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Title: Sons of fire, Vol. III.

Author: M. E. Braddon

Release date: January 22, 2025 [eBook #75175]

Language: English

Original publication: United Kingdom: Simpkin, Marshall, Hamilton, Kent & Co, 1895

Credits: Peter Becker, Mary Meehan and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive)


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SONS OF FIRE, VOL. III. ***





                             SONS OF FIRE

                                A Novel

                       By Mary Elizabeth Braddon

                             THE AUTHOR OF
                   "LADY AUDLEY'S SECRET," "VIXEN,"
                            "ISHMAEL," ETC.

                        _IN THREE VOLUMES_

                               VOL. III.

                                LONDON
            SIMPKIN, MARSHALL, HAMILTON, KENT & CO. LIMITED
                        STATIONERS' HALL COURT

                     [_All rights reserved_]

                                LONDON:

             PRINTED BY WILLIAM CLOWES AND SONS, LIMITED,
                  STAMFORD STREET AND CHARING CROSS.




                         CONTENTS OF VOL. III.


                    I. ROMAN AND SABINE

                   II. "IF SHE BE NOT FAIR TO ME"

                  III. "I GO TO PROVE MY SOUL"

                   IV. BLACK AND WHITE

                    V. THE MEETING-PLACE OF WATERS

                   VI. KIGAMBO

                  VII. MAMBU KWA MUNGU

                 VIII. WHERE THE BURDEN IS HEAVIEST

                   IX. ALL IN HONOUR

                    X. "AM I HIS KEEPER?"

                   XI. A SHADOW ACROSS THE PATH

                  XII. "IT IS THE STARS"

                 XIII. MADNESS OR CRIME?

                  XIV. "HE HATH AWAKENED FROM THE DREAM OF LIFE"




                             SONS OF FIRE.




                              CHAPTER I.

                           ROMAN AND SABINE.


Geoffrey was not to be baulked of his purpose. He sat till long after
midnight in the music-room with his mother--sat or roamed about in the
ample spaces of that fine apartment, talking in his own wild way, with
that restless, fitful romanticism which had marked him from childhood,
from the dim hours, so vaguely remembered and so sadly sweet in his
memory, when he had sat on the floor with his head leaning against
the soft silken folds of her gown, and had been moved to tears by her
playing. There were simple turns of melody, almost automatic phrases of
Mozart's, which recalled the vague heartache of those childish hours;
an idea of music so interwoven with that other idea of summer twilight
in a spacious, shadowy room, that it startled him to hear one of those
familiar movements in the broad glare of day, as if daylight and _that_
music were irreconcilable.

No arguments of his mother's could shake his purpose.

"I will see her and talk with her. She alone shall be the judge of what
is right. Perhaps when I am sure of her I may be able to teach myself
patience. But I must be sure of her love."

He was at Bournemouth by the first train that would carry him there,
and it was still early when he went roaming out towards Branksome and
the borderland of Dorset. To walk suited better with his impatience
than to be driven by a possibly stupid flyman, and to have the fly
pulled up every five minutes for the stupid flyman to interrogate
a--probably--more stupid pedestrian, who would inevitably prove "a
stranger in those parts," as if the inhabitants never walked abroad.

No, he would find Rosenkrantz, Mrs. Tolmash's villa, for himself. He
had been told it was near Branksome Chine.

Swift of foot and keen of apprehension, he succeeded in less time
than any flyman would have done. Yes, this was the villa--red-brick,
gabled, curtained with virginia creeper from chimneys downwards;
virginia creeper not yet touched by autumn's ruddy fingers; and with
roses enough climbing over the verandah and surrounding the windows to
justify the name which fancy had given. He opened the light iron gate
and went into the garden; a somewhat spacious garden. She was there,
perhaps. At any rate, he would explore before confronting servant,
drawing-room, and unknown lady of the house. The garden was so pretty,
and the morning was so fine, that, if within the precincts, surely she
would be in the garden.

He went boldly round the house by a shrubberied walk, and saw a fine
lawn on a breezy height above the Chine, facing the sunlit sea and the
wooded dip that went down to golden sands. The standard rose-trees were
blown about in the morning air, dropping a rain of pink and yellow on
the smooth short turf. He saw the sea westward--sapphire blue--through
an arch of reddest roses, and beyond that archway, close to the edge
of the cliff, as it seemed in the perspective, there was a bench with
a red and white awning, and sitting under that awning a figure in a
white frock, a slender waist, a graceful throat, a small dark head,
which he would have known from a thousand girlish heads and throats and
waists--for him the girl of girls.

He knew that restless foot, lightly tapping the grass as she looked
seaward. Was there not weariness of life, rebellion against fate,
in that quick movement of the slender foot? Was she not waiting for
happiness and for him?

He ran to her, sat down by her side, had taken both her hands in his,
before she could utter so much as a cry of surprise.

"My darling, my darling!" he murmured; "now and for ever my own!"

She snatched her hands away and started to her feet indignantly. Anger
flashed in the dark eyes and flushed the pale olive cheeks. And then
her frown changed to an ironical smile, and she stood looking at him
almost contemptuously.

"I think you forget, Mr. Wornock, that it is a long time since the
Romans ran away with the Sabines."

"You mean that I am too impetuous."

"I mean that you are too absurd."

