Tween Snow and Fire Part 31

For they who look upon the Home of the Serpents are seen no more in life. Thou hast seen the last of yon white man, Ixeshane; thou and these standing around here. Ha, ha! Better for him that he had never been born." And with a Satanic laugh she turned away and left him.

Strong-nerved as he was, Eustace felt his flesh creep. The hag's parting words hinted at some mysterious and darkly horrible fate in store for his unfortunate cousin. His own precarious position brought a sense of this doubly home to him. He remembered how jubilant poor Tom had been over the outbreak of the war. This, then, was to be the end of it. Instead of paying off old scores with his hated and despised foes, he had himself walked blindfold into the trap, and was to be sacrificed in some frightful manner to their vengeance.

CHAPTER THIRTY THREE.

"I WALK IN SHADOW."

Eanswyth was back again in her old home--living her old life, as in the times that were past--but alone.

When she had announced her intention of returning to Anta's Kloof, her friends had received the proposition with incredulity--when they saw that she was determined, with dismay.

It was stark lunacy, they declared. She to go to live on an out-of-the-way farm, alone! There was not even a neighbour for pretty near a score of miles, all the surrounding stock-farmers having trekked into _laager_. The Gaikas were reported more restless than ever, nor were symptoms wanting that they were on the eve of an outbreak. The Gcaleka campaign had fired their warlike spirits, but had failed to convey its accompanying warning, and those "in the know" a.s.serted that the savages might rise any minute and make common cause with their countrymen across the Kei. And in the face of all this, here was Eanswyth proposing to establish herself on a lonely farm bordering on the very location of the plotting and disaffected tribesmen. Why, it was lunacy--rank suicide!

The worst of it was that n.o.body on earth had the power to prevent her from doing as she chose. Her own family were Western Province people and lived far up in the Karroo. Had they been ever so willing, it would take them nearly three weeks to arrive--by which time it might be too late. But Eanswyth did not choose to send for any one. She wanted to be alone.

"You need not be in the least alarmed on my account," she had said to the Hostes in answer to their reiterated expostulations. "Even if the Gaikas should rise, I don't believe they would do me the slightest harm.

The people on Nteya's location know me well, and the old chief and I used to be great friends. I feel as if I must go to my old home again-- and--don't think me ungracious, but it will do me good to be entirely alone."

"That was how poor Milne used to argue," said Hoste gravely. "But they killed him all the same."

"Yes," she replied, mastering the quick sharp spasm which the allusion evoked. "But they were Gcalekas--not our people, who knew him."

Hoste shook his head.

"You are committing suicide," he said. "And the worst of it is we have no power on earth to prevent you."

"No, you haven't," she a.s.sented with the shadow of a smile. "So let me go my own way with a good grace. Besides, with old Josane to look after me, I can't come to much harm."

She had telegraphed to her late husband's manager at Swaanepoel's Hoek, requesting him to send the old cattle-herd to her at once. Three days later Josane arrived, and having commissioned Hoste to buy her a few cows and some slaughter sheep, enough to supply her modest household.

Eanswyth had carried out her somewhat eccentric plan.

The utter loneliness of the place--the entire absence of life--the empty kraals and the silent homestead, all this is inexpressibly grateful to her crushed and lacerated spirit. And in the dead silence of those uninhabited rooms she conjures up the sweetest, the holiest memories.

Her solitude, her complete isolation, conveys no terror--no spark of misgiving, for it is there that her very life has been lived. The dead stillness of the midnight hour, the ghostly creaking of a board, the hundred and one varying sounds begotten of silence and darkness, inspire her with no alarm, for her imagination peoples these empty and deserted rooms with life once more.

She can see him as she saw him in life, moving about the place on different errands bent. There is his favourite chair; there his place at the table. His personality seems still to pervade the whole house, his spirit to hover around her, to permeate her whole being, here as it could nowhere else. But it was on first entering his room, which still contained a few possessions too c.u.mbersome or too worthless to carry away--a trunk or two and a few old clothes--here it was that that awful and vivid contrast struck her in overwhelming force.

What an expression there is in such poor and useless relics--a glove, a boot, a hat, even an old pipe--when we know we shall never see the owner again, parted perhaps by circ.u.mstances, by distance, by death. Do not such things seem verily to speak--and to speak eloquently--to bring before our eyes, to sound within our ears, the vision, the voice of one whom we shall never behold again? Ah! do they not!

