Tween Snow and Fire Part 23

"Is he--is he--is it the worst!" she managed to get out.

"It is the worst," he answered simply, deeming it best to get it over as soon as possible.

For a minute he seemed to have reason to congratulate himself on this idea. The rigid stony horror depicted on her features relaxed, giving way to a dazed, bewildered expression, as though she had borne the first brunt of the shock, and was calming down.

"Tell me!" she gasped at length. "How was it? When? Where?"

"It was across the Bashi. They were cut off by the Kafirs, and killed."

"`They'? Who--who else?"

Shelton wished the friendly earth would open beneath his feet then and there.

"Mrs Carhayes, pray be calm," he said unsteadily. "You have heard the worst, remember--the worst, but not all. You cousin shared poor Tom's fate."

"Eustace?"

The word was framed, rather than uttered, by those livid and bloodless lips. Yet the listener caught it and bent his head in a.s.sent.

She did not cry out; she did not swoon. Yet those who beheld her almost wished she had done both--anything rather than take the blow as she was doing. She stood there in the doorway--her tall form seeming to tower above them--her large eyes sparkling forth from her livid and bloodless countenance--and the awful and set expression of despair imprinted therein was such as the two who witnessed it prayed they might never behold on human countenance again.

She had heard the worst--the worst, but not all--her informant had said.

Had she? The mockery of it! The first news was terrible; the second-- death; black, hopeless, living death. Had heard the worst! Ah, the mockery of it! And as these reflections sank into her dazed brain-- driven in, as it were, one after another by the dull blows of a hammer, her lips even shaped the ghost of a smile. Ah, the irony of it!

Still she did not faint. She stood there in the doorway, curdling the very heart's blood of the lookers on with that dreadful shadow of a smile. Then, without a word, she turned and walked to her room.

"Oh! I must go to her!" cried Mrs Hoste eagerly. "Oh, this is too fearful."

"If you take my advice--it's better not! Not at present, at any rate,"

answered Shelton. "Leave her to get over the first shock alone. And what a shock it is. Bereaved of husband and cousin at one stroke. And the cousin was almost like a brother, wasn't he?"

"Yes," and the recollection of her recent suspicions swept in with a rush upon the speaker's mind, deepening her flurry and distress. "Yes.

That is--I mean--Yes, I believe she was very fond of him. But how bravely she took it."

"Rather too bravely," answered the other with a grave shake of the head.

"I only hope the strain may not be too much for her--affect her brain, I mean. Mrs Carhayes has more than the average share of strong-mindedness, yet she strikes me as being a woman of extraordinarily strong feeling. The shock must have been frightful, and although she didn't scream or faint, the expression of her face was one that I devoutly hope never to see upon any face again. And now, good-bye for the present. I'll call around later and hear how she's getting on. Poor thing!"

The sun of her life had set--had gone down into black night--yet the warm rays of the summer sunshine glanced through the open window of her room, glowing down upon the wide _veldt_ outside and upon the distant sparkle of the blue sea. Never again would laughter issue from those lips--yet the sound of light-hearted chat and peals of mirth was ever and anon borne from without. The droning hum of insects in the afternoon air--the clink of horse-hoofs, the deep-toned conversation of natives pa.s.sing near the window--all these familiar sounds of everyday life found a faint and far-away echo in her benumbed brain. What, though one heart was broken--the world went on just the same.

Stay! Was it but a few minutes ago that she pa.s.sed out through that door trilling the cheerful fragments of the airiest of songs--but a few minutes since she picked up that fatal sc.r.a.p of paper, and then stood face to face with those who brought her news which had laid her life in ruins! Only a few minutes! Why, it seemed years--centuries--aeons.

Was it a former state of existence that upon which she now looked back as across a great and yawning gulf? Was she now dead--and was this the place of torment? The fire that burned forever and ever! How should she quench the fire in her heart and brain?

There was a very stoniness about her grief as if the blow had petrified her. She did not fling herself upon the couch in her agony of despair.

No tears did she shed--better if she had. For long after she had gained her room and locked herself in alone she stood--stood upright--and finally when she sought a chair it was mechanically, as with the movement of a sleep walker. Her heart was broken--her life was ended.

He had gone from her--it only remained for her to go to him.

And then, darting in across her tortured brain, in fiery characters, came the recollection of his own words--spoken that first and last blissful morning at Anta's Kloof. "If we are doing wrong through love for each other we shall have to expiate it at some future time. We shall be made to suffer _through_ each other," and to this she had responded "Amen." How soon had those words come true. The judgment had fallen. He had gone from her, but she could not go to him. Their love, unlawful in this world, could never be ratified in another. And then, indeed, there fell upon her the gloom of outer darkness. There was no hope.

CHAPTER TWENTY SIX.

"AND THE SUMMER'S NIGHT IS A WINTER'S DAY."