"Is it absurd to love the sweetest woman in the world--the prettiest,
the most enchanting? Suzette, I tore back from the Hartz Mountains
because I was told you were free--free to marry the man who loves you
with all the passion of his soul. When I told you of my love months
ago, you were bound to another man, you were obstinately bent upon
keeping your promise to him. I had no option but to withdraw, to fight
my battle, and try to live without you. I did try, Suzette. I left the
ground clear for my rival. I was self-banished from my own home."

"You need not have been banished. I could have kept away from Discombe."

"That would have distressed my mother, whose happiness depends on your
society, Suzette. You know how she loves you. To see you my wife will
make her very happy. She has taken you to her heart as a daughter."

"Not so much as she has taken Allan Carew to her heart. It was for his
sake she liked me. I could see when we parted that it was of Allan she
thought; it was for him she was sorry. I don't think she will ever
forgive me for making Allan unhappy."

"Not if her only son's happiness is bought with that price? Suzette,
why do you keep me at arm's length--now, when there is nothing to part
us; now, while I know that you love me?"

"You have no right to say that. If you know it, you know more than I
know myself."

"Suzette, Suzette, do you deny your love?"

She was crying, with her hands over her averted face. He tried to draw
those hands away, eager to look into her eyes. He would not believe
mere words. Only in her eyes could he read the truth.

"I deny your right to question me now, while my heart is aching for
Allan--Allan whom I like and respect more than any man living. He is
the best friend I have in the world, after my father. He will always be
my cherished and trusted friend. If in some great unhappiness I needed
any other friend than my father--badly, wickedly as I have behaved to
him--it is to Allan I would go for help."

"What, not to me?"

"To you! No more than I would appeal to a whirlwind."

"You think me so unreasonable a creature?"

"Yes, unreasonable! It is unreasonable in you to come here to-day. You
must know that I am sorry for having behaved so badly--deeply sorry for
Allan's disappointment."

"I begin to think it a pity you disappointed him, if nobody is to
profit by your release. Oh, forgive me, forgive me! I should have
killed myself if you had persisted. At least you have saved a life. I
hope you are glad of that."

"I cannot talk to you while you are so foolish."

"Is it foolish to tell you the truth? I bare my heart to you--to the
woman I want for my wife. I am a creature full of faults; but for you I
could become anything. I would be as wax, and you might mould me into
whatever shape you chose. Oh, Suzette, is not love enough? Is it not
enough for any woman to be loved as I love you?"

"You cannot love me better than Allan did, though he never talked as
wildly as you."

"Allan! It is not in his nature to love or to suffer as I do. He was
not born under the same burning star. All the forces of nature were at
war when I was born, Suzette. My Swiss nurse told me of the tempest
that was roaring over the wilderness of peaks and crags when I came
into the world, with something of that storm in my heart and brain. Be
my good genius, Suzette. Save me from my darker, stormier self. Make
and mould me into an amiable, order-loving English gentleman. I am
your slave. You have but to command me, and I shall submit as meekly
as the trained dog who lies down at his mistress's feet and shams the
stillness of death. Tell me to fetch and carry; tell me to die. I will
do your bidding like that dog."

She gave a troubled sigh and looked at him, pale and perplexed, in deep
distress. His pleading moved her as no words of Allan's had ever done,
and yet there was more of fear than of love in the emotion that he
awakened.

"I have only one thing in the world to ask of you," she said, in a low,
agitated voice. "I ask you to leave me to myself. I came here, almost
among strangers, in order that I might be calm and quiet, and away from
the associations of the past year. You must forgive me, Mr. Wornock,
if I say that it was cruel of you to follow me to this refuge."

"Cruel for passionate love to follow the beloved! 'Mr. Wornock,' too!
How formal! Suzette, if you do not love me, if I am nothing to you, why
did you jilt Carew?"

"I asked him to release me because I felt I did not love him well
enough to be his wife."

"Only that?"

"Only that. As time went on, I felt more and more acutely that I could
not give him love for love."

"And you cared for no one else?--there was no other reason?" he
insisted, trying to take her hand.

"I have hardly asked myself that question; and I will not be questioned
by you."

She rose and moved away, he following.

"Mr. Wornock, I am going into the house. I beg you not to persecute me.
It was persecution to come here to-day."

"Give me hope. I cannot leave you without hope."

"I can say nothing more than I have said. My heart is sore for Allan.
Allan is first in my thoughts, and must be for a long time. I hate
myself for having behaved so badly to him."

"And what of your behaviour to me? How cold! how cruel!"

"Oh, thank Heaven, here come Mrs. Tolmash and her daughter. Now you
_must_ go."

Geoffrey looked round and saw a middle-aged lady in a chair being
wheeled across the lawn, a girl in a pink frock pushing the chair.

He gave Suzette a despairing look, picked up his hat from the grass,
and walked quickly away. He was in no mood to make the acquaintance of
the pink frock or the lady in the chair, though that plump, benevolent
person, with neat little grey curls clustering round a fair forehead,
looked quite capable of asking him to luncheon.

He walked back to the nearest station, angry beyond measure, and paced
the platform for an hour, waiting for the train for Eastleigh, and
with half a mind to throw himself under the first express that came
shrieking by. Yet that were basest surrender.

"She is possessed by a devil of obstinacy," he told himself. "But the
stronger devil within me shall master her."

