Jasper Lyle

But as soon as he did gain courage to sound the depths of his own heart, he recognised the duty he owed to her, to her family, especially his gracious, generous host, and to himself; and he resolved that another sun should not set till the question, on which he felt whole years of happiness must depend, was decided.

The dew was on the leaves and the sun high in the east, when Eleanor Lyle came through the cool hall into the glowing verandah on the morning when Frankfort had at last resolved on requesting an interview with her father.

He had a very strong idea that she liked him. She was one who had evidently suffered from the treachery or the evil humour of man; everything she said or did was tinged with some fatal remembrance. She shrunk from the sound of the name she bore; she could not believe in Ormsby’s faith; she did not openly ignore all honourable feelings in the other sex, but she clearly set no store by men’s promises to women. She did not volunteer these strong opinions—they were drawn from her; but Frankfort soon discovered that it was he only who could elicit them. Yes, she most certainly liked him—she had a good opinion of him, too, he fancied; he had tested it at times in his own quiet way.

They met together in the verandah this fine, warm, balmy, dewy morning, while the world was pleasantly astir. Children creeping out of the wagon bivouacs with “shining morning faces;” herd-boys coming by the house with baskets of meelies and fine burnished English tins of milk; graceful Fingo girls, with fresh-gathered pumpkins and cool green water-melons on their heads; Mrs Trail’s Bechuana nursemaid and ruddy children—such contrasts to their dusky Abigail—loaded with heather, lilac, pink, and white, and purple; and then there swung out from the old mulberry-tree in the vineyard the call to prayers in the school. The people from the wagons hurried off; the front garden and avenue were deserted; there was not a sound but the whooming of a great bee that was always rifling the doricas and invading the roses and convolvuluses, till the “morning hymn” swelled on the warm, still air in solemn chorus, and true, though unstudied, harmony.

They descended the steps, and sought the shade of the avenue. It was flanked on either side by a little nursery of trees; there was a good deal of low bramble and brushwood, which made almost a labyrinth of the ground; but there was a shady spot beside a silver thread of water that stole from the rill irrigating the vineyard, and Frankfort and Eleanor were bent on gathering water-cresses for breakfast. I doubt if people not interested in each other would have thought of taking all this trouble for a few green leaves; but these two went about it as if they had laid out for themselves a serious employment.

It was a delicious nook. Eleanor had even laughed at the scramble she had had in reaching it, and sat down heated and fatigued with her descent of the bank, down which Frankfort might have made an excuse to lift her if he had so pleased—he would have been pleased to do so—but he did not; there was such a divine purity about this young and graceful and subdued being, that, had he been in a desert with her, he would, have felt that it was she who drew the barrier between them, which he dared not pass.

All this may seem very anomalous when you think how Frankfort dreaded to lift the veil between them; but, remember, his doubts were the issue of lonely reflective hours in Eleanor’s presence. He grieved at the secret sorrow that oppressed her, and bound with its heavy fetters the joyous impulses of youth.

How handsome he looked as he cast himself on the green-sward beside the little rill, his hat laid aside, his open, honest countenance brightened with enjoyment at the radiance of the morning and the fragrant beauty of this green retreat, with the shy retiring Eleanor actually smiling in his face, as he fanned her with the broad green leaves of arums growing in the shining watercourse. Ah, it was the honesty of that face that made it so handsome! Eleanor was not one to be attracted by mere statuesque beauty—she had forsworn love for ever—she was anticipating peace in this abjuration of love, when the kindly eyes and approving smile of this true-hearted soldier beamed on her with an effect like sunlight on the hills in Kafirland, scathed by the lightning. There are patches on which no green grass will ever again grow—desolate spots in the great oasis; but these are overlooked as the herald of a new day touches them with his glory, and casts all that is unsightly into shade.

Gems of dew glittered on the mossy bank—flowers, rainbow-hued, were opening their chalices to the genial influence of day—a magnificent corallodendrum spread its scarlet-tufted boughs over a low rustic bench, and they seated themselves together under this fine canopy. Eleanor had desired a little Fingo boy to follow her with a basket for the cresses—Frankfort thought he obeyed his mistress much too soon.

