A Veldt Official Part 20

Grace was predicting that my time would certainly come, and I said I didn't believe anything of the kind, but I rather hoped it would. And I had hardly said so when--oh, darling! _you_ came up! And it has all been so entrancingly sweet ever since. Life has been entirely different, and I am quite a transformed being."

Thus she ran on--almost rattled on, so airy, so bright and joyous was her tone. But it was so with a purpose; for all her pulses were thrilling; her very mind seemed to reel beneath the surpressed strength of her feeling. She felt giddy. The great stars in the dark vault overhead seemed to be whirling round. With heart panting, she leaned heavily upon the arms which encircled her, then tried to speak, to whisper, but could not.

"Dear, I ought not to have told you--ever at all," he went on. "But I am going away to-morrow--"

Then she found her voice.

"Why _are_ you going away to-morrow? Give it up, my heart's love, and stay near me."

"That is just why I am going away--to be away from you for a few days.

Wait," seeing she was about to interrupt. "This was my idea. I wanted to be at such a distance that it would be impossible to see you merely by taking one hour's short ride. I wanted to try if I could break the influence which you were so surely weaving round me."

"Ah, why would you try?"

"For the good of us both; but especially for your good. Listen, Mona.

I am no longer young, and my experience of the world is not small.

Well, nothing lasts. We are both of a strong nature. Two strong natures cannot fuse, cannot intertwine. Then comes disillusion."

"Now, I wonder if, since the world began, any living woman was ever convinced by such reasoning as that," said Mona decisively. But not heeding her, he went on--

"To every one of us the cup of life is filled but once. The contents of mine are nearer the dregs than the brim; whereas you are but beginning to sip at yours."

"Which dark syllogism I quite grasp, and fully appreciate--at its proper value," she returned. "But come; have we not had about enough solemn wisdom beneath the stars? Why, just before we first saw you--here, on this very spot--Gracie was trying to make me believe you were quite a sober and middle-aged fogey. Those were her words; and if you go on a little longer in this strain, I shall begin to think she was right. I remember, too, how I answered her. I said I was about tired of boys.

So let's hear no more about 'cups of life' and 'dregs,' but repeat what you said just now--just before--my beloved one!"

The glad, laughing voice changed to one of tenderest adjuration. And it may be that he did repeat it.

"Now," he went on, "would you rather I had told you this before going away, or after my return?"

"But you are not going away, now?"

"I am--more than ever, I was going to say. I want a few days to think."

"Roden!" she exclaimed suddenly, with a catching in her voice; "this is not an artifice? You are coming back--coming back to me?"

"If John Kaffir allows me--certainly. Dwelling a moment upon which consideration, perhaps that is why I told you before I left, what I have just told you. Would you rather I had not?"

"Would I rather forego one moment of the life, the soul, those words have given me? Love of my heart, I know it is of no use to try and persuade you to give up this plan now. But be careful of your life.

You are mine, remember. I won you when I held back your life that awful day upon the brow of the cliff; and that consciousness, and that alone, enabled me to do it. Whatever will and strength was given me then was through that alone. Now, say, are you not mine? mine for ever-- throughout all the years?"

"Dear, 'for ever' is a long time. Had we not better put it, 'as long as you think me worth keeping'?"

"Why do you say such a thing, and in such a voice?" This with a shiver, as though she had received a sudden stab.

"Mona, what was it I was trying to impress upon you but a minute or so back? I have got my life all behind me, remember. Nothing lasts. I have seen eyes melt, as those dear eyes of yours are melting now--have heard voices tremble in the same sweet intensity of tone. Well, it did not last. Time, separation, new interests, and it was swept away; nor did the process take very long, either. Nothing lasts! Nothing lasts!

It may be my curse; but, child, I have reached a stage at which one believes in nothing and n.o.body."

"Did they--those of whom you speak--love you as I do? Was their secret wrenched from them at the very jaws of death?"

"No. Never did I hear words of love under such, strange circ.u.mstances.

And yet, Mona, the fact that it was so, nearly turned me against you, for I seemed bound--bound to you in common grat.i.tude. If you had left me to myself, I believe that feeling would have changed into strong dislike."

"And when did the change come--the change for the better?" she said softly.

"I don't know. It has all been so gradual. But there is something, some magic about you, dear, that drew me to you in spite of myself--and kept me there."

"Then one can love, really love, more than once in a lifetime?"

"Of course. The notion to the contrary was invented for the purposes of fiction of the most callous sort. More than once, more than twice. But the difference is that through it all runs the interwoven thread of misgiving, that the thing is ill-judged and destined to end in blank--or worse."

