A Secret of the Lebombo

Chapter Eleven.

Dreams – and a Visit

“I wonder why Mr Wyvern never comes over to see us now,” remarked small Frank Le Sage, one morning.

“I believe he and Lala have had a row,” rejoined smaller Charlie; for thus were they wont at times to abbreviate their sister’s uncommon, and to them high-sounding name.

She for her part smiled. She would not “shut them up,” she liked to hear them talk about him.

“Man, but he’s a fine chap,” went on the first speaker. “I seem to miss him no end.”

“Rather,” assented the other. “And doesn’t he just know how to make stunning catapults!”

“And to use them too,” came the rejoinder.

Lalanté, who had been contemplating the small speakers with a smile of tender approval, burst out laughing at this ingenuous and whole-hearted appreciation of the absent one’s claim to esteem.

“And so that’s all he’s a ‘fine chap’ for, is it?” she said.

“Oh, no. He’s a jolly fine chap all round, you know.”

“Rather,” confirmed the other. Then, insinuatingly, “I say, Lalanté. Let us off that beastly catechism this morning, won’t you? It’s such a jolly morning to go down the kloof and humbug about.”

It was Sunday, and the form of instruction thus irreverently qualified, was wont on that day to take the place of the “three R’s” already referred to.

“Yes, and get yourselves into a nice mess, and tear yourselves to pieces. Supposing any visitors were to turn up – you wouldn’t be fit to be seen,” answered the girl. But her tone was, for the object they had in view, anything but hopeless.

“We shan’t get any visitors except Mr Wyvern, and he won’t care,” replied he who had made the request.

“I hope he will turn up,” declared the other. “He does spin such ripping good yarns. Do let us off, Lala.”

For answer they were encircled by an arm apiece, and upon each eager, pleading face was bestowed a hearty kiss.

“You darlings, I will then,” she said, releasing them. “But – go and put on your old clothes. I’m not going to have you running wild in those.”

Away they sped rejoicing. The condition was not a hard one. It is only fair to say, however, that their hymn of praise to the absent Wyvern was in no way inspired by ulterior motive. Their admiration for him was whole-souled and genuine.

Lalanté looked after them with something of a sigh. They could be happy enough – a small trifle would accomplish that. But she? However cheerful and sanguine and comforting she might be in the presence of her lover, there were times, when alone, that her heart failed her. And now that presence was withdrawn.

Nearly a month had gone by since her father had fixed an open quarrel upon him, which quarrel, for all its tragic potentialities, had found a somewhat tame and commonplace outcome at the time, to all outward seeming, that is. She had, as Wyvern had foreseen, come out to welcome him on that eventful morning; and while obliged to bid him good-bye then, had assured him openly and unmistakably, and in the presence of her father, that she had no more intention of giving him up than she had of jumping off the nearest krantz; a declaration which caused Le Sage to snarl and curse. Then Wyvern, having the good sense to see that no good purpose could be served by further irritating his quondam friend, had bidden her good-bye – not less affectionately than usual we may be sure – and had ridden off.

Since then a frost had set in between Lalanté and her father, but it was of his own creation and nursing, for after the first soreness, the girl had shown him the same affection as before, possibly even more; for, strange to say, she was capable of seeing the matter from his point of view; moreover she knew that his own soreness was largely a matter of jealousy in that he was no longer first. But she would not promise not to see Wyvern again, and this rankled in Le Sage’s mind more than ever, especially as he felt certain she would find opportunities of seeing him.

As a matter of fact she did so find them, but they were few and far between – and only then, when her father’s business necessitated his absence from home. Now of this Le Sage was aware, or at any rate more than suspicious. He was too proud to question Lalanté, she having frankly declared that she could not defer to his wishes in the matter. But his hatred of Wyvern became almost an obsession, dangerous alike to himself and its object. He had one satisfaction, however, out of which he gleaned grim comfort – he held the power now to eject Wyvern from Seven Kloofs within the space of a few months; in the acquisition of which power Vincent Le Sage had made the first bad bargain he had ever been known to make in his life.

