Wild Honey Part 11

He stared at her. She was deadly pale, but the moon itself was not more composed, and her eyes had the same steady glance as his own. Her question was spoken in a very low voice.

"Were you ever in love with--another man's wife?"

His face darkened. Prepared as he was, the unexpected form of her question took him unawares. He had antic.i.p.ated something to which he could give a firm, clear denial--but to this, what could he say, who had so much on his conscience!

"_You_ ... listening to scandal, Diane!" he said at last, and the reproach in his voice reached home. She faltered a moment, not answering at once, and they stood looking at each other, less like lovers than two duellists measuring each other's strength.

"I will believe anything you tell me, Marie," she said gently, at last; "I ask nothing better than to hear that it is only scandal."

He could not afford to hesitate any longer.

"If you are referring to my friends.h.i.+p with Mrs de Rivas, I may say that in _that_ at least I am innocent. Her husband neglected her; I was sorry for her; our so-called friends.h.i.+p was a concerted plan to bring him to his senses, and it worked like magic. They are now extremely happy."

But he had waked something new in Diane Heywood; she looked into his eyes with the cold curiosity of a child.

"Why should your friends.h.i.+p be so terrible a thing for a woman? Why should it bring a man to his senses?"

"Oh, dearest! for G.o.d's sake, don't ask questions the answers to which will only hurt you?"

"But I must know, Maryon," she said proudly. "I have never lived amongst lies and shadows. Everything must be clear and clean about me.

If you are innocent in this matter--of what is it then that you are guilty?"

The mad longing of the unshriven soul for confession swept over him then. He too would have all clear and clean about him, for once and all, cost what it might.

"Oh, just of being a blackguard," he said, and all the pent-up bitterness, and self-mockery and self-loathing of years came out in the low-spoken words. "Just of being a scoundrel and a coward as far as women are concerned--of robbing, looting--taking all and giving nothing in return--playing pirate and cut-throat in the great game of love, careless of what anyone suffered."

"_You_!" she whispered. "_You_ whom I have looked upon as a knight of chivalry--a Galahad--all that was fine and n.o.ble!"

"Oh! Diane, I have never pretended to be any of these things--never wanted you to believe it--I am only common earth--common or garden earth. But such as I am, I love you--I ask you to take me with all my sins."

There was a long silence.

"But _why_, Maryon?--What changed you from the man G.o.d meant you to be, to _this_?"

She loved him. For all her wounded pride and anger and horror, for all his black sins, she loved him, as women will love through everything, in spite of everything; and she longed for some word of extenuation that would justify the forgiveness she could not withhold.

"I loved a woman years ago, and she was faithless. She left me for another man. My wife ran away with my best friend."

"_Your wife_?"

"Yes. Oh, I meant to tell you everything before you married me, Diane-- only, I was putting it off as long as possible. I left America because of that, and came out to this country. Then, one day, after many years, I found myself up here living next door to the very man and woman who had been false to me--for whose sake I had been divorced in America so that they might marry and be happy."

"_Divorced_?"

"And they weren't happy after all. She loved him but he was neglecting her, and she turned to me again for help. I found a kind of cynical amus.e.m.e.nt in helping her out. So there you have the whole story, Diane--not a pretty one, G.o.d knows, but, in this instance, not a guilty one so far as I am concerned."

But the girl stood stammering at him, one word on her lips.

"_Divorced_?"

"You must believe that I meant to conceal nothing from you, Diane. I have already spoken to de Rivas and his wife and told them that you must know--though no one else need ever suspect. And if you choose it, if you will still take me in spite of my sins--and, darling, I believe you will, we'll get out of this country and go back to my own--"

"But, Maryon," she broke in, despairingly, "you do not seem to understand that this ends everything between us. I am a Catholic--do you not realise?"

"A Catholic? I don't care what you are--"

"But don't you know that we do not recognise divorce--that in my eyes you are still her husband--will be her husband until one of you dies?"

It was he who stood now staring and stammering.

"You would let your religion come between us--separate us?"

"Oh, Maryon--my religion is _me_--It is what I feel myself--it is deep in me. One cannot escape from what one has felt and believed all one's life."

"But the thing is impossible," he cried wildly, fiercely; "I cannot lose you. You must leave your religion--What does a good woman want with religion?--Our Love shall be your religion--_I_ will be your religion--I will never let you go."

"Hush, Marie, you don't know what you are saying," she said gently. "We must part. I can never, never marry you."

And despite her gentleness she stood like rock against the battery of his words, though he reasoned, pleaded, beguiled, even cursed, in his pain and wrath. Her heart turned to water, she was sick with love and pity for him, but through all she clung to her faith as a sailor might cling to a rock in a blinding, wrecking storm. For nothing he could say could she contemplate treachery to her people, her life-long principles, her G.o.d. Not so does the Catholic Church train its daughter against the hour of temptation.

