A DOUBLE EXILE.
Hail, dark mother of wanderers, parched nurse of lions! Amidst thy
romantic wildernesses grief and dishonour may forget themselves; with
thee man is only man! He leaves that other half of himself, reputation,
yonder in the crowd, and in these solitudes becomes a creature of thews
and sinews, valuable only for his strength and endurance, for the range
of his eye and the truth of his hand. He has done with the outward
shows of life, and with all nice differences between good and bad.
Here, worth is to be measured by the hunter’s fleetness of foot, and
honour by the marksman’s aim. What a man is counts for but little; what
he can do for much. In that aching misery which possessed him when he
left England, John Vansittart looked to the desert as his best refuge.
The hunter’s life in Mashonaland gives scanty leisure for brooding over
the ruins of a home in England. The early trek with the waggons, or the
start on foot from the skerm; the hard day’s tramp under the blazing
sun; the need of providing meat for the boys--the long following on
the spoor of giraffe or antelope, with the wild ride or cautious stalk
at the end--which that need involves; the charm of the life, its
poetry, its absolute novelty, and the ever-recurring vicissitudes which
each new day brings forth, leave the head of the expedition briefest
time for introspective thought. His slumbers are for the most part
dreamless; or his dreams are of lions prowling by the camp-fire, or of
the dark forms and wild gestures of those he has last seen dancing by
its flickering light; not of the lost faces of home. Best of all, his
conscience is at ease, for face to face with man in his most primitive
aspect he loses the habit of weighing his past acts and comparing, with
futile regret, the things he has done with the things he ought to have
done.
For Vansittart there could have been no better refuge than the desert.
Here, if his heart wounds were not healed, his consciousness of sin
was deadened. Here, where no exaggerated value was set on human life,
he could remember Harold Marchant’s death with less intensity of pain.
Here, where the native freely turned his gun or his assegai against his
fellow-man, a mischance such as that of Florian’s Caffè seemed a small
thing--the fortune of war, a spurt of anger, an unlucky blow, and there
an end. Every man must die somehow; and it may not be the worst doom
to drop down in the fulness of youth and vigour, knowing not the slow
agonies of gradual extinction, the torture of dying by inches.
Vansittart’s thoughts were tempered by his surroundings. His character
took new colours in that vivid life, in that lapse backward from the
civilized and the complicated to the primitive stage of man’s history.
It was as if Time had turned his glass and the earth were young. The
wild race of Cain, the outcast, could have been no wilder than these
woolly-haired followers of his, who were faithful to him because he was
a good shot.
Nature, the great consoler, helped him to forget his grief by
forgetting himself. Here, face to face with Nature’s mightiest forces,
man’s sense of his own personality dwindles to the faintest shadow in
the vastness of his surroundings. Instead of Trafalgar Square he has
the Falls of the Zambesi; instead of the languid club lounger he has
the elephant and the lion for his companions--the purring growl of the
lion instead of the gossip of the smoking-room; the trumpet of the
elephant instead of the chatter of the dinner-table. Surely it is good
for a man to be alone in the wilderness--alone save for the company of
followers to whom, though he be their leader, he is as another being,
a white man, a stranger in their land, between whose thoughts and
feelings and their own a great gulf is for ever fixed. It is good for
him to feel his own insignificance among men who value him only for
his powder and shot, and who will lose their reverence for his white
superiority with the spending of his last cartridge. Here he must needs
forget that pride of place which at home was a part of his being. Here
there are no tradesmen to fawn upon him, no servants to touch their
hats to him, no women to praise him. Small food for vanity here, where
the darkies call his smooth, flat hair dog’s hair, and who liken his
hairy arm to a baboon’s arm. Here if the women fawn upon him it is not
for his smiles or his favour, but for beads or printed calico, such
vivid orange or scarlet fabrics, figured with stars or half moons, as
Manchester weaves for the Torrid Zone. Here if the men are true to him
it is because he can feed them and pay them. He is in a world of stern
facts, where sentiment and sophistication are unknown.
The atmosphere suits him. The primitive interests of this primitive
life help to shut off that other life where all is gloom, the life of
thought and of memory. Sufficient for the day, that is the motto here:
food for the day; safety for the day; wood for the fires, water for man
and beast. Beside them, behind them, ahead of them, stalk dangers that
Europe knows not. Danger from beasts of prey; danger from men as cruel;
fever, starvation, death in many shapes--all the vicissitudes of a life
between the desert and the sky.
Fortune favours him in his desolation of spirit. A happier man might
have been less lucky. A man more careful of his life, with more to
live for, might have hardly escaped scot-free from all the dangers of
the hunter’s life in an unknown land. Travellers far more experienced
wondered afterwards when they heard the story of this man’s travels,
and the impunity with which he had done desperate things.
His daring had been the audacity of ignorance, they said. If he had
known the extent of the peril in such unconsidered wanderings, with
so small a party, with such inadequate preparation, he would have
been a madman to set his life upon such chances. Had he answered them
truthfully he would have told them that he was a madman when he turned
his face towards the desert; mad with the agony of a life that was
blighted; mad with the bitter memories of lost happiness.
