight warming her face, shining on the white surface of the vessel into which she gazed in thoughtful abstraction, brightening her whole figure, and the room which formed a quaint and fitting background for this girl who belonged to the wilds, and whose beauty suggested always to the man who watched her sunlit spaces and warmth and the scent and the winds of the veld. She lifted her gaze suddenly and met his eyes.
“Don’t let us talk of these matters,” she said. “It is wiser with the coming of morning to cease to dwell on the dreams which belong to the night that is past. I’ve dreamed my dreams—you too. We are awake now, and the day calls us to other activities. Just for a moment while sleep drugged our senses we forgot. But we are neither of us people who forget for long the path of honour.”
His gaze fell before her steady eyes. She was right. Their paths in life were no tractless ways; they stretched straight ahead, clearly defined and mile-stoned with duties, leading always in opposite directions to the accepted goal—the goal of individual endeavour which contributes its effort to the unending scheme of life.
Chapter Thirty Four.
There was a thoughtful look in Honor’s eyes when, leaving Butter Tom to the unaccustomed task of valeting the wounded baas, she stepped forth into the sunshine and walked with a certain weary reluctance towards the homestead. She was tired with her overnight vigil, and the emotional scene in the rondavel was succeeded by a feeling of exhaustion and nervous reaction. For the first time within her knowledge the thought of her cause failed to sustain her; and more than once the question formed itself in her mind whether after all this sacrifice of life were justified even in the securing of national independence? She had never doubted before. She had been as positive of the right and the urgency of their cause as she had felt certain of its ultimate success. Despite Herman Nel’s opposition, she had believed, until results proved the error of her hopes, in the whole-hearted co-operation of the entire Dutch community. Heinrich had assured her that the Boers would rise to a man. The treaty of Vereeniging was but another scrap of paper which the Teutonic mind lightly disregarded. Honor had disregarded it also, as a contract signed under compulsion by the leaders against the will of the majority; she felt that it was in no sense binding on the Dutch as a whole. Matheson’s statement that they were a people who had never known discipline stuck in her mind. Broadly it was true. The Boer does not submit readily to being governed, even by his own leaders. It is a nation in the making, without any of the traditions of an older race to guide it, but with sufficiently fine ideals from which to evolve traditions of its own. Clear-sighted men, like Nel, realised that there was nothing to be gained by fighting; the peaceful development of the country would best serve their interests.
That morning, in a state of physical and mental fatigue, Honor allowed her thoughts to dwell for the first time on the possibility of failure. Matheson had shaken her confidence; and in reminding her that her own brother’s life might be sacrificed to the cause she so ardently espoused, he had caused her enthusiasm a rude check. She had not considered the toll in human life that would be exacted: the grim ugliness of war had been lost sight of in the dazzling prospect of victory. It did not seem to her possible that Andreas could be killed. If that should happen, the triumph of their cause would prove a hollow mockery, and her mother’s tragic life would end in added sadness. It was too big a price, Honor felt in her overwrought and dispirited mood—too big a price to pay even for victory.