'You cannot just go away and leave me, Jordan. When you came to Khami, it was like the sun rising into my life; and if you go you will take the light with you. I love you, Jordan, oh sweet Jesus, forgive me, but I love you more than life itself.'
'Salina, stop! Please stop now.' He pleaded with her, but she clung to his hands.
'I cannot let you go without telling you, I love you, Jordan, I shall always love you.'
'Salina.' His voice was stricken. 'Oh Salina, I love somebody else,' he said.
'It's not true,' she whispered. 'Oh, please say it's not true.
'I am sorry, Salina. Terribly sorry.'
'Nobody else can love you as much as I do, nobody would sacrifice what I would.'
'Please stop, Salina. I don't want you to humiliate yourself.'
'Humiliate myself?' she asked. 'Oh, Jordan, that would be so small a price, you don't understand.'
'Salina, please.'
'Let me prove to you, Jordan, let me prove how joyfully I will make any sacrifice.' And when he tried to speak, she put her hand lightly over his mouth. 'We need not even have to wait for marriage. I will give myself to you this very night.'
When he shook his head, she tightened her grip to gag his words of denial.
'So fret not, like an idle girl, That life is dash'd with flecks of sin.'
She whispered the quotation, with quivering voice. 'Give me the chance, dear Jordan, please give me the chance to prove that I can love and cherish you more than any other woman in all the world. You will see how this other woman's love pales to nothing beside the flame of mine.'
He took her wrist and lifted her hand from his mouth, and his head bowed over hers with a terrible regret.
'Salina,' he said, 'it is not another woman.'
She stared up at him, both of them rooted and stricken, while the enormity of his words slowly spread across her soul like hoar frost.
'Not another woman?' she asked at last, and when he shook his head, 'Then I can never even hope, never?'
He did not reply, and at last she shook herself like a sleeper wakening from a dream to deathly reality.
'Will you kiss me goodbye, Jordan, just one last time?'
'It need not be the last-' But she reached up and crushed the words on his lips so fiercely that her teeth left a taste of blood on his tongue.
'Goodbye, Jordan,' she said, and turning from him she walked down the length of the verandah as infirmly as an invalid arising from a long sick-bed. At the door of her bedroom, she staggered and put out a hand to save herself, and then looked back at him.
Her lips moved, but no sound came from them. 'Goodbye, Jordan. Goodbye, my love.'
Ralph Ballantyne carried up the rifles, one thousand of them, brand new and still in their yellow grease, five in a wooden case, and twenty cases to a wagonload. There were another ten wagonloads of ammunition, all for the account of De Beers diamond mines, another three wagonloads of liquor for his own account, and a single wagon of furniture and household effects for the bungalow that Zouga was building for himself at Gubulawayo.
Ralph crossed the Shashi river with a certain thousand-pound profit from the convoy already safely deposited in the Standard Bank at Kimberley, but with a nagging hollow feeling in the pit of his stomach.
He had no way of knowing whether Bazo had reported him to Lobengula as the abductor of the stone falcons, or whether one of Bazo's warriors had recognized him and, despite the king's warning, had told a wife, who had told her mother, who had told her husband. 'Nothing moves in Matabeleland but the whole nation knows of it,' Clinton Codrington had warned him once. However, the profits on this run, and the prospect of visiting Khami Mission again, were worth the risk.
On the first day's march beyond the Shashi, that risk was vindicated, for it was Bazo himself at the head of his red shields who intercepted the convoy, and greeted Ralph inscrutably.
'Who dares the road? Who risks the wrath of Lobengula?' And after he had inspected the loaded wagons, as he and Ralph sat alone by the camp fire, Ralph asked him quietly: 'I heard that a white man died in the bush between great Zimbabwe and the Limpopo. What was that man's name?'
'Nobody knows of this matter, except Lobengula and one of his indunas,' Bazo replied, without lifting his gaze from the flames. 'And even the king does not know who the stranger was or where he came from, nor does he know the site of the grave of the nameless stranger.' Bazo took a little snuff and went on. 'Nor will we ever speak of this matter again, you and me.'
And now he lifted his eyes at last, and there was something in their dark depths that had never been there before, and Ralph thought that it was the look of a man destroyed, a man who would never trust a brother again.
in the morning, Bazo was gone, and Ralph faced northwards, with the doubts dispelled and his spirits soaring like the silver and mauve thunderheads that piled the horizon ahead of him. Zouga was waiting for him at the drift of the Khami river.
'You've made good time, my boy.'
'Nobody ever made better,' Ralph agreed, and twirled his thick dark moustache, 'and nobody is likely to, not until mister Rhodes builds his railroad.'
'Did mister Rhodes send the money?'
'In good gold sovereigns,' Ralph told him. 'I have carried them in my own saddle-bags.'