* * * * *
Of these wedded lovers, parted in the noontide of their love,
one carried his wounded heart to the wilderness, and sought for
tranquillity of spirit in a life of movement and peril; the other, the
weaker vessel, had no such large resources. The life of adventure, the
ever-changing horizon, were not for her. She could only creep to some
quiet haven and sit alone and brood upon her grief.
She went first to Avranches; then late in the autumn she took a fancy
to the solitude of Mont St. Michel, the quaint monastic citadel, the
fortress on the rock; and here, when the last of the tourists had gone,
and the equinoctial gales were roaring round the Gothic towers, she
took up her abode in an apartment specially prepared for her by the
cheery patronne of the Inn at the Gate, an apartment upon the ramparts,
with windows looking wide over the sea towards Coutances and Jersey.
Benson, who had a constitution of iron, complained bitterly of this
wind-swept rock, yet had to own later that her health had never been
better. Eve stopped here late into the winter, sketching a little,
reading a great deal, wandering on the sands in all weathers, and
sometimes wishing that her footsteps would take her unawares to that
portion of the bay, where, as in the Kelpie’s flow, sorrow might find a
grave.
An imprudent ramble in the marshy fields between Pontorson and the
Mount, which left her belated in the mists of a November evening,
resulted in congestion of the lungs. She had contrived to lose herself
among those salt meadows as completely as ever her husband had lost
himself in Mashonaland, and it was eleven o’clock when she and her
whimpering attendant tottered along the causeway leading to the gates
of the fortress, footsore and weary, their shoes worn out in that long
tramp over coarse grass and sandy hillocks.
Benson telegraphed to Miss Marchant at Fernhurst, and Sophy appeared
on the scene as quickly as boat and rail, and a wretched fly from
Avranches, with harness eked out by bits of rope, could bring her.
Sophy was broken-hearted at this cruel turn which her sister’s bright
fortunes had taken, and agonized with remorseful retrospection. It was
she, perhaps, whose imprudent tongue had parted husband and wife, had
destroyed that happy home. Sophy hated herself for the folly of that
revelation. Why could she not have let well alone? Why could she not
have left undisturbed that happy state of things by which she herself
had profited so richly? Looking back upon her conduct of that fatal
week, she saw that it was her own disappointment which had soured
her, and her own selfish vexation which had made her so angry with
Vansittart.
It was a long time before Eve was well enough for serious talk of
any kind. She rallied slowly, and during the monotonous days of her
convalescence she was treated as a child, who must only hear of
pleasant things; but when she was well again, quite well--save for that
little hacking cough which seemed to have become an element of her
being--Sophy ventured to approach the subject of her domestic sorrows.
“I have been utterly miserable since the day I left Charles Street,”
said Sophy, seated beside Eve’s easy-chair, and resting her forehead
on the cushioned arm as she talked, so that her face was invisible.
“I have hated myself for speaking of your husband as I did--only
upon hearsay. After all, Mr. Sefton might have misinterpreted Jack’s
conduct. It might all have been a mistake.”
“It was a mistake, Sophy.”
“Oh, I am so glad. You found out at once that Mr. Sefton was wrong.”
“Yes.”
“Thank God! But then”--looking up at her sister in blank
astonishment--“if that is so, why are you parted, Jack and you?”
“That is our secret, Sophy.”
“But why, but why? I can’t understand. There could be only one reason
for your leaving him when you loved him so dearly. Nothing but the
knowledge of his infidelity would justify----”
“Stop, Sophy,” said Eve, peremptorily. “There is nothing gained by
speculating about other people’s business. My husband and I have our
own reason for taking different roads. We have never quarrelled; we
have never ceased to care for each other. I shall love him with all my
heart, and mind, and strength, till my last breath.”
“I guess your reason,” answered Sophy, nodding sagaciously. “He is an
Atheist, and you, who have always been a good Church-woman, could not
go on living with an unbeliever. You are like poor Catherine in ‘Robert
Elsmere.’”
“Oh, Sophy, do you think I should forsake him because he was without
hope or comfort from God? Why do you tease me with foolish guesses? I
tell you again the reason of our parting is our secret. A secret that
will go down with me to the grave.”
Sophy’s eager imagination ran riot in the world of mystery. Politics,
Freemasonry, Hypnotism, Theosophy, Nihilism, hereditary madness,
epilepsy, hydrophobia, a family ghost, a family fatality! That lively
mind of hers touched each possibility, rejected each, and flew off to
the next; and lastly, with a sigh of relief, she exclaimed--
“I am more thankful than I can say that it was not my imprudent tongue
which parted you.”
An hour later, walking alone on the ramparts, she told herself that in
all probability this desolate wife was only throwing dust in her eyes,
and that Vansittart’s inconstancy had been clearly demonstrated in
accordance with Sefton’s story. It would be only like a devoted wife to
violate truth in order to vindicate her husband. Pride and love would
alike urge Eve to deny her husband’s infidelity.