The Avenger Part 59

"It is abandoned, then?" Duncan demanded.

"On the contrary, the courts have granted the decree," Wrayson answered, "but on political grounds only. Every material charge against the Queen was withdrawn, and the divorce became a matter of arrangement."

"She is free from that brute, then," Duncan said quietly. "I am glad."

Wrayson glanced down towards the valley. A couple of wagons and several Kaffir boys with led horses were just entering the valley.

"Yes!" he said, "she is free!"

Something in his intonation, some change in his face, gripped hold of Duncan. He caught his visitor by the shoulder roughly.

"What the devil do you mean?" he demanded, "What difference does it make?

She would never dare--to--"

"You can never tell," Wrayson said, with a little sigh, "what a woman will dare to do. Tell me the truth, Duncan. You care for her still?"

"G.o.d knows it!" he answered fiercely. "There has never been another woman. There never could be."

"Jump on your pony, then, and ride down and meet them. Gently, man!

Don't break your neck." ...

Later on they sat out upon the veranda. The swift darkness was falling already upon the land, the colour was fading fast from the gorgeous fragments of piled-up clouds in the western sky. Almost as they watched, the outline faded away from the distant mountains, the rolling woods lost their shape.

"It's a wonderful country, yours, Duncan," Wrayson said.

"It is G.o.d's own country," Duncan answered quietly. "What we shall make of it, He only knows! It is the country of eternal mysteries."

He pointed northwards.

"Think," he said, "beneath those forests are the ruins of cities, magnificent in civilization and art before a stone of Babylon was built, when Nineveh was unknown. What a heritage! What a splendid heritage, if only we can prove ourselves worthy of it!"

"Why not?" Wrayson asked quietly. "Our day of decline is not yet. Even the historians admit that."

"It is the money-grabbers of the world who belittle empire," Duncan answered. "It is from the money-grabbers of the Transvaal that we have most to fear. Only those can know what Africa is, what it might mean to us, who shake the dust of civilization from their feet, and creep a little way into its heart. It is here in the quiet places that one begins to understand. One has the sense of coming into a virgin country, strong, fresh, and wonderful. Think of the race who might be bred here! They would rejuvenate the world!"

"And yet," the woman at his side murmured, the woman who had been a queen, "it is not a virgin country after all. A little further northwards and the forests have in their keeping the secrets of ages.

Shall we ever possess them, I wonder!"

In the darkness she felt his arms about her. Louise and her husband had wandered away.

"One thing at least remains, changeless and eternal as history itself,"

he murmured, as their lips met. "Thank G.o.d for it!"