"Do you know, this place reminds me a little of our resting ground that
day down among the rocks at Camp's Bay," Nidia said, gazing up at the
gigantic boulder, which, piled obliquely against two more, formed a
natural penthouse on a very large scale. A blackened patch against the
rock in the entrance of the cave, showed a fireplace surrounded by
stones, and the very scanty baggage of the fugitives was disposed
around.
John Ames, who was engaged in his normal occupation, viz. mounting
guard, turned.
"Yes," he said; "it's the same sort of day, and grander scenery, because
wilder. Peaceful, too. Yet here we are, you and I, obliged to hide
among rocks and holes in peril of our lives."
"Strange, isn't it, how adaptable one can become?" went on Nidia. "That
day, do you remember, when you were so sceptical as to our ever meeting
again, who could have thought how we would meet and what experiences
should have been ours between then and now?
"Do you know," she went on gravely, after a thoughtful pause, "at times
I think I must be frightfully hard-hearted and unfeeling--I mean, to
have looked upon what I did--" and she shuddered.
"I liked the Hollingworths so much, too. And yet somehow it all seems
to have happened so long ago. Why is it that I do not feel it more,
think of it more? Tell me your opinion."
"One word explains it," he answered. "That is, `Action'."
"Action?"
"Yes. You have been kept continually on the move ever since. First of
all, you had your own safety to secure; consequently you had no time to
think of anything but that--of anybody but yourself."
"That sounds horribly selfish, somehow, but true."
"Well, selfishness in its etymological sense is only another word for
self-preservation, or, at any rate, an extension of that principle.
Were you to sit down and weep over the loss of your friends until some
obliging barbarian should come up and put an end to you? I think the
pluck you showed throughout was wonderful, and not less so the soundness
of judgment. When you found poor Hollingworth's youngster so badly
hurt, didn't you sit there and look after him at momentary risk of your
life until he died, poor little chap? Selfish? I call it by another
name, and so will other people when we get safely out of this."
Nidia smiled, rather sadly, and shook her head.
"Leave _you_ alone for trying to flatter me," she said softly. "You
have been doing nothing else ever since we have been together. But--you
don't really think me unfeeling and hard-hearted, Mr Ames?"
He turned quickly, for he had been looking out over the surrounding
waste.
"That isn't what you called me the first time in Shiminya's kraal," he
said.
"What? Unfeeling and hard-hearted. No. Why should I?" she rejoined
demurely, but brimming with mischief. Then, as he looked hurt, "Don't
be angry. I'm only teasing, as usual. Really, though, I ought to
apologise for that slip. But the name came out without my knowing it.
You see, Susie and I used always to call you by it between ourselves.
We saw it in the book at Cogill's the day we arrived, written in a hand
that seemed somehow to stand out differently from among all the others.
At first, when we were trying to locate the people there, we used to
wonder which was `John Ames,' and so we got into the habit of calling
you that way by ourselves. And in my mingled scare and surprise the
other day, out it came."
"We have been through a good deal together during the last four days,"
he said, "including one of the narrowest shaves for our lives we can
ever possibly again experience. Heaven knows how long we are destined
to roam the wilds together, but why not keep the conventional until our
return to conventionality?"
"Very well," she answered.
It was even as he had said. This was the afternoon of the fourth day
after leaving Shiminya's den, and now they were well in among the Matopo
range. Here, if anywhere, amid this vast sea of jumbled boulders and
granite cones and wide rocky hollows, they would be comparatively safe,
if only they kept a constant and careful look out, John Ames declared.
The open country would be swarming with rebels, and it was not
improbable that Bulawayo itself was in a state of siege. Here, where
almost every stone represented a hiding-place, they could lie _perdu_
for any time; and such was far the safer course, at any rate until able
to gain some inkling of what had really transpired, as to which they
were so far in complete ignorance. If the Matabele had risen upon
Bulawayo with the same secrecy and suddenness wherewith they had
surprised outlying stations, why, the capital would be absolutely at
their mercy, in which case the only whites left alive in the land would
be stray fugitives like themselves. Indeed, to John Ames it seemed too
much to hope that any other state of things could be the prevalent one,
wherefore for the present these rugged and seldom trodden fastnesses
afforded the securest of all refuges. This plan he had put to Nidia,
and she had agreed at once.