Standing for the first time alone in that room, Eanswyth felt as though her heart had been broken afresh. She fell p.r.o.ne among those poor and worthless relics, pressing them pa.s.sionately to her lips, while her tears fell like rain. If ever her lover's spirit could come back to her, surely it would be in that room.

"O Eustace, my darling, my first and only love!" murmured the stricken creature, lying face to the very floor in the agony of her grief. "Come to me from the shadowy spirit land! O G.o.d, send him to me, that I may look upon him once more!"

The shadows deepened within the room. Raising her head she gazed around, and the expression of pitiable eagerness on the white drawn face was fearful to behold.

"Oh, dear Lord, if our love is so wicked are we not punished enough! O G.o.d, show him to me again if but for a moment! The ghastliest terrors of the grave are sweetness to me, if I may but see him once--my dear dead love! Eustace, Eustace! You cannot come to me, but I shall soon go to you! Is it a loving G.o.d or a fiend that tortures us so? Ah-ah!"

Her heart-broken paroxysm could go no further. No apparition from another world met her eyes as they strove to penetrate the deepening shadows as though fully expecting one. The exhaustion that supervened was beneficial to a degree, in that it acted as a safety valve to her fearfully overwrought brain. Her very mind was in danger.

For nearly a fortnight has Eanswyth thus dwelt, and so far from beginning to tire of her solitude, she hugs it closer to her. She has received visits from the Hostes and other friends who, reckoning that a couple of days of solitude would sicken her of it altogether, had come with the object of inducing her to return to the settlement. Besides, Christmas was close at hand and, her bereavement notwithstanding, it did not somehow seem good that she should spend that genial season alone and in a position not altogether free from danger. But their kindly efforts proved futile; indeed, Eanswyth could hardly disguise the fact that their visits were unwelcome. She preferred solitude at such a time, she said. Then Mrs Hoste had undertaken to lecture her. It could not be right to abandon one's self so entirely, even to a great sorrow, purred that complacent matron. It seemed somehow to argue a want of Christian resignation. It was all very well up to a certain point, of course; but beyond that, it looked like flying in the face of Providence. And Eanswyth had turned her great eyes with such a blank and bewildered look upon the speaker's face, as if wondering what on earth the woman could be talking about, that Mrs Hoste, good-hearted though shallow, had dropped her role of preacher then and there.

One thing that struck Eanswyth as not a little strange was that hardly a Kafir had been near the place, whereas formerly their dusky neighbours had been wont to visit them on one pretext or another enough and to spare, the latter especially, in poor Tom's opinion. She had sent word to Nteya, inviting him to visit her and have a talk, but the old chief had made some excuse, promising, however, to come over and see her later. All this looked strange and, taken in conjunction with the fact that there had been war-dancing again in Nteya's location, suspicious.

So thought at any rate Josane, who gave vent to his misgivings in no uncertain tone. But Eanswyth treated his warnings with perfect unconcern. She would not move, she declared. She was afraid of n.o.body.

If Josane was, he might go if he liked. To which the staunch old fellow would reply that he feared no man, black or white; that he was there to take care of her, and there he would stay, adding, with a growl, that it might be bad for Nteya's, or anybody else's, people should they attempt to molest her.

It wanted but a day or two to Christmas--but an hour to sunset. It was one of those marvellous evenings not uncommon in South Africa, as well as in the southern parts of Europe--one of those evenings when sky and earth alike are vivid with rich colouring, and the cloudless blue of the heavens a.s.sumes a deeper azure still, and there is a dreamy enchantment in the air, and every sight, every sound, toned and mellowed by distance, blends in perfect harmony with the changing glories of the dying day. Then the sun goes down in a flaming rainbow of rare tints, each more subtle than the other, each more gorgeous, and withal more delicate than the last.

The enchantment of the hour was upon Eanswyth to the full--the loneliness, the sense of absolute solitude, cut off from the outer world, alone with her dead. Wandering down to the gate of the now tenantless ostrich camp she is going over the incidents of that last day--that first and that last day, for it was that upon which they had discovered to each other their great and all-absorbing love. "The last day we shall have together," he had said--and it was so. She can vividly conjure up his presence at her side now. Every word he said, every careless gesture even, comes back to her now. Here was the gate where they had stood feeding the great birds, idly chatting about nothing in particular, and yet how full were both their hearts even then. And that long sweet embrace so startlingly interrupted! Ah! what a day that had been! One day out of a whole lifetime. Standing here on this doubly hallowed spot, it seems to her that an eternity of unutterable wretchedness would not be too great a price to pay for just that one day over again. But he is gone. Whether their love had been the most sacred that ever blessed the lot of mortal here below, or the unhallowed, inexorably forbidden thing it really is, matters nothing now. Death has decided, and from his arbitration there is no appeal.