Her small brothers having skipped off down the kloof, clad in their old garments and armed with a catapult apiece – to the latter extent supremely happy, Lalanté dropped into a roomy cane chair upon the stoep and let herself go in meditation. Let it not be supposed, however, that hers was any mere contemplative life; far from it. Her strong, capable young nature was eminently cut out for the discharge of everyday duties, and the discharge of them well, too. We have seen how she managed her two small brothers, but her father’s comfort came second to nothing, and into all that concerned him, and occupied his daily interest, she entered thoroughly. Whereby it is manifest that from his point of view there was a good deal of excuse to be made for his soreness now. And if, as we have said, she had no “accomplishments,” and no high opinion of mere schooling, of which, by the way, she had undergone her full share, she had what was better, tact and the capability of rendering the lives of those belonging to her happy and comfortable.

Leaning back in her chair now, in an attitude of meditative ease, her hands knitted behind the soft masses of her sheeny hair, the curving lines of her figure, gowned in cool white, revealed to a sensuous advantage that was wholly unstudied and unconscious, her large grey eyes dilated between their thick lashes, accentuated by the sun-kissed tinge of brown in her clear complexion, the girl made a beautiful picture. In and out beneath the green leaves of the trellised vine which verandahed the stoep, long-waisted hornets winged their way, the winnowing draught of their flight fanning her face; but to such she paid no heed. Her wide gaze was fixed on nothing, but wandered afar – beyond the green and gold of the rolling, spek-boem clad ridges. What was he doing on this heavenly morning? If only he would come over, moved by some afterthought? Why not? Surely a few words need not open so wide a gulf – a few words between men, and one of them angry. But with a sigh she recognised, young as she was, that a few words might open a wider gulf than even a few deeds. If only he would!

There was small chance of it – in fact none. Yet, even then, Lalanté could not be pronounced unhappy. She had all his love, and he had hers. No room was there for any shadow of a doubt or misgiving upon that score, and now she, so to say, bathed herself in its consciousness, even though temporarily reft of the presence of the other of the two thus making to themselves a very paradise within the world!

Strange to say, considering her youth, and the circumstances, after the first natural soreness Lalanté had shown no resentment against her father for the part he had borne in the matter. Him she had treated in the same way as ever, indeed in a manner calculated to soothe rather than feed his rancour. On one or two occasions when he had savagely abused the absent one, she had, with great mastery of self-control, refrained from angry retort, and had begged him, as a matter of consideration for her, to refrain from wounding her. “You would not hurt your little Lalanté, would you, dear?” she had said with an arm round his shoulder. “Well, when you say these things you hurt me as much as you would if you hit me with a stick or a stone. No – more.” And Le Sage had stared, startled, into the moist eyes, and mumbling something, had left the room – hurriedly. But he never abused Wyvern again, at least not in her presence – nor when there was any possibility of her being within earshot. It is even possible that he might have relented, and extended a helping hand to the unlucky one, or at any rate have tolerated a further effort; but the hard, business instinct of the invariably successful man rose, as a bar – as a very bulkhead of hard oak – between him and his more human, and better inclinations.

The hot, dreamy hours of the forenoon flowed on, and still Lalanté sat, to all outward appearance doing nothing, but in reality with racing thoughts. She did not even care to read. You read in order to be taken out of yourself, which was just what she didn’t want. Her father was in a small inner room, with a pipe in his mouth, making up – we regret to say, having previously stated that the day was Sunday – certain accounts, for, in addition to his farming ventures, he did a good deal in the stock-jobbing line. And the girl sat there, dreaming on, reconstituting in her mind a retrospection of all that had passed within that year, which was, if there had ever been such a thing, literally and actually annus amoris.

