"Will you go in and see him, Evelyn? No, it's not you Edala. He wants
to talk to Evelyn this time."
Hyland had just come from his father's sick room. Both girls, awaiting
the summons, had started up. Some days had passed since the rescue
party had returned to Kwabulazi, but the wounded man did not seem to
improve. The doctor feared lest erysipelas might set in, it was even
possible that the patient might lose his sight, for the wound had
perforce been dressed in rough and ready fashion at the time--indeed but
that they had put their best foot foremost in the retreat they would
have been attacked by a force whose overwhelming strength would have
rendered massacre almost a certainty. As it was they were pressed hard
to within a mile of the entrenchments; but some at any rate among the
savages had had experience in trying to rush that very entrenchment, and
had no stomach for a repetition thereof. So the impi had drawn off.
To her dying day Edala will never forget the return of that rescue
party--and the lifting down of her father's half--unconscious form from
the horse on which Hyland had supported him--the deathly pallor of the
drawn face, the beard all clotted with dried blood, the hands limp and
nerveless. So utterly did she give way, in the plenitude of her grief
and gnawing remorse that several of the men had to turn away with a
suspicious choke.
"Too late! Too late!" she moaned, throwing herself on the ground beside
him. "You said it would be, and it is."
"But it isn't," struck in Hyland. "He's got a bad knock on the head,
but old Vine'll be able to put that right. Come, get up, Edala dear.
We must put him to bed, you know."
The tone was decisive, practical, but the speaker felt far from as
confident as he would have his sister believe. And Dr Vine's diagnosis
was by no means reassuring. He feared complications. So the wounded
man was carried into the airiest and most comfortable room in Elvesdon's
far from luxurious house, where all was done for him that could be done.
There was difficulty with Edala. She refused to leave the bedside day
or night. It was only when her father recovered full consciousness that
they were able to get her away, when she had poured out her soul to him
in an agony of remorse and self-reproach. Then he had soothed her, and
insisted upon her taking rest and food; and she had obeyed
unquestioningly. His lightest word was law now--as it had been in the
times long past. She was allowed to help her brother and Elvesdon in
their unremitting care of the wounded man, and the same held good of
Evelyn Carden. But it was once and for all decided that neither of the
girls should be allowed to overdo it, and this was adhered to no matter
how much they begged and pleaded.
Elvesdon had taken up the reins of office again, and found his hands
very full indeed. The telegraph wire had been repaired, and messages
kept flashing in, communicating matters which demanded his constant
attention, some necessary and some not. But at night he never curtailed
one single half hour of his vigil at the bedside of his friend in
recently and narrowly escaped peril. They had gone through a furnace
together.
Strong man as he was the strain was beginning to tell upon Elvesdon. He
looked pale and fagged, and his spirits became depressed. His
conversation with Thornhill in the hour of their mutual danger was fresh
in his mind, but although he saw a great deal of Edala there was nothing
in the girl's look or manner to show that she regarded him in the light
of any other than an ordinary friend, a jolly good chum with no nonsense
about him, and whom she could treat with the same free, frank
_camaraderie_ as her own brother. This, of course, was no time to urge
any further claim upon her: he recognised that. Still he felt
depressed.
While feeling a little more so than usual there came a knock at his
office door. It was late afternoon and he was wondering whether he
could venture to shut up for a time before any more of those beastly
wires came in.
"Miss Thornhill would like to see you, sir," said Prior, entering.
"Will you see her?"
"Why of course. And--er--Prior. I don't want to be disturbed, no
matter who by. See?"
Prior did see, and if the Governor himself had appeared on the scene
until that door should open again, decidedly His Excellency would have
had to wait.
"And now, to what is this unwonted honour due?" he began, closing the
door behind his visitor. "First of all, sit. Why, _Diane chasseresse_,
you have not been obeying orders I'm afraid. You are looking a little
bit--well, overdone."
"That's better than feeling a good bit underdone," she rejoined with
something of her old, bright laugh.
"How's the patient? Any further improvement?"
"Rather. Old Vine says we needn't be anxious any more."
"That's right royal news. We ought to give three cheers. But it was
sweet of you to come and tell me this, Edala."
The name came out half-unconsciously. He had taken to using it of late:
their new _rapprochement_ in the circumstances of a mutual care and
anxiety had seemed to render it natural. And she had never resented it
or shown any sign of astonishment.
"I didn't come to tell it you," answered the girl, in her direct
straightforward way. She had risen from her chair, and the clear blue
eyes met his full, yet he thought to detect in them a shade of
embarrassment. "What I came to tell you was--is--what an ungrateful,
unappreciative little beast I must have seemed all this time never to
have said a word about your bravery--your heroism. You saved father's
life. You stood over him and kept off those brutes when--when--"
She broke off, with a little stamp of the foot. Her eyes were beginning
to fill. Elvesdon's face flushed uneasily.
