Finally she decided upon crossing to St. Malo by the boat that left Southampton at five o’clock next day; and from St. Malo to Dinan or Avranches. She would avoid the seaside, where English visitors would be likely to be met at this season. The Norman and Breton towns she knew by repute as places where people lived quietly and economically, forgotten by the world.
The same post which brought Mrs. Vansittart Eve’s letter from London brought her a letter from her son, written from Southampton.
“You will be surprised at the address from which I write, and still more surprised when I tell you that Southampton is only the first stage on my journey to South Africa. I sail from here to the Cape, and from thence shall make my way to whichever portion of the Dark Continent promises best for health and enjoyment at this time of year. Do not be uneasy about me, my dear mother. I shall take counsel with experienced travellers before I turn my back upon the civilized world; and I shall not go to meet fever, famine, or assassination. You shall hear from me at each stage of my wanderings. I do not go as a scientific explorer, or as a sportsman in quest of big game, though I hope to make good use of my gun. I go with the desire to escape from civilization, monotony, and my own thoughts, which just now are of the saddest.
“A cloud has spread itself between Eve and me, and we two, who were so happy in each other’s affection a little while ago, have agreed to part, I fear never again to live together. I cannot tell you our reasons, for they involve a secret the revelation of which would be disastrous to me—the only secret I ever kept from you. Eve is blameless—chaste and faithful as in the beginning of our wedded lives. I implore you to think of her always with affection; to shelter and cherish her if ever she appeal to your love or claim your protection. She is entitled to your respect and to your pity. The only sinner—never a deliberate sinner—is your son, who in his shattered domestic life pays the forfeit of one unhappy act.”
CHAPTER XXX.
A DOUBLE EXILE.
Hail, dark mother of wanderers, parched nurse of lions! Amidst thy romantic wildernesses grief and dishonour may forget themselves; with thee man is only man! He leaves that other half of himself, reputation, yonder in the crowd, and in these solitudes becomes a creature of thews and sinews, valuable only for his strength and endurance, for the range of his eye and the truth of his hand. He has done with the outward shows of life, and with all nice differences between good and bad. Here, worth is to be measured by the hunter’s fleetness of foot, and honour by the marksman’s aim. What a man is counts for but little; what he can do for much. In that aching misery which possessed him when he left England, John Vansittart looked to the desert as his best refuge. The hunter’s life in Mashonaland gives scanty leisure for brooding over the ruins of a home in England. The early trek with the waggons, or the start on foot from the skerm; the hard day’s tramp under the blazing sun; the need of providing meat for the boys—the long following on the spoor of giraffe or antelope, with the wild ride or cautious stalk at the end—which that need involves; the charm of the life, its poetry, its absolute novelty, and the ever-recurring vicissitudes which each new day brings forth, leave the head of the expedition briefest time for introspective thought. His slumbers are for the most part dreamless; or his dreams are of lions prowling by the camp-fire, or of the dark forms and wild gestures of those he has last seen dancing by its flickering light; not of the lost faces of home. Best of all, his conscience is at ease, for face to face with man in his most primitive aspect he loses the habit of weighing his past acts and comparing, with futile regret, the things he has done with the things he ought to have done.
For Vansittart there could have been no better refuge than the desert.
Here, if his heart wounds were not healed, his consciousness of sin was deadened. Here, where no exaggerated value was set on human life, he could remember Harold Marchant’s death with less intensity of pain. Here, where the native freely turned his gun or his assegai against his fellow-man, a mischance such as that of Florian’s Caffè seemed a small thing—the fortune of war, a spurt of anger, an unlucky blow, and there an end. Every man must die somehow; and it may not be the worst doom to drop down in the fulness of youth and vigour, knowing not the slow agonies of gradual extinction, the torture of dying by inches.