She throws herself upon the sward: there in the shade of the mimosa trees where they had sat together. All Nature is calm and at peace, and, with the withdrawal of man, the wild creatures of the earth seem to have reclaimed their own. A little duiker buck steps daintily along beneath the thorn fence of the ostrich camp, and the grating, metallic cackle of the wild guinea-fowl is followed by the appearance of quite a large covey of those fine game birds, pecking away, though ever with an air of confirmed distrust, within two score yards of the pale, silent mourner, seated there. The half-whistling, half-tw.a.n.ging note of the yellow thrush mingles with the melodious call of a pair of blue cranes stalking along in the gra.s.s, and above the drowsy, measured hum of bees storing sweetness from the flowering aloes, there arises the heavier boom of some great scarabaeus winging his way in blundering, aimless fashion athwart the balmy and sensuous evening air.

The sun sinks to the western ridge--the voices of animal and insect life swell in harmonious chorus, louder and louder, in that last hour of parting day. His golden beams, now horizontal, sweep the broad and rolling plains in a sea of fire, throwing out the rounded spurs of the Kabousie Hills into so many waves of vivid green. Then the flaming chariot of day is gone.

And in the unearthly hush of the roseate afterglow, that pale, heart-broken mourner wends her way home. Home! An empty house, where the echo of a footfall sounds ghostly and startling; an abode peopled with reminiscences of the dead--meet companionship for a dead and empty heart.

Never so dead--never so empty--as this evening. Never since the first moment of receiving the awful news has she felt so utterly crushed, so soul-weary as here to-night. "How was it all to end?" had been their oft-spoken thought--here on this very spot. The answer had come now.

Death had supplied it. But--how was _this_ to end?

The glories of departing day were breaking forth into ever varying splendours. The spurs of the mountain range, now green, now gold, a.s.sumed a rich purple against the flaming red of the sky. The deepening afterglow flushed and quivered, as the scintillating eyes of heaven sprang forth into the arching vault--not one by one, but in whole groups. Then the pearly shades of twilight and the cool, moist fragrance of the falling night.

Why was the earth so wondrously lovely--why should eyes rest upon such semi-divine splendour while the heart was aching and bursting? was the unspoken cry that went up from that heart-weary mourner standing there alone gazing forth into the depths of the star-gemmed night.

Stay! What is that tongue of flame suddenly leaping forth into the darkness? Another and another--and lo! by magic, from a score of lofty heights, red fires are gushing upward into the black and velvety gloom, and as the ominous beacons gather in flaming volume roaring up to a great height, the lurid glow of the dark firmament is reflected dully upon the slumbering plains.

A weird, far-away chorus floats upon the stillness, now rising, now falling. Its boding import there is no mistaking. It is the gathering cry of a barbarian host. The Gaika location is up in arms. Heavens!

What is to become of this delicate woman here, alone and unprotected, exposed to the full brunt of a savage rising--and all that it means?

Eanswyth is standing on the _stoep_, her eyes fixed upon the appalling phenomenon, but in their glance is no shadow of fear. Death has no terrors for her now; at peril she can afford to laugh. Her lips are even curving into a sweet, sad smile.

"Just as it was that night," she exclaims. "The parallel is complete.

Blaze on red signals of death--and when destruction does break forth let it begin with me! I will wait for it, welcome it, for I walk in shadow now--will welcome it here on this spot where we stood that sweet and blessed night--here where our hearts first met--here where mine is breaking now!"

Her voice dies away in a sob. She sinks to the ground. The distant glare of the war-fires of the savages falls fully upon that prostrate figure lying there in the abandonment of woe. It lights up a very sacrifice. The rough stones of the _stoep_ are those of an altar--the sacrifice a broken heart.

"Here is where we stood that night together," she murmurs, pressing her lips to the hard, cold stones. "It is just as it was then. Oh, my love--my love, come back to me! Come back--even from the cold grave!"

"Eanswyth!"

The word is breathed in a low, unsteady voice. Every drop of blood within her turns to ice. It is answered at last, her oft-repeated prayer. She is about to behold him. Does she not shrink from it? Not by a hair's-breadth.

"Let me see you, my love," she murmurs softly, not daring to move lest the spell should be broken. "Where--where are you?"