The sweat came up in fat shining beads across her forehead and chin, each drop joining with the others until they ran in thick oily snakes back into her hair, soaking it as though she had been held under water. It ran into her eyes, faster than Mungo could wipe it away. It poured down her neck and wetted and matted the fur of the kaross. It soaked through the thin mattress and pattered like rain on the hard dry floor below.
The temperature of her body plunged dramatically, and when the sweat had passed, Juba and the twins sponged her naked body. She had dehydrated and wasted, so that the rack of her ribs stood out starkly, and her pelvis formed a bony hollowed- basin. They handled her with exaggerated care, for any rough movement might rupture the delicate damaged walls of the renal blood vessels and bring on the torrential haemorrhage which so often ended this disease.
When they had finished, they called Mungo back from where he was sitting with Harry Mellow on the stoep of the Mission. Robyn was comatose. Mungo set the lantern on the floor so that the feeble light would not trouble her.
'I will call you if there is any change.' He sent the women away and sat on the stool beside the cot.
Robyn sank slowly during the night, as the disease destroyed her blood, and in the dawn light she looked as though she had been sucked by some monstrous vampire. He knew she was dying, and he took her hand, and she did not stir.
A soft rustle at the door made Mungo turn his head. Robert, his son, stood in the door. His nightshirt was threadbare and patched, too tight under the armpits and the skirts were up above his knees. His thick tangled curls flopped onto the broad pale forehead, and he stared at Mungo unblinkingly, owl-eyed from sleep.
Mungo sat very still, for he sensed that any movement would put the child to flight like a frightened wild animal. He waited a hundred beats of his own heart, and at last the child shifted his gaze to his mother's face, and for the first time there was expression in his eyes.
Slowly, a pace at a time, he crossed to the bed, and hesitantly reached out to touch his mother's cheek. Robyn opened her eyes.
Already they were glazed and sightless, looking beyond the dark frontiers which she had reached. 'mummy, , said Robert. 'Please don't die, MUMMY.' Robyn's eyes flickered from side to side, and then miraculously they focused on Robert's face. She tried to lift her hand, but it merely twitched and then relaxed again.
'Listen to me. If you die,' Mungo said harshly, and her eyes swivelled to him, 'if you die,' he repeated deliberately, 'the child will be mine.' For the first time she recognized him. He could see it, and his words had reached her. He saw the anger come alive in her eyes, saw the enormous effort that she made to speak, but she could make no sound, only her lips formed a single word.
'Never!' 'Then live,' he challenged her. 'Live, damn you!' And he saw her begin to fight again.
Robyn's life-forces rose and sank to the dreadful tides of the disease, baking fever followed icy chills, and after a long exhausted Coma followed the bursting sweats. At times she raved in delirium, assailed by fantasies and demons from the past. Sometimes she looked at Mungo St. John and saw him as he had been so long ago, on the quarter-deck of his beautiful Baltimore clipper Huron, when Robyn had been in her early twenties.
'So handsome,' she whispered. 'So devilishly, impossibly handsome.' Then she was lucid for brief periods, and the fever added strength to her anger.
'You killed him you killed him, and he was a saint,' she whispered, her voice light but shaking with fury, and Mungo could not quieten her. 'He was my husband, and you sent him across the river to where you knew the Matabele assegais waited. You killed my husband as surely as if you had driven the blade through his heart with your own hand.' Then her mood changed again. 'Please, will you never let me be at peace?' she pleaded, her voice so weak that he had to lean over her to catch her words. 'You know I cannot resist you, yet everything you stand for is an offence against me and my God, against me and the lost and leaderless people that have been given into my care.' 'Drink,' he ordered. 'You must drink.' And she struggled weakly as he held the jug to her lips.
Then the disease would tighten its grip upon her and sweep her away into the burning fever mists, where there was no sense and no reality. The days and nights swung past in a blur. Sometimes Mungo would start awake to find it was past midnight, and one of the twins was sleeping in the chair on the other side of the bed. He would rise, numbed with fatigue, to force Robyn to drink again.
'Drink,' he whispered to her. 'Drink, or die.' Then he sank back into his own chair, and when he awoke again it was dawn, and his son stood beside the chair, staring into his face. As he opened his eyes, the boy darted away again, and when he called after him, Robyn whispered fiercely from the cot. 'You will never have him never!'