She had taken off the large straw hat—Frankfort held it for her; her fine hair was slightly disordered; there was a light in her eye, a colour in her cheek, her lover—we must call him such now—had never seen before. That young face, that candid smile—nay, the smile sometimes broke into a low musical laugh. Ah! could, the demon of self-reproach be lurking beneath all this bewitching feminine charm?

Frankfort felt that the time must soon come when he should ask her for her history. He had resolved to learn it from herself. He longed to pour balm into the wounded heart; he was growing hourly less afraid of hearing the truth. He was just, too,—he felt that no offer of confidence could be made to him till he solicited it.

He would do so now. She sent her little dusky page to the rill and rose to follow him. She was tying on her hat, when a slender chain encircling her throat caught in the strings, and she unwittingly drew it from her bosom. Frankfort saw suspended to it the miniature he had found in the vineyard.

He felt emboldened,—he ventured to touch it.

She made no remonstrance, but with a deep sigh would have replaced it.

Frankfort held it fast. His hand did not shake, but his heart beat.

How often does a sudden impulse bring to a crisis what has cost us many hours of forethought! and how often—oh! how often!—does the one great event of a life hinge upon some trifle unforeseen! A look, a word, an unexpected meeting, will often remove the doubts and agonies of years, when but for what we call accident, there might have been no meeting, no blessed exchange of look or word.

Frankfort felt that this was a crisis in his life.

“Eleanor,” said he, “whose child was this?”

“Mine, Major Frankfort,” she replied, “mine; he died, and—” she broke into a passion of tears. He drew close to her—she suffered him to take her hand. All his doubts faded at sight of those fast-falling tears,—those sobs of agony.

“Not now, not yet,” said she; “the bitterness of death is past; but you have touched a chord which has vibrated through my soul, and I must have time to recover my trembling senses.”

She took the arm offered her; they returned by an open pathway to the house, the little Fingo following, carrying his basket piled full of fresh and glittering leaves, and in his arms a quantity of arums, the large water-lilies of South Africa.

Mrs Daveney and Marion were in the entrance-rooms. Since Ormsby’s avowal of his attachment, Marion was more constantly at her mother’s side. I have shown you how Mr Trail had exerted his influence over Mrs Daveney for good; how his words, like the dew from heaven, falling on good seed, had revived her best impulses, and removed the tares of false pride and self-glorification from her heart. Ah, kind, useful man, there be many that the world calls “as good as thee;” but there are ways of ministering God’s word, “the small rain upon the tender herb,” refreshing the soil, not tearing it up and sweeping it away in the torrent of over-zeal and self-righteousness. It is such as Mr Trail who pioneer the way for the timid, and keep the ground for the weak. Verily, it is the meek-spirited who possess the earth; they consider the evil of their own nature in reproving others, and obtain concessions to their humility which would be denied to their assumption of supremacy.

How dark and unfathomable are the depths of our own hearts, till the Day-star from on high sheds its divine ray on our souls, and teaches us to guide others by conquering ourselves!

But it strikes me you may think me prosy,—too fond of dissecting people’s motives. Pardon me, it is my way, my fault, my habit,—excuse it if it does not suit you, and pass on.

“Ah!” cries the worldly-minded reader, “by Eleanor’s tact and candour, a very delicate point has been settled; confidence has been established among all; Ormsby declares he never should have known his own mind if he had not been brought to the point; he was never so happy in his life.”

In a word, you will exclaim, “All’s well that ends well.” Certainly, that is one of the secrets of self-gratulation and content in this work-a-day world.

But do not jump at conclusions—we are not near the end of our story yet.

Mrs Daveney saw traces of tears in Eleanor’s eyes. She glanced at Frankfort, and observed that his face was fall of serious thought; but, albeit Marion had always been the favourite, so to speak, the mother had every confidence in Eleanor. How often mothers love one child best, but trust another most!

Mr Trail had brought this mother and eldest daughter nearer to each other than they had been for years; and Mrs Daveney anticipated Eleanor’s confidence ere the morning passed. The latter did not appear at the breakfast-table, and the kind, anxious father went to satisfy himself that she was not ill.

