The sunlight flooded the rondavel and played in a golden radiance about
Honor's figure. The gleam of it was in her hair; it shone dazzlingly on
her white dress, and sparkled with a hard brilliance on the plain gold
circlet on her finger. Matheson caught the glint of the ring, and from
that moment it seemed to him that all the light in the room became
contracted and centred in that narrow band, darting forth its refracted
rays with a fiery challenge that hurt the eyes.
He put up a hand to shut out the sinister gleam of it, and lay quiet and
in silence. Honor had risen and moved away from the bed. She stood
with her face partly averted, watching the beauty of the sunrise through
the uncurtained open window. An immense embarrassment held her, an
embarrassment that made itself felt and in which the man shared. A
sense of wrongdoing robbed them both of all pleasure in that long caress
in the dawn, when their lips had met and lingered in the first kiss they
had interchanged. He had kissed her once before on the brow; that kiss
had been one of renunciation; the kiss he had given her that morning
held the quality of passion in its eager warmth, a passion to which the
woman was not insensible, to which she had in a measure responded. It
had been the act of a moment in obedience to the impulse of the moment,
and it left them both a little overcome and excited and enormously
self-conscious.
Honor was startled. There was an expression akin to fear in the eyes
that looked out at the sunlight, a warm colour in the beautiful face as
if the rosy light in the sky had caught and flushed her cheeks. Her
breathing was hurried, and the hand hanging at her side, the hand with
its shining circlet, clenched and unclenched itself nervously. What had
she done?--she, the bride of a few weeks. It was her fault, entirely
her fault; she had always known that he loved her--had realised when she
kissed him that she was touching fire. And yet after all what harm was
there in what had passed between them? Why should she deny him that
small satisfaction? She turned impulsively towards him, and stood
transfixed, surprised and disconcerted at the sight of him lying with
his eyes shielded by his hand. Why did he lie like that? Why would he
not lode at her?
"Mr Matheson!" she said softly.
He uncovered his eyes immediately and met her inquiring gaze.
"Oh, hang it all!" he exclaimed. "Why don't you call me Guy? We've got
beyond formalities."
He turned on his elbow.
"Come here," he said. "I can't talk to you from a distance. It's all
right. I'll not forget again. I've been seeing that damned ring on
your finger till I'm wellnigh blinded by it. It stands between us. I'm
not likely to forget that. And there's something else between us--
something... I ought to have remembered sooner. But the sight of
you..."
He broke off with jerky abruptness. Honor, observing him wonderingly,
drew nearer in obedience to his wish, and seated herself in the chair
near the bed. She folded her hands in her lap, and the ring was hidden
from him. He noticed that, and wondered if she concealed it
intentionally.
"I want to get away," he said. "You must help me. I want some kind of
conveyance... You'll see to it? ... It doesn't matter about this
morning... After I leave I shall never see you again. I wish I had not
seen you--ever. I wish I could forget you, but I know that is out of
the question. I'll never forget... your face... your voice... these
will live in my memory. I am going to be married almost immediately, to
the best little girl who ever loved a man not worthy of her. I've a
warm affection for her--a warm affection, and an immense respect... but
I have given the best of myself to you. That fact I am afraid is going
to spoil life for both of us--for her and for me, I mean."
"Need she know?" Honor asked quickly, in a voice that was not quite
steady.
"She knows already. I had to tell her that before asking her to be my
wife."
"I'm sorry," she said. "Oh! I'm sorry."
She was silent for a moment; then she burst forth with a sudden soft
vehemence that surprised him. He fell to listening, wondering, while he
watched her working face, as expressive of the emotion that swayed her
as the full rich tones giving voice to the flow of resentful thoughts
that expressed their owner's discontent with life, why this complicated
business of life and love should be dependent upon infinitesimal human
needs; why the disconnected individual existence should act and interact
upon each separate existence it came in contact with until certain lives
became interwoven with its own and, in adding to its completeness,
divorced it from its former state of comfortable detachment? To love
much is to suffer much; to love not at all is to remain unacquainted
with happiness. And it is never a matter of choice: the lover is
fashioned by circumstance; he is not his own creator.
