He led the way into a denser thicket of thorn. “We can never force our way through this,” she thought. Upright they could not have penetrated this spinous screen. Crouching low, they managed to pass beneath its lower branches where they drooped to the level of many fleshy spears of the wild sisal. At last Eva found that they had reached a little clear space about the root of a gigantic acacia.
“Now lie down,” said M‘Crae. She lay down in the dark and the shed spines of other years drove into her limbs till she could have cried. In this secret lair they waited silently for a long while. They heard no longer the mocking hornbill call, nor any sound at all until their silence was suddenly shattered by a burst of firing over the grass-land on their right. “They think that they have seen something,” said M‘Crae. “Don’t be frightened. You are quite safe here. Quite safe.”
And so this firing ceased, or rather bore away to the south-east across the line which they were following, and then again to the full south, in distant bush, where it muttered and died away. All this time Eva was lying with her arms between the thorny ground and her head, gazing up at the flat, horizontal tapestries of the acacia and beyond to a clear sky in which the moon sailed lightly as though it were rejoicing in the freedom of the heaven from any wisp of cloud to mar its brightness; for all the cloudy content of the sky lay piled upon the hills beyond which she had risen, in monstrous gleaming billows that dwarfed the dark hill-chains, but stood up so far away that Eva had no notion of their presence. A little wind passed in the night, and she grew aware of many dead or dry leaves shivering all around.
“Come along,” said M‘Crae, helping her gently to her feet. She was horribly stiff, but still not in the least tired.
Now it was not easy to escape from their hiding-place, so thick-set were the trees and so tangled about their roots with an undergrowth as wiry in the stem as heather but fledged with softer leaves. Eva’s hands clutched at these as they passed, and she became aware of a pungent and aromatic odour.
“Don’t do that, please,” said M‘Crae. “On a windless night that will smell for hours.”
She felt like a naughty child at this reproof. She found herself rubbing her hands on her skirt, almost expected to be scolded again for ruining her clothes. That skirt, at any rate, was past ruination. She felt inclined to laugh at her own feeling of guilt as much as at his seriousness; for she couldn’t get over the idea that even if they were going to die it would be just as well to make a little joke about it. M‘Crae’s intense monosyllables worried her and, thinking of this, she came to see that in reality it was the man, and not she, who was childish. “If I laugh,” she thought, “he will think I am mad. But if I don’t laugh soon I shall simply have to cry or something.” She learnt a great deal about M‘Crae in those early hours of their flight, realising that he was as blind to the essential humour of nearly every catastrophe as all the other men she had met would have been: as James, as her father, the minister at Far Forest who drove out on Sundays from Bewdley; as every one of them, in fact, but the second mate who had tried to make love to her on the mail-boat. “And he wasn’t really a nice man,” she thought.
In a little while they had pushed their way through several miles of this kind of bush. For a long time now they had heard no noise of firing, nor indeed any other sound; but at length there came to their ears a shrill, trilling note of a curiously liquid quality, and Eva knew that they must be approaching water of some kind, for she had often heard the same music on the edge of the swamp or near their own mission after rain. M‘Crae was still walking a little in front of her—never during all this chase had she seen his face—and suddenly she saw his shoulders dip as he disappeared over a grassy edge into a deep channel sunk in the ground. She followed him cautiously, for she did not know how steep the bank might be or what depth of water might be lying at the bottom. Her feet landed on a bank of soft sand.
“No luck,” said M‘Crae. In the dry watercourse no drop of moisture remained. “But I think we are near water for all that,” he said.