       *       *       *       *       *

While the more fiery and arrogant of Suzette's lovers was raging
against her coldness, resolved to bear down all opposing forces, to
ride roughshod over every obstacle, her gentler and more conscientious
lover was hiding his grief in the quiet of that level and unromantic
land on which his eyes had first opened. No tempest had raged when
Allan was born. He had entered life amidst no grandeurs of mountain
and glacier, arrested avalanche and roaring torrent. An English
home--English to intensity--had been his cradle; a mild, even-tempered
mother, a father in whom a gentle melancholy was the prevailing
characteristic. Growing up under such home-influences, Allan Carew had
something of womanly gentleness interwoven with the strong fibre of a
fine manly nature. He had the womanly capacity to suffer in silence, to
submit to Fate, and to take a very humble place at the banquet of life.

Well, he was not destined to be happy. She had never loved him--never.
He had won her by sheer persistency; he had imposed upon her yielding
nature, upon the amiability which makes it so hard for some women to
say no. She had always been friendly and kind and sweet, but the signs
and tokens of passionate love had been wanting. If she would have been
content to marry him upon those friendly terms, content to forego the
glamour of romantic love, all might have been well. Love would have
followed marriage in the quiet years of domestic life. The watchful
kindnesses of an adoring husband must have won her heart.

Yes, but for Geoffrey Wornock's appearance on the scene, all might have
been well. Suzette would have married Allan, and the years would have
ripened friendship into love. Geoffrey's was the fatal influence.
Contrast with that fiery nature had made Allan seem a dullard.

This is what the forsaken lover told himself as he roamed about the
autumn fields, the fertile levels, where all the soil he trod on was
his own, and had belonged to his ancestors when the clank of armed feet
was still a common thing in the land, and a stout Suffolk pad was your
swiftest mode of travel. The shooting had begun, and the houses of
Suffolk were full of guests, and the squires of Suffolk had mustered
their guns, and were doing their best to beat the record of last year
and all the years that were gone. But Allan had no heart for so much as
a morning tramp across the stubble. The flavour and the freshness were
gone out of life. He gave his shooting to a neighbour, an old friend of
his father's, while his own days were dawdled through in the library,
or spent in long walks by stream and mill-race, pine-wood and common,
in any direction that offered the best chance of solitude.

He wrote to Suzette, with grave kindness, apologizing for his angry
vehemence in the hour of their parting. He expatiated sorrowfully upon
that which might have been.

"I think I must have known all along that you had no romantic love for
me," he wrote; "but I would have been more than content to have your
liking in exchange for my passionate love. I should not have thought
myself a loser had you put the case in the plainest words. 'You idolize
me, and I--well--I think you an estimable young man, and I have no
objection to be your idol, accepting your devotion, and giving you a
sisterly regard in exchange.' There are men who would think that a bad
bargain; but I am not made of such proud stuff. Your friendship would
have been more precious to me than any other woman's love; and I should
have been happy, infinitely happy, could I have won you on those terms.

"But it was not to be--and now my heart turns cold every time the
post-bag is opened, lest it should contain the letter that will tell me
Geoffrey Wornock has won the prize that I have lost. Such things must
be, Suzette. They are happening every day, and hearts are breaking,
quietly. May you be happy--my dear lost love--whatever I may be."

Much as he might desire solitude, it was impossible for Allan to
escape his fellow-man through the month of September in such a
happy shooting-ground as that in which his property lay. In that
part of Suffolk people knew of hunting as a barbarous form of sport
somewhat affected in the midlands, and a fox was considered a beast
of prey. The guns had it all their own way in those woods which
Allan's great-grandfather had planted, and over the turnips which
Allan's tenants had sown. Among the shooters who were profiting by
his hospitality it was inevitable that he should meet some one he
knew; and that some one happened to be a man with whom he had been
on the friendliest terms five years before during a big shoot in the
neighbourhood.

They met at a dinner at the house of the jovial squire to whom Allan
had given his shooting--a five-mile drive from Fendyke. Lady Emily had
persuaded her son to accept the invitation.

His father had been dead six months. Though she, the widow, would go
nowhere, it might seem churlish in the son to hold himself aloof from
old friends.

"And you don't want to be wearing the willow for that shallow-hearted
girl, I hope," added Lady Emily, who was very angry with Suzette.

No, he did not want to wear the willow, to pose as a victim, so he
accepted Mr. Meadowbank's invitation.

It was to be only a friendly dinner, only the house party; and among
the house party Allan found his old acquaintance, Cecil Patrington,
a man who had spent the best years of his life in Africa, and had
won renown among sportsmen as a hunter of big game, a weather-beaten
athlete, brawny, strong of limb, with bronzed forehead and
copper-coloured neck.

"I think you were just back from Bechuana Land when we last met," said
Allan, in the unreserve of Squire Meadowbank's luxurious smoke-room,
"and you were going back to the Cape when the shooting was over. Have
you been in Africa ever since?"

"Yes, I have been moving about most of the time, here and there, mostly
in Central South Africa, between Brazzaville and Tabora, now on one
side of the lake, now on the other?"

"Which lake?"

"Tanganyika. It's a delightful district, only it's getting a deuced
deal too well known. Burton was a glorious fellow, and he had a
glorious career. No man can ever enjoy life in Africa like that. There
are steamers on the lake now, and one meets babies in perambulators,
genuine British babies!" with a profound sigh.

