An I.D.B. in South Africa Part 8

"Don't look all those centuries, eh?" said Kate, laughingly. "Why, I am twenty-eight." She then gave him an outline of her life, with the heartache left out. Although Kate was of an ardent imaginative temperament, she never sentimentally dwelt on her griefs.

By this time they had reached their destination. The call was short, the doctor taking little time to listen to the recounting of aches and pains. He braced his hypochondriacal patient up, by telling him that he was far better than he had expected to find him, and before the invalid could relapse, the doctor had gone. But the man was better, of course, for had not the doctor told him so?

"You have returned quickly," said Kate. "Is your patient better?"

"The patient? Oh yes, he's all right. I will bring my galvanic battery with me next time, and just give him a little h.o.m.oeopathic earthquake.

Don't let us talk about these sick people. You don't look as if sick subjects would be appropriate to your thoughts or conversation."

CHAPTER FOURTEEN.

AN UNEXPECTED DECLARATION.

"I have never had time to think of being sick myself, or to think of myself in any way. I used to worry over every thing, and strove to gather sufficient force in one day to last a week, but the effort was useless. I now realise that I am not doing this living. I am being lived. There is much rest to me in that thought."

"You speak in riddles," said the doctor, "how can an unimaginative fellow like me solve the mystery of 'I am being lived?'"

"It is not a riddle, and it is not for the imaginative," said Kate. "It is reality of which I speak. We talk of the burden of life. But life is not a burden. If you look about at the over-burdened world you will find that its people are weighed down with loads of their own acc.u.mulation. Apprehension, fretfulness, discontent--a thousand things--dissipate the strength and happiness of mortals. I have come to believe that individual life, as it was given from the hand of G.o.d, is a fulness--not a strife. The familiar old figure of speech, 'Life is a river,' expresses it to me, and the river just flows along and takes all the goodly, streams that flow into it all the length of its course. So it grows and is filled, not filling itself."

"But don't you see, Miss Darcy, that the river must also take all the bad that flows into it."

"But don't _you_ see," asked Kate, "that pursuing its course to the great ocean it purifies and brings to sparkling clearness _all_ that comes to it. That is always the result of patient and cheerful acceptance."

It is in unexpected places and at unexpected times that we most often find ourselves speaking of heart-experiences, and spiritual beliefs and attainments. To Dr Fox this was a rare occasion. In the life he had known since he had left his native sh.o.r.es, the questions of the hour arising for the earnest thinker had not been presented to him. Like other men away from the influence of home and intelligent high-toned womanhood, he had drifted into careless modes of thought.

The ease that comes from a happy-go-lucky philosophy is not the peace that comes of trust. Dr Fox felt this with a startling clearness.

Through the woman by his side came the white, searching light of a pure soul within, shining upon his own and revealing the barrenness of life without earnestness. How had she reached her spiritual alt.i.tude amid the ambitions and crushing disappointments of her past?

"Miss Darcy," said the doctor, "you are one of the rare beings who see only the good in every thing. You seem to know no other force. This may do for women, but how can men, with grosser natures, come into such a wide place?"

Kate looked at her companion with brave, open eyes, and she longed to impart her own earnestness to him. Every good woman is a natural moral reformer.

"Why," said Kate, "do men leave women lonely on spiritual heights? The men, too, are G.o.ds if they did but know it. Shall women have all the riches and delights of inward content? To live in harmony with our source means perfect health, and the attainment of our heart's desire, for then there can be no friction, no uncontrollable conditions. Why should not men without scepticism or half-heartedness accept and know the truth?"

"But you see, Miss Darcy, men would become dreamers, not workers. I fear we must leave the angel-side of existence to you, only stipulating that you do not fly away from us entirely."

"That is the trouble with a man," said Kate, "he calls the strongest force in the world a dream. As for the women flying away--don't think it. They love to stay where they can keep the men in sight."

She laughed. Laughter and tears were always close by with Kate.

"I believe," she continued, "most men think that thoughts of this sort are to be saved for the occupying of eternal years. Whereas Eternity always was, and now is. We are living in the Eternal Now."