There was a shade of anxiety on his brow, and as he passed his wife, on leaving the table at the call of some farm-servant, he whispered to her that Eleanor wished to see her.

The result of their conference was the resolution on Eleanor’s part, with the sanction of father and mother, to “tell Major Frankfort the history of the miniature, and more if he desired it.”

Light broke on Eleanor as her mother reminded her of many trifling incidents, plainly manifesting Frankfort’s partiality for her. These, connected with what had lately passed between the young widow and the generous, candid soldier, left no doubt an her mind of the nature of his regard for her. She began to weigh every look; she suddenly remembered he had addressed her as “Eleanor,”—she had been too much startled by the unexpected allusion to her lost darting to think of anything but the revival of the bitter pang.

Then Frankfort’s violent emotion was so at variance with his usual delicacy. She was half-frightened to believe that he loved her. They had spent three weeks together under the same roof. It might truly be said that the light of a new day had dawned upon her, so insensibly had Frankfort’s influence stolen over her, and sweetened an existence, of late so wretched and forlorn.

To have seen the settlement of Annerley, in the early part of March, 18—, you would have thought, had you known nothing of the terrible elements gathering silently around, that Mercy and Peace had met together, that Righteousness and Truth had kissed each other.

“In the deep noontide, in the sunset’s hush,” the children’s voices chimed together in the busy school; mothers and sisters plied their needles in the shady, trellised passage; the cattle herds grew careless, and dozed away the dreamy day; the ladies of the family party suffered themselves to hope that the dove with the olive branch was winging her way from the mountain haunts of the unhappy heathen. Ormsby was hourly profiting by his association with his energetic, intelligent, active-minded host. The “maxims” he had been accustomed to laugh at as “Frankfort’s platitudes” were household words here. The fresh, innocent mind of Marion was a new and beautiful study, and he was a little, a very little, afraid of Mrs Daveney. He was not quite sure that he liked her—she was evidently inclined to keep him in order, and then she was “dreadfully clever.”

So complete was the quiet reigning in this beautiful wilderness, that even Mr Daveney began to think the chiefs had held council, and determined on prolonging the truce, owing to the lateness of the season, the corn being yet unripe in the districts between the Buffalo and Keiskama rivers. The two officers were awaiting his expected despatch to rejoin their regiments, if ordered to do so, as they had considered it right, on so long and unforeseen detention, to “report” their whereabouts to their commanding officer.

You will think it all very novel-like and romantic to have brought these delightful, handsome, intelligent officers into the wilderness, and established them there with an obliging mamma, and a soldierlike host, and two charming daughters—you will consider it all perfectly correct in romance, but not quite so true to nature. Ah! if you had seen the world at home and abroad as I have done, dear reader, you would have discovered that romance and reality are much more nearly allied than untravelled folks imagine. I assure you, the picture of the Annerley settlement is not exaggerated, though I admit that the family I have selected to introduce to you is not of common stamp, even in England; but there is plenty of space for more of them in Southern Africa, and there is so little room in England, that vice jostles against virtue, and often has the best of it.

Frankfort and Eleanor were again seated on the rustic bench, beneath the scarlet-tufted corallodendrum. He could not doubt any longer that he had at least touched her heart—how deep the impression was, he could not tell. In her manner to him she was like a child, all joyousness; at times smiling, almost gay, and occasionally confiding, but as yet not so in matters connected with herself. Sometimes she would half promise to “talk of herself” to him; then the time came, and something would intervene. If he had shrunk from asking her previous history, she dreaded to tell it. She said so, but added, for his comfort—“Fear not, dear Major Frankfort; you may pity me as unfortunate, and contemn me as weak, but you will not have occasion to condemn. I am only a wronged, deceived, and, for a long time, most unhappy woman; and if you should despise me for my misfortunes, which you may do”—she put her hand on his lips, as he was about to interrupt her—“you will not love me less, though you may not choose me for your wife.”

He took her hand in his, and pressed it with a fervency, eloquent but silent.

“Ah!” said she, shuddering, “it is so long since I was happy, that, albeit you present the cup, I hold it to my lips, trembling lest it fall.”