"I have looked for a record of your exploits at the Geographical."

"Oh, I don't go in for that kind of thing, you see. I read a paper
once, and it didn't pay. I am not a literary cove like Burton, and I
haven't the gift of the gab like Stanley--who is a literary cove, too,
by the way. I ain't a scientific explorer. I don't care a hang what
becomes of the water, don't you know. I like the lakes for their own
sake--and the niggers for their own sake--and the picturesqueness of it
all, and the variety, and the danger of it all. If I discovered a new
lake or an unknown forest, I should keep the secret to myself. That's
my view of Africa. I ain't a geographer. I ain't a missionary. I ain't
a trader. I like Africa because it's jolly, and because there ain't any
other place in the world worth living in for the man who has once been
there."

"Shall you ever go again?"

"Shall I ever?" Mr. Patrington laughed at the question. "I sail for
Zanzibar next November."

"Do you?" said Allan. "I should like to go with you."

"Why not?" asked Mr. Patrington.




                              CHAPTER II.

                      "IF SHE BE NOT FAIR TO ME."


Geoffrey Wornock went back to Discombe, and his mother read failure
and mortification in his gloomy countenance; but he vouchsafed no
confidence. He was not sullen or unkind. He lived; and that was about
as much as could be said of him. The fiddles, which were to him as
cherished friends, lay mute in their cases. He seemed to regard that
spacious music-room with its lofty ceiling and noble capacity for
sound, as the captive lion regards his cage--a place in which to roam
about, and pace to and fro, restless, miserable, unsatisfied. He did
not complain, and his mother dared not attempt to console. Once she
pressed his hand and whispered "patience;" but he only shook his head
fretfully, and walked out of the room.

"Patience! yes," he muttered to himself. "I could be patient, as
patient as Jacob when he waited for Rachel--if I were sure she loved
me. But I have begun to doubt even that. Oh, if she knew what love
meant, she would have rushed into my arms. She would have swooned upon
my breast in the shock of that meeting; but she sat prim and quiet,
only a little pale and tearful, while I was shaken by a tempest of
passion. She is capable of no more than a schoolgirl's love--held
in check by the pettiest restraints of good manners and the world's
opinion--and she has hardly decided whether that feeble flame burns for
me or for Allan."

And then he began to preach to himself the sermon which almost every
slighted swain has preached since the world began. What was this woman
that he should die of heartache for her? Was she so much fairer than
other women whom he might have for the wooing? No, again and again,
no. He could conjure fairer faces out of the past--faces he had gazed
at and praised, and which had left him cold. She was not as handsome
as Miss Simpson, at Simla, last year--that Miss Simpson who had thrown
herself at his head--or as Miss Brown at Naini Tal, General Brown's
daughter, who looked liked a houri, and who waltzed like a thing of
air, imparting buoyancy and grace to the lumpiest of partners. He had
not cared a straw for Miss Brown, even although the General had hinted
to him, in the after-dinner freedom of the mess-room, that Miss Brown
had an exalted opinion of him. No, he had cared for neither of these
girls, though either might have been his for the asking. Perhaps that
was why he did not care. He was madly in love with Suzette, whom he
had known only as another man's betrothed. Suzette represented the
unattainable; and for Suzette he could die.

He hardly left the bounds of Discombe during those bright autumnal
days, when the music of the hounds was loud over field and down. He
had dissevered himself from most of the friends of his manhood by
leaving the army; and in Matcham he had only acquaintance. From these
he kept scrupulously aloof. One Matcham person, however, he could not
escape. Mrs. Mornington surprised him in the music-room with his mother
one afternoon, and instead of running away, as he would have done from
any one else, he stayed and handed tea-cups with supreme amiability.

He knew she would talk of Suzette. That was inevitable. She had
scarcely settled herself in a comfortable armchair when she began.

"Well, Mrs. Wornock, have you seen anything more of this niece of mine?"

Of course there could be only one niece in question.

"No, indeed. She has not come back from Bournemouth, has she?"

"Oh yes, she has. She has come and gone. I made sure she would pay you
a visit. You and she were always so thick. I believe she is fonder of
you than she is of me."

Geoffrey began to walk about the room--as softly as the parquetted
floor would allow--listening intently. Eager as he was to hear, he
could not sit still while Suzette was being discussed.

Mrs. Wornock murmured a gentle negative.

"Oh, but she is, you know. There is that," said Mrs. Mornington,
pointing to the organ, "and that," pointing to the piano, "and your son
is a fiddler. You are music mad, all of you. Suzette took to practising
five hours a day. It was Chopin, Rubinstein, Beethoven, and Mendelssohn
all day long. She looks upon me as an outsider, because I don't
appreciate classical music. I wonder she didn't run over to see you."

"Has she gone back to Bournemouth?"

"Not she. My foolish brother took fright about her because she was
looking pale and worried when she came home; so he whisked her off to
London, took her to a doctor in Mayfair, who said Schwalbach; and to
Schwalbach they are gone, and I believe, after a course of iron at
Schwalbach--where they will meet no civilized beings at this time of
year--they are to winter on the Riviera, and a pretty penny these whims
and fancies will cost her father. I am glad I have no daughters. Poor
Allan! such a fine, honest-hearted young man! She ought to have thanked
God for such a sweetheart. I dare say, if he had been a reprobate and a
bankrupt, she would have offered to go through fire and water for him."

