I tore it open and read:
"MY DEAR HUBERT,--I KNOW you will come; I KNOW you will follow me. So I am leaving this letter at Donald Currie & Co."s office, giving their agent instructions to hand it to you as soon as you reach Cape Town.
I am quite sure you will track me so far at least; I understand your temperament. But I beg you, I implore you, to go no further. You will ruin my plan if you do. And I still adhere to it. It is good of you to come so far; I cannot blame you for that. I know your motives. But do not try to find me out. I warn you, beforehand, it will be quite useless. I have made up my mind. I have an object in life, and, dear as you are to me--THAT I will not pretend to deny--I can never allow even YOU to interfere with it. So be warned in time. Go back quietly by the next steamer.
"Your ever attached and grateful,
"HILDA."
I read it twice through with a little thrill of joy. Did any man ever court so strange a love? Her very strangeness drew me. But go back by the next steamer! I felt sure of one thing: Hilda was far too good a judge of character to believe that I was likely to obey that mandate.
I will not trouble you with the remaining stages of my quest. Except for the slowness of South African mail coaches, they were comparatively easy. It is not so hard to track strangers in Cape Town as strangers in London. I followed Hilda to her hotel, and from her hotel up country, stage after stage--jolted by rail, worse jolted by mule-waggon--inquiring, inquiring, inquiring--till I learned at last she was somewhere in Rhodesia.
That is a big address; but it does not cover as many names as it covers square miles. In time I found her. Still, it took time; and before we met, Hilda had had leisure to settle down quietly to her new existence.
People in Rhodesia had noted her coming, as a new portent, because of one strange peculiarity. She was the only woman of means who had ever gone up of her own free will to Rhodesia. Other women had gone there to accompany their husbands, or to earn their livings; but that a lady should freely select that half-baked land as a place of residence--a lady of position, with all the world before her where to choose--that puzzled the Rhodesians. So she was a marked person. Most people solved the vexed problem, indeed, by suggesting that she had designs against the stern celibacy of a leading South African politician. "Depend upon it," they said, "it"s Rhodes she"s after." The moment I arrived at Salisbury, and stated my object in coming, all the world in the new town was ready to a.s.sist me. The lady was to be found (vaguely speaking) on a young farm to the north--a budding farm, whose general direction was expansively indicated to me by a wave of the arm, with South African uncertainty.
I bought a pony at Salisbury--a pretty little seasoned sorrel mare--and set out to find Hilda. My way lay over a brand-new road, or what pa.s.ses for a road in South Africa--very soft and lumpy, like an English cart-track. I am a fair cross-country rider in our own Midlands, but I never rode a more tedious journey than that one. I had crawled several miles under a blazing sun along the shadeless new track, on my African pony, when, to my surprise I saw, of all sights in the world, a bicycle coming towards me.
I could hardly believe my eyes. Civilisation indeed! A bicycle in these remotest wilds of Africa!
I had been picking my way for some hours through a desolate plateau--the high veldt--about five thousand feet above the sea level, and entirely treeless. In places, to be sure, a few low bushes of p.r.i.c.kly aspect rose in tangled clumps; but for the most part the arid table-land was covered by a thick growth of short brown gra.s.s, about nine inches high, burnt up in the sun, and most wearisome to look at. The distressing nakedness of a new country confronted me. Here and there a bald farm or two had been literally pegged out--the pegs were almost all one saw of them as yet; the fields were in the future. Here and there, again, a scattered range of low granite hills, known locally as kopjes--red, rocky prominences, flaunting in the sunshine--diversified the distance. But the road itself, such as it was, lay all on the high plain, looking down now and again into gorges or kloofs, wooded on their slopes with scrubby trees, and comparatively well-watered. In the midst of all this crude, unfinished land, the mere sight of a bicycle, b.u.mping over the rubbly road, was a sufficient surprise; but my astonishment reached a climax when I saw, as it drew near, that it was ridden by a woman!
One moment later I had burst into a wild cry, and rode forward to her hurriedly. "Hilda!" I shouted aloud, in my excitement: "Hilda!"
She stepped lightly from her pedals, as if it had been in the park: head erect and proud; eyes liquid, l.u.s.trous. I dismounted, trembling, and stood beside her. In the wild joy of the moment, for the first time in my life, I kissed her fervently. Hilda took the kiss, unreproving. She did not attempt to refuse me.
"So you have come at last!" she murmured, with a glow on her face, half nestling towards me, half withdrawing, as if two wills tore her in different directions. "I have been expecting you for some days; and, somehow, to-day, I was almost certain you were coming!"
"Then you are not angry with me?" I cried. "You remember, you forbade me!"
"Angry with you? Dear Hubert, could I ever be angry with you, especially for thus showing me your devotion and your trust? I am never angry with you. When one knows, one understands. I have thought of you so often; sometimes, alone here in this raw new land, I have longed for you to come. It is inconsistent of me, of course; but I am so solitary, so lonely!"
"And yet you begged me not to follow you!"
She looked up at me shyly--I was not accustomed to see Hilda shy. Her eyes gazed deep into mine beneath the long, soft lashes. "I begged you not to follow me," she repeated, a strange gladness in her tone. "Yes, dear Hubert, I begged you--and I meant it. Cannot you understand that sometimes one hopes a thing may never happen--and is supremely happy because it happens, in spite of one? I have a purpose in life for which I live: I live for it still. For its sake I told you you must not come to me. Yet you HAVE come, against my orders; and--" she paused, and drew a deep sigh--"oh, Hubert, I thank you for daring to disobey me!"