"I think you were unwise to tell her," Honor said, speaking low, and
looking away from him, gazing abstractedly at the golden path that
stretched from the doorway to her feet with wide unseeing eyes. "Your
confidence only aggravates the wrong. Life hurts enough." She pressed
her hands the one upon the other tightly in her lap, and her face was
sad. "Life has its beginning in pain; it struggles painfully through
the years to the inevitable end. We regard life dishonestly; we're
afraid to face the truth. We speak of the beauty of Nature, her
kindliness and compassion; and we look about us and behold the drought,
and the beasts dying of hunger and thirst; that is not beauty, it is
ugliness: we see men striving in a hated rivalry, competing always--
killing one another; that is not kindliness; kindliness is not born of
the lust of hate. Throughout creation, from the meanest organic life to
the highest, one thing preys upon another and kills in order to live;
that is not compassion. Beauty and serenity exist only in inanimate
objects. Perhaps that is why inanimate nature endures while we pass
away.
"I love this land," she added, in soft impassioned accents, "as a woman
loves her child. I wish I were a man that I could fight for it. Your
country in annexing ours tears my child from my arms. And you talk to
me of the futility, the wrong, of my wish to reclaim it... Go back to
the girl who loves you, marry her, and have children of your own; and
then perhaps you will understand. She will forget when her first child
lies in her arms that its father's love was ever given elsewhere. And
you will forget too. No human passion is so acute that time cannot dim
its keenness. I want you to forget. I want you, if you ever think of
me, to think of me kindly as a friend."
"Friend!" he ejaculated scornfully.
"It's the sweetest word in all the English language," she returned
gently, "when it is applied sincerely."
"That may be," he admitted, and thought how ill the term applied in his
case.
It incensed him that she could talk in that dispassionate manner about
friendship with his burning kisses hot upon her lips. He believed that
she was dissembling for the purpose of hiding from him her real
feelings. He had never really understood her. She was capable of an
immense reserve; not once in their most intimate moments had she
permitted herself to be entirely frank with him.
"Perhaps in the future," he said, "I may come to regard this thing with
the same cool detachment as yourself; but I can't think of you as a
friend--yet. And it is dishonourable for me to think of you in any
other way. I hadn't heard of your marriage. I can't get used to the
idea. It seems to me fantastic and unreal I met Herman Nel in Cape
Town; he never mentioned it."
"I doubt whether he knew of it," she answered. "Herman has not been to
Benfontein for some months. Freidja is away nursing. She has
quarrelled with him."
"Is she going to spoil her life and his?" he asked with sharp
impatience, recalling Nel's face with its slightly wistful smile when
the Dutchman had spoken to him of the rupture of his engagement.
Honor looked surprised.
"No," she said. "After the war she will marry him. She loves him.
Herman is a good man, and he is Dutch. They will live here."
"And you?" he asked. "Are you going to forsake Benfontein?"
She smiled at the question. The farm on the Karroo was more precious to
her than the fairest places of earth. She had come to Benfontein as a
child. Every tree and kopje, every flower that blossomed in the veld,
was dear to her with the priceless value of long familiar things. To
quit Benfontein would be to tear herself up by roots too deeply set to
bear such ruthless transplanting.
"Heinrich is working the farm for Andreas in his absence," she
explained; "he rents half the farm. We shall build a house for
ourselves on the land, and I shall live near my mother. When Andreas
marries, she will come to us."
"You make plans," he said, surprised at her confidence in the future.
"One cannot think beyond the present these days. I do not look so far
ahead."
"I forgot," she said, glancing at him swiftly. "You are going to
fight--against us..."
"I am going to join Botha's force as soon as I am married," he answered.
"You've talked with Herman... He has persuaded you?"
Her tone held a note of suspicion. For all his talk of love for her, he
had not been ready to yield to her persuasions. He was even prepared to
fight against her people, to look upon her people and herself as rebels.
That was not consistent with love.
"Herman has persuaded you," she said again.
"He helped to convince me, I admit."
"I tried to convince you," she said quickly. "I did my utmost to prove
to you the justice of our cause... Why couldn't you at least have kept
out of it? Why must you strike at me?"
"Oh! Honor," he protested. "You look at this thing so differently. It
isn't a personal question at all."
"It is," she cried passionately--"between you and me." She leaned
towards him, her face quivering, and flushed with angry shame. "No one
knows better than you do all this means to me. I've told you so much.
I've trusted you. And in return--in return you take up arms against me.
You talk of love--you, who cannot be true either to the woman you
profess to love, or to the woman you are pledged to marry! Your love is
not worthy any woman's acceptance."
"I've deserved that," he replied, with a quick change of colour, and
averting his gaze from the stormy reproach in her eyes. It came to him
in a swift illuminating flash that intense natures such as Honor's were
not only difficult to understand, they were difficult also to deal with;
possibly they would be difficult to live with.
