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It was late in the afternoon when I reached D'Urban. The date was the 27th of January, so I had spent twenty four days on the road. Considering the weather I had encountered, I had not done so badly.
Whether because the hour had come for Madame d'Urban, or whether because she was dazzled by the splendour of the chevalier's belonging to a princely house, her virtue, hitherto so fierce, melted like snow in the May sunshine; and the chevalier, luckier than the poor page, took the husband's place without any attempt on Madame d'Urban's part to cry for help.
Much is said of the reproofs of Sir Benjamin D'Urban by the Secretary of State, and, after 1838, of the dismissal of that Governor, The emigrants asserted that he was the best Governor the colony had had since it became subject to England; they dwelt upon his benevolence, his ability, his strict justice, his impartiality to white and black, his efforts to promote civilization; and then they complained, in words more bitter than are to be found when they referred to any other subject, that the good Governor had been reproved, and finally deprived of his office, because he had told the plain truth, regardless of the London Missionary Society; and had endeavoured to mete out to black criminals the same justice that he would have meted out had they been white.
Meanwhile, M. d'Urban, who, being jealous for the first time, was the more seriously so, having learned that the chevalier was with his wife, shut the doors, and posted himself in the ante-chamber with his servants, in order to seize him as he came out.
But the chevalier, having recovered from his first alarm, bade him go about his business, and take back the portrait which was of no use to him to the sender. The servant, however, like a faithful messenger, declared that his orders were positive, and that he should not dare go back to Madame d'Urban without fulfilling them.
A glance into the interior of the waggon would have shown that it was fully loaded, the chief contents being the skins of wild animals, the huge tusks of elephants, and other spoils of the chase, with which the proprietor was returning after a hunt of many months' duration, to dispose of them at Maritzburg or D'Urban.
He reinforced Maucune with his own divisions, which had just arrived, and, for a while, restored the battle. Then, past the right and left of Pakenham's division, the British cavalry, under Le Marchant, Anson, and D'Urban, burst through the smoke and dust, rode down twelve hundred of the French infantry, and then dashed on at the line behind.
In the meantime, Madame d'Urban, who had gone to the house of an aunt, opened negotiations with her husband that were entirely successful, and a month after this adventure she returned triumphantly to the conjugal roof.
I passed down the long, lovely Intshanga Ridge, and must have walked well, for I reached Pine Town fairly early in the afternoon. Here I met a man whose name I have forgotten; he also was about to walk to D'Urban.
I saw it at D'Urban, and I shall never forget the contrast of its vivid green, bright as the spring foliage of a young oak, and the crown of rich crimson flowers on its topmost branches, tossing their brilliant blossoms against a background of gleaming sea and sky. It was really splendid, like a bit of Italian coloring among the sombre tangle of tropical verdure.
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