Geoffrey walked out at the open window which afforded such a ready
escape.

She was gone! Heartless, selfish girl! Gone without a word of farewell,
without a whisper of hope.

       *       *       *       *       *

Allan returned to Matcham a few days after Mrs. Mornington's appearance
at Discombe, and in spite of his dark doubts about Geoffrey, his first
visit was to Mrs. Wornock.

She was shocked at the change in him. He was pale, and thin, and
serious looking, and, but for his grey-tweed suit, might have been
mistaken for an overworked East-end parson.

She talked to him about Lady Emily and the farm. Had he been shooting?
Were there many birds this year? She talked of the most frivolous
things in order to ward off painful subjects. But he himself spoke of
Suzette.

"She has gone away, I am told, for the whole winter. Marsh House is
shut up. I never knew what a bright, home-like house it was till I saw
it this morning, with the shutters shut, and the gates padlocked. There
was not even a dog to bark at me. She has gone far afield; but I am
going a good deal farther."

And then he told her with a certain excitement of his meeting with
Cecil Patrington, and his approaching departure for Zanzibar.

"It was the luckiest thing in the world for me," he said. "I had
not the least idea what to do with myself, or where to go, to get
out of myself. The little I have seen of the Continent rather bored
me--picture-gallery, cathedral, town-hall, a theatre, invariably shut
up, a river, reported delightful when navigable, but not navigable
at the time being. The same thing, and the same thing--not very
interesting to a man who can't reckon the age of a cathedral to within
a century or two--over and over again. But this will be new, this will
mean excitement. I shall feel as if I were born again. The wonder will
be--to myself, at least--that I don't come home black."

"And you think you will find consolation--in Africa?"

"I hope to find forgetfulness."

"Poor Allan! Poor Geoffrey! It is a hard thing that you should both
suffer."

"Mr. Wornock's sufferings will soon be over, I take it. Rapture and not
suffering will be the dominant in the scale of his life. He will have
everything his own way when I am gone."

"I don't think he will. He has not confided his secrets to me, but I
believe he has offered himself to her, since her engagement was broken,
and has been rejected."

"He will offer himself again and will be accepted. There are
conventionalities to be observed. Miss Vincent would not like people to
say that she transferred her affections from lover to lover with hardly
a week's interval."

"I only know that my son is very unhappy, Allan."

"So is a spoilt child when he can't have the moon. Your son will get
the moon all in good time--only he will have to wait for it, and spoilt
children don't like waiting."

"How bitterly you speak of him, Allan. I hope you are not going to be
ill friends."

"Why should we be ill friends? It is not his fault that she has thrown
me over--at the eleventh hour. It is only his good fortune to be more
attractive than I am. It was the contrast with his brilliancy that
showed her my dulness. He has the magnetism which I have not--genius,
perhaps, or at least the air and suggestion of genius. One hardly knows
what constitutes the real thing. I am one of the crowd. He has the
marked individuality which fascinates or repels."

"And you will be friends still, Allan--you and my poor wilful son? He
is like a ship without a rudder, now that he has left the army. He has
no intimate friends. He cannot rest long in one place. I never wanted
him to steal your sweetheart, Allan. I am sure you know that. But I
should be very glad to see him married."

"You will see him married before long--and to the lady who was once my
sweetheart."

Mrs. Wornock shook her head; and the argument was closed by the
appearance of Geoffrey himself, who came sauntering in from the garden,
with his favourite Clumber spaniel at his heels.

"Been shooting?" Allan asked, as they shook hands.

There was a certain aloofness in their greeting, but nothing churlish
or sullen in the manner of either. On Geoffrey's side there was only
listlessness; on Allan's a grave reserve.

"No. I look at my dogs every day. The keepers do the rest."

"You are not fond of shooting?"

"Not particularly--not of creeping about a copse on the look-out for a
cock pheasant; still less do I love a hot corner!"

He seated himself on the bench by the organ, and began to turn over a
pile of music, idly, almost mechanically, not as if he were looking for
anything in particular. Allan rose to go, and Mrs. Wornock followed him
to the corridor.

"Does he not look wretched? And wretchedly ill?" she asked appealingly;
her own unhappiness visible in every line of her face.

"He is certainly changed for the worse since I saw him last. That was
a longish time ago, you may remember. He looks hipped and worried. He
should go away, as I am going."

"Not like you, Allan, to a savage country. I wish he would take me
to Italy for the winter. We could move from place to place. He could
change the scene as often as he liked."

"I fear the mind would be the same, though earth and sky might change.
Travelling upon beaten paths would only bore him. If he is unhappy, and
you are unhappy about him, you had better let him come with Patrington
and me."

The offer was made on the impulse of the moment, out of sympathy with
the mother rather than out of regard for the son.

"No, no, I could not bear to lose him again--so soon. What would
my life be like if you were both gone? I should lapse into the old
loneliness--and solitude would bring back the old dreams--the old vain
longing----"

These last words were murmured brokenly, in self-communion.

Allan left her, and she went back to the music-room, where Geoffrey
had seated himself at the piano, and was playing a Spanish dance by
Sarasate, for the edification of the spaniel, who looked agonized.