He found this fresh mood disconcerting and distressing. And the
reproach to his honour came ill from her. He felt suddenly very tired.
He needed food. In her excitement she had forgotten the nourishment
that stood ready for him on the table, slowly cooling while they talked.
"It isn't altogether my fault," he asserted with almost sullen
insistence. "I'm not myself. I'm unnerved. You come to me when I'm
altogether unprepared, and--my God! how the sight of you tempts me! But
you are hard, Honor. All that is gentle in your nature has been
deliberately suppressed."
"I've been tutored in a hard world," she replied oddly. "It is well,
perhaps, that I am hard. A woman needs an armour of steel to protect
herself from the selfishness of men's love I believed in you once... I
cared... You know I cared. But you wanted everything, and would give
nothing. That is your way. For men like Beyers and Christian de Wet I
would die, if it would benefit them at all. They are brave men with a
single purpose in life. You call them rebels; we regard them as heroes.
Had you joined us, I would have done anything for you. Instead, you
side with the men who are trying to defeat our cause. Can you wonder
that I am bitter when you speak to me of love and strike with the other
hand?"
She got up abruptly, and stood for a moment irresolute, looking down at
him, the anger dying slowly out of her eyes.
"It isn't any use--it isn't any use at all to speak of these things now.
You will go your way, I mine. But it might have been so different.
Last year, when you went away, I hoped you would change your mind and
come back. I didn't know then of this girl. Heinrich told me about
her. You went back to her, and my influence ended."
So Holman had enlightened her about Brenda. Doubtless he had done so in
order to prosper his own suit. It was a card he would not have scrupled
to play.
"I could never have embraced your cause," he said gently. "I know what
you have suffered, and I feel for you. But the affairs of nations are
outside individual grievances. One has to accept a broader outlook. I
shall never forget that I owe it to you that I learnt to see your point
of view so clearly that I look upon this movement less as a rebellion
than the persistence in a righteous if mistaken cause by a people who
have never known discipline. In relying upon Germany you rely upon a
ruthless enemy; the protection of the British flag alone secures your
independence. This Colony is governed largely by the Dutch, in the
interests of the Dutch collectively with the British, and for the good
of the native community. You cannot improve on that. Let well alone,
Honor, and heal old wounds. Herman Nel's method of winning is the
better and surer way."
"Ah, Herman!" she said, and smiled. "Herman is a dreamer."
"He dreams sanely," he answered with conviction.
"Which means that he thinks as you do."
She moved away to the table and took up the neglected food.
"See what a bad nurse I make," she said, assuming a lighter manner. "I
would starve you while I attempt to show you the error of your ways. It
would appear that where you are concerned I must fail in everything."
She brought the cup to the bedside. He took it from her hand and
drained the contents eagerly.
"You were famished," she said reproachfully. "Yet you wouldn't ask me
for food."
"I hate to give so much trouble," he answered. "If you wouldn't mind
calling Butter Tom presently, I will get up and dress with his
assistance. It's all humbug, my lying here, and taking slops. I could
eat an ox."
"I'll dress your wound first," she said. "That is something I can do
for you better than Butter Tom."
"You dressed it before?" he asked. "I wondered. I thought possibly I
owed that to you. Honor..." He looked at her appealingly. "You are
not going to let us part with a sense of ill will between us? I want to
believe that when I am gone you will sometimes think kindly of me."
Honor did not at once reply. She stood With the empty cup in her hand,
the sunlight warming her face, shining on the white surface of the
vessel into which she gazed in thoughtful abstraction, brightening her
whole figure, and the room which formed a quaint and fitting background
for this girl who belonged to the wilds, and whose beauty suggested
always to the man who watched her sunlit spaces and warmth and the scent
and the winds of the veld. She lifted her gaze suddenly and met his
_eyes_.
"Don't let us talk of these matters," she said. "It is wiser with the
coming of morning to cease to dwell on the dreams which belong to the
night that is past. I've dreamed my dreams--you too. We are awake now,
and the day calls us to other activities. Just for a moment while sleep
drugged our senses we forgot. But we are neither of us people who
forget for long the path of honour."
His gaze fell before her steady eyes. She was right. Their paths in
life were no tractless ways; they stretched straight ahead, clearly
defined and mile-stoned with duties, leading always in opposite
directions to the accepted goal--the goal of individual endeavour which
contributes its effort to the unending scheme of life.