The Shadow of the Past Part 11

"Suppose I couldn't ride?" he asked.

She evinced surprise. Not ride! Every man rode.

"You do," she a.s.serted.

"As luck has it... but there are plenty of quite respectable persons in England who don't," he informed her. "Getting on and off busses in motion is a more useful accomplishment with us. To each country its own customs! Do we start now?"

"Yes; we will walk across to the stables." She flashed a smile at him.

"I am afraid we will have to saddle our own horses; there won't be any one about so early as this."

The business of getting the horses out took time. The sun was above the horizon when Matheson led them into the open, followed by Honor, who had done her share of the work. He held his hand for her, and a.s.sisted her to the saddle. Then he mounted himself. Honor sat quietly, with her face turned, and watched the performance. She had not expected him to be clumsy; his size and weight notwithstanding, he conveyed the impression that whatever he did he would do well. At least, she reflected, when, having gained the saddle, he brought his horse abreast of hers, his seat was good.

"Which direction do we take?" he asked.

She lifted a hand and pointed with her whip to some flat-topped hills far away, but standing out in the clear dry atmosphere, sharply defined against the blue cloudless sky like hills seen through a powerful gla.s.s.

"We will ride to the south," she said, "towards the tafel-kopjes yonder."

He looked down into her eyes.

"And there we shall find the beauty and the charm you promised?"

Honor returned his gaze with grave composure.

"That depends on yourself," she answered. "All this," and she indicated the wide and arid landscape, which, with the night dews still lingering on its gaping surfaces and sapless vegetation, sparkled in the early sunshine with a glitter as of silver and gems, "appeals to people differently. Some see in it beauty, and others only barrenness--but always it is impressive. It hurts or it pleases, according to the mood."

"But you believe I shall see its beauty," he said quietly.

"Yes," she answered; "I believe that--otherwise, I would not have suggested your coming."

They rode in silence for a while. Momentarily the sun gained power; the freshness of the early day yielded to its burning ardour, was caught up and enveloped in its heated embrace; the dew on the scant vegetation sparkled a moment and the next was absorbed; and the hot yellow stones basking in its rays revealed unexpected streaks of colour and fanciful patterns and quaint veinings, as they caught the refracted rays, and transmitted them, and gave back some of their a.s.similated heat into the shimmering air.

The soil became more sandy the farther they rode, and more arid; wide bare patches of sand appeared, and again other patches spa.r.s.ely covered with dry brown scrub. An occasional ostrich, suggestive of farms in the neighbourhood, wandered over the sunbaked ground, and pecked at the little stones. Here was Africa--the real Africa--untamed, barbaric, fiercely splendid, and cruel in its callous disregard of life.

Matheson's gaze travelled over the scene, travelled to the distant hills, and rested there. A dark shadow like a black stain lay upon the hillside, the curious effect of some unseen cloud. In his imagination it seemed a significant, even a sinister, shadow. He watched it for a time, but it moved so slowly that it did not appear to move at all, but to be in reality a black stain on the face of the land. He removed his gaze, and when later he looked again the shadow had pa.s.sed.

"This is the real thing," he said--"the key to Africa. The Karroo is the small sister of the Sahara."

Suddenly, moved by some unaccountable emotion, he turned towards her swiftly.

"How can you endure living here?" he asked. "The loneliness...

Heavens! the loneliness... It suggests a world in the making. The beauty! ... Yes, I acknowledge the beauty, the terrible beauty of it.

But--how often do you see a human face besides your own?"

She broke into a quiet laugh.

"Not often. But then, we are busy; we don't trouble about such things.

The blood of the old Voortrekkers runs in our veins. At least there is freedom here."

"G.o.ds! I should say so," he responded, and fell to contemplating once more the sameness of those leagues upon leagues of interminable, sun-scorched veld, with its dried-up water-courses, its gaping fissures, and scrubby blackened bush, among which at long intervals pushed the smooth green fingers of the milkbush, and the stunted, gnarled trunks of the b.u.t.terbloem, yellow as though smeared with sulphur, with bell-shaped flowers blooming on long blood-red stems. Boulders of iron-stone broke the sameness, and an occasional hill, rounded or peaked, not rising gradually but seeming to have been dumped down there, or happened otherwise by accident.

Honor's eyes rested dreamily upon the scene.

"You should see it after the rains fall," she said. "It is wonderful then."

