And to-night he must bury him far from all that. He faced the problem of the burial. The work must be done with his own hands and the carriers must know nothing. He could give out that Ward had been taken by a crocodile on the shore of the lake. The noise of shooting would be explained by eland meat he would send them to fetch next day. The first round fired would have missed. He passed to other considerations.
The digging must be done with a broad bladed native hoe that was tied on to one of his loads for general camp use. There was no spade. The ground was iron-hard and the tool inefficient. It would take his fever-weighted arms several hours to dig even a shallow grave. Fortunately the moon would shortly be up. He decided to fetch the hoe at once, and to light a small fire of brushwood to keep away hyænas and their kind. Then he remembered that in camp he would find Norah. The thought swept away his unnatural calm.
It was not that he still feared the temptation to outrage Norah by word or action, even to kill her. That moment of bleak rage had faded and would never return. Nor did he feel horror of the prospect of facing the woman whose lover's blood was wet on his hands, his body yet unburied. Yet, rather than cross to his camp and meet his wife, he would have preferred to stay in the company of the part-eaten corpse of the man he had shot down.
The pain he had felt, when he first learnt in that sunlit clearing that Norah was untrue, had been diffuse. Grief attacked his heart from many sides and numbed it. Despair mingled with puzzlement; self-reproach merged into anger. Norah he had been slow to blame, making his own shortcomings scapegoat and Ward's seduction. That she was guiltless, that her chastity was intact he could not pretend; but he found excuses and put his love at the five-barred gate of prejudice. Love saved him the shock of his wife's sinfulness that most men would have suffered, accepting the boom in virginity engineered by a Church that is celibate at heart and the great ring of women with plain daughters to marry.
But if Archie had tried to ignore his wife's infidelity and in his heart had longed to forgive it, disillusionment now seared him with hotter irons. His body and brain seemed to ache with the question—why in the morning say she was ready to come back to him and had left Dick Ward for ever, to be caught ere evening in his passionate embrace?
There were only two answers:—
It might be that, faithless herself, she had not believed his promise to bring her and her lover safe back to Abercorn. To make sure their escape she had coldly tortured him with lying offers, had tricked him with a flattering tale. Could it be true that the girl he had worshipped as all that was loyal, all that was high-hearted, had fallen to this treachery, grovelled in such cowardice and cruelty?
But if that was not the truth, then his clean, lovely Norah was a harlot so wanton, so rotten, she could not keep for an hour out of a man's arms, could not for a few days stay faithful. The day she was left on the farm welcoming a lover; renouncing him as soon as her husband found her; slinking back the same night.
He must accept, it seemed, one of these unendurable explanations. Where both so base, did it matter which was true? He had married and adored either a wanton or a traitress. Was further scrutiny necessary? Was not the only manly course amputation, to cut the woman out of his life?
When first he had learnt that she had left him, he had grieved for Norah as one untimely dead, lost to him but still dear. Now he must think of her not only as lost, but dishonoured. That he still loved her, degraded him to her level. She had eaten her way into his life like rust, had twined her fingers through his heart-strings. Before it was too late, he must tear himself free of her magic.