“How long?” she asked, looking up at him.
“Eight years to-day,” he answered, “since I rode away after those waggons.”
“Eight years,” she repeated, “and no word from you all that time. You have behaved badly to me, Richard.”
“No, no, I could not find out. I wrote three times, but always the letters were returned, except one that went to the wrong people, who were angry about it. Then two years ago, I heard that your father and mother had been in Natal, but had gone to England, and that you were dead. Yes, a man told me that you were dead,” he added with a gulp. “I suppose he was speaking of somebody else, as he could not remember whether the name was Dove or Cove, or perhaps he was just lying. At any rate, I did not believe, him. I always felt that you were alive.”
“Why did you not come to see, Richard?”
“Why? Because it was impossible. For years my father was an invalid, paralysed; and I was his only child, and could not leave him.”
She looked a question at him.
“Yes,” he answered with a nod, “dead, ten months ago, and for a few weeks I had to remain to arrange about the property, of which he left a good deal, for we did well of late years. Just then I heard a rumour of an English missionary and his wife and daughter who were said to be living somewhere beyond the boundaries of Natal, in a savage place on the Transvaal side of the Drakensberg, and as some Boers I knew were trekking into that country I came with them on the chance—a pretty poor one, as the story was vague enough.”
“You came—you came to seek the girl, Rachel Dove?”
“Of course. Otherwise why should I have left my farms down in the Cape to risk my neck among these savages?”