"What have you been saying to Carew, mother?" he asked, stopping in the
middle of a phrase.

"Nothing of any importance. Allan is going to Central Africa with a
friend he met in Suffolk--a Mr. Patrington."

"A Mr. Patrington? I suppose you mean Cecil Patrington?"

"Yes, that is the name."




                             CHAPTER III.

                       "I GO TO PROVE MY SOUL."


Allan lost no time in making his preparations. He ordered everything
that Cecil Patrington told him to order, and in all things followed
the advice of that experienced traveller, who consented to spend his
last fortnight in England at Beechhurst, where his appearance excited
considerable interest in the local mind. He allowed Allan to mount
him, and went out with the South Sarum; and as he neither dressed,
rode, nor looked like anybody else, he was the object of some curiosity
among those outsiders who did not know him as a famous African hunter,
a man who had made himself a name among British sportsmen unawares,
while following the bent of his own fancy, and caring nothing what his
countrymen at home thought about him.

Lady Emily was her son's guest during the last week, anxious to be
with him till he sailed, to postpone the parting till the final day.
She was full of sorrow at the idea of a separation which was to last
for at least two years, and might extend to double that time if the
climate and the manner of life in Central Africa suited Allan. Stanley
had taken nearly a year and a half going and returning between Zanzibar
and Ujiji, and Stanley had been a much quicker traveller than previous
explorers. And Mr. Patrington talked of Ujiji as a starting-point for
journeys to the north, and to the west, rambling explorations over less
familiar regions, and anon a leisurely journey down to Nyassaland, the
African Arcadia. His plans, if carried out, would occupy five or six
years.

That sturdy traveller laughed at the mother's apprehensions.

"My dear Lady Emily, you are under a delusion as to the remoteness of
the great lake country. Should your son grow home-sick, something less
than a three months' journey will bring him from the Tanganyika to the
Thames. Sixty years ago, it took longer to travel from Bombay to London
than it does now to come from the heart of Africa."

The mother sighed, and looked mournfully at her son. He was unhappy,
and travel and adventure would perhaps afford the best cure for his low
spirits. She discussed the situation with Mrs. Mornington when that
lady called upon her.

"Your niece has acted very cruelly," she said.

"My niece has acted like a fool. She has made two young men unhappy,
and left herself out in the cold. I saw Geoffrey Wornock last week, and
he looked a perfect wreck."

"Do you think she cared for him?"

"The girl must care for somebody. Looking back now, I can see that
there was a change in her--a gradual change--after Geoffrey Wornock's
return. It was very unfortunate. Either young man would have been a
capital match;" added Mrs. Mornington, waxing practical; "but she could
not marry them both!"

Lady Emily felt angry with Geoffrey as the cause of unhappiness, the
indirect cause of the coming separation between herself and her son.
How happy she might have been had all gone smoothly! Allan would have
settled at Beechhurst with his young wife; but they would have spent
nearly half of every year in Suffolk. How happy her own life might have
been with the son she loved, and the girl whom she was ready to take
to her heart as a daughter, but for this wilful cruelty on the part of
Suzette!

Lady Emily was sitting in the Mandarin-room with her son and his friend
late in the evening, their last evening but one in England. To-morrow
they were all going to London together, and on the day after the
travellers would embark for Zanzibar.

The night was wet and windy, and a large wood fire burnt and crackled
on the ample hearth. Lady Emily had her embroidered coverlet spread
over her lap, and her work-table drawn conveniently near her elbow,
in the light of a shaded lamp, while the two men lounged in luxurious
chairs in front of the fire. The room looked the picture of comfort,
the men companionable, content, and homely, and the mother's heart
sank at the thought that years must pass before such an evening could
repeat itself in that room, and before her poor Allan would be sitting
in so comfortable a chair. It was not without regret that her son had
contemplated the idea of their separation, or of his mother's solitary
home when he should be gone. He had talked with her of the coming
years, suggested the nieces or girl-friends whom she might invite to
enliven the slumberous house, and to enjoy the beauty of those fertile
gardens and level park-like meadows that stretched to the edge of the
river.

"You have troops of friends, mother, and you will have plenty of
occupation with your farm, and sovereign power over the whole estate.
Drake"--the bailiff--"will have to consult you about everything."

"Yes, there will be much to be looked at and thought about; but I shall
miss you every hour of my life, Allan."

"Not as much as if I had been living at home."

"Every bit as much. I was quite happy thinking of you here. How can
I be happy when I picture you toiling alone in the desert under a
broiling sun--no water--even the camels dropping and dying under their
burdens."

"Dear mother, be happy as to the camels. We shall not be in the camel
country. We shall see very little of sandy deserts. Shadowy woods,
fertile valleys, the margins of great lakes will be our portion."

"And you will drink the water--which is sure to be unwholesome--and you
will get fever."

Allan did not tell his mother that fever was inevitable, a phase of
African life which every traveller must reckon with. He represented
African travel as a perpetual holiday in a land of infinite beauty.

"Would Patrington go back there if it were not a delightful life?" he
argued. "He has not to get his living there, as the poor fellows have
who grill and bake themselves for half a lifetime in India. He goes
because he loves the life."

"He goes to shoot big game. He is a horrid, bloodthirsty creature."

