Chapter 14

"O, all the men are fond of him," she told them, evidently glad of an opportunity to sing his praises. "He never gives himself any airs with them for one thing, and he's just a man all through, living a clean, sportsman's life; and whether they do the same themselves or not, they all look up to him and admire him for it, without being afraid he will come down like a sledgehammer upon their failings. One knows the tone of the whole police force is better for having an officer like Major Carew, and it is a thousand pities there are not more like him. And Cecil Stanley is just the dearest boy in the world. Every one in Salisbury was fond of him. He is so good at games and dancing, and always so jolly and boyish and natural. We miss him badly, but I believe he likes being down there better than in the town."

"I think he does; he seemed perfectly happy."

They went on to speak of the gaiety of Salisbury; its golf and tennis and polo and dancing; and their visitor urged them to stay for a fancy-dress ball, when four hundred guests all in costume were expected. But neither of them were in the mood for balls, and the only attraction they cared about was an early-morning gallop with the hounds after jackal. Nothing could solace them for the careless, happy days they had left, and as soon as Mr. Pym had transacted his business, they persuaded him to take them out to Lomagundi with him, rather than be left behind in the town.

"They seem to be rather touchy ladies here, and so superior," Diana urged, when he demurred; "and you know I am never safe for two minutes with that type. I should be driven into saying appalling things, and our reputation might be ruined for ever."

In the end, as usual, they won him round, and departed one morning gleefully in the little toy train that runs out across the Gwebi Flats to the Eldorado Gold Mine. And to Diana's joy, they had a luggage-van fitted up as an impromptu saloon for them, and were able to spin along with both doors wide open, enjoying the air and the country. The Eldorado is the show mine of Rhodesia, having a native compound equal to any in South Africa, and charming bungalows for the staff, and an airy, comfortable hospital. But mines were not likely to hold much interest to lady travellers from Johannesburg, and all their eagerness was to go out to Sinoia to see the limestone caves, where, like an exquisite jewel in a massive setting, an underground lake, of wonderful colouring, lies in lonely loveliness.

Or perhaps it were better likened to a butterfly, with its wings closed, and only the more or less drab outside showing. The veldt, somewhat uniform and colourless, with its surrounding hills, is the butterfly with its wings closed. Enter the wide hole in the ground, beside the hidden lake, and descend the rough natural staircase of rocky boulders, to where the sun through an opening in the ground above shines down on to the translucent water, and there lies the butterfly with its wings open, and all their exquisite design and colouring and blending unfolded to the eye.

"You have some rare treasures in this far Rhodesia," Meryl said to their guide and host as they reluctantly left the hidden jewel behind; "treasures that your children and your children's children will be very proud of some day."

"If they have time," he answered a trifle cynically. "Not many Rhodesians to-day have time to care for any but the treasures that they can work for and grasp and carry away. The time for natural beauties to be appreciated is not yet. Why, we do not even pay a native half-a-crown a week to keep the caves free from the baboons and bats that defile them. I am afraid, at present, Rhodesia lives almost entirely for to-day," he continued. "The spirit ready to sacrifice itself for the good of future generations has yet to be developed." He was a clever-looking man, with quiet, thoughtful eyes, and he and Meryl had talked much together during her short stay. "The nobility of the bee is not found much among humans. In all the annals of the race, is there anything to compare with their service to the coming swarm?"

"Only that we do not know it is the result of calm reasoning," she answered. "The bee perhaps comes into existence, permeated through and through with this one idea, and lives solely to fulfil it. The service humanity asks of humanity is something even higher, surely--a willing, conscious sacrifice of present ease to future good. The spirit of heroes and fools"; and she smiled a little sadly, remembering Ailsa Grenville's verse and her enthusiasm for the dear Ship of Fools. "But you have some fine men out here," she added. "I think your future looks exceedingly hopeful."

