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Updated: May 20, 2025
It was Rudyard's footsteps outside her door, Rudyard's voice speaking to some one; then Rudyard's footsteps pausing; and afterwards a dead silence. She felt his presence; she imagined his hand upon her door. With a little smothered gasp, she made a move forward as though to lock the door; then she remembered that it had no lock.
Still, things that Rudyard had said before he left the house to dine with Wallstein, leaving her with Stafford, persistently recurred to her mind. "What's the matter?" had been Rudyard's troubled cry. "We've got everything everything, and yet !" Her eyes were not opened. She had had a shock, but it had not stirred the inner, smothered life; there had been no real revelation.
Fate had sent him through the hallway between Jasmine's and Rudyard's rooms in the moment when Jasmine had dropped Fellowes' letter; and he had seen it fall. He knew not what it was, but it might be of importance, for he had seen Fellowes' handwriting on an envelope among those waiting for Jasmine's return home.
Like the two women of the people ahead, she held Rudyard's hand, as she walked beside him, till he was carried into the manager's office near by. She was conscious that on the other side of Rudyard was a tall figure that staggered and swayed as it moved on, and that two dark eyes were turned towards her ever and anon.
They were the last words that Ian had addressed to her. It did not make her shrink now that both had said to her the same thing, for both knew her, each in his own way, better than she had ever known herself; and each had taught her in his own way, but by what different means! All at once, with a start, she caught Rudyard's arm with a little spasmodic grasp.
This morning the Boers would not get up early enough; for Rudyard's command had already reached the position from which they could do their work with good chances in their favour; and there had been no sign of life from the Boer trenches in the dusk naught of what chanced at Magersfontein.
As a boy flushes when he has been asked a disconcerting question which angers him or challenges his innocence, so Rudyard's face suffused; but the flush faded as quickly as it came. His eyes then looked at her steadily, the whites of them so white because of his bronzed face and forehead, the glance firmer by far than in his old days in London.
Outside her own room Jasmine paused for a moment and looked at the closed door of Rudyard's room. Only a step and yet she was kept apart from him by a shadow so black, so overwhelming, that she could not penetrate it. It smothered her sight. No, no, that little step could not be taken; there was a gulf between them which could not be bridged.
One kiss, a wrong? Why not, then, a thousand kisses! The wrong came in the moment that the one kiss was given. It is the one that kills, not the thousand after." There came to her mind again and now with what sardonic force Rudyard's words that day before they went to Glencader: "If you had lived a thousand years ago you would have had a thousand lovers."
And Krool was now bending over Rudyard's body, raising his head and still murmuring, "Baas Baas!" Krool's rifle had saved Rudyard from death by killing one of his own fellow-fighters. Much as Barry Whalen loathed the man, this act showed that Krool's love for the master who had sjamboked him was stronger than death.
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