"Mine throughout all the years, did I not say just now?" she whispered, again drawing down his head. "This seals it," and again speech was stilled in a long, clinging kiss. "This is our farewell--only for a few days--and oh, my heart's life, how slowly they will drag! I will go to the place where I held you up from death, and there--on that, to me the sweetest, spot on earth--pray, and pray with all my soul that no danger may come near you."

Were his very senses slipping away from him in that warm embrace? Was it indeed upon him that this love was outpoured, or upon somebody else?

The thought pa.s.sed with jarring hammer strokes through his brain. And like the distant echo of gibing demon-voices, came that old, grim, cynical refrain, "Nothing lasts! Nothing lasts!"

And as a little later he rode homeward through the stillness of the night, on the puffs of the fresh night breeze billowing up the gra.s.s, sighing through the coa.r.s.e bents, still that goading, tormenting refrain kept shrieking in his ears, "Nothing lasts! Nothing lasts!"

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN.

THE HOSTILE GROUND.

Doppersdorp was some distance behind the two hors.e.m.e.n by the time the sun shot up, a wheel of flame, into the cloudless beauty of the blue vault, flooding the great plains and the iron-crowned mountain heights with waves of gold; and the air, though warm, was on these high tablelands marvellously pure and clear. It was the morning for reflections of a dazzling nature to the man who could enjoy the rare luxury of such; and to Roden Musgrave seemed a fitting continuation of the strange, wondrous enchantment of the past night.

He had persisted with a purpose in this expedition, he had told Mona, because he wanted to be out of reach of her for a brief while, to think.

And now that every hoofstroke was bearing him thus out of reach, the strange prescription was indeed taking effect. Now he realised to the full what she was to his life. He had often been for days without seeing her. But then any day, any hour almost, he might have been at her side. His retrospect went to the time when he had looked upon her with something akin to dislike, even dread--dread lest the subtle power of her influence should steal him from himself, should drown his hard cold reason--the fruit of hard experience--in the sweet fumes of its intoxicating spell. But even through all this had run the misgiving that such dread was not ill-founded; for he knew that she possessed the power to do this, did she but choose to exercise it--knew it from the moment he had first looked into her eyes, and had gazed upon her exquisite grace of form and movement. And she had exercised it, and he--well, he had struggled with all the instinct of self-preservation, yet had struggled in vain. He was bound, and the bonds were of a captivity that was very, very sweet.

Yet, nothing lasts. This love of his latter-day life stirring up into a volcanic blaze of activity feelings not only dead and buried, but which he had been wont to scoff at as impossible of existence--how was it to end? In the prosaic, hard-and-fast knot of a legal bond? That, then, would be the beginning of the end. Nothing lasts. The prose, even the vulgarity, of a commonplace tie would be the beginning of disenchantment, disillusion. What then? Thus a sure and certain foresight into the future ran through the glowing, lotus-eating dream of the present, yet, with all its dark and neutral-tinted shades, only seemed to throw out the warm sun-waves of the present into greater contrast.

"I say, Musgrave, I can't congratulate myself on having the liveliest of travelling companions," said Darrell, with a grin. "Do you know that it's exactly forty-seven minutes since you've let fall a word? I've been timing you."

Roden started.

"The deuce you have! Excuse me, Darrell, I sometimes get that way. I believe you're right. Well, I'll make up for it now, anyway."

The other grinned again, but said no more on the subject, and the two men pursued their way at a quick, easy pace, now halting to off-saddle at some farmhouse, now in the veldt. But Roden afforded his companion no further pretext for rallying him on account of his silence.

That night they slept at a Boer's farm on the border of the hostile ground. The worthy Dutchman and his numerous progeny were in a high state of alarm, for rumours had come through his native hands that whole locations of Gaikas, hitherto peaceful, had risen in arms and joined Sandili, who was now trying to break through the not very closely drawn cordon of patrols, and take refuge in the dense forest fastnesses of the Amatola. He and his were going to trek into laager at once, and when he learned the destination of the two Englishmen, he stared at them as though they were ghosts already.

"Nay what. You'll never get through," he said, as they took their leave. "Your lives are not worth that," flinging away a grain of salt, "if you try. Besides, it is very wrong. It is laughing in the face of the good G.o.d. You will come to harm, and you will deserve it."

But Darrell's laugh was loud and irreverent as he bade the utterer of this comforting prognostication farewell. He was a harum-scarum, dare-devil sort of mortal, who was afraid of nothing, yet could be cool enough when occasion arose.

Throughout the day they pursued their journey, pa.s.sing now and then a deserted farmhouse, whose empty kraals and smokeless chimneys, and unreaped crops standing in the mealie lands, spoke eloquently to the desolation that reigned. "The land was dead" indeed, as the native idiom expressed it.

They had taken a straight line across the veldt, avoiding roads and beaten tracks as likely to be watched by outlying parties of the enemy.

And now the farther and farther they advanced, the brighter the outlook they kept.