She repeated: “Charles Hare.” But when he heard the words in her voice his incorrigible romanticism wouldn’t permit him to let them pass. It was like Hare to abandon in one moment an alias that he had carried for a quarter of a century. I suppose it was just the directness and simplicity of Eva that worked the miracle: it suddenly occurred to him that it would be a shame to deceive her in the least particular. He said:
“You can forget that name. It’s none the better for my having carried it. I don’t know”—there was a bright challenge in his eyes—“that it’s really much worse. But it isn’t mine. My name is M‘Crae. Hector M‘Crae.”
She was bewildered. “But why—” she began.
“I had sufficient reasons for losing it,” he said. “I’ve found it again. I’ve found a lot of things during the last four days. You must forgive me for having deceived you. One gets into the habit . . .”
It sounded rather a lame finish.
“Oh, it’s a long story,” he said, “a long story. Some day if you’ll listen to me I’ll tell it to you. Now, if you please, we’ll leave it. I want to know about your brother. I should like to know a little about you . . .”
He began to question her narrowly on the subject of James, approving, with monosyllables, what she had done. And then he told her seriously that she was looking over-tired. “You want sleep,” he said. “We mustn’t talk any more to-night. Will you throw this blanket over my shoulders? Oh . . . and there’s one thing more. I’ve been clumsy enough to break the point of your pencil. There’s a knife on my belt. Will you sharpen it for me?”
III
It was four nights later that M‘Crae—it is better to call him M‘Crae, if it were only to dissociate this new being from the figure which so many people in Africa know—came to his story. Eva had never asked for it; and I think this delicacy on her part did something towards making him feel that it was her due. Besides this, the passage of time had made an intimacy between the two more easy. For one thing, James suffered no return of his fever: Eva was less harassed and for that reason more able to devote herself to the other invalid. She had made it clear to him, once and for all, that a man with one hand, and that in a sling, was in no position to look after himself. At first, no doubt, his native pride, of which he had more than a man’s ordinary share, and which had been fostered alike by his infirmity and his solitary manner of life, made it difficult for him to accept her attentions with ease; but by degrees the naturalness and the simplicity of her outlook overcame him. Perhaps this was not so strange as one might imagine, for the man’s independence was more a matter of habit than of instinct. Her deftness and her tenderness together made it impossible to resist even if he would have done so. And her beauty . . . I do not know. I don’t think I want to know. Perhaps he was in love with her from the beginning. If he were, I can only believe that it was a great blessing to him: the very crown and fulfilment of a strangely romantic life.
On the fourth evening he had evidently prepared himself for his recitation. He would not talk of other things. Eva couldn’t understand it at first: for he answered her questions as though he were not in the least interested, and she thought that for some queer reason of his own he was sulking, or perhaps that he was in pain. I suppose he was in pain. It was not an easy matter for a man like M‘Crae to get a story off his chest. She had hung the blizzard lamp at the mouth of the banda and she was sitting in a deck-chair close to the partition, where it was so dark that neither of them could see the other’s face. She was just conscious of his eyes in the darkness, and it seemed to her that they never left her face. It was a very quiet, moonless night. For some reason the sky was unusually cloudy. The noises of the dark, the zizzing of cicalas and the trilling of frogs were so regular that they became as unnoticeable as silence. In the roof little lizards were moving; but they, too, came and went as softly as shadows. No violence troubled their isolation, unless it were the impact of an occasional moth hurling out of the darkness at the lantern’s flame or the very distant howling of a hyena on the edge of the forest. It was a silence that invited confidences. No two people in the world could have been more alone.