Vansittart’s thoughts were tempered by his surroundings. His character took new colours in that vivid life, in that lapse backward from the civilized and the complicated to the primitive stage of man’s history. It was as if Time had turned his glass and the earth were young. The wild race of Cain, the outcast, could have been no wilder than these woolly-haired followers of his, who were faithful to him because he was a good shot.
Nature, the great consoler, helped him to forget his grief by forgetting himself. Here, face to face with Nature’s mightiest forces, man’s sense of his own personality dwindles to the faintest shadow in the vastness of his surroundings. Instead of Trafalgar Square he has the Falls of the Zambesi; instead of the languid club lounger he has the elephant and the lion for his companions—the purring growl of the lion instead of the gossip of the smoking-room; the trumpet of the elephant instead of the chatter of the dinner-table. Surely it is good for a man to be alone in the wilderness—alone save for the company of followers to whom, though he be their leader, he is as another being, a white man, a stranger in their land, between whose thoughts and feelings and their own a great gulf is for ever fixed. It is good for him to feel his own insignificance among men who value him only for his powder and shot, and who will lose their reverence for his white superiority with the spending of his last cartridge. Here he must needs forget that pride of place which at home was a part of his being. Here there are no tradesmen to fawn upon him, no servants to touch their hats to him, no women to praise him. Small food for vanity here, where the darkies call his smooth, flat hair dog’s hair, and who liken his hairy arm to a baboon’s arm. Here if the women fawn upon him it is not for his smiles or his favour, but for beads or printed calico, such vivid orange or scarlet fabrics, figured with stars or half moons, as Manchester weaves for the Torrid Zone. Here if the men are true to him it is because he can feed them and pay them. He is in a world of stern facts, where sentiment and sophistication are unknown.
The atmosphere suits him. The primitive interests of this primitive life help to shut off that other life where all is gloom, the life of thought and of memory. Sufficient for the day, that is the motto here: food for the day; safety for the day; wood for the fires, water for man and beast. Beside them, behind them, ahead of them, stalk dangers that Europe knows not. Danger from beasts of prey; danger from men as cruel; fever, starvation, death in many shapes—all the vicissitudes of a life between the desert and the sky.
Fortune favours him in his desolation of spirit. A happier man might have been less lucky. A man more careful of his life, with more to live for, might have hardly escaped scot-free from all the dangers of the hunter’s life in an unknown land. Travellers far more experienced wondered afterwards when they heard the story of this man’s travels, and the impunity with which he had done desperate things.
His daring had been the audacity of ignorance, they said. If he had known the extent of the peril in such unconsidered wanderings, with so small a party, with such inadequate preparation, he would have been a madman to set his life upon such chances. Had he answered them truthfully he would have told them that he was a madman when he turned his face towards the desert; mad with the agony of a life that was blighted; mad with the bitter memories of lost happiness.
Of these wedded lovers, parted in the noontide of their love, one carried his wounded heart to the wilderness, and sought for tranquillity of spirit in a life of movement and peril; the other, the weaker vessel, had no such large resources. The life of adventure, the ever-changing horizon, were not for her. She could only creep to some quiet haven and sit alone and brood upon her grief.
She went first to Avranches; then late in the autumn she took a fancy to the solitude of Mont St. Michel, the quaint monastic citadel, the fortress on the rock; and here, when the last of the tourists had gone, and the equinoctial gales were roaring round the Gothic towers, she took up her abode in an apartment specially prepared for her by the cheery patronne of the Inn at the Gate, an apartment upon the ramparts, with windows looking wide over the sea towards Coutances and Jersey.
Benson, who had a constitution of iron, complained bitterly of this wind-swept rock, yet had to own later that her health had never been better. Eve stopped here late into the winter, sketching a little, reading a great deal, wandering on the sands in all weathers, and sometimes wishing that her footsteps would take her unawares to that portion of the bay, where, as in the Kelpie’s flow, sorrow might find a grave.
An imprudent ramble in the marshy fields between Pontorson and the Mount, which left her belated in the mists of a November evening, resulted in congestion of the lungs. She had contrived to lose herself among those salt meadows as completely as ever her husband had lost himself in Mashonaland, and it was eleven o’clock when she and her whimpering attendant tottered along the causeway leading to the gates of the fortress, footsore and weary, their shoes worn out in that long tramp over coarse grass and sandy hillocks.