"Do not even go to the trouble of consulting me," she had said. "Always
act exactly as you think best. What do I know about things here, and
where would I have been now but for you?"
"You showed yourself full of resource before I came on the scene,
anyway. You might have pulled through just as well."
"No; I should never have been able to keep it up. Heavens! where would
I have been?"--looking round upon the wilderness and realising its
sombre vastness. "But with you I feel almost as safe as I did--well,
this day last week."
As he had said, they had indeed been a great deal together during the
past four days, really a great deal more so than during the three weeks
and upwards that they had known each other down-country. Hiding away in
sluit and river-bed and thorn thicket, every step of their flight had
been attended with peril. Discovery meant death--certain death. Even
were any trace of them lighted upon so as to arouse suspicion of their
presence in the minds of their ruthless enemies, detection would not
long follow. They could be tracked and hunted down with dogs, whatever
start they might have gained; and as for hoping to distance their
pursuers, why, a chain is no stronger than its weakest link, and Nidia,
for all the fine healthy training she was most fortunately in, was
hardly a match, either in fleetness or staying power, for a pack of
hardy muscular barbarians. No; in superlative caution alone lay their
only chance of safety.
And, throughout all this most trying experience--trying alike in the
terrible strain upon the nerves, and the physical strain of forced
marches in the enervating heat of a sub-tropical climate, over rough and
fatiguing ground--how many times had Nidia noted with confidence and
admiration the consummate judgment of her fellow-fugitive; the
unflagging vigilance, the readiness of resource, and the tranquil
hopefulness which he threw into the situation. Never a moment did he
relax observation even in the most trivial matters, and his knowledge of
the country, too, was wonderful. The part they had to traverse was the
most dangerous part, indeed, through which their line of flight could
possibly take them, bearing, as it did, a considerable population. More
than once they would have to pass so near a kraal that the barking of
dogs almost made them think they were discovered; but the narrow escape
to which we heard him allude had occurred at about noon of the second
day after leaving Shiminya's.
The line of country they were traversing was rough and difficult--
undulating flats covered with long grass, and plentifully studded with
trees, but there was no avoiding it, and, indeed, every step, even here,
was fraught with the gravest peril, for they were in the neighbourhood
of quite a cluster of kraals. Poor Nidia felt as though she must give
up in despair and exhaustion. The flags of the coarse grass cut her
ankles like saws, and she felt as though she could hardly drag one foot
after another, and even the words of cheer whispered by her companion
seemed to fall on deaf ears. Suddenly the latter halted, listened a
moment, then Nidia felt herself seized, and, with a whisper of caution,
dragged down as though into the very earth itself. As a matter of fact
this was nearly the case. The place she found herself in was a shallow
donga, almost concealed by long grass and brambles, and these her
companion was quickly but noiselessly dragging over her and himself.
Then had come the sound of footsteps, the hum of voices. She could see
out through the grass that was over her, and that without moving a
muscle. An _impi_ was approaching, and that in a line which should
bring it right over their hiding-place; an _impi_ of considerable size,
and which might have numbered some hundreds. The warriors were marching
in no particular order, and she could make out every detail of their
equipment--the great tufted shields and gleaming assegais; rifles, too,
many of them carried, and knobkerries and battle-axes. Some were
crested with great ostrich skin war-bonnets covering the head and
shoulders, others wore the _isiqoba_, or ball of feathers, fixed to the
forelock; a long wing feather of the kite or crane stuck through this,
and rising horn-like above the head; and catskin _mutyas_ and anklets of
flowing cowhair. At any other time she would have admired the spectacle
exceedingly; now, however, in the grim dark faces and rolling eyeballs
she could see nothing but the countenances of bloodthirsty and pitiless
fiends. Oh, Heaven! would they never pass? The throb of her
heart-beats seemed loud enough to attract their attention and cause them
to stop. But no sooner had one squad glided by than another appeared;
and with the advent of each, to those who lay there, it seemed that the
bitterness of death had to be gone through again. Several passed so
near to their hiding-place that the effluvium of their heated bodies
reached the fugitives, musky and strong, but their attention was fixed
upon the conversation of their fellows on the other side, and that peril
was over. But not until nearly an hour had passed since the last of the
savages had disappeared, and the lingering drawl of their deep-toned
voices had died away, would John Ames suffer his companion even so much
as to whisper, let alone move.
