He left her standing alone under the avenue of acacia. A variety of projects swiftly filled her mind. She must go to M‘Crae, and tell him everything. It was strange that M‘Crae came first. She must find James without further delay and explain to him the difficulty in which she was placed. But it wouldn’t be easy to explain; the process involved the whole story of the fugitive, and she wasn’t sure that this was hers to tell. And in any case, James would be sure to misunderstand. She realised, for the first time, that her relation with M‘Crae actually might be misunderstood; and this filled her, more than ever, with a sort of blind anger which wouldn’t let her see things clearly. It overwhelmed her with shame to think that M‘Crae, too, must look at the matter in the odious light which Godovius had suggested. It seemed to her that the lovely innocence of their relation had been smirched for ever. She must have time to think. Now she couldn’t think at all. If she were to creep quietly into the house and shut herself up in her bedroom she would be able to cry; and then, perhaps, it would be easier. Beneath this awful heavy stillness of the charged sky she could do nothing. It seemed to her in the silence that all the enormous, unfriendly waste of country was just waiting quietly to see what she would do. Yes, she had better go to her room and cry. And then, before she knew what was happening, a demon of wind swept down from the sky and filled the branches of the avenue above her with rushing sound. A scurry of red sand came whirling along the path, and above her the black sky burst into a torrent of rain; rain so violent that in a moment her flimsy dress was saturated. Beneath this radical and alarming remedy for mental anguish she abandoned any attempt at making up her mind. She simply ran for shelter to the nearest that offered itself, and this was naturally the banda of M‘Crae.

She arrived, breathless, and beautifully flushed. M‘Crae was lying at the end of the banda next the path. She could see that he had been watching them all the time, even though he could not have heard them. Through the flimsy wall of grass he had pushed the muzzle of his rifle.

He smiled up at her. “You see, I had him covered,” he said. “Now you’d better tell me all about it.”

Then, quite against her will, she began to cry, making queer little noises of which she would have been ashamed if she had been able to think about them. It had to come . . .

To M‘Crae the position, in its sudden intimacy, was infinitely embarrassing. At any time it would have been painful for him to have seen a woman cry; but Eva was no ordinary woman in his eyes. She had brought, in a little time, a tender and very beautiful ideal into his life. He had thought of her as the incarnation of all the lovely and desirable things which had passed for ever out of his grasp, and chiefly of youth, which carries an atmosphere of beauty in itself. But even more than this, he had worshipped her naturalness and bravery, so that it was a terrible thing for him to see her in tears. He knew that no everyday trouble could have broken her simple and confident courage, and the consciousness of this adorable weakness overwhelmed him even more than his admiration of her strength. He saw in a moment what a child she was, and longed to protect her, as a young man and a lover might have done. He realised suddenly that the right to do this had passed from him, years ago . . . years ago. His eyes filled with tears, and he could do nothing; for the only things which he might naturally have done were obviously included in the prerogative of that parental interest which is the name under which the middle-aged man most often hides a furtive sensuality. Altogether, the matter was too harrowing in its complications for an honest man to deal with, and M‘Crae, as we have said, found himself in these days a mass of the most sensitive scruples. For all this he felt that he couldn’t merely sit there with tears in his eyes and do nothing. It was natural for him to put out his hand and take hold of her arm. Though she had often enough been nearer to him than this in her ministrations, he had never actually touched her before. Through the sodden muslin of her sleeve his fingers became conscious of her arm’s softness.

He felt the piteous impulse of her sobbing. Perhaps it was because of the coldness of the wet sleeve which he pressed against her arm that Eva shivered, and M‘Crae felt that he had been surprised in an indelicacy. Yet he had only done the thing which seemed most natural to him. All the time that she was sobbing, and he so desperately embarrassed by her tears, the rain was beating on the roof of the banda, so that if they had spoken they could scarcely have heard each other; and in a little time its violence penetrated the slanting reeds of the roof, and water dripped upon them; splashing into pits of the sandy floor. This rain did not fall as if it were harried by wind, but with a steady violence, increased from time to time to an intolerable pitch, as though the sky were indeed possessed by some brooding intelligence determined to lash the land without pity. Eva had never heard such rain. For an hour, maybe, they crouched together without speaking, and at the end of it, when the wildness of the storm had abated a little, she had managed to pull together her broken thoughts and make some decision as to what she would do.

In the beginning she had imagined that she must tell M‘Crae everything, but when the first moment at which this might have happened had passed, and her fit of crying had overtaken her, she began to count the consequences. She knew that he would not stay at Luguru for a moment if his presence endangered her peace. She knew that he would do anything in the world to save her; and it suddenly struck her that this involved an obligation on her side. She must not throw him into Godovius’s hands. Even if she had not realised this duty, there was always in the back of her mind the conviction that M‘Crae was, in fact, the only man on whom she could rely. She had felt the pressure of his fingers on her arm, and even though she had shivered she had been touched by this rather pathetic attempt at sympathy. In that moment he became no longer a man to be relied on, but one to be protected. In an ardent vision she saw herself saving the two of them. Him and James. How? . . . Godovius had offered her terms. From this alone she knew that she had power to deal with him, to make some sort of bargain, if only she had time. Time was the thing for which she must fight. Given time, some happy chance might move them from Luguru altogether. It seemed that it might even be necessary for her to receive Godovius’s addresses. Even if it came to that, she was determined to see the matter through. As the minutes passed, and the strain of the sobs which she could not control abated, she began to see the whole matter more clearly. The rainfall, too, was becoming less intense, and the evenness of her mood was increased by the peculiar atmosphere of relief which descends on all living creatures when a tropical sky has been washed with heavy rain. So strangely was her state of mind modified by the downpour, that she was almost happy. Now that the storm was lighter she would be able to run into the house without getting much more wet, and above all things she was anxious to escape any ordeal of questions.