She recalled, for instance, their first meeting; how she had come in, hot and dishevelled – or at any rate feeling it – after a long scramble with the two small boys away over the veldt – to find, all unexpectedly, the man of whom she had heard so much as her father’s – then – intimate friend. She remembered every line of the expression of the clear-cut, high-bred face, the look of admiration that had momentarily leapt into his eyes directly they rested upon her – hot and dishevelled – in straight, kindly glance; the tall, fine proportions of his frame, the courteous, interested conversation in which he had engaged her. She went over the hiatus of their prompt confidence and growing mutual interest, until – a certain evening, when standing together under the radiant moon amid the fragrant breaths of night – an evening which seemed specially created for such an object – their love had, as it were, rushed together and declared itself as one – yes, as one from the very first. For a brief time life had been a perfectly uninterrupted Paradise, and that to both – and then – and then – trouble, care – black care – had stolen in more and more, but – through it all, love was ever the same, ever undimmed, indeed if possible refined and winnowed by the prospect of adversity. No – assuredly there was no room for unhappiness in Lalanté’s present any more than in her past. The cloud hung heavy, but it would surely lift. It must. It should.

“Who the devil is this?”

The girl started from her day-dream, and turned quickly. In the doorway behind her stood her father, a pair of binoculars in his hand. Then she looked in the direction in which under the circumstance she naturally would look.

Away, where the road topped the ridge, two horsemen were riding; and they were approaching the house. They might have been merely passers-by certainly, but the girl’s true instinct informed her that it was not so, and her heart beats quickened. Yet – why two?

“One of ’em’s Warren,” pronounced Le Sage, with the glasses at his eyes. “And the other – why, damn it! it’s – it’s that fellow, Wyvern.”

This staccato. Lalanté, rising, saw that her father’s face had paled, and the hands that held the binoculars shook.

“Now, dear,” she adjured, putting a hand round his shoulder. “Don’t lose yourself, and remember he may have some particular object in wanting to see you. He has never been here since, and it’s quite possible that he has. Now do receive him with common civility. You must, you know. You can’t be offensive to a man on your own doorstep. Now can you?”

“Oh, can’t I? I seem to remember telling this one never to come near my ‘own doorstep’ again,” snorted Le Sage.

“Never mind. Wait till you hear what he has got to say. You will, won’t you.”

By this time she had got both arms round his neck, and was holding it tight. He looked into her luminous eyes with his own sombre and angry ones, and somehow the anger seemed to die.

“Very well, dear,” he said with an effort, though more gently, and loosening her hold. “I’ll wait and see.”

Meanwhile the two horsemen were drawing very near.

Chapter Twelve.

Farewell!

Warren it was who broke the awkwardness of the meeting.

“Hullo, Le Sage,” he sang out as they dismounted. “I lugged this chap over to say good-bye to you. He’s just going to clear. I told him he couldn’t clear without saying good-bye, just because you had a bit of a growl at each other.”

This in his most breezy way. Le Sage put out a hand to Wyvern, though not particularly cordially.

“Oh, you’re really going, are you?” he said.

“Yes. Day after to-morrow. My sale comes off next week, but I shan’t wait for it.”

The air was still and clear, and, upon such, voices travel afar. The above conversation, taking place at the stables, had been heard by Lalanté, who therefore felt exceedingly friendly towards Warren, whose words implied that the other would not have come over but for his persuasion. She knew, of course, that Wyvern would not leave without managing a farewell meeting between them – just as she knew what her father did not – that he was on the eve of departure. Yet, here he was, and he should not leave her that day if she could help it. There was parting at the end of it, but all its precious hours in between were theirs.

The anxiety which had at first overclouded her face cleared, as she knew by the conversation of the three men drawing near the house, that her father had kept his word. If his tone was somewhat constrained, why that was only to be expected.

“Well, Miss Lalanté,” cried Warren, in his breeziest way as she came to meet them. “I hope we haven’t invaded you too unexpectedly.”

“Not at all,” she answered cordially. “It was good of you to come over.”

