Blue Aloes Part 17

Gay helped to lift Marice into the two men's arms, and they went ahead with their moaning burden; then she came back to Druro, who was staggering vaguely along.

"Let me help you, Lundi. Lean on me."

He put out an arm, and she caught it and placed it around her shoulders.

"I can't see, Gay," he said, in a voice that was quite steady yet had in it some quality of terrible apprehension. She peered into his face.

The moon had become obscured, but she could see that his eyes were wide open with torn lids. There was a great gash down his cheek.

"Come quickly!" she cried, her voice trembling with tears. "Oh, come quickly, Lundi! We must bathe and dress your wounds as soon as possible. Leopard wounds are terribly poisonous."

"All right," he said. "Sure you don't mind my leaning on you? I hope they get a doctor at once for Mrs. Hading."

They went forward slowly, he taking curiously uneven steps. She was tall, but he had to stoop a little to keep his hold on her.

"There hasn't been a leopard in these parts for nearly two years," he mused. "The last was shot on my mine the day we struck the reef--that is why we called it the Leopard. You remember, Gay? Do you think Mrs.

Hading is badly wounded?"

"Her throat and chest are very much torn, but I don't think the wounds are deep."

"Poor woman! Good Lord; what bad luck!"

"Try and hurry, Lundi."

"But I can't see. Perhaps if I could wipe the blood out of my eyes, Gay--where the deuce is my handkerchief?"

"Here is mine--let me do it for you. Sit down for a moment on this ant-heap."

She knelt by his side and gently wiped away the blood. By the sweat that was pouring down his face, she knew that he must be suffering intense pain, and was almost afraid to touch the wounded eyes.

"Is that better? Can you see now?" she asked fearfully.

"No," he said quietly. There was a moment of anguished silence between them, then he laughed.

"Cheerful if I am going to be blind!"

The words tore her heart in two, appealing to all that was tender and n.o.ble in her nature, and to that brooding maternal love that was almost stronger in her than lover's love. She seemed, as once before when trouble was on him, to see him as a bright-haired boy with innocent eyes, whom life had led astray, but who was ready with a laugh on his lips to face the worst fate would do. And she cried out, with a great cry, tenderly, brokenly:

"No, no, Lundi; you shall not be blind!"

She put her arms round him as if to ward off the powers of darkness and evil, and he let his b.l.o.o.d.y face rest against the soft sweetness of her breast. Leaning there, he knew he was home at last. Her warm tears, falling like gentle rain upon his wounded eyes, slipped down into his heart, into his very soul, cleansing it, washing away the shadows that had been between them. Now he knew what the shrouded figure at the back of his mind had waited for so long to say to him--that he loved this girl and should make his life worthy of her. He had always loved her, but had been too idle and careless, too fond of the ways and pleasures of men to change his life for her. Now that he held her in his arms, and could feel the blaze of her love burning through the walls of her, meeting the flame in his own heart, it was too late.

Fate, with lightnings in her hand, had stepped between them, and a woman who held his promise intervened.

"Gay," he said gently, her name felt so sweet on his lips, "by a terrible mistake I have destroyed your happiness and mine. Forgive me."

"There is no question of forgiveness, Lundi," she whispered; "I will help you to stand by it."

He held up his blurred eyes and torn, bleeding lips, and she kissed him as one might kiss the dead, in exquisite renouncement and farewell.

Only that the quick are not the dead--and cannot be treated as such. A more poignant misery waked in both their hearts with that kiss. He could not see her--that was terrible--but the satiny warmth of her mouth was so dear, so exquisitely dear! He suddenly remembered her as she was that night in her little rose-leaf gown with all the dewdrops twinkling on her. He wondered if he would ever see her again in all her beauty.

"You were so sweet that night of the dance, Gay," he said, "in your little pinky gown, with the dewdrops winking on you!"

She understood that he was wondering if he should ever see her again.

"You shall--you shall!" she cried. "Oh, hurry! Come quickly! Let us get to the house and to help."

The serene and careless philosophy characteristic of him came back.

"If I am to be blind, all right," he said quietly. "I'll accept it without a kick, because of this hour."

Once more they stumbled deviously and slowly on. A light showed nearer now, in a house window, and presently the other two men were on their way to meet them with lanterns and a brandy-flask. In a short time, Druro was established in Mrs. Burral's sitting-room, having his eyes bathed and bandaged by her skilful hands.

"What about Mrs. Hading?" had been his first question. Marice's low moans could be plainly heard from behind the curtain which divided the one room of the little iron house.

"Her throat and shoulders are very much lacerated," said Mrs. Burral.

"I think we have avoided the danger of blood-poisoning for you both, as I was able to clean the wounds so quickly with bichloride. But she will be dreadfully scarred, poor thing! And you, Mr. Druro, I'm afraid--I'm afraid your eyes are badly hurt."

It seemed years to them all, though it was scarcely more than half an hour before a.s.sistance came from Selukine. All tragedies take place in the brain, it has been said, and poignant things were happening behind several foreheads during that bad half-hour of waiting. Marice Hading, lying on Mrs. Burral's bed, hovered over by that kind woman, was suffering more acutely in the thought of her ravaged beauty than from the pain of her wounds. Druro's bandaged eyes saw with greater clearness down the bleak avenues of the future than they had ever seen in health. Tryon was afraid to look at Gay. He was outwardly attentive to Burral's tale of the leopard's depredations--chickens torn from the roost, a mutilated foal, a half-eaten calf--and of the final stalking and unlucky wounding of the beast, rendering it mad with the rage to attack everything it met; but his brain was occupying itself with a thought that ran round and round in it like a squirrel in a cage--the thought that Gay was lost to him for ever. He had seen her looking at Lundi Druro with all her tortured soul in her eyes. Now she stood at the window, staring into the night.

