The Shadow of the Past Part 27

"I think you are a brave, dear little soul. Your friendship is an immense help to me. It's the best thing that has happened to me. I've been back in Cape Town three months now, and I've come out here alone and thought about our jolly walks and missed you more than I can say.

It was good to find you unexpectedly like that to-day."

Brenda glanced at him swiftly.

"You came into the cafe last week," she said, "and stood close to me. I could have touched you."

"Really?" he exclaimed in amaze. "Why in the name of mystery didn't you speak to me?"

"I wasn't sure you would be pleased. I thought--perhaps you didn't wish to see me."

"Oh Lord!" he cried, and laughed. "You--Puritan, you! As though I could be anything but pleased to see you anywhere. I don't know how I came not to see you... But I'm eyes right generally with all those girls around. If you hadn't returned my change--"

"Your tip," she corrected.

"My tip, then." He laughed again light-heartedly.--"I doubt I'd have noticed you at all. What made you do it?"

"I don't know. It was quite a handsome tip for a cafe. But I could not take it--from you."

She did not add that besides her reluctance to take his tip, she had desired to make him recognise her--had wanted to prove to her own satisfaction whether his former omission was intentional or merely the accident he now a.s.sured her it had been. She had believed it to be accidental, but at the back of her mind there had lingered a doubt; and the doubt hurt.

"I don't want you to take tips from any one," he said. "Promise me...

I don't like the thought of your being offered tips. I don't like to think of your serving people. It's ridiculous, perhaps, but I would rather you were still in attendance on that immoral old woman. She was an immoral old woman. I'd like to tell her how her conduct strikes an outsider."

"I prefer the cafe," Brenda said. "At least, there's a mental freedom.

Often I am tired, and frequently I am annoyed; but there's a sort of liberty... After all, liberty is the best thing in life. And it's good to get home at night-time," she added on a softened note.

Home consisted of one room, but in that room her mother waited for her, and that meant everything.

"On the whole," he said lightly, "you're a lucky person. I get off at night, but I can't get home. There's the ocean between me and all the home I ever knew."

He described his home to her briefly, and his parentless childhood.

"One day I hope to make a home of my own," he finished reflectively, and after a brief pause proceeded to unburden himself of his ambitions to her in much the same words as he had confided them to Macfarlane. Then, drawing on his imagination, he enlarged and elaborated his schemes, almost forgetting his audience in the pleasure of thinking out and developing his views of life, evolved in the first instance from Nel's opinions.

She listened in an attentive silence, which she did not break when he ceased talking. For the life of her she could find nothing to say. It sounded so coldblooded this deliberate purpose of marriage for certain ends, with a definite idea of colonisation, and no thought, it seemed to her, of love or the needs of the girl he would single out for his purpose. She felt the keen breath of disappointment chilling her liking for him.

"You don't say anything," he observed, slightly aggrieved. "I don't believe you are the least interested. You don't enter into the spirit of Empire building."

She was looking away, seaward, and the moonlight, falling upon her face, lent it a strange pallor, and revealed the soft roundness of its outline and the shadowed mystery of her eyes. Quietly, and very deliberately she turned her face towards him, and he noticed when she moved the quick, nervous beat of a tiny pulse in the bare white throat, and the faint, half-wistful smile that curved the parted lips.

"Oh, Empire building!" she said indifferently. "What of the human need?

... Isn't that more important? You are overlooking that, and yet it's the most important thing of all. I don't think so much of the Empire.

Of course I'm patriotic; but the human need comes first."

He did not answer immediately. He looked into her eyes, puzzled and disquieted, and reflected a while. The patriotism that Honor had stirred into active being was questioned and opposed by this other girl's quiet insistence on the claim of the individual. Was he in danger of developing into a bloodless idealist, with a limited understanding of the requirement both of the individual and of the State?