In secret Wyvern somewhat resented this way Warren had of using the girl’s own name, even though not omitting the formal prefix. It was quite unnecessary, and formal prefixes are prone to lapse on occasions. But this little jealous twinge was allayed with her greeting of him – all in the old way. He appreciated, too, Warren’s tactful thought in turning Le Sage’s attention right in the other direction.

Then the small boys came in, hot and dusty after their ramble, and it behoved Lalanté to go and superintend the process of making them presentable for dinner – for which it was nearly time.

In process of that festivity assuredly Wyvern’s reputation with the two youngsters as a spinner of “such ripping good yarns” did not suffer as they listened open-mouthed to his narrative of shooting the big leopard in the Third Kloof. The more startling incident of that night he did not narrate for their benefit.

“Man, Mr Wyvern, but I’d like to have been there,” said Charlie.

“Do take us with you some night, Mr Wyvern,” supplemented Frank.

“There won’t be any ‘some night’ again, Frank. I’m going away.”

“What?” cried both youngsters. “No. It’s not true.”

“But it is,” answered Wyvern, with a tinge of sadness. “The day after to-morrow. I’ve only come to-day to say good-bye.”

“But you can’t go. Lala, tell him he’s not to. He’ll stop if you tell him to.”

These two youngsters were actually beginning to feel “choky,” in proof whereof a plateful apiece of one of their favourite puddings seemed in danger of being left untouched.

The whole-souled affection of the two little boys – Lalanté’s brothers – went to Wyvern’s heart.

“Never mind, old chappies,” he said. “We shall meet again some day, and then you’ll be big fellows, and will want to patronise me because I don’t bring down a bushbuck ram at four hundred yards when only his head is showing round a spek-boem bush, as you’ll do. Here, stop that,” he added, as Charlie, the smallest of the pair, began to sniffle ominously, then giving up the effort, broke into a genuine howl. “Men don’t cry – and, this last day we most be all jolly together. See?”

“If you’re going in for the Zulu trade, Wyvern, I’m afraid you’ve hit upon the wrong time,” struck in Le Sage. “I hear they’re all unsettled in the Zulu country over the return of Cetywayo. There’ll be a lively war up there among themselves I’m told.”

“Got to chance that, like most things in this sad and weary world.”

“Man, Mr Wyvern, but they’ll kill you if you go up there,” remarked one of the small boys in round-eyed consternation. “Why you fought against them in the war” – some of his Zulu war experiences being among the “ripping good yarns” he had the reputation for spinning.

“Oh, no they won’t. Besides, you don’t suppose they know who fought against them or who didn’t – and even if they did they’d only respect me the more for it.”

“There’s a little matter I want to talk over with you, Le Sage,” said Warren, as they got up from table, “if it isn’t trenching on your Sabbath rest.”

“Oh, Sabbath rest be hanged,” answered Le Sage, shortly. “Come along.”

“Father, don’t talk in that abominably heathenish way,” laughed Lalanté. “Before your children too!”

She and Wyvern, both, and again, appreciated Warren’s tact, for neither of them believed in the pretext. They had not been alone together yet, and Warren, like the good fellow he was, had resolved that they should be. That was how they read it.

So while the other two adjourned to Le Sage’s business den, these two adjourned to the stoep. The small boys, like their kind, unable to keep still for any length of time, betook themselves off somewhere down in the garden.

“Love, and so you are really going,” began Lalanté with her hand in his.

“Really. But it is going only to return.”

“Yes, I feel that. Yet – it is like parting with one’s very life.”

“That is how I feel it. And yet – and yet – this time somehow I am sanguine. I have a sort of instinct that things are going to mend; that one’s luck cannot always be on the down grade. I can’t tell why, but something – a sort of revelation, perhaps – has come to me telling me I am doing right in going away from here – wrench though it will be. But mere locality – why that’s nothing as long as we have each other. Is it?”

