Kitabı oku: «The White Hand and the Black: A Story of the Natal Rising», sayfa 17
Chapter Thirty Two.
Thornhill’s Story
“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.”
She looked hurt. “Why, Inqoto?”
“Because child,” and he smiled a little at her still slight difficulty with the dick. “I am wondering how I am ever going to do without you again. You did threaten to take yourself off once you know.”
“Well I can’t inflict myself upon you for ever,” she answered, with a laugh. “But I have been very happy at Sipazi – very.”
“Happy? I should have thought you’d have been bored out of your immortal soul, shut up all this time with only another girl and a sober-sided, boring, old fogey.”
“Stop that now, Inqoto,” she said quickly, dropping her other hand on to his, and there was a ring in her voice that his ear might or might not have caught. The air seemed charged with some sort of unwonted force.
“Well, what I was trying to screw up courage to say was this,” he went on. “If you have been so happy here why not continue to be so on the same terms, for the rest of our natural lives – that is if you can put up with the old fogey aforesaid ‘for better or for worse,’ as the rigmarole has it, probably the latter? What do you say, dear?”
A flush had come over her face, giving way to a momentary paleness, then it returned. The light in her eyes burned dear and soft. She looked wonderfully attractive.
“I say – ‘Yes,’” she answered. “But oh, dearest, are you sure of yourself. You are weak and ill you know. Had we not better treat this as though it had not been until you are your own strong self again, and even then if you wish it?”
“No – we had not. Well? You said yes just now. Say it again.”
She did so. And she bent down and kissed him again, this time on the lips.
“I’ve never seen anyone like you before,” she whispered tenderly. “Never.”
“Gee-yupp! Strikes me I’ve looked in at the wrong time.”
Evelyn sprang back, flushing crimson. Hyland was standing in the doorway, with the most mischievously comical expression of countenance. The coolest of the three was the patient himself.
“No you haven’t,” said the latter. “Come in Hyland, and shut the door. Evelyn here has agreed to take me on for better or for worse – probably worse, I tell her. What d’you think of that?”
“Good old step-ma!” cried Hyland, seizing hold of Evelyn, and bestowing upon her cheeks a hearty kiss – Hyland was nothing if not boisterous. “I say dad, though, I’ve got a bit of news for you – and very much of the same sort. Edala’s gone and got engaged to that fellow Elvesdon. What d’you think of that?”
“Well, it doesn’t come upon me as a wild surprise. When did they put up that bargain?”
“Now. This afternoon; half an hour ago.”
“That’s odd, the coincidence I mean. So did we.”
Hyland whistled.
“My hat!” he exclaimed, “but it’s a rum world.”
” – And very much given to match-making,” supplied Thornhill complacently.
Chapter Thirty Three.
Envoi
The table was laid out in the cool shade of the fig-trees, but the birds which loved to depredate in crowds in the garden at Sipazi had taken themselves off to the further end of the same with that object, for it was not quiet here; not by any means. A small, but very jovial party was assembled, a party of six. And it was Christmas day.
The afternoon heat of the midsummer day shimmered without, but there was no hot wind, wherefore here in the cool shade it was delightful. Nearly a year had gone by since we first made acquaintance with the spot, and the party here gathered; nearly half a year since we last saw the latter brought safely through the times of peril and anxiety which that year had brought forth. And upon the third finger of the left hand of two members of that party was a plain ring of somewhat suspicious brightness – which had not been there then.
“I say,” cried Hyland, getting up to pop off another of the gold-headed bottles which stood in a vaatje of water. “We’ve drank all our own healths and everybody else’s. Now we ought to drink the health of this jolly ghost party.”
“Contradiction in terms, boy,” said his father. “Who ever heard of a ‘jolly’ ghost?”
“Well, ain’t we? We’re all in white.”
“Lucky we’re not all in black,” said Edala, half seriously.
“Hear – hear!” cried Prior.
“Appropriate colour for Christmas,” put in Evelyn.
“And the heat,” supplied Elvesdon.
“Who ever saw a ghost with a very red and skinned nose either?” observed Edala, with a severe glance at her brother, whose face still bore traces of the exposure of a hard campaign.
“Look here, Mrs Elvesdon, don’t you make personal remarks,” retorted Hyland. “Two can play at that game, and I for one never saw you look so dashed fetching as you’re doing now – and that’s saying a great deal. Gee-yupp!” pretending to dodge the bottle which his sister pretended to throw at him. “Elvesdon, keep your wife in order, can’t you. It’s a bad example for us two old bachelors – eh. Prior? Two poor old bachelors!”
“The remedy for that pitiable state lies in your own hands, Hyland,” said Evelyn serenely. “Why don’t you apply it?”