I clasped her to my bosom. She allowed me, half resisting. "I am too weak," she murmured. "Only this morning, I made up my mind that when I saw you I would implore you to return at once. And now that you are here--" she laid her little hand confidingly in mine--"see how foolish I am!--I cannot dismiss you."
"Which means to say, Hilda, that, after all, you are still a woman!"
"A woman; oh, yes; very much a woman! Hubert, I love you; I half wish I did not."
"Why, darling?" I drew her to me.
"Because--if I did not, I could send you away--so easily! As it is--I cannot let you stop--and... I cannot dismiss you."
"Then divide it," I cried gaily; "do neither; come away with me!"
"No, no; nor that, either. I will not stultify my whole past life. I will not dishonour my dear father"s memory."
I looked around for something to which to tether my horse. A bridle is in one"s way--when one has to discuss important business. There was really nothing about that seemed fit for the purpose. Hilda saw what I sought, and pointed mutely to a stunted bush beside a big granite boulder which rose abruptly from the dead level of the gra.s.s, affording a little shade from that sweltering sunlight. I tied my mare to the gnarled root--it was the only part big enough--and sat down by Hilda"s side, under the shadow of a great rock in a thirsty land. I realised at that moment the force and appropriateness of the Psalmist"s simile. The sun beat fiercely on the seeding gra.s.ses. Away on the southern horizon we could faintly perceive the floating yellow haze of the prairie fires lit by the Mashonas.
"Then you knew I would come?" I began, as she seated herself on the burnt-up herbage, while my hand stole into hers, to nestle there naturally.
She pressed it in return. "Oh, yes; I knew you would come," she answered, with that strange ring of confidence in her voice. "Of course you got my letter at Cape Town?"
"I did, Hilda--and I wondered at you more than ever as I read it. But if you KNEW I would come, why write to prevent me?"
Her eyes had their mysterious far-away air. She looked out upon infinity. "Well, I wanted to do my best to turn you aside," she said, slowly. "One must always do one"s best, even when one feels and believes it is useless. That surely is the first clause in a doctor"s or a nurse"s rubric."
"But WHY didn"t you want me to come?" I persisted. "Why fight against your own heart? Hilda, I am sure--I KNOW you love me."
Her bosom rose and fell. Her eyes dilated. "Love you?" she cried, looking away over the bushy ridges, as if afraid to trust herself. "Oh, yes, Hubert, I love you! It is not for that that I wish to avoid you.
Or, rather, it is just because of that. I cannot endure to spoil your life--by a fruitless affection."
"Why fruitless?" I asked, leaning forward.
She crossed her hands resignedly. "You know all by this time," she answered. "Sebastian would tell you, of course, when you went to announce that you were leaving Nathaniel"s. He could not do otherwise; it is the outcome of his temperament--an integral part of his nature."
"Hilda," I cried, "you are a witch! How COULD you know that? I can"t imagine."
She smiled her restrained, Chaldean smile. "Because I KNOW Sebastian,"
she answered, quietly. "I can read that man to the core. He is simple as a book. His composition is plain, straightforward, quite natural, uniform. There are no twists and turns in him. Once learn the key, and it discloses everything, like an open sesame. He has a gigantic intellect, a burning thirst for knowledge; one love, one hobby--science; and no moral instincts. He goes straight for his ends; and whatever comes in his way," she dug her little heel in the brown soil, "he tramples on it as ruthlessly as a child will trample on a worm or a beetle."
"And yet," I said, "he is so great."
"Yes, great, I grant you; but the easiest character to unravel that I have ever met. It is calm, austere, unbending, yet not in the least degree complex. He has the impa.s.sioned temperament, pushed to its highest pitch; the temperament that runs deep, with irresistible force; but the pa.s.sion that inspires him, that carries him away headlong, as love carries some men, is a rare and abstract one--the pa.s.sion of science."
I gazed at her as she spoke, with a feeling akin to awe. "It must destroy the plot-interest of life for you, Hilda," I cried--out there in the vast void of that wild African plateau--"to foresee so well what each person will do--how each will act under such given circ.u.mstances."
She pulled a bent of gra.s.s and plucked off its dry spikelets one by one. "Perhaps so," she answered, after a meditative pause; "though, of course, all natures are not equally simple. Only with great souls can you be sure beforehand like that, for good or for evil. It is essential to anything worth calling character that one should be able to predict in what way it will act under given circ.u.mstances--to feel certain, "This man will do nothing small or mean," "That one could never act dishonestly, or speak deceitfully." But smaller natures are more complex. They defy a.n.a.lysis, because their motives are not consistent."
"Most people think to be complex is to be great," I objected.
She shook her head. "That is quite a mistake," she answered. "Great natures are simple, and relatively predictable, since their motives balance one another justly. Small natures are complex, and hard to predict, because small pa.s.sions, small jealousies, small discords and perturbations come in at all moments, and override for a time the permanent underlying factors of character. Great natures, good or bad, are equably poised; small natures let petty motives intervene to upset their balance."
"Then you knew I would come," I exclaimed, half pleased to find I belonged inferentially to her higher category.
Her eyes beamed on me with a beautiful light. "Knew you would come? Oh, yes. I begged you not to come; but I felt sure you were too deeply in earnest to obey me. I asked a friend in Cape Town to telegraph your arrival; and almost ever since the telegram reached me I have been expecting you and awaiting you."
"So you believed in me?"
"Implicitly--as you in me. That is the worst of it, Hubert. If you did NOT believe in me, I could have told you all--and then, you would have left me. But, as it is, you KNOW all--and yet, you want to cling to me."
"You know I know all--because Sebastian told me?"
"Yes; and I think I even know how you answered him."