A few days later they started on their return to Bulawayo, and the tour was practically ended. There was nothing more now but dusty railway journeys and elegant garments and conventionalities.

"No more grubby hands and red faces and 'anyhow' clothes that did not matter," was Diana's constant lament. Meryl said nothing. What was there to say? But the pain that dwelt in her eyes sometimes, when she thought no one was looking, sent deep stabs to her father's heart. With all his money, and all his power and influence, what could he do in this one thing that seemed to matter beyond all other things? Nothing except to look quietly on, and hope the wound was not too deep for healing. That, and to humour her in anything she asked. Which was partly why some of the long hours of the hot, dusty journey were spent in discussing plans for the settlement of young men upon his land, on exceptionally easy terms. He was not quite sure that the country was ripe for such a scheme yet; but Meryl's great wish for it, and obvious pleasure in the discussions, took him to lengths he might otherwise have avoided.

So they came to Bulawayo, and as they stepped out on to the platform, Meryl saw suddenly among the other passengers a tall form in khaki that caused her to draw in her breath with a little catch, while her eyes grew strained and anxious. Diana was still in the saloon, only half dressed, and her father was talking aside to someone who had come to the station to meet him. She was quite alone, rooted momentarily to the spot, waiting for the tall man to turn in her direction, if he chanced to look that way at all before hurrying off.

Then someone accosted him, and she saw the strong, self-contained face, as he turned to the speaker. A moment's suspense followed; then the man who had accosted him went towards the station entrance, and Carew came slowly in her direction, with his helmet low over his eyes. Thus he did not see her until they were face to face, and in the first moment of recognition she saw him start, as one taken in swift surprise. Then a slow colour crept up under the sunburn on his cheeks, and something came into his eyes that she had never seen there before.

But he only came forward with a formal air and saluted her solemnly. "I joined the train in the night," he said. "I had no idea you would be coming to Bulawayo so soon."

It was all very ordinary, very sedate, and a little wooden, but Meryl paid no heed to that, paid no heed to the obvious conclusion he had taken no chance journey hoping to see her again. For what his lips could not say, and his manner would not, his eyes had revealed to her in that first swift moment of surprise. She knew that whatever came between them in the future, whatever was between them now, Peter Carew was not indifferent to her.

XX

FAREWELL

"Did I hear the growl of a bear?" sang out a voice from behind a drawn blind of the saloon coach beside which they were standing.

"I'm afraid you did," said Carew, addressing the blind.

"O, joy! joy! Growl again, growl again--like the Christmas bells. How would it go?... 'Growl out, wild bear'--I forget the rest, but it's a silly song I learnt to sing when I was young. Don't go away; I shall be dressed directly. If these God-forsaken railways had not such a mania for landing you at your destination when all respectable people are snug in bed!..." and sundry sounds suggested the impatient speaker was flinging things about. Then a face with bright eyes appeared over the blind, which was a wooden shutter, and could be lowered to a discreet distance. "Hullo!... I simply had to take a look at you. I've been pining for a glimpse of The Kid's smile and your scowl. It's been deadly since we left Zimbabwe. Ugh!... how I hate civilisation!"

Carew looked at her with his rare, slow smile. "Is that why you keep the whole train waiting in the station, and the station-master, conductor, and guard in a state of ferment, because they cannot clear the line until you are dressed?"

"Rude man!" came back the quick retort. "You haven't yet said, How do you do?"

"How do you do, Miss Diana Pym?" gravely. "I hope I see you well! And how did you leave Salisbury?"

"I do very nicely, thank you, Major Carew. You cannot see me very well through a wooden shutter, I imagine. And how is your old heap of stones?" ... with which she vanished again to the interior. "Tell the conductor I've come to the last curl and the last hook and eye," she called, and a few minutes later stepped out on to the platform, a vision of fresh daintiness. "I'm rather glad," she remarked to Carew, with a twinkle, "that you will have an opportunity of seeing us in our best clothes"; then running on, "I see you look as fierce and awe-inspiring as ever; but having learnt, in Rhodesia, to keep quite calm with cockchafers and beetles running about in my bed, I am not likely to be afraid of a bear."

