John Ames, Native Commissioner Part 23

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN.

HAVEN BETWEEN STORM.

"Do you know, this place reminds me a little of our resting ground that day down among the rocks at Camp's Bay," Nidia said, gazing up at the gigantic boulder, which, piled obliquely against two more, formed a natural penthouse on a very large scale. A blackened patch against the rock in the entrance of the cave, showed a fireplace surrounded by stones, and the very scanty baggage of the fugitives was disposed around.

John Ames, who was engaged in his normal occupation, viz. mounting guard, turned.

"Yes," he said; "it's the same sort of day, and grander scenery, because wilder. Peaceful, too. Yet here we are, you and I, obliged to hide among rocks and holes in peril of our lives."

"Strange, isn't it, how adaptable one can become?" went on Nidia. "That day, do you remember, when you were so sceptical as to our ever meeting again, who could have thought how we would meet and what experiences should have been ours between then and now?

"Do you know," she went on gravely, after a thoughtful pause, "at times I think I must be frightfully hard-hearted and unfeeling--I mean, to have looked upon what I did--" and she shuddered.

"I liked the Hollingworths so much, too. And yet somehow it all seems to have happened so long ago. Why is it that I do not feel it more, think of it more? Tell me your opinion."

"One word explains it," he answered. "That is, 'Action'."

"Action?"

"Yes. You have been kept continually on the move ever since. First of all, you had your own safety to secure; consequently you had no time to think of anything but that--of anybody but yourself."

"That sounds horribly selfish, somehow, but true."

"Well, selfishness in its etymological sense is only another word for self-preservation, or, at any rate, an extension of that principle.

Were you to sit down and weep over the loss of your friends until some obliging barbarian should come up and put an end to you? I think the pluck you showed throughout was wonderful, and not less so the soundness of judgment. When you found poor Hollingworth's youngster so badly hurt, didn't you sit there and look after him at momentary risk of your life until he died, poor little chap? Selfish? I call it by another name, and so will other people when we get safely out of this."

Nidia smiled, rather sadly, and shook her head.

"Leave _you_ alone for trying to flatter me," she said softly. "You have been doing nothing else ever since we have been together. But--you don't really think me unfeeling and hard-hearted, Mr Ames?"

He turned quickly, for he had been looking out over the surrounding waste.

"That isn't what you called me the first time in Shiminya's kraal," he said.

"What? Unfeeling and hard-hearted. No. Why should I?" she rejoined demurely, but br.i.m.m.i.n.g with mischief. Then, as he looked hurt, "Don't be angry. I'm only teasing, as usual. Really, though, I ought to apologise for that slip. But the name came out without my knowing it.

You see, Susie and I used always to call you by it between ourselves.

We saw it in the book at Cogill's the day we arrived, written in a hand that seemed somehow to stand out differently from among all the others.

At first, when we were trying to locate the people there, we used to wonder which was 'John Ames,' and so we got into the habit of calling you that way by ourselves. And in my mingled scare and surprise the other day, out it came."

"We have been through a good deal together during the last four days,"

he said, "including one of the narrowest shaves for our lives we can ever possibly again experience. Heaven knows how long we are destined to roam the wilds together, but why not keep the conventional until our return to conventionality?"

"Very well," she answered.

It was even as he had said. This was the afternoon of the fourth day after leaving Shiminya's den, and now they were well in among the Matopo range. Here, if anywhere, amid this vast sea of jumbled boulders and granite cones and wide rocky hollows, they would be comparatively safe, if only they kept a constant and careful look out, John Ames declared.

The open country would be swarming with rebels, and it was not improbable that Bulawayo itself was in a state of siege. Here, where almost every stone represented a hiding-place, they could lie _perdu_ for any time; and such was far the safer course, at any rate until able to gain some inkling of what had really transpired, as to which they were so far in complete ignorance. If the Matabele had risen upon Bulawayo with the same secrecy and suddenness wherewith they had surprised outlying stations, why, the capital would be absolutely at their mercy, in which case the only whites left alive in the land would be stray fugitives like themselves. Indeed, to John Ames it seemed too much to hope that any other state of things could be the prevalent one, wherefore for the present these rugged and seldom trodden fastnesses afforded the securest of all refuges. This plan he had put to Nidia, and she had agreed at once.