“That’s what I might have been going to do, if the dad there hadn’t been so beastly slim in cutting me out,” retorted the incorrigible rascal. “I don’t know what to say about Prior. Pity you haven’t got any sisters, Evelyn.”
“Plenty of other people have, Hyland,” said Elvesdon. “A man crowned with your laurels, you know, isn’t likely to go begging.”
“Oh here, I say, shut up,” was the reply, made half seriously, the point being that the speaker had served all through the campaign and that with some distinction.
“No fear,” cried Edala. “You started the campaign of chaff, Hyland, and you can’t yell out if you get the worst of it.”
“Ah. I like to see – er – pals, shall we call it? stand by each other. Now then Elvesdon – back her up.”
Of course all this was precious poor repartee or wit, especially in cold print. But given the circumstances – a jovial reunion coming close upon vivid recollections of peril and storm – now a setting of peace and serenity and happiness – and Christmas Day – and it is obvious to anyone not possessed of a churlish soul that very little makes towards fun and jollity and mirth. And this held good here.
The rising, a far more formidable affair than the home public ever seems to have realised, and of which this narrative only deals with in its earlier stages, had been very effectually quelled, through the bravery and devotion of Colonial troops and the high efficiency and personnel of Colonial officers; and that without the aid of a single Imperial soldier. As such the campaign stands unique in the annals of South African warfare. The pluck displayed in several fierce battles, the splendid grit and endurance, never failing, under every difficulty, in hard and almost unnegotiable country, has been in evidence before in such warfare, but never more so than during this last campaign in Natal.
Well it was over now, but in it Hyland Thornhill as we have said, had borne his full share, and that with distinction. Elvesdon, as a Civil servant, had perforce taken no active part in the subsequent operations, but indirectly, ever at his post during that wearing anxious time he had borne his share in it by smoothing down many a difficulty – in the matter of facilitating supplies, and so forth, for those who had; so much so that his superiors were led to re-consider their first impressions to the effect that he had rather muddled the situation in the matter of Babatyana. Anyhow, here he was, still at Kwabulazi, and with him the faithful Prior.
“Please – one man want to see master. He say he Zulu nigger.”
The interruption came from Thornhill’s Indian cook. There was a laugh, and Hyland fairly roared.
“I’ll swear he never said that, Ramasam,” said the latter, “Who is he?”
But before the other could answer a tall figure strode up and halted in front of them, uttering a sonorous hail.
“Whau! Manamandhla!” cried Hyland. “This is good, good to meet again here, for I think the last time we looked on each other’s faces was among the rocks and bushes of the Mome. Here is tywala that I don’t suppose you ever drank before,” creaming up a large tumbler with champagne, and handing it to the new arrival.
“That have I never, Ugwala,” said the Zulu with a smile, after a good pull at the sparkling beverage. “How a man – an impi – could fight if doctored with such múti as this, say in the Nkandhla!”
There was a humorous twinkle in the speaker’s eyes, the point of the allusion being that he and Hyland had twice met in battle face to face, but the assegai of the one and the revolver of the other had simultaneously turned upon another enemy.
“We’ll have no end of yarns now from the other side,” went on Hyland. Then to the Zulu. “I was saying Manamandhla, this is a good day to have arrived on – Christmas Day – but then, you don’t know what that is.”
“I have heard U ’Jobo tell the people some story about it – ” was the answer.
“U ’Jobo!” cried Hyland, “Whau! U ’Jobo! It will be a long time before he tells ‘the people’ any more of his stories —impela!”
“He’s a considerable swine and deserves all he’s got,” said Elvesdon. “Still I’m glad I was able to help the poor devil a little. After all he did try to warn us.”
For the Rev. Job Magwegwe had fallen upon evil days. He had been arrested at an early stage of the rebellion, and tried, on several charges of holding seditious and inflammatory gatherings under the guise of prayer meetings; and in the result was sentenced to two years’ hard labour and thirty-six lashes. But Elvesdon’s representations had procured the remission of the lashes and of six months of imprisonment.
They sat thus chatting for some time, and then Thornhill suggested that his visitor should go with Hyland and choose a fat beast to kill, for himself and the farm people, and any others the latter might like to send word to – by way of making a Christmas festivity for themselves in the evening.
“Good idea!” said Hyland, “I’m getting tired of sitting still. A ride over to the herd will do all right. Coming, Prior?”
“Rather.”
Now, by all rights, Manamandhla should have been arrested as an arch-rebel, and sent for trial: but – he was not.
So the remaining four sat on there, and the hours of the golden afternoon rolled on, and the birds piped and twittered down the valley in the lengthening sunbeams, and the great red krantz, frowning down majestically from the face of Sipazi, glowed like fire in the westering sun. But upon these lay the sunset of a perfect content and peace.