"Are you going to the Grand Hotel?" Mr. Pym asked him, having joined them while Diana was finishing her toilet, "because there is plenty of room in our motor."

Carew thanked him, and they all moved away together. At the hotel, however, he vanished, and it was only after a little adroit persuasion later that Mr. Pym got him to accept an invitation to dine with them in their private room in the evening.

And after accepting, Carew went about the work that had brought him to Bulawayo with an uneasy mind. The fortnight that had elapsed since the evening he found Meryl unexpectedly at the Grenvilles' had been a somewhat disturbed one for him. For many years now his life had flown so evenly in all big essentials. Little worries, little disturbances, disappointments, were inevitable for a man whose heart was so thoroughly in his work, and for whom the conditions of work were often so trying. But these had only ruffled the surface; underneath the smooth river flowed along strong and self-contained. After the upheaval that had been as a volcanic eruption upon smiling sunshine-flooded fields in his life, and the black desolation that followed, there had succeeded a long quiet period of calm action that, if it held nothing which could be termed joy, held nothing either that was sorrow except his buried memories. And he had been well content that it should be so; well content to contemplate just that and nothing else to the journey's end.

And now, suddenly, had come this vague unrest. He sought for its source and its reason, and could not find a satisfactory answer. For though it dated from the coming of the millionaire and his party, he would not admit himself capable of the folly of falling in love with Meryl. To him it was such inexcusable foolishness, in view of many things. Rather he chose to believe it was a voice from the old life, reawakened in his heart, and calling to him across the years. When he smoked his pipe outside the huts, and pondered deeply some knotty point in his report and in the work of the Native Commission, he found himself suddenly remembering that it was September. And away in his beloved Devon they would be out after the partridges--striding through the heather and across the stubble-fields, ranging over the purple moors with purple horizons all round, and in the distance a strip of turquoise, which was the sea. He could almost hear the whir ... rr of wings and the shots on some far hill-side. And he knew that, though the shooting in a wild, vast country like Rhodesia is a far finer and more sportsmanlike affair than shooting driven birds in England, he yet felt, and would ever feel, that intense British love of the soil that had reared him, and the moors where he fired his first gun and shot his first bird. And, of course, upon the heels of the shooting came the hunting, which had once been the joy of his life, ever after he first put his pony at a stiff fence, entirely on his own, and sailed gloriously over, in spite of an anxious groom shouting caution to the winds.

And then all the woodcraft and fieldcraft he had learnt from his uncle's keepers and his uncle's farmer tenants. He remembered how it had been part of his education as a youngster, and how in pursuit of knowledge he had been up early and late and in the middle of the night, picking up information about the woodland creatures from anyone who could teach him or finding things out for himself. There was the poacher who had shown him, for love of the sport, if sport it could be called, how he got the pheasants silently off the boughs in the night--taking them from their roosting-places and never a sound. He had given that poacher a bright half-crown, he remembered, and his firm lips twitched a little over the recollection. He had not seen the humour then of paying the man who was stealing his uncle's pheasants--the pheasants that would some day be his. He wondered if the boys in England now, the future landowners, were taught woodlore as he had been taught it, because it was good for an English gentleman to know all the scents and signs and sounds of his estate.

And after all, he was no landowner at all. By his own act, instead, merely an officer in the British South Africa Police, with a few hundreds a year income, and nothing but a meagre pension ahead.

Ah well! he had had a good deal besides for what he had lost, and it had been a good life enough, dependent solely on himself, and far removed from the caprices of a rich uncle. He regretted nothing at this stage of what had transpired after the upheaval came. Of course, his brother was now owner of the estates that might have been his, and was married, and had children; whereas he was a soldier-policeman looking forward to a meagre pension.

