“O, elephant! I am silent as the dead: Bayte. O Somptseu! I am quiet: ‘Bayte.’“
“Go! Begone!”
With a final shout of Bayte the Zulu turned and fled down the street with the swiftness of the wind, shouting praises as he went.
“How do you do, sir?” said Mr. Alston, advancing. “I was just coming up to call upon you.”
“Ah, Alston, I am delighted to see you. I heard that you were gone on a hunting trip. Given up work and taken to hunting, eh? Well, I should like to do the same. If I could have found you when I came up here, I should have been tempted to ask you to come with us.”
At this point Mr. Alston introduced Ernest and Jeremy. The Special Commissioner shook hands with them.
“I have heard of you,” he said to Jeremy; “but I must ask you not to fight any more giants here just at present; the tension between Boer and Englishman is too great to allow of its being stretched any more. Do you know, you nearly provoked an outbreak last night with your fighting? I trust that you will not do it again.”
He spoke rather severely, and Jeremy coloured. Presently, however, he made amends by asking them all to dinner.
On the following morning Ernest sent off his letter to Eva. He also wrote to his uncle and to Dorothy, explaining his long silence as best he could. The latter, too, he for the first time took into his confidence about Eva. At a distance he no longer felt the same shyness in speaking to her about another woman that had always overpowered him when he was by her side.
Now that he had been away from England for a year or so, many things connected with his home life had grown rather faint amid the daily change and activity of his new life. The rush of fresh impressions had to a great extent overlaid the old ones, and Dorothy and Mr. Cardus and all the old Kesterwick existence and surroundings seemed faint and far away. They were indeed rapidly assuming that unreality which in time the wanderer finds gather round his old associations. He feels that they know him no more; very likely he imagines that they have forgotten him, and so they become like the shades of the dead. It is almost a shock to such an one to come back and find, after an absence of many years, that though he has been living a rapid vigorous life, and storing his time with many acts, good, bad, and indifferent; though he thinks that he has changed so completely, and developed greatly in one direction or another, yet the old spots, the old familiar surroundings, and the old dear faces have changed hardly one whit. They have been living their quiet English life, in which sensation, incident, and excitement are things unfamiliar, and have varied not at all.