"Do not even go to the trouble of consulting me," she had said. "Always act exactly as you think best. What do I know about things here, and where would I have been now but for you?"

"You showed yourself full of resource before I came on the scene, anyway. You might have pulled through just as well."

"No; I should never have been able to keep it up. Heavens! where would I have been?"--looking round upon the wilderness and realising its sombre vastness. "But with you I feel almost as safe as I did--well, this day last week."

As he had said, they had indeed been a great deal together during the past four days, really a great deal more so than during the three weeks and upwards that they had known each other down-country. Hiding away in sluit and river-bed and thorn thicket, every step of their flight had been attended with peril. Discovery meant death--certain death. Even were any trace of them lighted upon so as to arouse suspicion of their presence in the minds of their ruthless enemies, detection would not long follow. They could be tracked and hunted down with dogs, whatever start they might have gained; and as for hoping to distance their pursuers, why, a chain is no stronger than its weakest link, and Nidia, for all the fine healthy training she was most fortunately in, was hardly a match, either in fleetness or staying power, for a pack of hardy muscular barbarians. No; in superlative caution alone lay their only chance of safety.

And, throughout all this most trying experience--trying alike in the terrible strain upon the nerves, and the physical strain of forced marches in the enervating heat of a sub-tropical climate, over rough and fatiguing ground--how many times had Nidia noted with confidence and admiration the consummate judgment of her fellow-fugitive; the unflagging vigilance, the readiness of resource, and the tranquil hopefulness which he threw into the situation. Never a moment did he relax observation even in the most trivial matters, and his knowledge of the country, too, was wonderful. The part they had to traverse was the most dangerous part, indeed, through which their line of flight could possibly take them, bearing, as it did, a considerable population. More than once they would have to pa.s.s so near a kraal that the barking of dogs almost made them think they were discovered; but the narrow escape to which we heard him allude had occurred at about noon of the second day after leaving Shiminya's.

The line of country they were traversing was rough and difficult-- undulating flats covered with long gra.s.s, and plentifully studded with trees, but there was no avoiding it, and, indeed, every step, even here, was fraught with the gravest peril, for they were in the neighbourhood of quite a cl.u.s.ter of kraals. Poor Nidia felt as though she must give up in despair and exhaustion. The flags of the coa.r.s.e gra.s.s cut her ankles like saws, and she felt as though she could hardly drag one foot after another, and even the words of cheer whispered by her companion seemed to fall on deaf ears. Suddenly the latter halted, listened a moment, then Nidia felt herself seized, and, with a whisper of caution, dragged down as though into the very earth itself. As a matter of fact this was nearly the case. The place she found herself in was a shallow donga, almost concealed by long gra.s.s and brambles, and these her companion was quickly but noiselessly dragging over her and himself.

Then had come the sound of footsteps, the hum of voices. She could see out through the gra.s.s that was over her, and that without moving a muscle. An _impi_ was approaching, and that in a line which should bring it right over their hiding-place; an _impi_ of considerable size, and which might have numbered some hundreds. The warriors were marching in no particular order, and she could make out every detail of their equipment--the great tufted shields and gleaming a.s.segais; rifles, too, many of them carried, and k.n.o.bkerries and battle-axes. Some were crested with great ostrich skin war-bonnets covering the head and shoulders, others wore the _isiqoba_, or ball of feathers, fixed to the forelock; a long wing feather of the kite or crane stuck through this, and rising horn-like above the head; and catskin _mutyas_ and anklets of flowing cowhair. At any other time she would have admired the spectacle exceedingly; now, however, in the grim dark faces and rolling eyeb.a.l.l.s she could see nothing but the countenances of bloodthirsty and pitiless fiends. Oh, Heaven! would they never pa.s.s? The throb of her heart-beats seemed loud enough to attract their attention and cause them to stop. But no sooner had one squad glided by than another appeared; and with the advent of each, to those who lay there, it seemed that the bitterness of death had to be gone through again. Several pa.s.sed so near to their hiding-place that the effluvium of their heated bodies reached the fugitives, musky and strong, but their attention was fixed upon the conversation of their fellows on the other side, and that peril was over. But not until nearly an hour had pa.s.sed since the last of the savages had disappeared, and the lingering drawl of their deep-toned voices had died away, would John Ames suffer his companion even so much as to whisper, let alone move.