Little by little, however, Lady Emily had allowed herself to be
persuaded that Central Africa was not so hideous a region as she had
supposed. She was told that there were bits of country like Suffolk, a
home-like Arcadia on the shores of Nyassa which would remind her of her
own farm.

"Then why not make that district your head-quarters?" she argued,
appealing to Patrington.

"We shall have no head-quarters. We shall wander from one interesting
spot to another. We shall settle down only in the Masika season, when
travelling is out of the question--not so much because it couldn't be
done as because the blackies won't do it. They are uncommonly careful
of themselves; won't budge in the rains, won't take a canoe on the
lake, if there's a bit of a swell on."

"I am glad of that," sighed Lady Emily, with an air of relief; "I am
very glad the negroes are prudent and careful."

"A deuced deal too prudent, my dear Lady Emily."

The men were sitting at a table looking at a map, one of Patrington's
rough sketch maps, and splotched with a blunt quill pen. He was showing
Allan where more scientific map-makers had gone wrong.

"Here's the Lualaba, you see, and here's the little wood where we
camped--I seldom use a tent if I can help it, but there wasn't a
village within ten miles of that spot."

The door was opened and a servant announced--

"Mr. Wornock."

Allan started up, surprised, thrown off his balance by Geoffrey's
entrance. It was half-past ten--Matcham bedtime.

"You have come to bid us good-bye," Allan said, recovering his
self-possession as they shook hands. "This is kind and friendly of you."

"I have come to do nothing of the sort. I want to join your party, if
you and your friend will have me."

He spoke in his lightest tone; but he was looking worn and ill, and
there were all the signs of sleeplessness and worry in his haggard face.

"I know it's the eleventh hour," he said, "but I heard you say,"
looking from Allan to Patrington, "that your important preparations
have to be made at Zanzibar, where you buy most of the things you want.
I--I only made up my mind this evening, after dinner. I am bored to
death in England. There is nothing for me to do. I get so tired of
things----"

"And your mother?" hazarded Allan, feebly.

"My mother is accustomed to doing without me. I believe I only worry
her when I am at home. Will you take me, Carew? 'Yes,' or 'No'?"

"Why, of course it is 'Yes,' Mr. Wornock," exclaimed Lady Emily, coming
from the other end of the room, where she had been folding up her work
for the night. "Allan, why don't you introduce Mr. Wornock to me?"

She was radiant, charmed at the idea of a third traveller, and such a
traveller as the Squire of Discombe. It seemed to lessen the peril of
the expedition, that this other man should want to go, should offer
himself thus lightly, on the eve of departure.

She shook hands with Geoffrey in the friendliest way, looking at the
wan, worn face with keen interest. Like Allan? Yes, he was like, but
not so good-looking. His features were too sharply cut; his hollow
cheeks and sunken eyes made him look ever so much older than Allan,
thought the mother, admiring her own son above all the world.

"Of course they will take you," she said, looking from one to the
other. "It will make the expedition ever so much pleasanter for them
both. They will feel less lonely."

"I ain't afraid of loneliness," growled Patrington; "but if Mr. Wornock
really wishes to go with us, and will fall into our plans, and not
want to make alterations, and upset our route for whims of his own,
I'm agreeable. It isn't always easy for three men to get on smoothly,
you see. Even two don't always hit it--Burton and Speke, for instance.
There were bothers."

"You shall be my chief and captain," protested Geoffrey, "and if you
should tire of me, well, I can always wander off on my own hook, you
know. I could start by myself, now, take my chance and trust to native
guides, choose another line of country, where I couldn't molest you----"

"Molest! My dear Wornock, if you are really in earnest, really
inclined to join us as a pleasant thing to do, and not a caprice of the
moment, I shall be glad to have you, and I think Patrington will have
no objection," said Allan, hastily.

"Not the slightest. I only want unity of purpose. You don't look very
fit," added Patrington, bluntly; "but you can rough it, I suppose?"

"Yes; I'm not afraid of hardships."

"I should like to have a few words with you before anything is settled,
if you will take a turn on the terrace," said Allan, and on Geoffrey
assenting, he went over to the glass door, and led the way to the
gravel walk outside.

The rain was over, and the moon was shining out of a ragged mass of
cloud.

"Why do you leave this place, now, when you are master of the
situation?" Allan asked abruptly, when he and Geoffrey had walked a few
paces.

"I am not master, no more than a beaten hound is master. I have
mastered nothing, not even the lukewarm regard which she still
professes for you. She has thrown you over, but I am not to be the
gainer. I went to her directly I knew she was free. I offered myself to
her, an adoring slave. But she would have none of me. She did not love
you enough to be your wife; but for me she had only contempt, cruel
words, mocking laughter that cut me like a bunch of scorpions. I am
frank with you, Carew. If I had a ghost of a chance, I would follow her
to Schwalbach, to the Riviera, all round this globe on which we crawl
and suffer. Distance should not divide us. But I am too much a man to
pursue a woman who scorns me. I want to forget her; I mean to forget
her; and I think I might have a chance if I went with you and your chum
yonder. I should like to go with you, unless you dislike me too much to
be at ease in my company."

"Dislike you! No, indeed, I do not."

"I'm glad of that. My mother is very fond of you. You have been to her
almost as a son. It will comfort her to think that we are together,
together in danger and difficulty, and if one of us should not come
back----"

"Nonsense, Wornock! Of course we are coming back. Look at
Patrington----"

"Ah, but he has been a solitary traveller. When two go, there is always
one who stays."

