The Shadow of the Past Part 29

"You look," she said, a.s.suming a graceful pose by the head of the sofa upon which she leaned, "abnormally serious. I believe mother has been fault finding. Come and sit over here, and I'll comfort you."

He laughed, and answered her jestingly; but he did not avail himself of the invitation. That was the general idea in that house, that a man must be comfortably placed, and submit to being petted. Possibly some men liked petting, but that sort of thing was not in his line.

"It's getting late," he said, with an attentive eye on the clock, the big hand of which seemed to drag with such exasperating slowness. He felt grateful for the first time in their acquaintance to Mrs Aplin for silencing her daughter's protests against his leaving so soon.

"Whatever did you say to him to make him so huffy?" Rosie asked when he had gone. "I always knew he had a horrid temper."

"I warned him against that Upton girl. Those people are shameless in their pursuit of him. But he wouldn't hear a word. If he spends all his spare time with the girls in the cafes, I don't think it advisable to ask him out here any more."

"It will be a triumph for her if she succeeds in marrying him," May opined.

"Oh! he won't marry her. Men don't marry those sort of girls."

As an outcome of that unfortunate talk Matheson went the following afternoon in search of Brenda. It was a cold dark day. A south-east gale was blowing, and the town was enveloped in a sticky dust that clung to the clothes and hair. Grit and small pebbles were carried by the force of the wind and stung the unprotected faces of the few pedestrians who ventured abroad in the teeth of the gale. The clouds hung dense and low upon the mountain, pouring over the rocky sides with the effect of cascades of foam tumbling over a precipice. Matheson, with his head down, buffetted against the gale, and arrived damp and rather breathless at his destination. He was early. He had timed his arrival in the hope of getting Brenda to himself. He asked for Brenda on being admitted.

She came to him almost immediately, and it was manifest from her manner that his visit was unexpected.

She shook hands, looked out at the lowering sky and the waving branches of the trees, and smiled.

"You are brave to venture out in this," she said.

"I've been lonely for a week," he replied, as though that explained everything, as perhaps it did; "an earthquake couldn't have kept me away to-day."

The wind rattled the window, and flung a shower of tiny stones against the gla.s.s.

"G.o.d! how it blows!" he cried. He drew her to the sofa, and seated himself beside her.

"I'm not in the way, am I? You weren't lying down?"

"No." She laughed brightly. "I don't do those nice reposeful things even on a Sunday afternoon. Mother is resting though, and I imagine every one else in the house. There is nothing much to do with a black south-easter blowing."

"We won't disturb them," he said, and smiled at her. "I am needing at the moment only you. You don't mind if I stay?"

She looked surprised at this question, and answered in the negative.

"You've made me dependent on you somehow," he explained. "I've never felt so intolerably lonely as during this past week. You ought not to teach me to rely on you and then send me into banishment. It isn't kind."

"But," she protested quickly, a soft amazement in her voice, "I never suggested that I didn't wish to see you."

"I know," he said, "but..."

He paused, and regarded her fixedly. Their eyes met for a moment; then she turned her gaze from his deliberately and looked out through the window, an expression of distressed embarra.s.sment sweeping over her face. He stretched an arm along the back of the sofa behind her and leaned slightly towards her.

"That isn't enough," he said--"not as things stand. You see, I can't always have your comradeship that way. The time will come--it's approaching now--when my work will take me away from here. What's the good of friendship then? When I go, I'll miss you--as I have missed you this week. I can't face it. I've grown to want you. I want to keep you with me. There's only one way to do that, and I'm not sure you'll agree to it. Had I been sure I'd have said all this weeks ago. But you... you haven't let me somehow. You've held me off. And since that day at the Monument I've been conscious of--a sort of estrangement. You made me feel that I haven't enough to offer--"

"No," she interrupted sharply. "Surely not that?"

The tears rose in her eyes: slowly they overflowed and rolled down her cheeks. She made no effort to stay them. She sat still with her face averted and wept silently.

"I'm a clumsy fool," he said; "I hurt you without intending it. And you're so sweet and kind... Dear, if you will marry me I will do everything a man can do to make you happy."

Never one word of love! ... Not one word of love had he ever let fall in all their talks together. She dropped her quivering face suddenly between her hands to hide its sorrow from him.

"All that I have to give is yours," she whispered--"everything... If all my love can help you just a little I will be glad. I've loved you-- from that first morning when you spoke to me on the beach."

He put his arms about her and drew her close and held her, still weeping, with her face hidden upon his shoulder--giving all of herself to him, taking the little that he offered, because she was a woman in love who must have denied the crumbs of his affection.

"I couldn't bear to lose you," she sobbed... "I couldn't bear it. I've thought I couldn't marry you even if you wished it, but--I can't--give you up."