When at last in the bitter madness of defeat and loss he caught and crushed her in his arms, kissing her savagely, she stayed silent, too proud to struggle in those iron arms, but cold, cold as snow; until at last the cold purity of her penetrated him like a lance of ice, piercing his heart.

"Forgive me!--forgive me, Diane--I am a brute--I am mad!" he muttered, and stumbled away into the night.

After a night of drenching rain, the camp out at the Carissima Mine lay sparkling in the morning suns.h.i.+ne. It was five a.m. with the promise of a golden day. Birds were twittering in tree and bush and wet leaves flickered and twinkled like diamonds, throwing off a myriad points of light. From the thatched roofs of the half dozen large huts in the clearing, steam arose, mingling with the blue spirals from newly kindled fires.

Hammond dressing leisurely in his hut looked out through his open door and the beauty and promise of the day seemed to take him by the throat, for he turned away from it with a face darkened and convulsed.

"G.o.d! What a day!" he groaned as a man might groan who has had a knife jabbed into him. For it is thus that Nature hunts and hurts those who loving her are yet a law unto themselves. Since he had lost Diane, all beautiful things struck at him with wounding, hurtful hands.

He had a sudden longing to let work go to the deuce for that day, to take horse and his desolate heart away to some lonely wild place where he could be absolutely alone, un.o.bliged to speak or be spoken to by any; but he knew that it was impossible to think of such a thing. Girder and he were the only white men in the camp, and he could not leave all the work to Girder. The Mine Manager had been laid low by fever, and the sub-manager had taken the Cape cart and driven off with him the night before to Salisbury Hospital. As for Carr, he had been away on business for some days in the Lomagundi district.

It behoved Hammond to get his breakfast over and start for the native compound. There was a matter of three hundred boys or so to round up and hustle to their labours down the shaft. He threw a glance round for his boots, a special pair he kept for negotiating the wet sloppy clay at the bottom of the mine, and, seeing them nowhere, whistled for his body servant.

"My mine boots, Pongo," he jerked in the vernacular at the sleek-eyed Mashona who answered his signal. It transpired that the boots had been forgotten and were still in the saddle-hut covered with the dust and mud of yesterday! After receiving Hammond's comments on the subject, Pongo disappeared in a hurry to fulfil his neglected task.

"And tell Candle to rustle with my breakfast," roared Pongo's lord like a lion in pain, and Candle at the sound did not need telling, but rustled to such good effect that in five minutes breakfast stood steaming on the rough wooden table that was pitched under a tree in the middle of the clearing. Girder very spick and span in white moleskins emerged from another hut, and Hammond, dressed all but his boots, and impatient of waiting, thrust his feet into a pair of silk slippers sent him at Christmas by his sister (and brought out by accident to the camp) and strolled out to join his friend at the table.

The three partners had been in camp for nearly six weeks. After that night on the Gymkhana Ground, Salisbury had no further hold for Hammond and he left the next morning, accompanied by Carr, grave and unquestioning, and followed a day or two later by Girder. He had never opened his lips on the subject of his changed plans, and he did not need to. Carr knew that the trouble was deep, and guessed the cause. Later, Girder brought the news of the broken engagement as briefly announced by Jack Heywood with whom Hammond had encompa.s.sed a short interview before leaving.

With the exception of a remark or two on the subject of the storm during the night, the two men took their breakfast in silence. Girder was at no time a talkative fellow, and, of late, Hammond's mood seldom invited gaiety. This morning he had not yet recovered from the savage misery that had smitten him in his hut, and still preoccupied was not his usual observant self, or he would have noticed something unnatural in the atmosphere of the camp.

About three hundred yards off from where they were sitting, a construction of heavy beams forming a rough hauling gear marked the mine's mouth, with the power-house and a number of small shanties grouped beside it. Beyond, and almost hidden by this group of buildings was the _kraal_ or compound occupied by the natives who worked the mine.

It was merely the usual collection of fifty or more rough _dagga_ huts with thatched roofs drooping almost to the ground and lop-sided like a lot of old battered straw hats, surrounded by a high dagga wall; and from it came the usual morning sound peculiar to Kaffir kraals--a low humming sing-song of voices, with an occasional _tap_ or _boom_ on a vessel of metal or skin. What Hammond should have noticed and did not, was that his natives were humming a war-song--one of those monotonous chants, flat and unmusical, yet full of some hidden power to stir the blood of a savage to dreams of reeking a.s.segai and the cras.h.i.+ng thud of k.n.o.bkerry upon skull. The few "boys" loitering among the white men's huts, all personal servants, cast furtive glances tinged with surprise at the indifferent faces of the white men. Certainly _Inkos_ Girder was but a new hand--only a year or two in Africa; but _Inkos_ Hammond was an _induna_ [Chief; captain] who knew all things, and had fought in many Kaffir wars! _Clk_! Surely he must hear that song in the kraal and know its meaning!

Hammond indeed would probably have waked in a moment to a sense of something wrong, but, as it happened, his attention was suddenly averted by the sight of a man on horseback tearing full-tilt towards the camp.

"What the--"