The Claw Part 3

"But I was told by two different people that night, both relatives of his, that you were engaged; that the announcement was to be made immediately."

"They had no right to say so," I said firmly. "We were never engaged."

"Will you tell me that he never asked you to marry him?"

"I cannot tell you more than I have," I answered rather stiffly.

"And you think it insolence on my part to ask so much?" His voice had gone back to reverie and his eyes to the dying fires. "Do not think that, Miss Saurin. Insolence has no place near you in my mind and memory. It was no business of mine I suppose whether you refused Herriott, or why. In any case I should have left Ireland at once as I did. Only--I wish to G.o.d I _had_ known in all these years."

I had to realise at last that this man was making love to me, and that the fact aroused in my heart neither anger nor indignation. I felt not the slightest disposition to reprove him, but rather to go on sitting there for ever listening to his strange burning words and vibrating voice. It seemed to me suddenly that I was listening to an old song I had known all my life, but had never before heard set to music. My heart began to flutter like a wild bird in my breast and a trembling thrilled me unlike any trembling I had known through the past hours of darkness and fear. A faintness stole over my senses. I, too, had kept my gaze straight before me while we talked, but now, while I felt myself growing pale to the lips with some strange emotion, I turned my eyes his way and found him looking at me. Glance burnt glance. His blue, intent eyes searching in mine as if for something that was his. Mine reading in his--I know not what--something I had long known dimly but dared not recognise. In that moment I realised why I had come to Africa. I knew why I had refused Herriott. It was for the sake of seeing again this strange man with the voice that pulled at my heart-strings and the burning eyes that searched in mine as if for something that was his.

And now, alone with him in this wild and desolate spot, where conventions and all the superficialities of life fell sheer away, and left us just simple man and woman, I was afraid of the poignant sweetness and wonder of it. I was afraid for my immortal soul.

For the second time that night, and half unconsciously, I put up my hand, and as do all good Catholics in the supreme moments of life, crossed myself. I hardly knew what I had done until I found my right hand touching the shoulder nearest him and almost as if in answer to my action, which he could not have failed to observe, he lifted his hand, which still lay upon my left hand, and pushed back from his eyes the fallen streak of hair. Afterwards he did not replace it, though mine still lay where he left it.

"You are a Catholic?" he said abruptly.

"Yes, the Saurins have always been Catholics," I answered. Then a silence fell between us that I feared. For some reason I did not understand, I began, in a voice at first a little strained and uncertain, to tell him of the love there had always been in my family for the beautiful old faith, of how much its forms and ceremonies meant to even the most irreligious of us. I told him legends of long-dead rakes and scamps among my paternal ancestors who, forsaking their sins, had gone from their own country to fight for the faith they loved in other lands. How never a Saurin for three centuries had died without a scapular about his throat and a _De profundis_ on his lips. I told him how my mother, coming of a rigid Protestant American family, had yet, for love of my Irish father, embraced his faith with all the fervour of the convert, and taught me to love it as she did herself. I told him things, I knew not why, that had never been told out of my family before. Whether he was interested in my facts or the soft and even flow of my voice I cannot say, but the sweet and dangerous silence was dispersed, and a kind of fragrant peace fell around us, cooling our hands and quieting our hearts.

"Catholicism was the faith of my fathers, too," he said at last, "but I suppose we fell away from it through wandering far from our own land. I have never practised Catholicism or anything else. What religion the love of my mother put into my heart is there still, and I recognise it in great moments--at this moment--but oh, Lord! Where do these things go? The clean, fair dreams of our youth, the fine visions we began to fight with, the generosity wide as the horizon! All lost in the scuffle, buried under the mud and sc.u.m. Do you know that tag of verse--

"'In the mud and sc.u.m of things Something, something always sings?'

"It is something, I suppose, in the end, if we still can hear the singing. There is some rag of grace left in us, perhaps, if we can recognise a man like Rhodes when we see him, and, leaving all, go after him into the wilderness to do or die for a man with bigger dreams than our own--but it isn't much, by G.o.d! considering what dreams we ourselves set out with!"

