"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 Lalante.
"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 Lalante 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 s.n.a.t.c.hed 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 Lalante had said, they would have managed a final and farewell meeting; but as she had also said, it would have been a s.n.a.t.c.hed 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 pa.s.sed 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, pa.s.sionate accents thrilled his every fibre, then his arms were around her in a close embrace.
"Lalante--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, Lalante--what a sweet name that is, for I am perfectly certain n.o.body 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 pa.s.sionate 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."
"Dead love! My Lalante, how could such a term occur as between you and me?"
"No--no. Not as between us. My imagination was only running away with me. That was all."
Thus they wandered on. Half unconsciously their steps turned towards a favourite spot, where even on the hottest of days shade lay, in the coolness reflected by a rock-face never turned to the sun, ever shadowed by an overhanging growth. Birds piped in the brake with varying and fantastic note, while now and again the still air was rent by the l.u.s.ty shouting of c.o.c.k-koorhaans, rising fussily near and far, disturbed by real or imaginary cause of alarm. It was an ideal place, this sheltered nook, for such meetings as these.
Hour followed upon hour, but they heeded it not at all, as they sat and talked; and the glance of each seemed unable to leave the other, and the pressure of interlocked fingers tightened. This would be their first parting since they had first met, and it was difficult to determine upon which of the two it fell the hardest Wyvern was a man of deep and strong feeling, in no wise dulled by the fact that he could no longer exactly be called young, and the impending parting had been with him as an all-pervading heart pain to an extent which well-nigh astonished himself--while as for the girl, her pa.s.sionate adoration of him was as her whole being. It is safe to say that he could have done with her what he chose; and realising this, and how he stood as a tower of strength to her, not as a source of weakness, in his firm unbending principle, the very fact fed and fostered that adoration.
It was here that their real farewell was made, here alone, unseen save by the bright birds that flitted joyously and piped melodiously in the shaded solitude.
"Oh, my own, my own," whispered Lalante, her beautiful form shaken by sobs she was powerless to repress. "My adored love, you will come back to me, even if you meet with nothing but ill-fortune--worse even than you have met with up till now. You will come back to me. Promise."
He could only bend his head in reply. He dared not trust himself to speak.
"Haven"t those two come in yet?" said Le Sage shortly, sitting up in his chair. "_Magtig_! Warren, I must have been asleep."
"Well, you were, but why not?" answered Warren easily. "Oh, never mind about them: you were young once yourself, Le Sage."
The latter looked grim.
"Wyvern"s not so d.a.m.ned young," he said. "That makes it all the worse, because it shows he"ll never do any good."
"He may where he"s going."
Le Sage snorted.
"Where he"s going. Going!--Yes, that"s the only good thing about him-- he"s _going_."
If only the speaker knew how intensely his listener was agreeing with him. It might be that Le Sage"s hostility was not the most formidable obstacle these two had to reckon with. A sufficiently lurid picture was at that moment pa.s.sing before the mental gaze of the easy-mannered, elf-possessed lawyer. People who were "going" did not always return.
"Why, here they are," he said, "and the kiddies with them."
The two youngsters, whom they had chanced to pick up on the way, were a factor in easing down the situation, which was as well, for Lalante"s face with all her brave efforts at absolute self-control, was not without some pathetic trace of the strain she was undergoing.