Up Commissioner Street and down Commissioner Street and around and around Market Square tramped a haggard man in khaki who surveyed all things with dull, unseeing eyes. On his cheek, an inch or so above his stubbly beard, was a wide cross of plaster, and his left wrist wore a narrow bandage. He walked with quick, nervous strides; yet every now and then he halted to rest for a moment. Then he hurried on again, as if pursued by some unseen, but malignant foe.
Twice he turned northward and paused before the hospital, staring irresolutely up at the lighted windows. Then, facing about abruptly, he moved on, swiftly, but with the mechanical tread of a man in a dream. Once he found himself resting on the steps of the Jewish synagogue. The next time he roused himself to take note of his surroundings, he was at the Berea Estate, following Hospital Hill straight to the eastward. It was then that he had turned about and faced back to the hospital. A scant half-dozen hours before, that hospital had held what was all the world to him. Now, without warning, that all had proved to be naught.
The blow had come crashing upon him, straight between the eyes and so suddenly that there had been no time for him to brace himself to meet it. From the moment of his facing Ethel in the doorway of the hospital, that noon, he had been sure that the talk which he would have with her, that evening, could bring but the one ending. At sight of the soiled and haggard man before her, her blue eyes had lighted with something far more than pleased surprise. His appearing had been quite unexpected; her meeting with him had been the naked impulse of her girlish heart. And, all that endless day, her grief for the Captain had in no way hidden her evident pleasure in his own presence. And then, all at once, had come the end, unexpected and hence doubly crushing. His young, newborn happiness was as little strong to bear the blow as were his exhausted body and his shattered nerve. Like a wild beast wounded to the death, he had crept silently away, to go through his agony, unseen.
Standing under the fierce glare of the electric light by the hospital gate, his appearance would wellnigh have baffled the recognition of his mother. Soiled and stained and tattered, his head sunk between his shoulders, he looked a feeble man of middle years. Dark shadows lay around his heavy gray eyes, and the corners of his mouth drooped pitifully. And, somewhere inside that building, was the girl who had snatched away from him what was dearer than life itself. For six long months she had been the incentive to all of his best work; it had been her influence which finally had led him to come back into the firing line; it had been in the hope for the future, a hope growing less and less vague as the months passed by, that he had been willing and glad to prolong his stay through one more torrid African summer. And to what end?
Strange to say, it never once occurred to him to try to win her love now, after all that bad passed. Still less did it occur to him to doubt the truth of her final words to the Captain. Weldon had missed the look of appealing anguish in the blue eyes which she had lifted to his; but he had heard the low, steady voice, had seen the pressure of the living fingers answer to the slight movement of the hand already growing cold. He had heard, and seen. It was enough. Always he had believed implicitly in Ethel's truth. There was no reason he should distrust her now. It was only that he had been an egregious ass to think that he could win her love, in the face of a man like Captain Leo Frazer. With a mighty effort, he straightened his shoulders, faced the wing where he knew the Captain would now be lying and reverently removed his hat. Then, for one last time, his eyes swept over the building and, turning away, he crawled off towards the railway station.
And, meanwhile, alone in a room behind one of those brightly-lighted windows, a girl sat huddled together, her crossed arms on her knees and her face buried in her arms, while she wailed to herself over and over again,—
"He might have waited! He might have waited! My God in heaven, what have I done? But at least he might have waited!"
A commissariat train was leaving Johannesburg at two o'clock the next morning. His pass in his hand, Weldon clambered drearily on the train for the long ride back to Kroonstad. Motion of any kind was better than remaining longer in Johannesburg. Nevertheless, the jolting of the train was wellnigh unbearable. His shoulder throbbed, and the dull pain in his head was maddening. He had passed the stage of weariness, however, where one is conscious of exhaustion. An ever-tightening strain was upon him. He could not rest now; he must go on, and on, and on, faster and ever faster, until at last something should snap and quiet perforce should overtake him.
Early dawn found him at Kroonstad. Sleep had been impossible for him; he had no appetite for food, and it took an ever-increasing effort for him to pull himself together. Like a man mounting a steep, pathless hill, he tried to drag himself up above the consciousness of his aching head and throbbing wounds; but it was not to be done. At the station he halted irresolutely. Then of a sudden he faced towards the great hospital tent.
"I want something to steady me a bit," he said briefly to the first doctor he met there. "I have two or three scratches, and I am feeling fagged. Give me something to help me get a grip on myself again, for I can't spend time to be ill."
The doctor remonstrated; but Weldon's answer was peremptory.
"I tell you, I can't stop. Give me something and let me go. I've work at Lindley that must be done, and a convoy leaves in an hour."
An hour later he was trudging over the veldt in the direction of Lindley. Lindley was forty miles away; the roads were dusty, and the sun of early February struck down upon him with the heat of a belated summer. Nevertheless, at Lindley was his squadron, and with his squadron would be work. Never in all his past life had Weldon known this imperative need for work. In it now, and in its accompanying excitement and in its inevitable risk, would lie his ultimate salvation. For him, the future held but one plain duty, and that duty was to forget.
The experienced eye of the doctor had told him that the gaunt trooper was a sick man; it had also told him that the trooper's determination would outweigh his sickness, at least for the present crisis. He made no effort to penetrate the cause of that determination. He merely yielded to it. A doctor less wise would have ordered Weldon into bed. This one saw further. He knew that a delicately adjusted machine often receives its worst damage from the friction needed to stop the whirring wheels. Better to wait and let them run down, untouched.
