The Claw Part 30

"G.o.d knows what I was made for," I answered bitterly. "I am beginning to wonder. But I am sure it was not to many you, Maurice. You must not think of this any further."

"Why not? Ah--but I know why not. You think Kinsella is still alive.

I know that is it. My poor child, how can you delude yourself so?"

"You don't know that it is a delusion," I said.

"But I do."

"You do not," I contended almost violently. "No one knows; no one can know for certain--"

"But I do," he repeated oddly: so oddly that my attention was arrested.

My heart stood still.

"What do you know?" I demanded, in a trembling voice. "What can you know that is not known to every one? And it is not enough. For me at least it is not enough."

In the long while that seemed to me to elapse before he made an answer I had time to soundlessly cry from my heart in exquisite bitterness and fear:

"Oh, G.o.d! spare me this... spare me this... let this pa.s.s."

Maurice Stair looked strangely pale standing there in the moonlight.

When he did speak his voice was low and stammering: but I heard his words as clearly as bells.

"I never told you before--it seemed unnecessarily brutal--but now I know that it was a mistake. I ought to have told you. I found something on the spot where the bones lay--something that made me absolutely certain that the man killed there was Tony Kinsella. I have never told any one of it. I--"

"How dared you keep it secret? Oh! how dared you? What was it? But I do not believe you--nothing will ever make me believe you."

I thought to cry the words in a ringing voice, but I found that I was speaking in a whisper. The ground was slipping away from beneath my feet; Africa was dragging her gift from my heart; my eyes dimmed; I swayed a little, almost falling: but still I whispered:

"I do not believe--I do not believe--"

At last I saw that he was holding something out towards me, and speaking:

"I searched long and well for the other--but--either it was washed away, or the kaffirs took it."

The thing that lay in the palm of his hand stared up at me like a dull blue eye. I took it with trembling, frozen fingers--_a little turquoise ear-ring_!

CHAPTER SIXTEEN.

WHAT A MAY DAY SAW.

"And are not afraid with any amazement."

"He is rich," said Judy for the twentieth time.

"And a clever business man. And he adores me. I do not see how you can think yourself justified in being so hard and unsympathetic about it, Deirdre. I am one of those extremely feminine women who must have some one to look after me. You can have no idea how wretched and lonely I am. It is all very well for you--so self-poised and full of character.

Women like you don't really know what it is to love and suffer. I don't believe tall women feel things like little women either; and I am so tiny--d.i.c.k always said I was like a tiny sweet rosebud."

"Oh, leave d.i.c.k out of it for G.o.d's sake, Judy," I groaned. "Content yourself with the words of Mr Courtfield now. Let poor d.i.c.k rest in his grave."

"How brutal you are, Deirdre!" A moment afterwards she added vindictively, "It is really the best thing that could have happened for both of us. You and I could not have got on together much longer. And I can see you are beginning to set my boy against me too."

"Oh, Judy!" I burst out pa.s.sionately, but the moment after my anger and indignation evaporated, and I felt nothing but the dull aching pain that would never leave me now. What did it matter what unjust, cruel words she spoke? What did anything matter? I did not care. I did not care about anything, nor want anything. Ah, yes! There was one thing I wanted burningly, consumingly, terribly: to leave the pitiless brute of a country that had beaten and broken and robbed me, that had ground me to powder in its cruel maw.

But I did not know how to go, nor where. And I knew not how I should bear to leave d.i.c.k's boy behind. I had no money, either. I must earn it first. And how to do that? In a country where there was nothing for a woman to do who had never been trained to work with her hands!

"What is there I can do?" I said to Maurice Stair. "For G.o.d's sake tell me how I can earn money to leave this country and never see it again."

"There is no way that a girl like you can earn money here," he said.

"There is only one thing to do, one thing which I am always urging--to marry: to marry me. Be my wife and I will take you away."

"Oh! don't, _don't_. How can you ask me that? You know I have nothing to give. You know I can never love you."

"I will make you love me, Deirdre," he cried, and even in my dull misery a ghostly smile twisted my lips to hear once more that vain-glorious boast so often on men's lips!

"I don't care--I will ask nothing of you--until you love me--Until then I want nothing of you, only to be near you, to have the right to take care of you, to give you all you wish for, to do all you desire. Oh!

Deirdre, do not turn away from me--I want you--I want you.--I am a failure and a good-for-nothing now, but with you at my side to help and guide me I feel that I could carve out a great career--make a great name for you to bear. I know that I have it in me to do great things, and for your sake and with you beside me I will do them. Why spoil two lives?--mine as well as your own. You say your life is a wasted one!

Don't let it be. Do something with it: make a man of me! Help me to become something, instead of pitching away my youth, a waster and loafer who will never do or be anything. If you refuse me, my life will be over as sure as I am standing here. G.o.d knows what will become of me."

He stood there pleading in his low, gentle voice, pale and handsome and chivalrous-looking in the moonlight--the liquid, silver, African moonlight that had tricked and mocked me! And the great, empty woman-land echoed back to me his pathetic pleading words. The scarlet stars hung overhead, and the golden moon that had seen Anthony Kinsella lying dead smiled down her mocking smile. Everything mocked me in this cruel land. How I hated it! How I hated the sun and moon and stars of it!

"_If you will take me away from Africa_!" I cried at last, hardly knowing what I said in my bitter pain.

"Yes--yes: I will do anything, everything you wish. We will marry and go away immediately afterwards. My uncle has great influence in diplomatic circles and can easily get me into the Consular service. We will go abroad and begin a splendid new life in some other land."

"You offer me too much," I said, "for I have nothing to give in return.

Do you understand that, Maurice? I can only give you my services as a sister, a companion, some one who will make your interests hers, entertain your friends, help you in your career--"

"I swear to G.o.d I will ask nothing more of you, Deirdre--until you love me."

"And you will take me away from Africa?"

"The minute I can break loose from my billet in the Chartered Company."

That is how I bartered myself away in marriage to Maurice Stair.

He was of my religion though he had never been what is called "a good Catholic." All _that_ was going to be altered now he told me, but I did not think very deeply about it. My faith required that I should marry a Catholic, but I had never cared for religious men, being content if those I closely knew were just clean-hearted and generous-minded gentlemen--"steel--true and blade-straight!"

We were married by one of the Jesuit fathers on a May morning a year and ten months after my first coming to Mashonaland. The thought of being married in May did not irk my superst.i.tious soul as once it might have done. It was unlucky every one said: but I knew that luck and I had parted company. She had done her worst, and thrown me over. I laughed with a wry lip when even Judy did not fail to repeat to me the old rhyme:

"Marry in May You'll rue the day,"

- just in case I might never have heard it before! I told her that rue had been my portion for such a good time now that I was used to the flavour, but it seemed to me the saying came with singular gracelessness from her lips, seeing how much she had to do with my choice of that--or any month in which to marry Maurice Stair.

It was to avoid seeing her marry John Courtfield, or in the alternative to prevent the scandal my absence from her wedding would cause, that I had let Maurice persuade me to be married at once instead of waiting for the end of June when his service as one of the Company's officials would be at an end. So after all, I should be obliged to stay another month in Rhodesia--and that as Maurice Stair's wife.

The arrangement was that after a few days on the farm of a friend of his we were to go for the rest of his service to a small new township in Matabeleland, where he would take over the work _pro tem_ of another man on leave. When I first heard of this I trembled and turned sick.