She took the miniature of her boy from her bosom. Frankfort bent over her, and gazed upon the angel face, dimmed with the young mother’s tears; but though she wept, it was not with that passionate anguish he had witnessed before. He drew her to him—he ventured to kiss away those slow-falling tears—he had told her that morning that he loved her.

“Tell me,” at last whispered Frankfort, trembling and cold with suspense, “who was this child’s father?”

“I could not nerve myself to tell you my sad story,” replied Eleanor. “I have written it. My father will give it you this evening, I own I shrunk from this tearing open of the records of the past. There are some passages from which you will turn perhaps in dismay. You will discover, what you may have already suspected, that I have loved and been deceived; but you have yet to decide whether I am a fitting bride for you. I confess I have no hope.”

Frankfort withdrew his hand from Eleanor’s. He paced the walk in great agitation.

She waited till he approached her again. “Pity me,” said she, rising. “Ah! it has been a terrible task to make this revelation to you. Do me justice—I did not seek to win you. I had abjured love for ever; but you came; you were kind; I listened; a new emotion stirred my heart, unlike the wild passion which once brought me to the depths of despair, and now, God help me! you, too, may forsake me.”

She was weeping. “Tell me,” he again whispered, “is there any self-reproach?—any shame? Ah, Eleanor! I must know—any—”

“Disgrace!” you would say, interrupted Eleanor.

Her lover answered her not a word, but stood waiting her reply. The strong, tall man shook like an aspen-tree.

“You will learn all,” said Eleanor, “in the packet I have left for you with my father. I leave it to you to decide whether we may meet again.”

The light of day was fading. Side by side, they returned towards the house; but not a word did either speak. They went round by the vineyard; they stood at the gateway leading to the trellised passage. Frankfort opened it, and Eleanor would have passed him by.

He drew her back. “Shall we meet again, Eleanor?” said he.

“Alas!” she answered, “I fear you will decide otherwise.” And he—his heart answered her in the spirit, if not in the words, of Moore’s beautiful song:

“I know not and care not if guilt’s in that heart,I but know that I love thee, whatever thou art!”

Ah, reader! you will be glad to know, for I cannot help telling you, that Eleanor, though disgraced, was not guilty, save in the act, and that I do not defend, of marrying one for whom she had no real affection.

The inmates of Annerley have retired to their rest. The whole household seems hushed in the deepest repose; but Frankfort is seated with a packet before him, which he longs, yet dreads, to open.

He tears the seal away, and the sight of Eleanor Lyle’s handwriting makes his heart beat—he can hear it in the silence of the midnight hour.

But we must first see how sped the convicts.

Chapter Eleven.

The Torture

It was in the month of December, 18—, that Lee and Martin Gray established themselves as traders at Umlala’s kraal, in Kafirland. The reader has been given to understand that Lee had no intention of domesticating himself with the savages, albeit he adapted himself at once to the customs of the tribe, persuading the chief and his councillors that he had been induced to join them from a desire to better his condition, as well as aid and advise them in their plans and operations against the colony. He was too well acquainted with the Kafir character to attempt to impose on them by professing disinterested motives, for on these he knew they would place no reliance; but by fixing himself as a trader among them, he could in the first place bide his time for carrying out his intentions of joining the Dutch; and while doing so, lay up a fund for future pecuniary wants or emergencies. To Brennard it was his interest to be a faithful agent. To do Lee justice, he had no thought of fraud in money matters, and from the traders to the eastward he easily gathered intelligence of the Dutch farmers’ movements, from the districts of Natal, and beyond the Draakberg, to an appointed spot between the branches of the Orange River, where a general gathering of emigrant Boers was to take place previous to treking in a body to Orichstad, a settlement beyond the 25th degree of south latitude, and therefore considered by them as not subject to the British Government.

With an air of good faith, he opened a correspondence in cipher with Brennard, who, at his suggestion, placed an agent on the Stormberg mountains, and thus increased his contraband traffic by disposing of arms and ammunition to the Boers, who, assisted by these traitors, grew sanguine in their hopes and determined in their preparations. So blind, indeed, was the colonial government to the real state of affairs, that wagons containing guns actually passed the outskirts of the frontier garrisons, on their way to the Modder and Bilt River settlements, while smaller arms were landed at the Umtata, and conveyed to a dépôt at the foot of the northern extremity of the Stormberg mountains.