Well, that peril had pa.s.sed over their beads, and now, in the well-nigh uninhabited fastnesses of the Matopo, they felt comparatively safe. And Nidia, remembering, and observing her fellow-fugitive and protector, would find herself twenty times a day making comparisons between him and all the other men she had ever known in a sense which was sadly unflattering to the latter; and an unconscious softness would come into her voice in conversing with him which was not a little trying to John Ames.

For if there was one point upon which the latter had made up his mind, it was that while Nidia was alone with him, and entirely under his care, he must never for a moment allow his feelings to get the better of him.

To do so under the circ.u.mstances was, rightly or wrongly, to take an advantage of the position, against which his principles rose up in revolt. Yet there were times when his guard would insensibly slacken, and his tone, too, would take on an unconscious softening.

They were fugitives, those two, hiding for their lives in the heart of a savage and hostile land, wherein well-nigh every one of their own colour had almost certainly been ma.s.sacred, yet to one of them, at any rate, the days that followed, that saw them hiding in and wandering through this grim rock wilderness, were days of sheer unadulterated delight.

Life in the open entailed upon him no privation--he was used to it; to rough it on coa.r.s.e and scanty fare he never felt, and as a price to pay for the happiness that was now his, why, it did not come in at all. To awaken in the morning to the consciousness that the whole day should be spent in the society and presence of this girl; that she was as absolutely dependent upon him--upon his care and protection--as she was upon the very air she breathed; that throughout the livelong day he would have in his ears the music of her voice, under his gaze the sunny witchery of that bright face, the blue eyes lighting up in rallying mockery, or growing soft and dewy and serious according to the thoughts discussed between them--all this was to John Ames rapture unutterable.

He looked back on his many communings in his solitary comings and goings, and how the thought of her alone had possessed his whole being, how he would sit for hours recalling every incident of their acquaintanceship, even--so vivid was memory--going over all that was said and done on each day of the same, and yet, running through all, the hope of meeting again, somehow, somewhere. And now they had met--not as he had all along pictured, under conventional circ.u.mstances and surrounded by others, but as the survivors of savage ma.s.sacre, who had been wonderfully thrown together, having pa.s.sed through an ordeal of tragedy and blood. Her very life was in his hands, and by a sure and certain instinct he knew that it was in his hands to save once more, even as he had done more than once already.

And that his cup of joy might be full, the way in which his charge accepted the position was perfect. Under the circ.u.mstances other women might well have given way. The very precariousness of their situation, recollection of the horrors and perils so lately pa.s.sed through, apprehensions as to the future, the necessary roughness of their life, the deprivation of a thousand and one of the many conveniences and comforts--great and small--of ordinary civilisation, the society of but one companion day after day--all might have conduced to low spirits and constraint and irritation, but nothing of the kind was manifest in Nidia Commerell. A day of complete rest in their snug hiding-place amid the rocks had completely set her up. The outdoor life and plain rough living, and sense of temporary security, had brought a healthy glow into her face, and the excitement and novelty of the position a brightness and sparkle into her eyes, that rendered her in the sight of her companion more entrancing to look upon than ever. Nor did she show the least tendency to become weary of him, any more than in that time, which now seemed so long back, when they were so much together amid surroundings of civilisation and peace. Her spirits were unflagging, her appreciation of his efforts and care for her comfort never wanting.

She, too, seemed to have made up her mind to put the past, with its grievous and terrible recollections, the future, with its apprehensive uncertainty, far from her, and to live in the present.