“Darling, you know it is not,” she answered, her head resting in the hollow of his shoulder. “If it were a mere rock island in the middle of the sea and I had you, it would be Paradise.”

He laughed sadly. But it was no time for upsetting her ideals. For a few moments they sat in a happy, if somewhat sad, silence; the same hum of winged insects making its droning lull upon the sunlit air; the sweeping roll of golden green spread out in radiant vista beneath the unclouded sky; the full, seductive beauty of the girl nestling within his arms.

“I was longing for you so,” she said at last. “I was sitting here all the morning going over all the time since we had first known each other. I felt that I would give half my life if you would only come over to-day. And – here you are.”

“But you didn’t think I should go without seeing you again, child?”

“Of course not. But it would have been one of those hurried snatched meetings in the veldt. Well now I have got you all to myself, and I will keep you. Come. We will have a last long walk alone together while they are in there.”

The while the thought was hammering in her brain, that to-morrow at the same time all would be as it was now; no shadow of a difference in anything around but – he would be gone.

“I won’t keep you waiting a moment,” she said, her fingers intertwined in his as she rose. “We will go before they come out.”

Wyvern, left there even for that “moment,” could not help blessing the luck that had brought Warren over to Seven Kloofs the night before, to talk him into coming to bid good-bye to Le Sage as if nothing had happened. As Lalanté had said, they would have managed a final and farewell meeting; but as she had also said, it would have been a snatched and hurried one.

True to her word she reappeared in a moment, looking her best and sweetest; and that was very good to look at indeed. And they went forth, down the way they knew so well, the way they had so often trodden together, and the voices of the gladsome, sunlit veldt made music as they went.

“Oh, darling,” said the girl, as she leaned heavily upon the arm passed through hers, and upon his shoulder. “However am I going to get through the time without you – day after day, week after week, even month after month, and know that you are hundreds of miles from me, after this year – this whole year – when we have been all in all to each other? Tell me – again. No one has ever been to you as I have? Tell me. I will feed on it after you have – gone.”

Her hungry, passionate accents thrilled his every fibre, then his arms were around her in a close embrace.

“Lalanté – my own love – my one and only love, I could go on telling you the same thing. No one has ever been to me as you have been or ever could be. You know how from the time our eyes first met we knew we were made for each other, and it was not long before we proved it to be so.”

“Yes, I know. I was thinking of that all this morning, was bathing myself in a very day-dream of our time together. And now, you are leaving me.”

“Oh, sweet – don’t put that tone – that hopeless tone – into it. I am leaving you only to come back to you. You know that there is no one like you in all the world. I could not imagine anything approaching a duplicate of you if I were to try. But, if ever I find a difficulty it is what on earth you can see in me to love like this: in me – a battered failure all along the line. What is it?”

“What is it?” she answered, slowly, her eyes responding to his straight, full gaze. “What is it? I don’t know. Only a little trick of thought-reading – character-reading rather – and when I had seen you I thought I had seen – the Deity.”

“No, no, child,” he said quickly and reprovingly. “You must not – to put it on the lowest ground – pitch your ideals at such dizzy heights. Only think what a fall it means one of these days.”

“Now I could laugh. Never mind. We have just so many hours – how many have we? And then – blank – deathlike blank.”

“No – no – no! Not deathlike. It is life – life through absence. See now, Lalanté – what a sweet name that is, for I am perfectly certain nobody else in the world bears it – I am looking at you, now in the full glow of the sun at his best light I am looking into and photographing your dear face – as if it needed that – so that it will remain fixed in the retina of memory through day and night when we are apart. Those eyes – yes, look into mine, so will it burn the picture in more indelibly, if possible.”

“Oh, love, love!” Her accents thrilled in their passionate abandonment. “You are going away from me and you have torn my very heart out with you. Yes, I look into your eyes, and my very first prayer is that they may look at me in my dreams as they do now. Yes. Even parting is bliss beside what I could imagine of dead love.”