Not that it mattered. Nothing mattered. It was only that, seeing so much more of the Pyms socially than he had been wont to see of anyone, old memories had been awakened. He hoped they would soon go to sleep again, for, in passing, they had taken some of the restfulness out of Rhodesia's far horizons, and fretted the flow of the strong, silent river, with a vague discontent. Sometimes between him and those far horizons there was a face now--sometimes a voice--sometimes just a dim presence--the voice and the face and the presence of Meryl Pym. And it was a thing to be fought down and crushed and conquered--a weakness that was well-nigh a foolishness--a folly such as stern men trample underfoot.

So when Mr. Pym asked him to dine with them privately, he made some excuse, and only yielded under pressure. And when he joined them he was in one of his gravest moods, as if he had barricaded himself round with impenetrable reserve. There were two other guests, so Diana did not twit him openly; she only murmured in an aside, for his ear alone, "I'm so sorry it's a party, and we shall feel obliged to be polite. This civilisation is becoming a positive burden."

Meryl was a little late, and she wore a beautiful gown, of a classic cut, with exquisite classic embroideries and a filigree band on her lovely hair. It was the first time he had seen her in evening dress, and he took one keen, sweeping glance and then looked away. He had rather the attitude of a soldier on parade, to whom the colonel had said "eyes front." Only he was his own colonel, obeying his own laws and restrictions. And Meryl only dared to take a fleeting glance also, for fear her eyes might betray her. And though he looked as striking as a man may, in immaculate evening dress, with his strong, clear-cut features, and inches that dwarfed most men, with the inconsistency of a woman she decided she liked him best in khaki that had seen hard service, and that look of being all of a piece, because his hands and face were so brown. He sat on her left, while Lord Elmsleigh, who was passing through from the Victoria Falls, sat on her right; and though she chatted lightly to his lordship, she was conscious every second of the hour of the big, silent, rather grim soldier-policeman. He spoke very little. Just an opinion now and then when he was asked for it, or the corroboration or correction of a statement, when someone looked to him questioningly. The millionaire, chatting in his quiet, weighty way to his two other guests, noted everything. He knew that Carew and Meryl scarcely once looked at each other, or addressed each other direct, and with a deep sense of regret he had again that feeling of being brought up against some barrier where neither his money nor power nor influence could be of any avail. And at the same time he knew in his heart that he had never met any man to whom he would sooner entrust Meryl and the fortune that must be hers. For though their very silence together revealed to his astute brain that neither was indifferent to the other, he could not but see also that undercurrent of grim determination in Carew. True, he was almost always silent, but Henry Pym perceived that his silence to-day was not quite of that of yesterday. Something had gone out of it--some quiet, grave, unquestioning content. In the keen, direct, steel-blue eyes now there was a shadow lurking behind, that might have been of some old memory, or might have been of some new pain, but which vaguely hurt the millionaire host.

Meryl's eyes were less smiling than her lips, turning a little unsteadily this way and that, with a restlessness that added a touch of vivacity to her quiet beauty. But that, he knew, was the thing we baldly name pluck. It was not to-night he need fear what he should see in her eyes, nor perhaps to-morrow. It was any day, any hour, any moment in the weeks to come, when she believed no one was observing her.

So the evening passed, and the last rubber of bridge was played, and the first move made towards departure.

"Shall we have your company for a day or two? I must stay here over to-morrow!" Mr. Pym said to Carew.

"I leave early in the morning," was the quiet reply. "I only came here to see Mr. Ireson, and now I go to Salisbury."

Meryl, with her face turned away, blanched a little in the shadow. This was the end then. This casual, conventional good-bye at a dinner-party. To-morrow he would go east before they were up; and the next day she would go back to Johannesburg, and later England. She turned quickly to make a gay remark. Something in her heart tightened. She felt suddenly appalled at the future, and was afraid she might show it.