The Dutch soon felt the influence of a master mind at work. A secret communication was set on foot between Lee and the rebel leader; but Lee was cautious in his policy, since, to be suspected by the Kafirs as anything but a trader, would be to draw down attention from the missionaries, who were, when permitted, in communication with the tribes most distant from the colony. Those within the border were becoming every day more lawless. It was said by some of these teachers, in after times, that they had had an idea of some men of suspicious character living among Umlala’s people; but having no tangible proof of their existence, having only the word of Kafir spies to depend on, they could take no steps in the matter, either by offering advice to the Kafirs, near whom the poor missionaries and their families were living in dread and peril of their lives, or by giving information to the authorities, who were too remote to act.

Lee liked the life he led; the form of government so favourable to the doctrine that “might is right,” though tempered in some measure by general opinion, in which he succeeded in gaining a voice; the total absence of all moral discipline except as regarded women, with whom Lee, as he said, had no mind to trouble himself—a life of ease, yet of excitement, the spacious and beautiful country, all conspired to render his temporary location desirable; but while he thus rested on his arms, his mind was ceaselessly at work.

With that shrewdness which stands bad men in stead of deeper knowledge, Lee had long penetrated the weaker outworks, so to speak, of Gray’s heart; keenly susceptible, of facile mind, and imbued with a vanity as natural to men as to women, he had easily yielded to the gentle influences and watchful solicitude of Amayeka. Lee at once profited by this “fancy,” as he called it, to turn it to his own account, and used every means to encourage it.

Desirous of personal conference with the Dutch agent at the station in the Stormberg, he had no mind to be attended in such expeditions by Gray; yet he knew well that without some counter-charm, the deserter, on being left to himself, would at once appeal, through the missionaries, to the mercy of the British Government. True, there was the oath which had bound the three traders together in solemn compact, but paramount to all other considerations was Gray’s horror of his own treachery and disloyalty as a soldier. However desirous he might be of keeping the compact, as regarded Brennard and Lee, inviolate, the issue of Gray’s surrender would be keen inquiry, and consequently a fatal result to the chief convict’s schemes. Like a good man’s neglected garden, the surface of the young deserter’s character presented a wilderness of weeds and briars, but below were seeds long sown, some dead, but some struggling, with every capability of fruition, when the soil should fall under the hand of the labourer. All considerations, Lee felt, would vanish before the wish to retrieve the past, to become, in Gray’s own words, “an honest man again.”

Evening time in Kafirland! The sun has all day long been glowing on the river, lighting it up like burnished steel; the trees motionless, the birds on listless wing, screening themselves within the shady boughs. Now the mountain peaks are blending their purple summits with a crimson sky, and the last rays of light deck the clouds in the west as with a glory! Lo! it fades, and the heavens are veiled with a mantle of pale grey; the stream begins to murmur, responsive to the breeze that stirs its waters; the birds congregate in the balmy air before seeking their rest; the countless herds more slowly homeward, panting for the refreshment of cool water brooks; and the women, some singly, some in parties in single file, trip across the plains to draw water, as is their custom at eventide. The picture reminds one of what one reads of in the patriarchal days.

Lee and Gray sat upon a bank that sloped to the river, a tributary of the Great Kei—would you had a map, dear reader, to trace the country I would fain describe. Peals of laughter stirred the air. Beneath the over-arching boughs a crowd of dusky Nereides were taking their evening bath, swimming, diving, pulling each other in sport below the surface of the stream, swinging from branch to branch with amazing activity and grace, and tossing up fountains of spray on the elder women, who stood silently filling their calabashes at the clear pools between the stones at the drift.

“Amayeka, Amayeka, izapa, izapa (come hither),” cried two or three of the younger girls, as Amayeka, apparently unconscious of the gathering below, and with slow step, vacant air, and pitcher on her head, moved along the opposite bank, followed by her little attendant, a tiny meercat, which I have hitherto forgotten to mention.