Well, that peril had passed over their beads, and now, in the well-nigh
uninhabited fastnesses of the Matopo, they felt comparatively safe. And
Nidia, remembering, and observing her fellow-fugitive and protector,
would find herself twenty times a day making comparisons between him and
all the other men she had ever known in a sense which was sadly
unflattering to the latter; and an unconscious softness would come into
her voice in conversing with him which was not a little trying to John
Ames.
For if there was one point upon which the latter had made up his mind,
it was that while Nidia was alone with him, and entirely under his care,
he must never for a moment allow his feelings to get the better of him.
To do so under the circumstances was, rightly or wrongly, to take an
advantage of the position, against which his principles rose up in
revolt. Yet there were times when his guard would insensibly slacken,
and his tone, too, would take on an unconscious softening.
They were fugitives, those two, hiding for their lives in the heart of a
savage and hostile land, wherein well-nigh every one of their own colour
had almost certainly been massacred, yet to one of them, at any rate,
the days that followed, that saw them hiding in and wandering through
this grim rock wilderness, were days of sheer unadulterated delight.
Life in the open entailed upon him no privation--he was used to it; to
rough it on coarse and scanty fare he never felt, and as a price to pay
for the happiness that was now his, why, it did not come in at all. To
awaken in the morning to the consciousness that the whole day should be
spent in the society and presence of this girl; that she was as
absolutely dependent upon him--upon his care and protection--as she was
upon the very air she breathed; that throughout the livelong day he
would have in his ears the music of her voice, under his gaze the sunny
witchery of that bright face, the blue eyes lighting up in rallying
mockery, or growing soft and dewy and serious according to the thoughts
discussed between them--all this was to John Ames rapture unutterable.
He looked back on his many communings in his solitary comings and
goings, and how the thought of her alone had possessed his whole being,
how he would sit for hours recalling every incident of their
acquaintanceship, even--so vivid was memory--going over all that was
said and done on each day of the same, and yet, running through all, the
hope of meeting again, somehow, somewhere. And now they had met--not as
he had all along pictured, under conventional circumstances and
surrounded by others, but as the survivors of savage massacre, who had
been wonderfully thrown together, having passed through an ordeal of
tragedy and blood. Her very life was in his hands, and by a sure and
certain instinct he knew that it was in his hands to save once more,
even as he had done more than once already.
And that his cup of joy might be full, the way in which his charge
accepted the position was perfect. Under the circumstances other women
might well have given way. The very precariousness of their situation,
recollection of the horrors and perils so lately passed through,
apprehensions as to the future, the necessary roughness of their life,
the deprivation of a thousand and one of the many conveniences and
comforts--great and small--of ordinary civilisation, the society of but
one companion day after day--all might have conduced to low spirits and
constraint and irritation, but nothing of the kind was manifest in Nidia
Commerell. A day of complete rest in their snug hiding-place amid the
rocks had completely set her up. The outdoor life and plain rough
living, and sense of temporary security, had brought a healthy glow into
her face, and the excitement and novelty of the position a brightness
and sparkle into her eyes, that rendered her in the sight of her
companion more entrancing to look upon than ever. Nor did she show the
least tendency to become weary of him, any more than in that time, which
now seemed so long back, when they were so much together amid
surroundings of civilisation and peace. Her spirits were unflagging,
her appreciation of his efforts and care for her comfort never wanting.
She, too, seemed to have made up her mind to put the past, with its
grievous and terrible recollections, the future, with its apprehensive
uncertainty, far from her, and to live in the present.
And at night, when the grim mountain solitudes would be awakened by
strange eerie sounds--the weird bay of the jackal, the harsh truculent
bark of the baboon, the howling of tiger wolves, and other mysterious
and uncanny noises, exaggerated by echo, rolling and reverberating among
the grim rocks--she would lie and listen, her eyes upon the patch of
gushing stars framed in the black portal of their rocky retreat, alive
to the ghostly gloom and vastness of the wilderness around; then,
rejoicing in the sense of proximity, even the care, of one whose slumber
was light unto wakefulness in the reliability of his guard over her, she
would fall asleep once more in the restful security afforded by the
contrast.