Black Heart and White Heart (1900) by H. Rider Haggard

Author:H. Rider Haggard [Haggard, H. Rider]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Delphi Main Series
Publisher: Delphi Classics
Published: 2020-12-20T15:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER IV

NANEA

PRESENTLY, MUTTERING SOMETHING that the listener could not catch, Nahoon left Nanea, and crept out of the hut by its bee-hole entrance. Then Hadden opened his eyes and looked round him. The sun was sinking and a ray of its red light streaming through the little opening filled the place with a soft and crimson glow. In the centre of the hut — supporting it — stood a thorn-wood roof-tree coloured black by the smoke of the fire; and against this, the rich light falling full upon her, leaned the girl Nanea — a very picture of gentle despair.

As is occasionally the case among Zulu women, she was beautiful — so beautiful that the sight of her went straight to the white man’s heart, for a moment causing the breath to catch in his throat. Her dress was very simple. On her shoulders, hanging open in front, lay a mantle of soft white stuff edged with blue beads, about her middle was a buck-skin moocha, also embroidered with blue beads, while round her forehead and left knee were strips of grey fur, and on her right wrist a shining bangle of copper. Her naked bronze-hued figure was tall and perfect in its proportions; while her face had little in common with that of the ordinary native girl, showing as it did strong traces of the ancestral Arabian or Semitic blood. It was oval in shape, with delicate aquiline features, arched eyebrows, a full mouth, that drooped a little at the corners, tiny ears, behind which the wavy coal-black hair hung down to the shoulders, and the very loveliest pair of dark and liquid eyes that it is possible to imagine.

For a minute or more Nanea stood thus, her sweet face bathed in the sunbeam, while Hadden feasted his eyes upon its beauty. Then sighing heavily, she turned, and seeing that he was awake, started, drew her mantle over her breast and came, or rather glided, towards him.

“The chief is awake,” she said in her soft Zulu accents. “Does he need aught?”

“Yes, Lady,” he answered; “I need to drink, but alas! I am too weak.”

She knelt down beside him, and supporting him with her left arm, with her right held the gourd to his lips.

How it came about Hadden never knew, but before that draught was finished a change passed over him. Whether it was the savage girl’s touch, or her strange and fawn-like loveliness, or the tender pity in her eyes, matters not — the issue was the same. She struck some cord in his turbulent uncurbed nature, and of a sudden it was filled full with passion for her — a passion which if, not elevated, at least was real. He did not for a moment mistake the significance of the flood of feeling that surged through his veins. Hadden never shirked facts.

“By Heaven!” he said to himself, “I have fallen in love with a black beauty at first sight — more in love than I have ever been before.

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