Wild Honey Part 31

"It is nearly finished," he muttered staring across the blue-gum stumps that now were bursting into great cl.u.s.ters of silvery blue leaves, "and I am nearly finished too."

The two thin lines of steel glittering under the moonbeams had, in fact, almost reached the eastern boundary-line of Jackalsfontein. Soon the old man's eyes would be pained no longer by the piles of wood and steel, the tents and paraphernalia of the camp. Shangaan Jim brought the news that all would be removed next day. Chrissie found him whispering by the bedside as the sun went down, and wondered to see a smile on her father's face for the first time in many months--if that strange distortion of bloated and discoloured flesh could be called a smile?

"Shall I come sit by you to-night for a while, Poppey?" she asked, leaning tenderly over him. "And let Shangaan go to his hut?"

"Yes," he said, "let Shangaan go." He looked up at the big Kaffir, and Chrissie fancied she saw a glance of some significance pa.s.s between them, but thought she must be mistaken.

At any rate, Shangaan Jim went away, and she sat talking to her father for a long while, listening preciously to every broken muttered word that fell from him, for she was well aware that the end was near.

He spoke of her marriage with Piet. It was not such a marriage as he had hoped for her. One of those _pat-looping_ Uyses! But still, Piet was a good fellow, and the only one of her suitors who had remained faithful, now that the money was all gone! Piet would be a good husband, but she must look after the farm, or he would be robbed and lose it, and have to retire to the back lands and the bad veld like all the Uys clan who were bad managers, though they were good men. He made her promise that she would marry Piet soon, so that when the war broke out she could follow him to the field if need be.

"As your mother would have followed me," he said, and looked up at the pale still face of his child. For, in proportion to his great increase of colour and stature she had grown whiter and thinner. Grief for his condition and some other secret sorrow brought tears to wet her pillow many a night, underlined her eyes, and carved faint hollows in her cheeks. Bubbling youth was quite gone out of Chrissie.

As the night wore on, the old man, stirring and turning on his pillows, grew more restless. He panted and gasped and some strange excitement seemed tormenting him, making him roll and struggle like a great helpless beetle. And always he strained to keep his head high on the pillows so that he might stare, and stare across the land. Sometimes he held his breath and seemed to be listening.

It must have been near midnight when a tremendous explosion shook the earth, breaking every pane of gla.s.s in the windows behind them, rattling the old farmhouse as though it were made of reeds, and crashing and booming across the empty veld like the crack of doom.

Suddenly, down by the workers' encampment, flames sprang up and cries and groans were heard. Chrissie, recovered from her first shock of terror and amazement, sprang up.

"Father!" she cried, then stood still staring. The old man was sitting up in bed, his eyes alight with a dreadful fire.

"Now, I can die in peace," he shouted. "Jim knew what to do with their dynamite tent! Good boy, Jim! Didn't I warn them that I would blow them off, if they came meddling with my land?"

With a great shout of laughter that rang across the veld like a bell, he fell back upon his pillows. There was a terrible gurgling sound in his throat, and all was still.

One long look at the dead face, then Chrissie ran down the steps and sprang across the veld. Men's forms were moving hither and thither, carrying the dead and wounded away from the raging flames. Groans resounded everywhere, and there were bitter cries for water. To one such _cry_, in a voice she knew, Chrissie flew like an arrow from a bow.

She found him lying where the explosion had thrown him, far down the river bank, shattered, broken, dying; and when she had given him water, she kissed his lips, and baring her breast let his head lie there, sobbing out his life's blood against her heart.

CHAPTER EIGHT.

THE PROMISE OF LIFE.

"I have been trying to meet you ever since I came to Durban," said the boy, in a voice that all the world might hear, so young it was and eager.

There was a stir among that portion of the world present in Mrs Carr-Ellison's drawing-room. The man playing beautiful, desultory modulations on the grand piano struck a pa.s.sionate chord and quivered off into the treble softly so that he might hear the woman's answer; several scandalised skirts shivered and seemed to whisper, but the woman on the high-backed, gold satin sofa, did not disturb herself. She sat unsmiling, her head resting against the back of the sofa, her arms stretched wide on either side of her.

She had the despairing, unlighted eyes that tell of a soul's light gone out, and her mouth drooped bitterly at the corners; but her hair was very beautifully arranged, and her pale gown with its gloomy sleeves and silvery bands must have taken some weeks to design.

"I saw your picture on Le Poer's table, and I told him to give me an introduction to you; but the beggar wouldn't," the boy went on; and the skirts drawn closer, whispered again. Le Poer was the fastest man in the fastest military set in Maritzburg; what was Miss Wilde's picture doing on his table? Really, these writing women were very queer, one never knew what they were up to, coming from Heaven knows where, and settling down in rooms without a chaperone, writing for newspapers.

"Oh!" the sphinx woman had spoken at last but her voice was very tired and uninterested. She was used to having men try to meet her, and candour did not appeal to her very much. She had long ago worn out her interest in the obvious, and walked through life now with ears only for the silences, and eyes only for the things not seen, unless they were the traces of pain quivering the surface under which she lived. She was always interested in pain.