Sometimes in the noonday, when Robyn was lying pale and silent, resting between the periodic onslaughts of the fever, Mungo could sleep for a few hours on the pallet set at the far end of the veranda, until Juba or one of the twins called him. 'It has begun again.' And he hurried to the cot and goaded and coaxed her from her lethargy and forced her to go on fighting.
Sometimes, sitting beside the cot, his own bony features now gaunt and haggard, he wondered at himself. He had possessed a hundred women more beautiful than this in his lifetime. He was well aware of the strange attraction he could still wield over any woman, and yet he had chosen this one, this one whom he could never possess. The one who hated him as fiercely as she loved him, who had conceived his son in a soul-consuming passion, and yet kept him from the child with all her determination. She was the one who had demanded that Mungo marry her, yet vehemently denied him the duty of a wife, who would not allow him in her presence except now when she was too weak to resist, or on those rare occasions when her lust for him overcame her conscience and her revulsion.
He remembered one of those occasions only a month or so previously, when he had wakened in the backroom of his mud-brick hut on the outskirts of Bulawayo. There was a candle burning, and Robyn stood beside the camp-bed that was the only item of furniture in his room. She must have ridden through the darkness and the wilderness to reach him.
'God forgive me!' she had whispered, and fallen upon him in a frenzy of desire.
In the first light she had left him exhausted and stunned, and when he had followed her out to Kharni Mission the next day, she had met him on the veranda armed with a shotgun and he had known instinctively that if he tried to mount the steps to touch her, she would have killed him. He had never seen such loathing as there was in her eyes, for herself as much as for him.
Endlessly she had written to the newspapers, at home and in the Cape, denouncing almost every proclamation he made as Chief Native Commissioner of Matabeleland. She had attacked his conscripted labour policy which provided the ranchers and the miners with the black men they desperately needed to ensure the continuance and the prosperity of this new land. She had condemned the levy of his native police force he used to keep order over the tribe. Once she had even stormed into an indaba he was holding with the tribal indunas and harangued them in fluent Sindebele in his presence, calling the indunas 'old women' and 'cowards' for submitting to the authority of Mungo and the British South Africa Company. Then not an hour later, she had waited beside the path, in thick bush near the ford of the river, and had waylaid him as he rode back from the indaba. Naked as wild animals, they had made love upon her saddle blanket in the veld, and the fury of it came so close to mutual destruction that it left him shaken and appalled.
'I hate you, oh God, how I hate you,' she had whispered, her eyes full of tears, as she mounted her horse again and galloped away, heedless of the thorns that ripped at her skirts.
Her exhortations to the indunas were blatant incitement to rebellion and bloody revolution, while in her book Trooper Hackett of Matabeleland, in which she mentioned Mungo by name, the words she put into his mouth and the actions she ascribed to him were a most virulent slander. Mr. Rhodes and other directors of the BSA Company had urged Mungo to take legal action against her.
'Against my own wife, sir?' He had slanted his single eye and smiled ruefully. 'What a fool I would appear.' She was the most implacable and remorseless adversary he had ever known, and yet the thought of her dead desolated him, so that each time she sank back towards the abyss, so he sank with her, and when she rallied, so his spirits soared to match her.
Yet the play of emotion and the way in which he drained his own reserves to sustain her wearied him to the very core of his soul, and it went on and on, without respite, day after day until finally Elizabeth broke in on the few hours of deathlike sleep which he allowed himself. He heard the emotion that shook her voice and saw the tears in her eyes.
'It's over, General St. John,' she said, and he flinched as though she had struck him across the face, and staggered groggily to his feet.
He felt his own tears sting the rims of his eyes.
'I cannot believe it.' Then he realized that Elizabeth was smiling through her tears, and she was proffering the enamelled pot she held in both hands.
It stank of ammonia and the peculiar rotting odour of the disease, but the colour of the fluid had changed, from the deadly black of Guinness stout to the light golden of Pilsner beer.
'It's over,' Elizabeth repeated. 'Her water has cleared. She's safe. Thank God, she's safe.' By that afternoon Robyn was well