And at night, when the grim mountain solitudes would be awakened by strange eerie sounds--the weird bay of the jackal, the harsh truculent bark of the baboon, the howling of tiger wolves, and other mysterious and uncanny noises, exaggerated by echo, rolling and reverberating among the grim rocks--she would lie and listen, her eyes upon the patch of gushing stars framed in the black portal of their rocky retreat, alive to the ghostly gloom and vastness of the wilderness around; then, rejoicing in the sense of proximity, even the care, of one whose slumber was light unto wakefulness in the reliability of his guard over her, she would fall asleep once more in the restful security afforded by the contrast.

CHAPTER NINETEEN.

A FOOTPRINT IN THE SAND.

Reduced to existence in its most primitive state, it followed that the means of sustaining such existence were perforce primitive, and, foreseeing this, John Ames had managed, during their progress through the inhabited districts, to levy upon the grain fields. But although the supply was not yet exhausted, it had to be supplemented. There was no grain in the mountains, wherefore it became necessary to go out and hunt.

This primitive method of obtaining food was, however, handicapped by two important considerations. First, there was very little game indeed, most of that little consisted of birds--wild guinea-fowl, francolin, and a few partridges--and the hunter, though well set up in rifle ammunition, had no shot-gun. Much hard climbing sometimes produced a klip-springer; but this comes under the second of the two considerations, the inexpediency of discharging a firearm lest the report should reach undesirable ears. Fortunately John Ames, having been raised among natives, was an adept at throwing a kerrie, and with this primitive weapon was able to keep the larder supplied.

It meant hard work, though. Just as he would be congratulating himself upon having successfully stalked a troop of guinea-fowl, yet wanting a little shorter throwing-range, the abominable birds would raise their grating cackle of alarm, and, running like spiders through the gra.s.s, eventually wing their way to a lofty pile of boulders. Then the stalk had to be begun over again, involving unwearied patience and a well-nigh superhuman display of activity; involving, too, a more or less prolonged absence from camp.

Nidia, left alone during such absences, was obliged to summon all her courage, all her self-command. For she felt so thoroughly alone. The consciousness that no human being was within reach, that she stood solitary as she looked forth upon the tossing sea of granite crags and feathery foliage and frowning piles of rocks towering to the sky like giants' castles, would get upon her nerves to such an extent that when her companion was absent longer than usual she would become half frantic with uneasiness and fear. What if he should not come back? What if he should meet with an accident, a fall, perhaps, and perish miserably in those grim solitudes, alone, unaided, or, what was much more likely, allow himself to be surprised by the savage enemy? What would become of her? And then she would take herself to task. Was it only of herself she could think at such a time? Had she no thought for him and his safety? Ah! had she not? She could hardly disguise the truth from herself. It was of no use to reason that being thrown together she must perforce make the best of the companionship into which she was thrown.

She was face to face with the fact that John Ames was becoming very dear to her indeed.

More and more did each enforced absence emphasise this consciousness.

It did not lessen her uneasiness; indeed, if any thing, very much the reverse. But it changed the quality thereof. She thought less and less of what a mishap involving him would entail upon her, more and more of what it would mean on his account.

And yet this growing consciousness did not give rise to any alteration in their daily relations. Nidia Commerell's character was stamped with a very strong individuality. Prudery was utterly foreign to it, and she could not for the life of her see any necessity for affecting a reserve she did not feel, because she had for the first time in her life discovered a man possessed of every quality to which she could look up-- merely because she and that man happened to be alone together in a wilderness, in hiding for their lives. She smiled a little to herself as she thought of her people in England, and what they would say if they could see her now. Then she thought of their anxiety on hearing of the outbreak in Rhodesia, but they would not have time to be anxious before hearing of her safety. She wondered, too, whether Susie Bateman was becoming alarmed about her, and from that she got to thinking, not for the first time that afternoon, that John Ames was later than usual; and, thus thinking, she rose to look forth.

The sun was dipping to the serrated sky-line, bathing the granite-piles in a lurid flush. The light had gone off the wide hollow beneath, leaving its broken-up stormy billows cold and grey, and the hush of evening was in the air. Then a sound fell upon her ear, the sound as of a stone dislodged by a light footfall. Her pulse beat quicker. It was her companion returning at last.