"AND THE SUMMER'S NIGHT IS A WINTER'S DAY."
For Eanswyth Carhayes the sun of life had indeed set.
The first numbing shock of the fearful news over, a period of even
greater agony supervened. He who had succeeded in setting free the
wholly unsuspected volcanic fires of her strong and passionate nature--
him, her first and only love--she would never see again in life. If she
had sinned in yielding to a love that was unlawful, surely she was
expiating it now. The punishment seemed greater than she could bear.
She made no outcry--no wild demonstrations of grief. Her sorrow was too
real, too sacred, for any such commonplace manifestations. But when she
emerged from her first retirement, it was as a walking ghost. There was
something about that strained and unnatural calm, something which
overawed those who saw it. She was as one walking outside the world and
its incidents. They feared for her brain.
As the days slipped by, people wondered. It seemed strange that poor
Tom Carhayes should have the faculty of inspiring such intense affection
in anybody. No one suspected anything more than the most ordinary of
easy-going attachment to exist between him and his wife, yet that the
latter was now a broken-hearted woman was but too sadly obvious. Well,
there must have been far more in the poor fellow than he had generally
been credited with, said the popular voice, and after all, those outside
are not of necessity the best judges as to the precise relationship
existing between two people. So sympathy for Eanswyth was widespread
and unfeigned.
Yet amid all her heart-torture, all her aching and hopeless sorrow, poor
Tom's fate hardly obtruded itself. In fact, had she been capable of a
thorough and candid self-analysis she would have been forced to admit
that it was rather a matter for gratulation than otherwise, for under
cover of it she was enabled to indulge her heart-broken grief to the
uttermost. Apart from this, horrible as it may seem, her predominating
feeling toward her dead husband was that of intense bitterness and
resentment. He it was who had led the others into peril. That
aggressive fool-hardiness of his, which had caused her many and many a
long hour of uneasiness and apprehension, had betrayed him to a
barbarous death, and with it that other. The cruel irony of it, too,
would burst upon her. He had avenged himself in his very death--had
broken her heart.
Had Tom Carhayes been the only one to fall, it is probable that Eanswyth
would have mourned him with genuine--we do not say with durable--regret.
It is possible that she might have been afflicted with acute remorse at
the part she had played. But now all thoughts of any such thing faded
completely from her mind, obliterated by the one overwhelming, stunning
stroke which had left her life in shadow until it should end.
Then the Rangers had returned, and from the two surviving actors in the
terrible tragedy--Payne and Hoste, to wit--she learned the full
particulars. It was even as she had suspected--Tom's rashness from
first to last. The insane idea of bushbuck hunting in a small party in
an enemy's country, then venturing across the river right into what was
nothing more nor less than a not very cunningly baited trap--all was due
to his truculent fool-hardiness. But Eustace, knowing that her very
life was bound up in his--how could _he_ have allowed himself to be so
easily led away? And this was the bitterest side of it.
To the philosophic and somewhat cynical Payne this interview was an
uncomfortable one, while Hoste subsequently pronounced it to be the most
trying thing he had ever gone through in his life.
"Is there absolutely no hope?" Eanswyth had said, in a hard, forced
voice.
The two men looked at each other.
"Absolutely none, Mrs Carhayes," said Payne. "It would be sham
kindness to tell you anything different. Escape was an impossibility,
you see. Both their horses were killed and they themselves were
surrounded. Hoste and I only got through by the skin of our teeth. If
our horses had `gone under' earlier it would have been all up with us,
too."
"But the--but they were not found, were they? They may have been taken
prisoners."
Again the two men looked at each other. Neither liked to give utterance
to what was passing through his mind. Better a hundredfold the
unfortunate men were dead and at rest than helpless captives in the
hands of exasperated and merciless savages.
"Kafirs never do take prisoners," said Payne after a pause. "At least,
never in the heat and excitement of battle. And it is not likely that
Carhayes or Milne would give them a chance, poor chaps."
"You mean--?"
"They would fight hard to the bitter end--would sell their lives dearly.
I am afraid you must face the worst. I wish I could say otherwise, but
I can't. Eh, Hoste?"
The latter nodded. He had very willingly allowed the other to do all
the talking. Then, as all things come to an end sooner or later--even
Wigmore Street--so eventually did this trying interview.
"I say, George. That just was a bad quarter of an hour," said Hoste, as
the two companions-in-arms found themselves once more in their favourite
element--the open air, to wit. "I don't want to go through it again
many times in a lifetime. If ever there was `broken heart,' writ large
in any woman's face, it is on that of poor Mrs Carhayes. I believe
she'll never get over it."
Payne, who had shown himself far from unfeeling during the
above-mentioned trying interview, regarded this remark as a direct
challenge to the ingrained cynicism of his nature.
"You don't, eh?" he replied. "Well, I don't want to seem brutal, Hoste,
but I predict she'll be patching up that same `broken heart' in most
effective style at some other fellow's expense, before the regulation
two years are over. They all do it. Lend us your 'bacco pouch."
Hoste said nothing. But for that little corner of the curtain of her
suspicions which his wife had lifted on the first night of Eanswyth's
arrival, he might have been three parts inclined to agree with his
friend. As things stood, he wasn't.
But could they at that moment have seen the subject of their
conversation, it is possible that even the shelly and cynical Payne
might have felt shaken in his so glibly expressed opinion. In the
seclusion of her room she sat, soft tears coming to the relief of the
hitherto dry and burning eyes as she pressed to her lips, forehead, and
heart, a little bit of cold and tarnished metal. It was the broken spur
which Eustace had been wearing at the time of the disaster, and which
her recent visitors had just given her. And over this last sorry relic
she was pouring out her whole soul--sorrowing as one who had no hope.