Part 4 (1/2)
”My mother bids me tell you that she is dying, and that you must come to her at once.”
Gideon rose to his feet, his face twitching. Elsie slowly turned, held out her hand for the guiding twig which Kanu extended to her, and stepped swiftly forth.
Within the s.p.a.ce of a few minutes Gideon sprang on a horse and galloped off in the direction of the homestead where the woman he loved lay dying. Marta sent one of the servants to fetch a span of oxen, and soon followed her husband, in a wagon.
When Gideon arrived at Marta's homestead he could at once see that directions had been given as to the details of his reception. As he ascended the steep flight of steps which led to the _voorkuis_ the door swayed open and revealed the weeping figure of Sara, his niece. Walking on tip-toe she beckoned to him to follow her, and led the way to an inner room, the door of which stood ajar. Gideon entered, every nerve in his body tingling with apprehension. Sara softly closed the door behind him, and then he heard her retreating footsteps upon the clay floor of the pa.s.sage.
The dying woman lay propped up in bed, her cheeks flushed and her lips parted in a smile of loving welcome. She looked, for the moment, not more than twenty years of age. Her face carried Gideon back to the spring morning of long ago, when he met her for the first time, walking under the budding oaks of the Stellenbosch street. With a last, pathetic effort of coquetry, the poor remnant of her once-beautiful hair was spread over her shoulder. Her hand appeared for an instant from under the bed-clothes; it looked like the hand of a skeleton in a livid glove.
Gideon stood for a s.p.a.ce looking into the smiling eyes of the woman whom he loved and sunning himself in their dying glow. The soiled years seemed to shrivel away like a burnt-up scroll, the past lived again in a borrowed glamour of lost joy that had never existed and his withered heart expanded like a rose in summer.
With a long-drawn sigh he sank to his knees at the side of the bed and pressed his lips hurriedly upon the tress of silky hair; then he drew hurriedly back, startled at his own temerity. Marta turned her head slightly until she could see his face. Her eyes became softer with the dew of happiness and a smile hovered upon her lips. Then she spoke:
”Listen--I am dying;--will you take my children and care for them?”
Gideon could not speak; he nodded his head and she proceeded:
”I only knew you loved me when it was too late... I waited for you to speak--then they said that you loved someone else--”
Gideon's brain was busy recalling the long-past. Every obscure detail of the days of his brother's courts.h.i.+p and his own bitter disappointment came back to him with strange distinctness. How had the misunderstanding arisen; who was to blame?--”Stepha.n.u.s always hated you and I loved you all the time--Aletta need not know--I only tell you now that I am dying--”
Gideon tenderly took the wasted hand and laid it against his rugged cheek.
”My children--I love them--Let them not suffer for their father's sin--”
”Wait, Marta,” said Gideon in a strained and trembling voice, ”I must tell you--”
”There is nothing to tell--I know it all.--He got to know I loved you and he tried to kill you.--Forgive him, if you can, for my sake--”
”Wait, Marta,--I must tell you the truth--you are wrong--I must tell you the truth, even if it kills us both.”
The dying woman's lips became compressed, and the colour began to fade from her cheeks. Gideon tried to move so that her eyes, full of startled interrogatory and the pain of apprehension, might not rest upon his face whilst he made his confession, but they followed and held his spell-bound. Then in a hoa.r.s.e, broken murmur he said:
”Stepha.n.u.s shot me by accident--I accused him falsely--because I hated him all my life.”
When he ceased speaking he drooped his head and hid his face among the bed-clothes next to Marta's shoulder. A slight shudder went through the woman's frame and then she ceased to breathe. Gideon kept his head bowed for a long time. When, by a torturing effort he lifted it, he saw a dead, ashen face lying on the pillow at his side,--the face of an old woman who seemed to have died in sharp agony.
When Gideon left the chamber of death he moved like a man in a dream.
Mounting his horse mechanically he allowed the animal to stray homewards at a walk. He met the wagon in which Aletta was hurrying to the death-bed as fast as the team of oxen could bring her, but he pa.s.sed it without recognition.
The pathway led past the spring, the scene of the three-years' past tragedy. The day was hot and the horse turned, aside to drink as was its wont. It was not until the animal paused and bent its head to the water that the rider recognised the locality. He was quite calm and the environment in which he found himself seemed appropriate to his mood.
He dismounted when the horse had finished drinking, led it away to a spot where it could graze, a few paces distant, and then returned to the water-side.
He went over the whole scene anew. There was the spot where he had sat sleeping; he stepped over and sat there again, in the same att.i.tude.
There Stepha.n.u.s had approached through the bushes; yonder was the place where the struggle for possession of the gun had taken place and where he had ignominiously sunk to the ground beneath his brother's superior strength. A little to the right was the green tussock upon which Stepha.n.u.s, after wrenching the gun from his grasp, had stood and looked insulting defiance at him. He recalled the face which bore such a detestable resemblance to his own, and remembered its look of triumphant hate. He recalled the taunting words that Stepha.n.u.s had uttered and his own insulting reply. Again he felt the sickening torture of the cras.h.i.+ng bullet tearing through flesh and bone. Involuntarily he lifted quickly the half-crippled limb; a torturing twinge shot through it and almost made him scream.
His thoughts swung back--searching among the mists of old memory for a clue to the one that had wrecked his life by telling falsehoods about him to the woman he loved, and who, he now knew for the first time, had loved him. Who could it be? None but the brother whose life he had been fool enough to save and who had always been his evil genius.
The scene he had just lived through was too recent for him to take in its full significance. He knew that he had caused Marta's death by his confession--which he now bitterly regretted having made, and he wondered if they should meet in the next world whether she would hate him for what he had done. He had left the house of death with the full intention of confessing his transgression and expiating it in the fullest manner. It was not that he had made any resolution to this effect, but rather that a full confession, with its consequences, seemed to be the only possible outcome of what had happened.