Wild Honey Part 17

Then one bleak morning in late autumn the nostalgia of Africa took him by the heart and before that day was out he was shaking the dust of Ireland from his feet with his face set for Southampton where the Union-Castle liners turn their noses towards the Southern Cross.

One of the first faces to greet him at the Cape Town Docks was Talfourd's. Carden fell upon him as upon a long-lost brother. It seemed to him there was no other man in the world he would so gladly have met. He was conscious that Tal and he shared an experience that was secret to the rest of his friends. Wherefore he could not disguise his pleasure at the encounter. Tal was hooked in to come and lunch at the City Club, and later to dine at the Mount Nelson. For the moment there was no one like Tal. The latter indeed found himself somewhat intrigued by this unwonted demonstrativeness. Carden seemed to him to be queerly changed since first they had met some five or six years past.

When after dinner that night, out among the trim walks and aromatic bushes of the garden, they fell into reminiscences he voiced something of his thought. He was an introspective fellow with a good deal of sentiment in his composition, and the wine and cigars had been excellent.

"You were always a hard nut to crack, Carden, but the gayest chap on earth, and even the fellows you knocked out liked you for it afterwards.

But Africa changed you as it changes us all. You went queer on that trek of ours up north and I never could make it out. I've thought a lot about it and, do you know, I always dated the change in you back to that little farm we put up at on the road to Tuli--_Greis-Kopje_--remember the place?"

Carden gloomed at him. Did he remember it? By G.o.d!

"Strange," continued Talfourd, "I ran into our old driver Swartz at Pretoria the other day. He has got regular work on the Zeederburg Coach Line, and is up and down the Tuli Road. He told me a queer thing about _Greis-Kopje_. It appears that old de Beer, the fellow who owned the place, disappeared about a year ago and has never been seen since. He was the husband of that pretty girl we thought was his daughter at first. You remember?"

Carden was busy lighting another cigar, his face mask-like except for the eyes which burnt like points of blue fire.

"The supposition is that either he was drowned crossing the Crocodile River or else a stray lion got him."

"And Mrs de Beer?"

"Still lives on there with old Grietje and Yacop."

"Let's go in," said Carden abruptly. "I have to be up at daybreak and get through a lot of business. I leave by the mail at eleven."

"What a fellow you are! Where for? Johannesburg?"

"Yes." And from thence to the Tuli Road, fast as hoof and wheel could carry him. Now he knew what ailed him, and would shout it from the mountain-tops but that it was too sweet and dear a secret to be shared with all the world--_yet_. Now he knew what anodyne to seek for healing of his raging wound, what drink for solace of his burning torment. By the broad, dusty road to Tuli ran a stream of clear, cold water and his parched soul was sick to drink from it. Memory suddenly sculptured in his brain a face that all Ireland had not been able to duplicate. Yet all Ireland lay in the dewy, pa.s.sionate eyes of Frances de Beer, and for him all home, all peace, all future. Now, at last, he acknowledged what he had always known, and gave himself up to the thought of what he had denied so long: she who had given all asked nothing, and let him go without a reproach. He knew now that he had been a knave and a fool and that for the last two and a half years he had been paying with torment of body and soul for it. And still was paying. When he remembered her and all she had been to him--his loneliness was a still small torment that pierced and tortured him like a dart in his vitals.

Throughout that night he paced his room, or stood at his open window, staring out at the silvered slopes of Table Mountain but getting no peace of her stern eternal loveliness. Pacing, and staring, in the small hours, he went over every detail of that brief sweet-madness on the Tuli Road, remembering her face, her voice, her eyes, and the soul of her that had leaped from them to him. And, as always, the thing that stirred him most was the memory of her fluttering hand under his that first night when they sat on the stoep listening to Talfourd's singing.

He remembered how a mist had come over his eyes at the feel of it; his heart had seemed to turn over in his breast; it was as though he had trapped something he had lain in wait for all his life; all the tyranny and tenderness of his nature had been roused in that moment, with something of a boy's elation when he has caught with his own hands some beautiful wild thing that he has watched for long.

It all came back, like a dream of delirium, only more vividly. He re-lived the moment when a pa.s.sing chivalrous impulse had bade him kiss her hands and leave her, and that dark hour on the veld when he had fought a battle with his baser self and lost. Then that other mad hour of stolen sweetness, when he had groped for her in the luminous darkness of her room and found first the little, pale, strong hands that smelled like apple blossom--then her lips! He recalled her tears and little broken cries, and how his lips had crushed them down and kissed them away! How all too soon the dawn had come! And with this memory came pain and shame. Bitter shame that he had so debased her whom he loved.

She who had only wished to do right, but found her heart and his will too strong for her. Love anointed his cynical eyes at last and he saw and understood the hearts of women as he had never done before, and knew at last how unworthy were most men, and he with them, of the sacrifices women make on the altar of love. Hot, unaccustomed moisture that seemed to be dragged torturingly from the very depths of his being seared his eyes. He flung himself on his bed, ashamed at first of his tears, then of his acts, and, at last, ashamed of his life.