Without answering her, he kissed her, if not with pa.s.sion, with a great tenderness and an almost reverential grat.i.tude; and in his heart he resolved that he would make good to her in every way in which it was humanly possible for the one thing which he could not give her--that which was given already, and which no one can give twice--the pure flame of a first pa.s.sion. The love which he had for her was the steady glow which succeeds the fierce upward flash of the white flame that leaps from the heart and leaves behind only memories.

CHAPTER TWENTY SIX.

It seemed to Matheson that with his engagement events multiplied with such amazing rapidity that the deep significance of the step he had taken was lost sight of; its importance was swamped in the whirlpool of calamitous happenings that marked the year of 1914 in b.l.o.o.d.y letters upon the calendar of the world.

It was in July that he became engaged, and within a week of his proposal the world war had made its puling start with the faked dispute over an a.s.sa.s.sinated archduke. The insignificant start swelled to compelling significance; and the world awaited with suspended breath each new development of the most appalling disaster in the history of the nations. From the first Matheson had no doubt that Great Britain would be forced into the struggle. There was no choice about it; it was a question of national safety as well as of honour. He began to consider the subject in connexion with himself. Plainly if the country went to war it was his duty to see the matter through. Quite apart from inclination the man of military age and fitness was called upon to serve.

He talked to Macfarlane about it. Macfarlane was cautious and reserved his opinion.

"You've got a girl now," he said. "You've got to consider her."

"But that's all the greater reason why a man should stand by his country," Matheson insisted.

"Better talk it over with her first. And, look here!" Macfarlane became more alert. "This trouble, if it involves England, is going to reach out here. Have you forgotten your talk about a Boer rebellion? I thought you were rotting at the time--but you weren't. You are something of a prophet, you know, Matheson. If England is full up with her own affairs, that's just the time the Boers will seize for getting hold of this country. It's all cut and dried, you can depend on that.

Should there be trouble out here," Macfarlane added in a hard decisive voice, "I am for helping to quell that anyway. If your talk of colonisation is worth anything, you will do the same."

Matheson made no immediate answer. Macfarlane's speech somehow visualised for him the whitewashed walls of Benfontein, and Honor's face showing wanly in the moonlight while the low-pitched voice breathed its earnest question: "I wonder if you will ever see into the heart of the veld?"

"I can't tell what I'll do," he answered after a long silence, and got up and went away with rather surprising suddenness.

July ended and August came in on the pathetic note of Belgium's appeal against the savage b.e.s.t.i.a.lity of this new-born oppression which overran her territory, an appeal to which there could be but one answer. The hour for Great Britain's intervention struck with that piteous cry for help.

To Matheson, after the first shock of amaze wore off, it did not appear so much a question of a European crisis as of the deepening of that sinister shadow which stretched its forbidding length across this land.

Dark though the cloud of war loomed in Europe, this lesser cloud, which lay like a black stain upon the sunlit peacefulness, was even more tragic in the bitter personal nature of its animus. If no human agency could disperse this cloud, brother would be against brother, friend against friend.

Matheson did not believe that anything would avert the disaster. Quite clearly he saw it coming. Every word in Holman's letter was indelibly fixed in his memory--the letter which Honor had read to him, and which breathed through every line the insidious cunning of the spy who is paid to organise rebellion. It was coming surely, and it would come soon.

The first intimation of active trouble revealed itself in the impudent invasion of the Union by a German force from South-West Africa, an act of war that could have originated only in a confident a.s.surance of a prompt and general rising of the Boers.

Matheson applied to his firm for leave to volunteer, and received immediate permission. He was in a state of considerable indecision.

His interest in the country inclined him to stay to defend it. Had it been a matter simply of fighting the Germans there would have been no hesitation in respect of choice; but he felt an increasing reluctance to take the field against Honor's people. They were wrong, they were wholly mistaken; but at bottom, the motives which actuated the majority of them were pure in conception. If later in the heat of conflict, and with a free rein given to hatred, some among them lowered their ideals and committed base acts, these were in the minority. He knew what they would fight for--Liberty. Man has sought after and fought for his ideal of liberty since the beginning of time.

One result of the war was to precipitate his marriage. Whether he went to Europe, or whether he remained in the Colony and joined the Union forces, now commanded by the Premier since General Beyers' resignation of troops he knew he could never take over with him in his treacherous alliance with the Germans, the question of Brenda's future could not remain unsettled.

He took her for a walk and discussed the matter with her.

"I can't, you see," he said, "go away and leave you at the cafe. I want to provide for you. It will be an inadequate provision, but it will be an improvement on the cafe. I can't leave you there. I don't like your being there. I've never liked it. It's rather inconsiderate to hurry you like this... Do you mind?"

"No. I can be ready as soon as you wish. But if you go to Europe I'll go too. I could put my hand to something to help. At least," she said, smiling, "I could undertake canteen work. I'm qualified for that. You wouldn't object to my doing that--for the war?"