They came to a flowering mass of gethyllis—that strange plant the curled leaves of which wind out their spirals in winter to catch the dewdrops and conduct them down their tube-like channels to the deep-underground bulb, which waits until the fiercest sun of summer shines before it sends up its lovely, tulip-like cup of snowy white or vivid crimson. The luscious scent filled the air and caused a faint, delicious intoxication. They bent over the blossoms and began gathering them. In doing this their hands met by accident and they started apart suddenly, thrilling with unknown confusion.
Their faltering speech died away altogether, and they more than ever avoided each other’s gaze. After retracing their steps for a short distance they again paused. The vague horizon seemed to become of absorbing interest. Each felt to blame for the abashment of the other, and both seemed to drink of a cup of humiliation. The old tree waved sympathetically over them its topmost branches, in which the wind seemed to waken a sigh.
Careless Nature, to bring them together, sacrificed a life. She sent a message down through a cleft in the rock against which Susannah was dejectedly leaning, and called from the depths where it had long been sleeping a poisonous red centipede. The creature crawled down over the girl’s shoulder and endeavoured to enter her sleeve at the wrist. Then Max saw it. He sprang forward in a spasm of terror, brushed the centipede aside with his hand; not, however, before it had given him a venomous nip. In an instant he had crushed the life out of the creature with his foot; then, with an exclamation of pain, he turned towards the girl. His hand was already beginning to swell. Susannah tore a piece off the curtain of her cappie and began to bind up the injury. As she did so she came so close that she leant slightly against Max. Then the opportunity triumphed over the pain—he passed his arm around her, drew her to him, and kissed her on the quivering lips.
The centipede and its sting were soon forgotten. Nature held them, embraced and embracing, for a blissful eternity; they saw the face of happiness smiling in the rosy gloom under Love’s wing.
The koekerboom became wrapped in a whirlwind of excitement, its gaunt boughs swayed until they clashed, and the sap rose in its slowly beating heart until the yellow buds which a few of its less mature twigs had put forth tentatively, as though half ashamed of such frivolity, burst open and sent forth a faint shower of pollen, which fell like a spangling of gold-dust upon Susannah’s hair.
As they paced away, hand in hand, a small army of fierce desert ants were dragging away the still writhing body of the centipede to their underground storehouse. Nature, so very lavish in large matters, is extremely economical in trifles.