"G.o.d forgive me!" he thought. "It shall never happen again."

But G.o.d's forgiveness was taken for granted and he thought less about that than of the sweetness the future promised.

It was not many nights before his feet were set upon the long white dusty road that wound by kop and kloof and vlei to the haven of his heart's desire. He had given orders for everything he possessed on the Rand to be sold, and did not mean to return to the Golden City. Waggons were being fitted up and provisioned in Pretoria for his use, and would follow him. For the veld was to be his home now once and for all. He was sick of money-making, politics, and all the little games and intrigues of finance, of artificial women, and conventions. He meant to have done with these things and forget on the brown, kind breast of Mother Africa that he had ever known them.

And _she_ was coming with him; the one woman who fitted into the wild places his soul loved; the woman with dreams of stretching plains and forests in her eyes. Ah! that was a woman with whom to seek the blue mountains, to camp under the stars and forget cities and sins! It was well that old de Beer had disappeared, for Dark Carden meant to take what was his own at last, and swore that all the de Beers in the world, dead or alive, should not prevent him. He was ready to defy Heaven and h.e.l.l to prevent him.

His cart drew near the line of grey kopjes at the end of a long day's run. From his outspan the distance was too great for any but his own keen eyes to distinguish the little ramshackle farm.

Everything was as it had been nearly two and a half years before. The dust lay thick on the sage-green bush, and once more a blood-red sun was sinking to rest behind the horizon of ma.s.sed scarlet and bronze. No one had mended the broken-down kraal, and on a far off rise a figure that might have been Yacop was picking up dried cow-dung. There was something very like the smell of roasting coffee on the air.

Carden was glad to be alive with a fierce gladness. He felt a boy again, and looked it, as he strode across the sunburnt gra.s.s. Yes!

there was Grietje crouching by the fire. And a white gown flickered on the stoep as long ago it had flickered a signal to his heart. She was waiting for him there, as he had always known that she would be waiting.

The baboon barked furiously as he approached. It was not chained to the tree any longer, but to a post by the side of the house. At the sound of the creature's hoa.r.s.e voice the old woman by the fire rose up. She did not speak when she saw that it was Carden, only looked at him with strange little old eyes, dark as the unexplored depths of a secret well.

When he had pa.s.sed she stood a moment gazing after him, then shuffled silently away to the back of the house.

He went forward to the stoep and slowly mounted the crumbling stone steps. The old woman's gaze had vaguely disturbed him. Or was it something in the motionless silence of the woman who sat gravely observing him, that chilled the riot of his veins?

She wore her little sunbonnet cappie as of old, her face so far back in it that nothing could be seen but two great eyes. It seemed strange to him that she did not rise, nor put out her hand in welcome. Only sat there observing him sombrely.

"Frances," he said gently, "I have come back."

She sighed. After a moment she spoke from her cappie. But it was not a voice that he remembered at all.

"You should not have done that, Dark Carden."

He stood very still. It seemed as if something ice cold had entered his breast and was slowly approaching his heart. His voice jerked a little when he spoke again, very humbly.

"I should have come long ago."

"Yes; you should have come long ago." There was something relentless and fateful in the sound of that voice, so soft and stern. "Now, it is too late."

"No," he said violently. "It is not. I have come to take you away and never let you go again. I cannot do without you any longer."

She gave one of her strange terrible sighs, and spite of his firm words he felt the cold thing creep a little nearer to his heart.

"Where is your husband, Frances?" G.o.d knew what made him ask. He cared little enough for the whereabouts of old de Beer. Yet the answer was extraordinarily disconcerting.

"He is over there." She made a gesture and he jerked his head round abruptly. There was nothing to be seen in the direction her hand had indicated. Nothing but the lonely tree. He looked at her piercingly then, with a new inquiry in his glance, and a creeping, clutching fear for her mind.

"I heard that he was dead," he said slowly.

"Yes, it is true. He is dead," she answered quietly, looking past him to where she had pointed. Spite of himself he looked once more in the same direction. Again nothing but the tree.

But something else arrested his eye. Grietje had come back and was squatting by the fire, and at her side, playing in the dust, was the toddling dumpy figure of a little child. It must have come round with Grietje from the back of the house. Certainly it had not been there before.

"Whose child is that?" he asked in surprise. And the stern, still voice from the sunbonnet answered him:

"It is your child and mine."

"My G.o.d!"

After a long time he said again, brokenly, with bitter self-accusation.

"My G.o.d! Frances, forgive me! I did not know. How was I to know?"

She did not answer.

"Can you ever forgive me?"

"Yes, as I hope for forgiveness," she said.

There was a dull solemnity in her tone and she did not touch the hand he stretched out. Un.o.bserved by him the little toddling child had come up and now flung itself against its mother's knees hiding its face in her lap. It swung a little sunbonnet in its hand and by the fading light he could see the softly curling hair, black as his own, and the outline of a small tender face. He knew that her child and his could not but be beautiful, and stood staring there, trembling, the magic of fatherhood on him and an urgent longing to catch the little creature in his arms.