“You’re like to get very damp,” said M‘Crae. She knew that this was his last way of asking her to tell him what had happened; and if he had pressed her, as he might easily have done, it is probable that her resolutions would have vanished and she would have told him. She smiled and shook her head. In that dim light, under the dripping banda roof, he looked very pathetic. It occurred to her that she had better hurry up. Outside it was still raining, as it might rain in the height of a thunderstorm at home. The eastern sky was ringed with masses of lurid yellow cloud. In the garden the hot earth steamed already, and the rain had washed away the sandy path, which it had been her pleasant labour to construct. Between her and the house a tawny torrent ran. She made a rush for the stoep, and while she ran, with her skirts picked up, she laughed as she would have done when she was a child running in from the rain.

The person who felt the strain of this enforced imprisonment between four walls most deeply was James. Every day of late he had been gaining strength and looking forward more than ever to the renewal of his work. He had even been less concerned with his minor prophets and had picked up from among a heap of Mr. Bullace’s books an account of the life and labours of his great forerunner, Mackay of Uganda. This book, the work of the missionary’s sister, had impressed him enormously. It was strange that he had never come across it before; for the early field of Mackay’s splendid failures had lain upon the edge of the Masai steep, only a few hundred miles to the northward of Luguru. There, in his collapsible boat, Mackay had explored the waters of the Lukigura and the greater Wami; there he had first striven with the coastal Arabs, by whose whips chained gangs of slaves were driven from the Great Lakes to Bagamoyo and Zanzibar. He read how Mackay’s comrades had died of fever, one by one: how the missionary himself had been beaten from time to time by that most cruel land, how he had overcome at last, by virtue of hardihood and enthusiasm, obstacles far greater than any which had stood in the steps of the most famous African explorers. It filled him with a flaming hope to realise that the caravans of shackled slaves moved no more along the trade routes through M’papwa on their way to the coastal markets; but he knew that a slavery as degrading was still the lot of peoples such as the Waluguru, among whom his business lay.

He was very excited about it all, and wanted Eva to read the book. “You’ll see,” he said, “that we have no cause to grumble. A glorious life: a wonderful death. And yet one can’t help feeling that small isolated peoples like the Waluguru have been left behind. Missionaries have been eager to get at the intelligent races, such as the Baganda, and left the more primitive for poor people such as us. I almost think that our task is more difficult. There are things I can’t understand about them. It is a privilege to be dealing with virgin soil . . . and yet . . .”

Always when he spoke of virgin soil the old hunter’s warning as to the deadly humours which its disturbance released returned to him.

“When the rain stops,” he said, “I shall be able to start work again. Mackay’s story has taught me a lot. I sha’n’t expect quite so much. I hope this weather will be over by Sunday. It may change by then, for on that day there’s a new moon. We always used to say at home that the weather took a turn for the better or worse when the new moon came.”

She listened to him, but only heard the words that he said without entering into his thoughts. Her own mind was too full of wondering what she was going to do, always obstinately hoping that time would show her a way out of her difficulties. Only occasionally a word would detach itself from James’ conversation and startle her by its peculiar suggestions. Such was his conventional mention of the new moon. The two words had suddenly thrust his presence into the full current of her subconscious mind. And the strangeness of this frightened her. It made her suddenly want to tell James everything; but when she turned, almost resolved upon the spur of the moment to do so, she found that the gleam of intimacy had faded and that she couldn’t possibly do anything of the sort: that James was as distant and precise as ever, an absolute stranger whom she could never hope to understand, far more of a stranger even than M‘Crae.

During the rainy days she saw as much as she dared of M‘Crae; but it was hard to find an excuse for going to her banda in the wet. He suffered there a good deal of discomfort, which struck her as intolerable, but which he almost seemed to enjoy. “A wonderful thing, rain,” he said. “In a dry land like this. When you’ve lived longer in Africa you’ll know how precious it is.”

She tried to make him as dry and comfortable as she could. She knew that he was watching her narrowly, felt that he was waiting for her to tell him all that had happened with Godovius, but though she knew well enough that she couldn’t keep it up for ever, she didn’t see how matters would be bettered by her telling. In a way it was almost as well that he shouldn’t know how she stood between him and disaster. If he had asked her. . . . But he didn’t. He had seen on the first night that for some reason or other she didn’t want to take him into her confidence, and had decided, in pursuance of the peculiarly delicate code of behaviour which his idealism had invented for their relation, that it was not for him to press her. Everything that she did, every one of the little tendernesses by which she ravished his soul, must be of her own sweet giving. He had an infinite and touching faith in her simple wisdom. And it is difficult to say what would have happened, how this story might have ended, if she had told him. From the beginning it had been certain that it must come to an end of violence. It is possible that M‘Crae would have killed Godovius. For the sake of Eva he would certainly have doubled the offence for which he had lost his name and suffered for so many years. His own life would have been the last thing which he would have considered. In the end it was the last thing.