He seemed for the moment to have forgotten me, and to be communing with the desolation of his own soul. I offered him no word. Something told me then, that no woman can quite comfort a man for his lost dreams. At the best she may be able to create others for him; but surely they are never quite the same as those first dreams that had the freshness of the morning on them. Even as I mourned for him his mood changed, and he laughed with a laugh that turned him into a joyous boy.

"Listen to the river!" said he, laughing. "Listen to the jackals chanting their dirge of the empty stomach! Smell the rolling leagues of emptiness! Look at that beauty lying there in the gra.s.s! Oh, I tell you, this is good enough for a man! One can get back some of the old fair visions here. One might even go back to the 'gold for silver'

creed that Whyte Melville put into some of us long ago!"

"The 'gold for silver' creed?"

"Do you not know your _Bones and I_? They were the last of my prophets."

He began to misquote, laughing a little, but without any bitterness at all now:

"Gold for silver: old lamps for new: stack your capital in the bank that in the end pays cent for cent--the bank of human kindness, where the bonds are charity, help to the broken-down, sympathy with the bust-up, protection to the weak-kneed, encouragement to the forlorn, etc; and afterwards the inscription on your tomb or in some one's memory:

"'What he spent he had: what he saved he lost! What he gave he has.'

"Ah! what a long time since I heard those words, and believed that any one could be such a fool as to try and live up to them!"

"How can you say that?" I said. "It is still your creed. If ever any one protected the weak-kneed and encouraged the forlorn you have done it to-night."

At that we both began to laugh. The shadows had fled from his brow, and his face had no more marks on it than d.i.c.k's when he and I played together as children. Indeed, we were both as happy as children. Later he stepped down from the cart to feed the fires and fetch my rugs from where they still lay on the ground. He wrapped them round me, for the air had grown very chill, and told me to sleep. And I did, for the heavy weariness of the small morning hours had suddenly stolen upon me.

When I awoke the stars were pale in the sky, and dawn, with pearl and purple and amber on her feet, was treading the distant hills. A long line of red-legged birds streaked overhead, calling to each other as they pa.s.sed. The rush of the river, which could now be plainly seen glinting between the trees, was like music on the air. A cloak of silver dew lay over gra.s.s and fern and the ma.s.sed foliage of the bush; and little veldt flowers were lifting their pink faces to give forth a sweet scent. Against the faint rose and amber of the horizon a blue spiral of smoke ascended from a newly-built fire, on which the kettle was already boiling for breakfast. The only grim thing to be seen in all that fair place was the long, honey-coloured body of the dead lion, stretched upon the carpet of gra.s.s and flowers. His great s.h.a.ggy head lay amidst a ma.s.s of bright wild lilies: but already little beetles and ants were busy about his blood-reddened mouth and open eyes. It was the only joyless thing to be seen, but it had no power to sadden me. I, too, was full of the glad spirit of morning, and my singing heart gave thanks as it had never done before for the magic gift of life.

CHAPTER THREE.

CATS' CALLS.

"Originality, like beauty, is a fatal gift."

Once more I was alone in the coach with my driver, moving onwards towards my destination--Fort Salisbury. In an hour or two I should reach Fort George, which was only a day or so from my journey's end. My new driver, also a Cape boy, was a big, honest-looking fellow named Hendricks, one of the most trusted men in the coach service, and possessing no traits in common with the last man, except a vocabulary and an affection for "cold tea." This man had been waiting at the other side of the river with fresh mules and another cart the morning after my adventurous night on the banks of the Umzingwani. The river had been still too full to cross by cart, so a wire apparatus for slinging mails and pa.s.sengers from one bank to another had been brought into requisition. My new friend and the driver (grown curiously meek and submissive after I know not what threats and imprecations flung at him in an unknown tongue when he emerged from his fastness into the light of day) then engaged together in furthering a nerve-racking business of which I was to be the chief victim. First the mails were taken out and divided into lots weighing about 130 pounds, then each lot was placed in a sort of canvas bucket and slung across the broad sweeping stream on a piece of wire about the thickness of a clothes-line. When all the mails were over, and my luggage, I thought my turn had come and advanced with what I hoped was a nonchalant air (though my knees were trembling under me) to my fate. But the blue-eyed man was already in the bucket and whizzing across the stream. Half-way over the wire sagged hideously, and the sack touched the water. I closed my eyes with a sick feeling, and when I opened them again it was to see him just starting to recross.