For Eanswyth Carhayes the sun of life had indeed set.

The first numbing shock of the fearful news over, a period of even greater agony supervened. He who had succeeded in setting free the wholly unsuspected volcanic fires of her strong and pa.s.sionate nature-- him, her first and only love--she would never see again in life. If she had sinned in yielding to a love that was unlawful, surely she was expiating it now. The punishment seemed greater than she could bear.

She made no outcry--no wild demonstrations of grief. Her sorrow was too real, too sacred, for any such commonplace manifestations. But when she emerged from her first retirement, it was as a walking ghost. There was something about that strained and unnatural calm, something which overawed those who saw it. She was as one walking outside the world and its incidents. They feared for her brain.

As the days slipped by, people wondered. It seemed strange that poor Tom Carhayes should have the faculty of inspiring such intense affection in anybody. No one suspected anything more than the most ordinary of easy-going attachment to exist between him and his wife, yet that the latter was now a broken-hearted woman was but too sadly obvious. Well, there must have been far more in the poor fellow than he had generally been credited with, said the popular voice, and after all, those outside are not of necessity the best judges as to the precise relationship existing between two people. So sympathy for Eanswyth was widespread and unfeigned.

Yet amid all her heart-torture, all her aching and hopeless sorrow, poor Tom's fate hardly obtruded itself. In fact, had she been capable of a thorough and candid self-a.n.a.lysis she would have been forced to admit that it was rather a matter for gratulation than otherwise, for under cover of it she was enabled to indulge her heart-broken grief to the uttermost. Apart from this, horrible as it may seem, her predominating feeling toward her dead husband was that of intense bitterness and resentment. He it was who had led the others into peril. That aggressive fool-hardiness of his, which had caused her many and many a long hour of uneasiness and apprehension, had betrayed him to a barbarous death, and with it that other. The cruel irony of it, too, would burst upon her. He had avenged himself in his very death--had broken her heart.

Had Tom Carhayes been the only one to fall, it is probable that Eanswyth would have mourned him with genuine--we do not say with durable--regret.

It is possible that she might have been afflicted with acute remorse at the part she had played. But now all thoughts of any such thing faded completely from her mind, obliterated by the one overwhelming, stunning stroke which had left her life in shadow until it should end.

Then the Rangers had returned, and from the two surviving actors in the terrible tragedy--Payne and Hoste, to wit--she learned the full particulars. It was even as she had suspected--Tom's rashness from first to last. The insane idea of bushbuck hunting in a small party in an enemy's country, then venturing across the river right into what was nothing more nor less than a not very cunningly baited trap--all was due to his truculent fool-hardiness. But Eustace, knowing that her very life was bound up in his--how could _he_ have allowed himself to be so easily led away? And this was the bitterest side of it.

To the philosophic and somewhat cynical Payne this interview was an uncomfortable one, while Hoste subsequently p.r.o.nounced it to be the most trying thing he had ever gone through in his life.

"Is there absolutely no hope?" Eanswyth had said, in a hard, forced voice.

The two men looked at each other.

"Absolutely none, Mrs Carhayes," said Payne. "It would be sham kindness to tell you anything different. Escape was an impossibility, you see. Both their horses were killed and they themselves were surrounded. Hoste and I only got through by the skin of our teeth. If our horses had `gone under' earlier it would have been all up with us, too."

"But the--but they were not found, were they? They may have been taken prisoners."

Again the two men looked at each other. Neither liked to give utterance to what was pa.s.sing through his mind. Better a hundredfold the unfortunate men were dead and at rest than helpless captives in the hands of exasperated and merciless savages.

"Kafirs never do take prisoners," said Payne after a pause. "At least, never in the heat and excitement of battle. And it is not likely that Carhayes or Milne would give them a chance, poor chaps."

"You mean--?"

"They would fight hard to the bitter end--would sell their lives dearly.

I am afraid you must face the worst. I wish I could say otherwise, but I can't. Eh, Hoste?"

The latter nodded. He had very willingly allowed the other to do all the talking. Then, as all things come to an end sooner or later--even Wigmore Street--so eventually did this trying interview.

"I say, George. That just was a bad quarter of an hour," said Hoste, as the two companions-in-arms found themselves once more in their favourite element--the open air, to wit. "I don't want to go through it again many times in a lifetime. If ever there was `broken heart,' writ large in any woman's face, it is on that of poor Mrs Carhayes. I believe she'll never get over it."

Payne, who had shown himself far from unfeeling during the above-mentioned trying interview, regarded this remark as a direct challenge to the ingrained cynicism of his nature.

"You don't, eh?" he replied. "Well, I don't want to seem brutal, Hoste, but I predict she'll be patching up that same `broken heart' in most effective style at some other fellow's expense, before the regulation two years are over. They all do it. Lend us your 'bacco pouch."