So many emotions had held him of late for a s.p.a.ce, so many thoughts had filtered through his brain and left their conflicting impressions there, that a certain confusion held possession of his mind. All the old warm impulses were subdued and dulled, and he had nothing in the place of them that was as good as the emotions he repressed. He realised that now. Something--something enveloping, stultifying and bewildering the understanding--dropped away from his soul, as a leaf drops from the tree which no longer nourishes it. He saw clearly how surely, through disappointment, he was drifting towards a hard callousness that would end inevitably in all the kindly human sensibilities becoming submerged therein and ultimately lost. He did not want that to happen. And yet he felt that he had no power to stay this drifting. The warm, generous youth of him was running back, as the sap runs back in the bark; and he was no more able to prevent this than the tree to stay the processes of nature. He had believed that he had discovered the purpose of life: now he was beginning to realise that he had discovered nothing, only lost something of worth, which he might never recover.

"It's odd," he remarked, "how you set me thinking. I never met any one who challenged thought as you do. I believed I was on the right tack, and you immediately point out that I've got my values wrong. It's like having one's sums crossed out on the slate when one fancied the answers were correct. There's a baffling sort of feeling about it. And you're right, that's the worst of it."

"It's only your values that are wrong," she said quietly. "If you readjust those, then the idea is fine enough."

In confiding his plans to her he had intended to prepare her for the proposal of marriage he had in contemplation, and to accustom her to the idea of marriage with a man who could never be a lover. He did not know whether she divined his purpose, but he apprehended very clearly that she would not be satisfied with that.

CHAPTER TWENTY FOUR.

Matheson made Mrs Upton's acquaintance on the following Sunday. He called at the boarding house and had tea in the shabby general sitting-room, and allowed himself to be drawn out by Brenda's mother, who was plainly bent on learning all she could concerning him before and since his intimacy with her daughter.

He succeeded on the whole in impressing her favourably, despite a natural prejudice she entertained against the unconventional manner in which the acquaintance had begun, and a further disapproval of the nightly excursions which Brenda made under his escort, a custom which allied itself with her present occupation but was not the custom of her cla.s.s. Without a home, a girl was so handicapped. She felt their social downfall more bitterly on her daughter's account than ever she had felt it on her own.

She resembled her daughter in appearance, and also in manner. Before life had bruised her she had possibly been a very entertaining woman.

She possessed still a certain charm, and had an alert way of expressing herself which appealed to the listener. Matheson was conscious primarily of an immense relief. He had rather dreaded this meeting with Brenda's mother. Why he should have expected anything so wildly improbable he could not tell, but he had antic.i.p.ated a replica of Mrs Aplin. But this little quiet-eyed woman was altogether different; and her bright way of saying the unexpected thing pleased him. If her life had known unusual distress, she had not permitted herself to go down under them, but kept a brave front to the world, hiding even from her daughter the humiliation she experienced in coming back to the place where she and her misfortunes were so well known.

Brenda poured out the tea and left the talking princ.i.p.ally to the others. She was almost nervously anxious that this man whom she already liked so well should win her mother's approval. Mrs Upton had expressed doubts as to the desirability of this casual friendship.

Matheson's request for permission to call had done much towards mislaying these misgivings; but the ultimate decision, Brenda felt, rested with himself. She wanted him to shine, to say brilliant things; and all the while he was behaving in a perfectly correct and commonplace manner. She had not believed he could be so dull. It exasperated her.

And when he rose to go he did not suggest, as she hoped he would, that they should go for a walk. Possibly, she reflected resentfully, he had other calls to make and did not want her company. It never occurred to her that he was regulating his conduct with a view to its effect upon her mother. It surprised her when he was gone to hear her mother praise in him the characteristics which she deplored.

"But he wasn't at his best," she protested. "I never knew him to be so dull."

"He is a very interesting man," Mrs Upton declared. "It was you who were a little dull. You scarcely spoke to him." She laughed suddenly.

"Perhaps he is one of those men who like an audience; otherwise I don't see what he gets out of it, if you are not more eloquent alone with him than you were to-day."

"Yes, he needs an audience. He always does most of the talking," Brenda said.

After that Sunday it became a weekly custom for Matheson to call in the afternoon. Generally he took Brenda out somewhere, and when he brought her back he stayed for a chat with her mother, and occasionally had tea with them. He took them to the theatre, and to any entertainment he thought might give them pleasure. And once, despite a natural shrinking on Mrs Upton's part to be seen in public, he persuaded them to dine with him at the Mount Nelson. That evening stuck in his memory. It was the first occasion on which he had seen Brenda in evening dress. She looked well, and was animated and almost brilliant. He felt proud to be seen with her.