"No--no--no. `Bravery! Heroism!' Bah!" he answered. "You don't
suppose I was going to run away and leave him, do you? Why even Ramasam
would hardly have done that. Besides--if I had wanted to ever so much I
couldn't have got far. We were unmounted remember. And, if you only
knew it, I've been cursing myself and my own idiocy right roundly in
having been such a blithering idiot as to get us into that hobble at
all. I daresay I shall get a kick down in the Service on the strength
of it when my full report goes in, and I haven't spared myself in it I
can tell you."
"Have you sent it in yet?" asked the girl, speaking quickly.
"No--but I shall to-morrow."
"Then promise me you won't--until you've rewritten it. If you don't I
shall make Hyland, and anyone else who's likely to be of any use, blazon
the whole thing out in every paper in the Colony, and in all South
Africa too. Now promise me you won't."
The colour had come into her cheeks, emphasising the clearness of the
dilated blue eyes. She looked lovely. As she stood there, drawn up
erect, again came back to him that vision of her on that exciting
occasion of their first meeting. He felt a trifle unsteadied, a trifle
thrown off his balance.
"It's of no use belittling the thing," she went on, her words tripping
over each other's heels, as it were. "You men who _do_ things are too
fond of doing that--"
"Are--_they_?" rejoined Elvesdon, with a touch of humour. "I've
sometimes noticed it's rather the other way on." And then a sudden
whirlwind of feeling seemed to sweep him off his feet. "Edala, when
your father and I were in that very tight fix together--I mean just
before either of us knew that we were going to have the feeblest chance
of escape--I put a question to him. Would you like to know what it
was?"
"Yes."
"Then you shall. I asked him whether, in the event of us ever getting
away again, he would have any objection to my trying to win your love."
"What did he answer?"
"He answered by another question. Did I think I could do it?"
"Well--and do you?"
She stood--the lovely flower-like face transformed with sweetness. He
had already taken a couple of steps towards her, in his uncontrollable
tension, and then--
"Yes, I think you can--darling," she whispered, into his shoulder a few
moments later. "In fact--you have."
"This is a strange sort of surrounding for such a climax--my own," he
murmured--after an interval. "A fusty, dusty old office."
"Well, and what could be more appropriate,"--she returned--"under the
circumstances."
The while Prior had sent at least two damning Government transport--
riders away, using dreadful language because being _after office hours_
they could not get their way-bills checked, and wondering what was the
_blanked_ use of blanked Resident Magistrates or blanked _blanked_ Civil
servants _blanked_ anyhow.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Evelyn Carden got up in obedience to the summons, to go to her relative.
"You don't mind, do you, dear?" she said, with her usual tactful
consideration.
"No--no. Of course not," answered Edala, yet still conscious of that
faint remaining twinge of jealousy. But the two had become drawn to
each other like sisters now. They had been through strange experiences
together, and each had come fully to rate the other at her own worth.
The room was cool and restful if not luxurious. Thornhill's tall form
lay there under the coverlet, a pathetic embodiment of strength laid
low. Even the bandages round his head, unsightly as all bandages are,
did not detract from the reposeful dignity of that calm strong face.
Evelyn stooped and kissed him on the cheek, taking, in her cool grasp,
the hand which was searching for hers.
"Well Inqoto, and you are much better now?" she said, and there was a
sort of cooing softness about the tone.
"No--I am not particularly--by the way, you seem to have got your tongue
round that dick at last."
"Practice," she answered smilingly.
"I'm not better, and I don't want to be. I've run out my time. Who
cares how soon I'm dead? I don't, for one." The pathos in the
naturalness of the voice brought something of a lump into the listener's
throat.
"Who cares?" she echoed after a moment of suspicious pause. "What about
Hyland for instance?"
"Hyland? Ah! Dear boy, he always believed in me."
"So does Edala," said the other boldly.
There was no answer. What was she to say? thought Evelyn.
"She does now," she went on. The wounded man opened his eyes wide.
"Does now? Rather late in the day. But," as if it had suddenly dawned
upon him, "what do you--I've had a whack on the head you know, and it's
left me rather stupid--what do you--know about things?"
"Nothing. Because there's nothing to know," came the cheerful confident
rejoinder. "Listen Inqoto--I believe it's useless, and worse, any
beating about the bush between you and me. Shall I speak plainly?"
Thornhill looked at her long and earnestly. As he did so a whole world
of reassurance came into his eyes. "Yes, of course," he said. "Talk as
plainly as you like."