But the evening had still one little unexpected treat in store for her. Lord Elmsleigh had a big-game trophy in his room that he wanted to show Mr. Pym and their other guests--something that he had shot in the Kafue valley. And in consequence, while Diana and Carew and Meryl were standing together by the open window that led on to the wide balcony, he took them both off with him.

And then Diana said to Carew, "As you are going to-morrow, I will give you those snapshots to-night. I have them in my room," and she went away, pulling the door to after her.

So Carew and Meryl were left alone by the window, looking out into the pulsing southern night. Meryl, quite suddenly, felt a little dizzy, and she drew back into the corner, leaning against the woodwork, feeling glad of some support. Carew remained upright and rigid, with something in that very rigidity that suggested a special need to keep himself well in hand. If he had stopped to think about it, he might have felt that Fate was treating him a little unkindly. So far he had done the strong thing every time, and gone quietly away from danger; not because he was a coward, but because he knew it is sometimes far more cowardly to skate on thin ice, and hope it will be all right, than to remain in safety on the bank. For Meryl's sake as well as his own he had chosen to remain on the bank. And yet here, for the third time, was Fate deliberately bringing the danger zone to him, in spite of his efforts to avoid it. But he did not stop to cogitate either one way or the other. Sufficient for him that he knew himself in the danger zone, and therefore it behoved him to be very wary. Not by act or word, if he could help it, must he let Meryl see how she had disturbed his peace. And there, again, it would seem, Fate had played with him. A subtler man would have perceived that an added rigidity was not entirely the safeguard he needed now. Meryl already knew him too well for that. Had he talked and laughed a little, she might have been puzzled and baffled. But Carew was not subtle. He was simply sincere. And so he just stood very rigid and silent; not perceiving that in the circumstances that it was hardly the best way to baffle the eyes of love. Meryl knew instinctively he was putting some special restraint on himself, and the knowledge made her quietly glad, underneath the sudden pain of the knowledge that it was farewell. Back, in her vantage of shadow, she looked at him. And she saw, not for the first time, but perhaps more fully, that inner force in this man, which told any who had eyes to see and understanding to perceive, that nothing would turn him from a set purpose, if he were persuaded it was a right one; and whatever woman's arts she might possess, they would be as the waves against a granite rock. They might play round him, and sprinkle foam on him, and soften his aspect, but they would not _move_ him. So, with an inner strength not unlike his own, she accepted his decree. For some reason, or set of reasons, love might not come into being between them. He was determined that it should not. Very well, she would hide her hurt and face her future without it.

And if she chose to cherish his image, hidden deep down in her heart, that was her affair. A laughing, mocking world need never know.

She broke the silence first:

"If you are going early to-morrow, we shall not meet again."

"No." He looked at her a moment, about to say something else; then changed his mind, and looked out of the window in silence. Leaning up against the lintel, in the softened light, her outline and features and deep, true eyes made too fair a picture for him to trust himself to look upon.

"Perhaps you will be coming to Johannesburg presently?"

"I think not."

"Nor England?..." with a little wistful smile.

"Nor England."

"You speak almost as if you never expected to go there again?"

"I shall never go there again."

There was a pause; then she continued:

"Yet you are so absolutely an Englishman, and they say"--with another little smile--"an Englishman always wants to go home to be buried."

"I am more a Rhodesian."

"And you feel like Cecil Rhodes?... We went out to the Matopos this afternoon. It was a big thought, that of his, to be buried there. It gives you people in the north something that we of the south have not--your own special great man, lying in your midst. What a country you will be some day! I envy you your share of the building."

"The south is a great country _now_. It is not a small thing to be building there."

"Yes, but we have two races, and it spells division and weakens our enthusiasm."

"Help to bridge over the gap. Help to make it spell union. That were a work that any man might be proud to give his life to."

And at that slowly she became taut and rigid almost as he, with wide eyes gazing into the night. He had struck a hidden chord; struck it full and strong.