No More Learning

I answered out of my astonishment:--"What do you want with HER? "
Would you believe it, for the next two minutes, he and I were shouting
at each other like maniacs--he vowing that it was the youngest sister he
had meant to propose to all along, and I telling him till my throat
was hoarse that he must have made a mistake! I can't account for
this except, again, by the fact that we were neither of us ourselves.
Everything seemed to me like a bad dream--from the stamping of the
horses in the darkness to Saumarez telling me the story of his loving
Edith Copleigh since the first. He was still clawing my shoulder and
begging me to tell him where Edith Copleigh was, when another lull came
and brought light with it, and we saw the dust-cloud forming on the
plain in front of us. So we knew the worst was over. The moon was low
down, and there was just the glimmer of the false dawn that comes about
an hour before the real one. But the light was very faint, and the dun
cloud roared like a bull. I wondered where Edith Copleigh had gone; and
as I was wondering I saw three things together: First Maud Copleigh's
face come smiling out of the darkness and move towards Saumarez, who was
standing by me. I heard the girl whisper, "George," and slide her arm
through the arm that was not clawing my shoulder, and I saw that look on
her face which only comes once or twice in a lifetime--when a woman is
perfectly happy and the air is full of trumpets and gorgeous-colored
fire and the Earth turns into cloud because she loves and is loved. At
the same time, I saw Saumarez's face as he heard Maud Copleigh's voice,
and fifty yards away from the clump of orange-trees I saw a brown
holland habit getting upon a horse.

It must have been my state of over-excitement that made me so quick
to meddle with what did not concern me. Saumarez was moving off to the
habit; but I pushed him back and said:--"Stop here and explain. I'll
fetch her back! " and I ran out to get at my own horse.
I had a perfectly
unnecessary notion that everything must be done decently and in order,
and that Saumarez's first care was to wipe the happy look out of Maud
Copleigh's face. All the time I was linking up the curb-chain I wondered
how he would do it.

I cantered after Edith Copleigh, thinking to bring her back slowly on
some pretence or another. But she galloped away as soon as she saw me,
and I was forced to ride after her in earnest. She called back over her
shoulder--"Go away! I'm going home. Oh, go away! " two or three times;
but my business was to catch her first, and argue later. The ride just
fitted in with the rest of the evil dream. The ground was very bad, and
now and again we rushed through the whirling, choking "dust-devils" in
the skirts of the flying storm. There was a burning hot wind blowing
that brought up a stench of stale brick-kilns with it; and through the
half light and through the dust-devils, across that desolate plain,
flickered the brown holland habit on the gray horse. She headed for
the Station at first. Then she wheeled round and set off for the river
through beds of burnt down jungle-grass, bad even to ride a pig over. In
cold blood I should never have dreamed of going over such a country
at night, but it seemed quite right and natural with the lightning
crackling overhead, and a reek like the smell of the Pit in my nostrils.
I rode and shouted, and she bent forward and lashed her horse, and the
aftermath of the dust-storm came up and caught us both, and drove us
downwind like pieces of paper.

I don't know how far we rode; but the drumming of the horse-hoofs and
the roar of the wind and the race of the faint blood-red moon through
the yellow mist seemed to have gone on for years and years, and I was
literally drenched with sweat from my helmet to my gaiters when the gray
stumbled, recovered himself, and pulled up dead lame.