"It is wonderful now," he returned. "I have never beheld anything so extraordinarily moving and impressive."

"But you don't like it," she said quickly.

"Oh, like! ... the term scarcely applies. I couldn't live here... I'd be afraid to live here--not physically, of course. I mean it's so immense, so unpeopled. The Karroo is jealous of life; it crushes it.

I'd go down under the spell of it. I can imagine a man falling into the habit of talking aloud to himself here--for company."

"One need not live alone," she said.

"You love the solitudes," he said, looking at her wonderingly.

"Yes; I suppose I do. I love the veld... It is my blood--that intense love of the land."

Her eyes, looking out from the shade of her helmet, dwelt with intense appreciation upon the shimmering landscape. All the wonder and the beauty and the richness of the plain, which appeared now but a blackened waste, was known to her. To the un.o.bservant gaze the scene might wear the semblance of an arid desert; but to one familiar with it through the different seasons the drought-stricken sterility which held the veld in a relentless, strangling grip was but the period of waiting when the land rested in expectation of the coming gift of life. With the rains the richness concealed in her dry bosom would spring forth and blossom prodigally, and the desert would be a garden, teeming with life.

"Love of the land!" she repeated softly. And added, after a moment: "Have you ever breathed air so good as this?--so light and clear and dry? There's health in every breath of it. One could see to the ends of the earth through air so pure and clear. There is health here, and freedom."

"It is a savage land," he said suddenly--"but it grips. It is the savagery which gets hold of one. I feel I want to tame it."

She laughed, and pointed upward where a vulture with great wings outspread flew heavily in the blue, sensing its prey.

"Could you tame the aasvogel," she asked, "till it ceases to be a carrion bird and eats from your hand? Could you teach the jackal to respect the lamb?--or the snake to forget its venom? I would hate to see this land subdued."

He smiled at her enthusiasm. There was something in herself which, if not exactly savage, was at least untamed, he reflected. Without thinking she had quickened her horse's pace. Matheson rode faster to keep up with her.

"I have disappointed you," he said.

"Oh, no!" she contradicted quickly. "It wasn't to be expected that you would feel as we do about the veld... But you see deeper than many Englishmen. You will love the land yet."

He made no answer to this. Had he put his thoughts into words, they would have claimed to love the land already. It was amazing how surely and firmly it had got a hold on his imagination. It was not only with his arrival at the farm, he told himself, that he had felt this extraordinary influence; but since he had come to Benfontein he had acquired a new sympathy with, and a deeper understanding of, the country. Honor Krige was teaching him that, and other things.

He had set forth that morning to behold the beauty and the charm of the veld; and, insensibly, while he gazed upon this sun-scorched sameness, the mystery and the beauty of it were revealed to him. The translucent air, quivering in the sunlight like some glad and living thing, was wondrously soft and stimulating; eye and brain cleared with its magic healing; the mind became surprisingly alert and receptive of new impressions. The sandy soil lost its aridity, and disclosed numberless unsuspected shining beauties; it glittered as with many gems, and revealed in places unexpected shades and colours, and curious, infinitesimal insect-life creeping and pushing upon its white surface.

The dry sluits and water-courses, proclaiming moisture where it would appear that moisture was unknown; the cairns of yellow stones, piled high in rude and strange formation; the yellow and red of the b.u.t.terbloem, crude intense colours in an intense atmosphere under the hard blue of the sky; the occasional oddly-shaped kopjes; the distant oasis of some lonely farm; each struck a separate note of beauty in this strange, uncivilised scene--a beauty that was fearful and fiercely a.s.sertive, that crushed the senses, that again attracted and held surely by the unfailing magnetism of elemental and sincere things. And over all the parched nakedness of the land the sun flung its golden radiance, a yellow flame that quivered through the hot air and pierced into the earth.

Matheson knew while his eyes lingered upon it all that he would in very truth love the land.

And then he turned his head suddenly and met Honor's eyes. She was smiling softly, but she did not speak.

CHAPTER TWELVE.

Freidja Krige went many times to the window to look for the riders'

return. She had prepared the breakfast; the sarsates were cooked and ready to be served, and Andreas had come in from the land and was waiting with extraordinary patience for the meal, which usually made its appearance with his own. He glanced up from an agricultural journal he was reading when for about the fourth time his sister came through from the kitchen and took her stand by the window and looked out across the veld.