"You think that men and women could be companions in this thought?"

queried the doctor.

"I do. To be companions in the married or unmarried state, is just the rarest happiness in the world, but we are demanding it. It is the desire of the heart, and we will have it. Man stands for Love. Woman for Intelligence, Intuition. The Woman, no matter how intellectual, is ever craving for Love, ever seeking it. When Love on the one hand, and Intelligence and Intuition on the other, meet in this belief in the one Force, and recognise in each other the desire of their hearts and cry out, 'I have found you,' the two become one--Spirit."

"Why do you say 'Man is Love?' I have always thought he represented Intelligence."

"Is not Cupid a boy?" replied Kate saucily.

The doctor touched the horses with the whip, and they sped along the road. There was silence for a few moments, when Kate broke it by saying:

"I shall remember this ride with pleasure, Doctor, as it will probably be the last one I shall take with you before my departure for other scenes."

The reins fell idly on the doctor's lap, and the horses dropped into a walk. Horses have a trick of accommodating themselves to the moods of their drivers.

The doctor's face lost its look of enthusiasm.

"When do you go, and where do you go?" he asked.

"I want to leave the Fields during the hot Christmas holidays, and have arranged to go to that pretty little spot not far away--Bloemfontein."

"I am sorry you are going away," said the doctor, "but I should be sorrier if it were further from Kimberley. It seems a short time since you came here."

"Short stays make long friends," said Kate.

"Then I shall come and make short stays," exclaimed the doctor, with a return to something like gaiety.

"Do--" said Kate. "I mean do come. I don't mean make short stays!"

"Of course you will return to Kimberley?"

"I hardly think I shall," replied Kate.

"Is there nothing that I can say that could induce you to return?" The doctor said this with an accent on the personal p.r.o.noun "I."

Kate did not think for a moment that it meant anything more than gallantry, but something: in the tone of his voice made her look into his face. The doctor was looking at her in that manly way of his, and she answered his look, with one as sweetly womanly, but hesitated to frame any words, for the right ones would not come. Where now was Kate's fluency of speech? He laid his hand over hers, resting pa.s.sively in her lap, and said:

"Pardon me for revealing my feelings toward you. Don't speak now. I cannot expect you to come to my quick conclusions in a matter like this.

Kate, you are my ideal woman. Only that man who has daily before him his ideal for inspiration can hope to attain his highest manhood. When I make a farewell call upon you before my trip to England, tell me if I have gone farther than you can go with me."

Kate sat in a twilight happiness and her lips were dumb. She could neither encourage nor deny. Her past was before her. She remembered the time when she had laid her young heart on the altar of an early love. Could it be possible she could find happiness in the love of another? Should she take into the joyousness of her existence, won by submission and an exalted spiritual life, a new relationship?

The doctor's manner showed neither embarra.s.sment nor anxiety. He had the a.s.surance of a nature that knows what it wants--as the satisfaction of love, and that can say, "I want you for my wife. Come!" intending to take no denial. Then the woman, contented in his love, is willing to say, "I will love, honour, and obey," for her yoke is the yoke of love, and her burden light, because she is evenly yoked. He was sure that he could make Kate Darcy happy. It should be her own fault if he did not.

A vision of such a home as could be counted by thousands in his own happy land was before him. If this woman had drank of the elixir of life, she should by her companionship share her cup with him. By her own story she had grown younger with years. She should share her perfected youth with him.

This was a strange couple. Not a wand more of the mysteries of life and love escaped them. They talked as though they were henceforth sane on all subjects. The horses once more became swift. It is well that horses, if they can hear and comprehend, cannot talk.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN.

AN ABRUPT AWAKENING.

"Fingo boy here, Ba-a-as," said a Coolie servant, as he entered the room where Laure was sitting, on the third day after the visit to the mine.

"Where is he?"

"In kitchen."

A cloud darkened Laure's face; after a moment's hesitation he told the Coolie to send the boy to him. The Fingo boy, who had handed the diamond to Laure in the tunnel, entered the room, and standing near the door waited for him to speak.