The Top of the World Part 20

"Quite sure?" said Burke.

Something in his tone made her look up sharply. His eyes were intently and critically upon her, but the glow had gone out of them. They told her nothing.

"Do you think we need discuss this subject?" she asked him uneasily.

"Not if you prefer to shirk it," he said. She flushed a little.

"But I don't shirk. I'm not that sort."

"No," he said. "I don't think you are. You may be frightened, but you won't run away."

"But I'm not frightened," she a.s.serted boldly, looking him squarely in the face. "We are friends, you and I. And--we are going to trust each other. Being married isn't going to make any difference to us. It was just a matter of convenience and--we are going to forget it."

She paused. Burke's face had not altered. He was looking back at her with perfectly steady eyes.

"Very simple in theory," he said. "Won't you finish?"

"That's all," she said lightly. "Except--if you really want to kiss me now and then--you can do so. Only don't be silly about it!"

Burke's quick movement of surprise told her that this was unexpected. The two horses had recovered their wind and begun to nibble at one another. He checked them with a growling rebuke.

Then very quietly he placed Sylvia's bridle in her hand, and put her from him.

"Thank you," he said again. "But you mustn't be too generous at the outset. I might begin to expect too much. And that would be--silly of me, wouldn't it?"

There was no bitterness in voice or action, but there was unmistakable irony. A curious sense of coldness came upon her, as if out of the heart a distant storm-cloud an icy breath had reached her.

She looked at him rather piteously. "You are not angry?" she said.

He leaned back in the saddle to knock a blood-sucking fly off his horse's flank. Then he straightened himself and laughed.

"No, not in the least," he said.

She knew that he spoke the truth, yet her heart misgave her. There was something baffling, something almost sinister to her, in the very carelessness of his att.i.tude. She turned her horse's head and walked soberly away.

He did not immediately follow her, and after a few moments she glanced back for him. He had dismounted and was scratching something on the trunk of the blasted tree with a knife. The withered arms stretched out above his head. They looked weirdly human in the sunset glow. She wished he would not linger in that eerie place.

She waited for him, and he came at length, riding with his head up and a strange gleam of triumph in his eyes.

"What were you doing?" she asked him, as he joined her.

He met her look with a directness oddly disconcerting. "I was commemorating the occasion, he said.

"What do you mean?" she said.

"Never mind now!" said Burke, and took out his pipe.

The light still lingered in his eyes, firing her to something deeper than curiosity. She turned her horse abruptly.

"I am going back to see for myself."

But in the same moment his hand came out, grasping her bridle. "I shouldn't do that," he said. "It isn't worth it. Wait till we come again!"

"The tree may be gone by then," she objected.

"In that case you won't have missed much," he rejoined. "Don't go now!"

He had his way though she yielded against her will. They turned their animals towards Brennerstadt, and rode back together over, the sun-scorched _veldt_.

PART II

CHAPTER I

COMRADES

Some degree of normality seemed to come back into Sylvia's life with her return to Blue Hill Farm. She found plenty to do there, and she rapidly became accustomed to her surroundings.

It would have been a monotonous and even dreary existence but for the fact that she rode with Burke almost every evening, and sometimes in the early morning also, and thus saw a good deal of the working of the farm. Her keen interest in horses made a strong bond of sympathy between them. She loved them all. The mares and their foals were a perpetual joy to her, and she begged hard to be allowed to try her powers at breaking in some of the young animals.

Burke, however, would not hear of this. He was very kind to her, unfailingly considerate in his treatment of her, but by some means he made her aware that his orders were to be respected. The Kaffir servants were swift to do his bidding, though she did not find them so eager to fulfil their duties when he was not at hand.

She laughingly commented upon this one day to Burke, and he amazed her by pointing to the riding-whip she chanced to be holding at the time.

"You'll find that's the only medicine for that kind of thing," he said. "Give 'em a taste of that and they'll respect you!"

She decided he must be joking, but only a few days later he quite undeceived her on that point by dragging Joe, the house boy, into the yard and chastising him with a _sjambok_ for some neglected duty.

Joe howled l.u.s.tily, and Sylvia yearned to fly to the rescue, but there was something so judicial about Burke's administration of punishment that she did not venture to intervene.

When he came in a little later, she was sitting in their living-room nervously st.i.tching at the sleeve of a shirt that he had managed to tear on some barbed wire. He had his pipe in his hand, and there was an air of grim satisfaction about him that seemed to denote a consciousness of something well done.

Sylvia set her mouth hard and st.i.tched rapidly, trying to forget Joe's piercing yells of a few minutes before. Burke went to the window and stood there, pensively filling his pipe.

Suddenly, as if something in her silence struck him, he turned and looked at her. She felt his eyes upon her though she did not raise her own.

After a moment or two he came to her. "What are you doing there?"

he said.

It was the first piece of work she had done for him. She glanced up. "Mending your shirt," she told him briefly.

He laid his hand abruptly upon it. "What are you doing that for?

I don't want you to mend my things."

"Oh, don't be silly, Burke!" she said. "You can't go in tatters.

Please don't hinder me! I want to get it done."

She spoke with a touch of sharpness, not feeling very kindly disposed towards him at the moment. She was still somewhat agitated, and she wished with all her heart that he would go and leave her alone.