The girl made a little gesture. "I would like to understand. You and Desmond have all that most men wish for. Why are you risking your life and health in Africa?"
A curious little smile crept into Ormsgill's eyes. "Well," he said reflectively, "there are respects in which one's possessions are apt to become burdensome. They seem to carry so many obligations along with them that one falls into bondage under them, and I think some of us are rebels born. We feel we must make our little protest, if it's only by doing the thing everybody else considers reprehensible."
He stopped a moment, and his face grew a trifle grim when he went on again. "In my case it must be made now since I shall probably never have an opportunity of doing anything of the kind again."
Benicia understood him, for she had watched Miss Ratcliffe carefully at Las Palmas. In fact, she had understood him all along. That he should shrink from any claim to philanthropy was only what she had expected from him, and it was also characteristic that he should have made as little as possible of his motives. Admitting that he had to some extent been swayed by the rebellious impulse he had mentioned, she knew there was beneath it a chivalrous purpose that was likely to prove the more effective from its practical simplicity. The Latins can appreciate chivalry, though they do not invariably practice it now, and she realized vaguely that there is nothing in man more knightly than the desire to strike a blow for the oppressed or at his peril to redress a wrong. Ormsgill's sentiments and methods were, perhaps, a trifle crude, and, from one point of view, somewhat old fashioned. He did not preach a crusade, but couched the lance himself. After all, he belonged to a nation which had once, using crude effective means, swept the slavers off that coast, and still stamps its coinage with the George and Dragon.
It was, however, after all, not so much as a redresser of grievances and a friend of the oppressed, but as a man that Benicia regarded her companion, for she knew that she loved him. She said nothing, and in a minute or two he spoke again.
"There is a thing that has been on my mind the last few days," he said. "The fever must have left me too shaky to think of it before. I am afraid, though it was very pleasant to see you, I haven't quite kept faith with your father in allowing you to come and talk with me. You, of course, don't understand exactly how the Authorities regard me."
Benicia smiled a little, for she understood very well. "I don't think that counts," she said, "and what is, perhaps, more to the purpose, my father is not here; he has gone, I believe, on business of the State, into the bush country. If you had remembered earlier you would have been anxious to send me away?"
She leaned forward looking at him, and saw the tension in his face. It told her a good deal, and she felt that for all his resolution she could, if she wished, bend him to her will.
"No," he said, "I'm not sure I could have done it if I had wished. In fact, the week—is it a week?—I have lain here has been such a one as I have never spent before. Now I am horribly sorry that it is over."
There was something in his voice which fully bore out what he had said, but Benicia was aware that it was she who had forced the admission from him without his quite realizing its significance. She knew that he would speak more plainly still if she kept her eyes on him.