"Well, I overheard a couple of silly cackling geese under the window the
other day, but the subject of their cackle was too farcical for words--
about you of course. Edala heard it too."
"Edala heard it?"
"Yes. Then we talked it out, and she said she didn't believe it
either."
There seemed no necessity on the part of Thornhill--perhaps from force
of mental habit no such occurred to him--to ask what the said `it' might
be.
"She has believed it up till now, anyhow," he said.
"And if you could have seen the awful agony of self-reproach she was in
that day!" urged the other. "It seemed almost like someone blind
restored to sight when I put the whole thing to her in a few words.
Under any other circumstances it would have been laughable--the quick
transformation, I mean."
"Yet they had something to go upon--something to go upon," repeated the
wounded man slowly. "I may as well tell you all about it, though
there's not much to tell."
Evelyn's clasp of the hand she held, tightened.
"You know I was under arrest years ago on suspicion of doing away with
my--legal partner in life?"
Evelyn nodded. Since she had overheard the two women's gossip she had
gone straight to Hyland and got the whole story out of him. Thornhill
went on.
"The strange part of the whole thing is that I didn't do it."
"I never for one fraction of a second supposed _you_ did."
"You stand pretty well alone there," answered Thornhill with a pressure
of the hand. "To cut a long story--and a very unpleasant one, for even
now the taste comes back--short, the party to whom I had given my name,
when I was young and foolish, and who, incidentally, gained far more by
the transaction than I did, led me a most shocking life. No--it wasn't
owing to drink, it was sheer innate devilishness. This went on for
years--by the bye you can still see some of its results in the way Edala
has turned against me ever since. That process, however, had begun
before, and not only with this child but with all of them. Well let's
get to the end of the abominable rotten episode, for the bare telling of
it makes me sick."
"Then don't tell it, Inqoto. Why should you?" adjured Evelyn earnestly,
and very uneasily as she remembered the doctor's injunctions that the
wounded man was not to be allowed to excite himself in the least degree.
Yet, now, his face was flushed and he was moving restlessly in the bed.
"I'd better get it over. Fact is I haven't mentioned the matter to
anybody--since--since it happened. You are the first. One night--after
raising a particularly shameful and scandalous scene--good Lord! it's
lucky the walls at Sipazi can't talk--she rushed out of the house
swearing that she was going to put an end to herself. Candidly I didn't
in the least care if she did, to such a pass had things come; however I
thought I should probably be suspected of murder if such a thing
happened. So I started to follow her, and didn't overtake her all of a
sudden either. When I did she had got among the rocks and crevices--
never mind what part of the farm or even if on it at all. I tell you
then, she was just like one possessed. I thought the devil must be
standing there before me, but I tried to warn her that she was ramping
dangerously near an ugly crevice that might be any depth. She answered
she didn't care. She was going to jump into it if only to get me hanged
for her murder. Well hardly were the words uttered than she tripped on
something and hurtled bang into the crack. I could do nothing, you
know. I was fully twenty yards off. Horrible, isn't it?"
The listener bent her head gravely.
"You were not to blame," she said. "The thing was sheer accident."
"So it was. I have had a great many years wherein to look back, and I
have never been able to blame myself in the affair in any single
particular. Well at the time my first feeling was one of intense
relief--shocking again, wasn't it? Then a horrid thought struck me.
Our relations with each other were well known, were matter of common
scandal. I began to feel the tightening of a noose, for who the devil
was likely to believe my version? Just then I saw someone watching me.
"I must have been mad. I don't know how it happened, but instead of
treating any witness as a friendly and invaluable one, I at once assumed
this one's hostility. I decided that one of us must not leave the spot
alive. I flung myself upon him and--didn't we have a tussle! Well, he
did exactly the same thing--stepped back into a crevice, and--stayed
there. That man was Manamandhla."
"Then he got out?"
"Well, of course. But I didn't know he was alive from that night until
a few weeks before you came. And he saved all four of our lives--but
that part of the story you know. Well that's all--and, thank God it
is."
The narrator closed his eyes wearily and lay still. The listener sat
there, still holding his hand. Her glance rested upon the firm, fine
features, and a great yearning was round her heart. What a tragedy had
this man's life been. Her thoughts went round to Edala. Had she been
in Edala's place would she have taken everything on trust? She thought
she would: she was sure she would.
"Why didn't you tell Edala all this, Inqoto?" she asked. "When she was
old enough I mean."
"She wouldn't have believed me. Do you?"
He had opened his eyes and was fixing them full on her face. But not
the slightest sign of doubt or misgiving did he read there. On the
contrary the expression was one of complete trust.
"Haven't I already said so?" she answered.
"Do you know, Evelyn, since I have been lying here I have found myself
wishing you had never found us out at all."