As he jumped from the bucket on my side of the river once more, I realised that he had been trying the wire for me. Then my nonchalance was not all a.s.sumed, as I took my turn in the horrible contrivance, for what had carried him would surely bear me safely. All the same, it was sickening to feel the slither of the bag on the wire, to see the grey-yellow water s.h.i.+ning beneath me smooth and waveless as a mighty torrent of cod-liver oil, to experience the sag in midstream and the extra jerk of the wire to overcome it. I confess that at that moment I was not captain of my soul. I was not captain of anything, even the canvas bag! I should have given up the ghost if I had not known that a strong brown hand was on the wire, and blue keen eyes watching every movement. I think it was the most _effarouchant_ of all my experiences, and I was still rather limp when he, having crossed once more, came to me standing by the new post-cart. He held out his hand.

"But what are _you_ going to do?" I asked in surprise.

"Going back across the river," said he. "I have just come over to say good-bye."

"Are you not coming on too?"

"Not just yet. First I have a little business to transact on the other side. Later, I shall take my horse and swim a drift I know of about three miles lower down."

I stared at him in astonishment. What business could he possibly have on the other side of the river, unless it was to skin the lion? Then I suddenly remembered his threatening words about the driver the night before, and the man's meek mien that morning.

"I hope you are not going to beat the driver," I said quickly.

"Good-bye," said he, still holding out his hand.

It naturally annoyed me to have my remarks ignored in that way. I looked at him coldly.

"You will please not hurt the man on my account," I said stiffly.

"Then I must hurt him on my own," he calmly replied. "These men have to be taught their duty to white ladies."

It vexed me curiously to think that he should so resent having been left alone with me all night that he must needs punish the driver for it.

"I hate brutality," I said. "The thought of one man hitting another makes me feel sick. I think you are very vindictive."

"I am sorry," said he, but there was not the faintest trace of sorrow anywhere about him; in fact, he was smiling me hardily in the eyes and I saw that he had every intention of beating the man in spite of my wishes. I turned away from him to hide the vexation that surged through me, and began to arrange my rugs in the cart, but when I had finished he was still there, and with something further to remark.

"Miss Saurin, I hope you will pardon me for saying that it would be unwise of you to let any one know that your last night's vigil included my society."

That was really too much! I stared at him haughtily, utterly taken aback by such a remark and its inference. But he met my eyes quite unabashed. It occurred to me at the moment that he had probably never been abashed in his life, and the idea did not please me.

"I'm afraid I do not quite understand you," I said at last in a frozen voice, "but if it is that you do not wish me to boast of having made your acquaintance--I can a.s.sure you that you need have no fear."

Even his hardened pelt was pierced at last, though he tried to hide the fact under a sardonic grin that did not become him in the least. He threw back his rag of black hair--a sign of battle I was beginning to recognise.

"Hardly that. I was merely proffering a little friendly advice, but I remember now that you do not take kindly to advice--or you would not be here." He grinned again, and I flushed with anger. After the terrors of the past night to fling the advice of people like Elizabet von Stohl into my teeth!

"I believe myself perfectly capable of minding my own affairs," I said.

"Further, I very much resent your inference that people would dare to talk scandal about me."

"Evidently you do not know people as well as I do." I merely looked over his head. "Certainly you will allow that I know my own reputation better."

There was an opening for a dart, and I flung one with all my might.