The Shadow of the Past

by F. E. Mills Young

Her relief at his compliance was manifest. She was nervous and unstrung, and the sudden reaction shook her fortitude. She turned her face aside to hide its emotion from him; but he saw the tears in her eyes, and was immensely disconcerted at the sight of this distress which he failed altogether to understand. He advanced a few paces towards her, hesitated, and stood irresolute, regarding her with an exasperated sense of his own inadequacy.

“I say!” he said awkwardly. “Don’t! ... Please, don’t... I’m awfully sorry that my presence has so upset you. I’ll go. I’ll go at once, Honor.” Then a doubt crept into his mind. He approached quite close to her and put out a hand and touched her sleeve. “You want me to go?” he asked.

“Yes,” she cried quickly—“yes... Of course.” She moved away. “Drive straight for the town,” she added. “And don’t spare the horse.”

Without once looking at him she left the rondavel, hiding her tear-wet face from him, and hurrying away in the sunshine with steps as fleet as those she had used in coming, but followed a less direct route for the purpose of allaying suspicion as to where she had been in the event of meeting any one on the way back. She had done her utmost for him; his safety was now his own affair.

Matheson remained for a while inactive, watching her retreating figure. He followed her to the doorway, and stood in the brilliant sunshine, looking after her, as she sped away with never a backward glance, the gold of the sunlight upon her and the morning wind ruffling her hair.

Innumerable doubts troubled him while he stood there, doubts which she had set fermenting in his brain. She was not happy. The change in her was very marked. When he had first met her she had been afire with enthusiasm and eager interest in life; now she was a woman, grave and thoughtful, on whom cares and responsibilities pressed heavily. She had sold her birthright of joy, sacrificing it to a long-cherished dream of vengeance; and already she was discovering how unsatisfying was the bargain she had made. Nel was right. There was a predestination in these matters beyond human control.

A sense of utter futility gripped Matheson, a sort of sick disappointment more distressing than physical nausea. His passion for Honor assumed a new significance: it became less personal—more of a formal worship of beauty for beauty’s sake than the love of man for woman for simple and primitive ends. He realised that temperamentally they were entirely opposed, as the north wind is opposed to the south, the east to the west. In no circumstance could they have mated with felicitous results. He had loved her beauty and the quick fire of her imagination; she had attracted him as the fierce untamed land she loved attracted him, by reason of its untrammelled freedom, its unconquerable savagery and beauty. But these qualities do not make for the sublime happiness of domestic peace. The human need demands something more satisfying than passionate discords in its relations with life. A man may enjoy climbing to exalted altitudes; but he lives preferably in the valleys among quiet and orderly things.

It seemed to Matheson that he saw life clearly for the first time. He was regarding things from the detached standpoint of an unbiassed onlooker—regarding himself, as a person takes note of some acquaintance and determines his place in the scheme of the universe. He had a place, quite unimportant and prosaic, but with certain clearly defined duties and work to perform. Always he came back to that. There was work for him to do—work for every one. He had been idling in the backwaters of good intentions long enough. Too often a man idles away his best years in dreaming, and overcrowds his middle age with much that might have been accomplished during his youth. Youth is the period for activities; and most surely is youth the time for marriage—useful marriage for the raising and rearing of healthy and beautiful children.

Then, breaking in sharply upon his musings, came the sound of wheels and the noise of Butter Tom’s guttural exhortations to the recalcitrant bony horse which Matheson had hired at De Aar, and which, accustomed to the saddle, displayed mule-like tendencies between the shafts. Butter Tom sawed at the reins and swore at it in Kaffir, while Matheson looked on with apathetic indifference, thinking drearily of the long drive before him in the heat, with his wounded shoulder and the useless right arm for which Honor had improvised a sling from a scarf of her own.

With the moment of departure it occurred to him what a fool he had been to come. He did not know what he had expected from the visit. It had proved a wild, impossible venture. A man may not take the law into his own hands even in Africa. Had he killed Holman he would have found himself placed in an awkward dilemma. It would not have been easy to establish a sufficient reason for the act. He had nothing but circumstantial evidence to produce against Holman, evidence which would have implicated Honor, and which therefore he could not have made use of. He realised clearly that he had been actuated by a strong personal animus, the result of his recognition of the man’s responsibility for the poisoning of Honor’s mind, and the systematic fostering of her brother’s disloyalty. It had never been with him a question of German treachery against England, but of the injury done to himself through the woman he had loved His sense of justice had not sprung from any lofty motive; therefore its failure of accomplishment, though humiliating, was not deserving of many regrets.