The boy's persistence worried her; his words seemed very crude. Yet a certain vigour in his voice drew her eyes up to where, waiting for one or other of the men at her side to move, he stood before her. It occurred to her then that for so tall a man he stood up with remarkable calmness and indifference where everyone was seated.

"The stage," she thought, then mused as to how, if she were writing of him, she could best describe the young untidy way his hair grew above his forehead.

"Ragged would be too extravagant," were the words that formed themselves in her mind with a sense of familiarity that puzzled her, until in a flash she remembered that the night before she had seen him on the stage, and had thought the same thought about his hair.

"Ah! the apothecary!" she exclaimed, and sitting up, stared back into his blue, intense eyes.

"She is really a little mad," thought Mrs Carr-Ellison, who, at first distressed at the girl's unsociability to a strange guest, was now filled with vague embarra.s.sment to see them staring into each other's eyes and babbling of apothecaries. She did not appreciate that to Dolores Wilde the boy had changed suddenly into a man--a man who had lived and suffered and understood; and that with the memory of how, in the few lines a.s.signed to him as the starving seller of drugs and potions in Shakespeare's greatest romance--he had supplied the touch of tragedy that to her made the play real life, her inmost soul leaped out to him as a comrade. While, though she knew it not, her hands were already at his heart-strings.

Mrs Carr-Ellison did not see these things, because they were not to be seen. She only thought that it was very queer and Bohemian of Miss Wilde to behave so, and a very bad example for her daughter Gwen, who was observing the proceedings with all her eyes and ears; so she interrupted that touching of spirit hands with a commonplace.

"Mr Scarlett," she said, "do take Miss Wilde into the verandah, and get some ices for yourselves."

They refused the ices earnestly, sharing a smile; but they were glad to go. He followed the trails of her strange gown through the wide dim-lit verandahs, and found her a chair in a far corner where the light from above fell palely into her eyes, and restless shadows of maidenhair fern played about her drooping mouth.

"Your picture spoke to me from Le Poer's table," he said, as though there had been no interruption, "and then he told me all about you. Do you mind? Ever since I have wanted to speak to you, and tell you that you shall not always be sad. Look here,"--his expressions were very boyish,--"I have had my life broken up too, and yet I am beginning to be glad again, and you must. You are too sweet and splendid to be always sad."

"You are very young," she answered quietly, wondering why she did not resent the first spoken sympathy anyone had dared to offer her in all these years. "For me--I am an old woman."

He was twenty-eight, and she was a year younger, but he knew how sorrow ages the heart, and understood. He moved a pot of fern away from her feet, because it seemed to blur the picture of her, sitting there, and a crumple it had made in the hem of her gown he smoothed out with the simplicity of a child and the gentle hands of a woman.

"I am not so young. I have tasted the rough of the world and some of its joys, and I still love the joys. You are in danger of loving its sorrows so much that you will not be able to be happy again when you have the chance."

"I shall never have the chance, boy, not in this world anyhow; the G.o.ds will take care of that."

"Well, in the next then," he persisted. "I have all sorts of splendid theories about our failures here being our triumphs there, haven't you?

Don't you--when things go all askew, find yourself building on what comes--after?"

Her lips curved in a wry smile. Truth to tell, this world had treated her so ill that she had but small hope of the next.

He went on speaking with an amazing buoyancy in his voice.

"If death were not so hemmed in with the sickness and horrors that frighten a man! If it would only come to one quickly, out in the open air and sunshine--in a rush of living excitement--how many of us would stay, I wonder?"

"I would," she cried, with a shiver, "I would."

"I wouldn't," he said fervently. "I am so curious and interested in what is hidden that I--"

"Don't," she cried out, half in anger, "you are so young, so full of the joy of life, why do you speak of death? Earth must be very sweet to you yet."

"So it is," he a.s.sented, quickly; "and there are always ambitions here."

"Ah, yes!" she said, with the relief of one whose feet have found firm ground. "Our ambitions. What do you want?"

He sat up very straight, and his eyes seemed to grow bluer. He loved his profession.

"I want to be as fine as Ravenhill first. You have seen his _Hamlet_, and know what that means. I want to be his equal and then--alone.

Then--but one want at a time is enough, if you mean to achieve it. What do you want?"

She had wanted many things. Her wants had formed the lever by which the G.o.ds had worked their irony upon her; and her portion had been dead sea-apples. So now she "went softly under the stars," and voiced no want. But oh! to write something good--not the petty drivel of Women and Emanc.i.p.ation--but something alive and true, so that Meredith, and Kipling, and Hardy would some day take her by the hand and greet her "comrade." Oh! to fill in her life with work, work, work, work, n.o.ble work, so that there was never a gap left to remember in. O! for rest from the torment of memory and an empty heart.

Did she tell him these things, or did he simply understand? She never remembered afterwards, but she knew that he knew, on that sweet, tropical summer night.

They sat late talking.