When, at last, the whir of motor-wheels was heard on the far-off road, each of them hastened to recapture their wretched minds and drag them back from the lands of desolation in which they wandered, to face once more the formalities of life behind life's mask of convention. There came a sound of many voices--subdued, deploring, anxious, inquiring.

The picnickers had heard of the accident and were returning in force to succour the lost ones. It was a sorry ending to the great Leopard picnic.

Mrs. Hading and Druro were driven to the w.a.n.kelo Hospital, and doctors and nurses closed in on them. Specialists came from Buluwayo and the Cape, and, after a time of waiting, it was known that the danger of blood-poisoning was past for both of the victims. But whether Lundi Druro was to walk in darkness for the rest of his days could not be so quickly told or what lay behind the significant silence concerning Mrs.

Hading's injuries. It was known that her condition was not dangerous, but she saw no one, and, in the private ward she had engaged, she surrounded herself with nurses whose business it was not to talk, and doctors, even in Rhodesia, do not gratify the inquiries of the merely curious. So, for a long period of waiting, no one quite knew how the tragedy was all to end.

In another part of the hospital, Druro sat in his room with bandaged eyes and Toby on his knees, gossiping with the friends who came to beguile his monotony, giving no outward sign that hope had been dragged from his heart as effectively as light had been wiped from his eyes.

From the black emptiness in which he sat, he sent Marice Hading a daily message containing all the elements of a mental c.o.c.ktail--a jibe at fate, a fleer at leopards in general, and a prophecy of merrier times to come as soon as they were out of their present annoyances. In reply, she wrote guarded little notes (that were read to him by his nurse), making small mention of her own injuries but seeming feverishly anxious concerning his sight. All he could tell her was that he awaited the arrival and verdict of Sir Charles Tryon, the famous eye-specialist, now somewhere on his way between Madeira and w.a.n.kelo.

It was d.i.c.k Tryon, who, knowing that his brother was taking a holiday at Madeira, had cabled asking for his services for Druro.

Poor d.i.c.k Tryon! He blamed himself bitterly for the whole catastrophe on the grounds that, if he had only looked into the petrol-tank instead of taking a Kafir's word, the car would never have been held up or the encounter with the leopard occurred. It was no use Lundi Druro's telling him that such reasoning manifested an arrogant underrating of the powers of destiny.

"You are a very clever fellow, d.i.c.k, but even you can't wash out the writing on the wall," philosophized the patient, from behind his bandage, "nor scribble anew on the tablet of Fate, which is hung round the neck of every man. If the old hag meant me to be blind, she'd fixed me all right without your a.s.sistance."

But Tryon could not be reasoned with in this wise. Perhaps it was the shipwreck in Gay's eyes that would not let him rest. Druro could not see that; but it was part of d.i.c.k Tryon's penance to witness it every day when he fetched Gay and her father in his car to visit the hospital. She always came laden with flowers and cheery words, and left an odour of happiness and hope behind her. But Tryon had seen what was in her eyes that night at Burral's, and behind all her hopeful smiling he saw it there still. He realized that she and Druro had found each other in the hour of tragedy, and that for him there was no role left but that of spectator--unless he could prove himself a friend by helping them to each other's arms, in spite of Marice Hading. As for Druro and Gay, they had never been alone together since that night--and never meant to be. They had had their hour.

Another of Tryon's self-imposed jobs was to motor to Selukine and bring back Emma Guthrie to see his partner. For there were moments when Druro could stand no one's society so well as the bitter-tongued American's.

"Go and bring in Emma to say a few pleasant words all round," he would enjoin, and Emma would come, looking like a wounded bear ready to eat up everything in sight. But, strange to say, after the first two or three visits, his words were sweeter than honey in the honeycomb, and all his ways were soothing and serene. He had nothing but good news to dispense. The novelty first amused then exasperated Druro, and he ended up by telling Guthrie to clear out of the hospital and never come back.

Emma did come back, however, and every time he showed his face, it was to bring some fresh tale of the sparkling fortunes hidden in the bosom of his Golconda. The mine was a brick, a peach, a flower. Zeus dropping nightly showers of gold upon Danae was nothing to the miracles going on at the Leopard.

One evening after dinner, while Druro was sitting alone with his own dark thoughts, a message was brought to him--a message that Mrs. Hading would be glad to see him. It appeared that she had been up and about her room for some days, and was as bored as he with her own society.

Leaning on the arm of his nurse, he walked down the long veranda and came to her big, cool room, delicately shaded with rose lights and full of the scent of violets and faint Parisian essences. He could not see her of course, or the rose lights, but he sensed her sitting there in her long chair, looking languorous and subtle, with colours and flowers and books about her. The nurse guided him to a seat near her and left them together.

"Well, here we are, Lundi--turned into a pair of wretched, broken-down crocks!"

The words were light, but the indescribable bitterness of her voice struck at him painfully.