The forty miles from Kroonstad to Lindley were reducing themselves from a geographical fact to a matter of physical and mental anguish. There had been no rain for days, and under the burning sun, the dusty veldt seemed dancing up and down before Weldon's tired, feverish eyes. Now he passed through a stretch of bare and burned-out sand; now he tramped over patches of tall dry grass; now he plodded wearily around a heap of smooth black stones. Brick-red ant-hills higher than his knees dotted themselves over the veldt, their shell-like surface shielding a crowded insect colony within. Ant-bear holes lurked unseen in his pathway, tripping his heedless steps; and an occasional partridge went whirring upward, making him start aside in causeless terror at the unwonted sound. And over it all rested the glaring, shimmering, blinding light, laden with myriad particles of dazzling red-brown dust. Later still, the red-brown color vanished, and he walked for weary leagues over the fire-blackened veldt where the black rocks offered no contrast to the eye, and where the air was heavy with ashes caught up and scattered by the light breeze which heralded the coming night. And it was all so lonely, so hostile, so limitless. But no more lonely and hostile and limitless than the desolate future which stretched away and away before his gaze.
As yet he dared not trust his mind to rest too much upon the past. The future demanded his whole attention. It was a far cry for him from the present up to his limit of threescore years and ten. Still, he would not funk it now. That was the part of a sneak. Now, as always, he would stand by his young resolution to play out the game, to abide by the rules and to take the consequences. Nevertheless, it would be weary work to play out the game to its end, when the end held nothing for him in its keeping. His mind trailed off upon all sorts or vague corollaries scarcely connected with the fact. He recalled it with a jerk.
The Captain was dead. Ethel had loved the Captain. She had told the Captain of her love. As consequence, she could not love himself, Harvard Weldon. But he loved her. He had loved her for thirteen months and twenty-one days. Carefully he reckoned up the time; then, to make sure, he counted it off upon his fingers. Yes, he had loved her ever since that first lunch on the steamer, when she had snubbed him so roundly. He did not know it then. Looking backward, he knew it now. And there had been Cape Town, and Johannesburg, and Cape Town again. He stumbled into the open mouth of an ant-bear's hole and came down with a crash, full upon his wounded shoulder. Strange that his step should be so uncertain! Strange that he should feel so little inclination to swear! As he picked himself up, he wondered vaguely whether his pipe would be refreshing; but his wonder stopped, impotent to lead his dangling hand in the direction of his pocket. Then his mind took up its interrupted story, its record of brief, categorical facts.
He had meant to go home, that winter. Instead, Ethel had fanned the flame of his desire to go back to the front. He had left her, one evening, to pass a sleepless night, and, the next morning, to take himself out to enlist for another six months of service. The six months were nearly ended. Only three weeks remained. And then? Nothing.
The second night found him still far from Lindley. He had plodded on mechanically, stumbling often, but halting never, while his mind went whirling on and on, over and over the same old questions. His lips were feverish, and his eyes burned hotly, so it was almost with a sense of relief that he greeted the swift chill which followed the dropping of the sun. Over his head, the great arch of the sky shaded from east to west through every tint of purple and blue and turquoise and emerald-green, down to the golden band of the afterglow. Then the stars began to dot the purple, their tiny points of light serving only to emphasize its darkness, until the full moon swept up across the heavens, throwing its mystic silver light over all the land and adding tenfold to the empty loneliness of the veldt. Sleep was out of the question. He could only snuggle more closely into his blankets and wait for morning with what grace he could. The stopping of his physical action only increased the swiftness of his swirling thoughts which chased each other round and round in circling eddies about one fixed point. That point was Ethel.
Across the veldt at his left hand, he had watched the chain of blockhouses which lay along the country between Kroonstad and Lindley. Their squat outlines and the shining blue of their corrugated iron roofs had caught his wandering attention, held it, pinned it to other associations with those same blockhouses and, of a sudden, had brought him to a full realization that griefs did not come singly. He had left Johannesburg, to face a future apart from Ethel. He was coming back to Lindley, to face a future bereft of the Captain.
It was full noon, the next day, when the camp came into view. Leaving the convoy to follow in his wake, he headed straight for the rise where he had so often sat with Carew and gossiped of all things under the light of the sun. Then, as the round tents lay under his eyes like rows of dots punched into relief above the surface of the plain, he sank down on the coarse, parched grass and hid his eyes in his shaking hands. Yet even then the pitiless circle of tragic thoughts refused to stop their ceaseless round.
He roused himself at a touch on his arm. Kruger Bobs, at a distance, was eying him with a look of chastened welcome; but Carew stood beside him, one thin, sun-tanned hand on Weldon's shoulder.
"It's all right, old man," he was saying. "Don't try to tell me anything about it. Kruger Bobs saw you coming, and we rode out to meet you. Come in and rest. You look utterly done up."
Half way back to the camp, Carew spoke again; but it was only once.
"I told the fellows you were coming, and that you would be tired. They will keep out of your way, till you have had time to rest up a bit. Paddy is waiting to look out for you; but you needn't worry. He knows when to hold his tongue. If you need anything, or if you care to talk, send him out to look for me. Meanwhile, you need some rest."
All books are sourced from Project Gutenberg