“I should have stopped him somehow; I should have told him some story or other.” She became acutely conscious of his eyes on her face and blushed. “Yes, I should have told a lie,” she said, “if that is what you mean.”
He shook his head. “Things will get more and more difficult,” he said. “For you, I mean. Now that I can look after myself, I don’t think I ought to stay in your banda.”
He waited a long time for her reply. She sat there with downcast eyes; and when, at last, she raised them, even though she was smiling, they were full of tears. It was a very sweet and dangerous moment. She heard the voice of James calling her from the stoep, and was glad of the excuse to leave him.
These were trying days for all of them. James didn’t pick up very quickly. The weather had begun to show a variation from a type that is not altogether uncommon in the neighbourhood of isolated mountain patches such as the Luguru Hills. The time about dawn was as fresh and lovely as ever, but as the day wore on the heavy mood with which noon burdened the countryside increased. Upon the wide horizon companies of cloud massed and assembled, enormous clouds, as black and ponderable as the mountains themselves. By the hour of sunset they would threaten the whole sky and ring it round as though they were laying particular siege to the Mission Station itself and must shortly overwhelm it in thunder and violent rain. Beneath this menace the sunsets were unusually savage and fantastic, lighting such lurid skies as are to be found in mediæval pictures of great battle-fields or of hell itself. These days were all amazingly quiet: as though the wild things in the bush were conscious of the threatening sky, and only waited for it to be broken with thunder or ripped with lightning flashes. With the descent of darkness this sense of anticipation grew heavier still. It was difficult to sleep for the heat and for the feeling of intolerable pressure. But when morning came not one shred of cloud would mar the sky.
As I have said, it was trying weather for all of them. For James, who read in the sunset apocalyptic terrors; for M‘Crae, sweating in the confined space of Bullace’s banda; for Eva, who found in the skies a reinforcement of that sense of dread and apprehension with which the menace of Godovius oppressed her. Still it would not rain and still Godovius did not come . . .
One evening M‘Crae said to her suddenly:
“I never hear your Waluguru boys working near the banda now. I suppose you’ll have kept them at the other end of the garden for my sake?”
She told him that she was always frightened when anyone came near him.
“You mustn’t be frightened,” he said. “At the worst, nothing very serious could happen. But I want you to keep them working near me. I think this sisal hedge at the back of the banda is badly in need of thinning. You can put them to weed it if you like. Any job that you like to give them, as long as they are working near me. I want to listen to them.”
“They will find out that you are here,” she said in a voice that was rather pitiable.