Mrs Upton was considerably perplexed. It was quite manifest to her that Matheson was making up his mind to propose to her daughter, if indeed it was not already made up; but she could discover in his undoubted affection for Brenda nothing of the quality of pa.s.sionate love. This disturbed her. Matheson's quiet affection seemed to her a wholly inadequate return for the devotion of the girl's whole heart. It was no secret from her mother that Brenda was very much in love. It was the girl's first and only love affair, and it absorbed her entirely.

Should anything interpose between her love and its fulfilment the result might easily lead to a lifelong disappointment.

Mrs Upton, realising this perfectly, could only stand by and watch the course of events shaping themselves to the making or the marring of her daughter's happiness. There were times when she wished Matheson had not come into the girl's life; though all the glamour and romance her life had known had come to her through him. She wished too that he had not been so sure of Brenda. The girl's devotion shone in her look.

But Matheson, though he had no doubt of Brenda's love, was not so confident of winning her as her mother believed. In all the weeks of their renewed friendship he had not uttered one word of love to her, had attempted none of those affectionate familiarities he had practised during the early days of their acquaintance. The kiss she had given him in the road at their first parting was the only kiss he had received from her. Something in the girl's manner silenced him.--It may have been that the mere knowledge that she loved him, acted as a restraint; possibly too the lukewarm quality of his own desires caused him to hesitate ere taking the irrevocable step he contemplated. He was sure of the girl's love, but he could not feel positive as to her answer.

Nor was he satisfied that perfect happiness would result from an alliance based on such inequalities of affection. She had set this doubt working in his mind, and he was powerless to determine it, or to put it aside. The matter occasioned him endless thought and worry.

At times he felt like taking the plunge and leaving the doubts to resolve themselves; and then her quiet face, with the earnest eyes lit with love for him, gave him pause, and he decided to wait and allow the friendship to develop. Already it had grown deep enough to make him conscious of his need of her. The idea of letting her drop out of his life again was altogether unthinkable. She was necessary to him. He did not understand it, but he realised it perfectly. Out of the odd confection of human emotions that swayed him, his dependence on Brenda, even the inconsistent urgency of his requirement of her love, stood out and dominated the rest. He wanted her; he had no longer any doubt about that.

And yet when he was alone, and at night-time, it was seldom of Brenda he thought Even when he was with her the memory of Honor thrust between them, a beautiful, intangible obstruction keeping them apart.

The time came when he felt the necessity to talk to her about Honor. He did not stop to consider whether it was wise to do so; something impelled him to speak of this matter which alone formed a bar to their complete understanding. He could not, he found, ask Brenda to marry him without confiding to her something of that part of his life the influences of which intervened between them.

It was on a Sunday afternoon that Matheson chose to unburden himself.

He took Brenda to see the Rhodes' Memorial--the fine unfinished work of Watts, emblematic of Rhodes' unfinished work--for that matter, emblematic of the unfinished work of any human span.

It was a day of brilliant sunshine and cool winds, such as one gets during the Cape winter, and which one can only compare with spring weather in England, or an early autumn day before the leaves fall. They went out by tram, and walked through the wonderful grounds of Groot Schuur, that magnificent home of a wealthy, ambitious, brilliant man, who dreamed of Empire expansion, and who realised a part, though never the entire dream.

Silent and a little weary, they followed the broad gravelled drive to the temple where the eight bronze lions guard the steps which lead up to the lonely enshrined bust of a strong man who, for all his greatness, despite wealth and success and numberless friends, stands out a lonely figure in the history of his time.

They walked up the broad stone steps and stood before the fine thoughtful face, lifelike in its quiet abstraction, gazing towards the north, as Watts' equestrian statue of Energy gazes, through eternal sunlit s.p.a.ces, across rich plains of unsurpa.s.sed beauty, towards the mountains and the remote distances of that hinterland which lies beyond them, and in which Rhodes' hopes and thoughts were centred.