"If you think that, you had much better stop at home."

"No, no; the risk is the best part of the business to a man of my
temper. It's the toss-up that I like. Heads, a safe return; tails,
death in the wilderness--death by niggers, wild beasts, flood, or
fire. I go with my life in my hand, as the catch phrase of the day has
it; and if there were no hazards, no danger--well, one might as well
stay at home, or play polo at Simla. Fellows get themselves killed
even at that. Allan, we have been rivals, but not enemies. Shall we be
brothers, henceforward?"

"Yes, friends and brothers, if you will."

They went back to the Mandarin-room, and when Lady Emily had bidden
them good night, the three men lit up pipes and cigars, and talked
about that wonder-world of tropical Africa, and what they were to do
there, till the night grew late, and the Manor groom, dozing on the
settle by the saddle-room fire after a hearty supper of beef and beer,
questioned querulously whether his guv'nor meant to go home before
daylight.




                              CHAPTER IV.

                           BLACK AND WHITE.


A year and more, spring and summer, autumn and winter, had gone by
since Allan Carew and his companions set their faces towards the Dark
Continent; and now it was spring again, the early spring of Central
Africa; and under the pale cloudless blue of a tropical sky three white
men, with their modest following of Wangwana and Wanyamwezi--a company
no bigger than that with which Captain Trivier crossed from shore to
shore--camped beside the Sea of Ujiji. They had come from the east,
and the journey from the coast opposite Zanzibar, taken very easily,
with many halting-places on the way, had occupied the best part of a
year. Some of those resting-places had been chosen for sport, for
exploration, for repose after weary and troublesome stages. Sometimes a
long halt had been forced upon the travellers by sickness, by inclement
weather, by the rebellion or the perversity of their men--those porters
upon whose endurance and good will their comfort and safety alike
depended, in a land where it has been truly said that "luggage is life."

That march from Bagamoyo, Stanley's starting-point, through the
vicissitudes of the road and the seasons, had not been all pleasure;
and there were darker hours on the way, when, toiling on with aching
head and blistered feet, half stifled by the rank mists and poisonous
odours of a jungle that smelt of death, Allan Carew and his companions
may have wished themselves back in the beaten paths of a civilized
world, where there is no need to think of bed or dinner, and where all
that life requires for sustenance and support seems to come of itself.
But if there had been weak yearnings for the comfortable, as opposed to
the adventurous, not one of the three travellers had ever given any
indication of such backsliding. Each in his turn stricken down--not
once, but often--by the deadly mukunguru, or African fever, had rallied
and girded his loins for the journey without an hour's needless delay;
and then, on recovery, there had followed a fervent joy in life and
nature; a rapture in the atmosphere; a keener eye for every changeful
light and colour in earth and sky; the blissful sensations of a newly
created being, basking in a new world. It was almost worth a man's
while to pass through the painful stages of that deadly fever, the ague
fit and languor, the yawning and drowsiness which mark the beginning
of sickness, the raging thirst and throbbing temples, the aching spine
and hideous visions that are its later agonies, in order to feel that
ecstasy of restored health in which the convalescent sees ineffable
loveliness even in the dull monotony of rolling woods, and thrills with
friendship and love for the dusky companions of his journey.

Loneliness and horror, pleasantness and danger, a startling variety
of scenes had been traversed between the red coast of Eastern Africa
and that vast inland sea where many rivers meet and mingle in the deep
bosom of the mountains. Across the monotony of rolling woods that rise
and fall in a seemingly endless sequence; by fever-haunted plains and
swampy hollows; through the dripping scrub of the Makata wilderness;
in all the dull horror of the Masika season, when the long swathes
of tiger-grass lie rotting under the brooding mists that curtain the
foul-smelling waste, when the Makata river has changed from a narrow
stream to a vast lake which covers the plain, and in whose shallow
waters trees and canes and lush green parasites subside into tangled
masses of putrid vegetation, until to the traveller's weary eye it
seems as if this very earth were slowly rotting in universal and final
decay.

They had come through many a settlement, friendly or unfriendly,
through rivers difficult to cross by ford or ferry, difficult and
costly too, since there are dusky sultans who take toll of these white
adventurers at every ferry, sometimes rival chiefs who set up a claim
to the same ferry, and have to be defied or satisfied--generally the
latter; through many a _guet à pens_, where the "whit-whit" of the
long arrows sounded athwart the woods as the travellers hurried by;
through scenes of beauty and romantic grandeur; across vast expanses
of green sward diversified with noble timber, calmly picturesque as
an English park--a hunter's paradise of big game. They had journeyed
at a leisurely pace, loitering wherever nature invited to enjoyment,
their camp of the simplest, their followers as few as the absolute
necessities of the route demanded.

By these same forest paths, fighting his way through the same
inexorable jungle, Burton had come on his famous voyage of discovery to
the unknown lake; and by the same, or almost the same, paths Stanley
had followed in his search for the great God-fearing traveller, brave
and calm and patient, who made Africa his own. And here had come
Cameron, meeting that dead lord of untrodden lands, journeying on
other men's shoulders, no longer the guide and chief, but the silent
companion of a sorrowful pilgrimage. Lonely as the track might be, it
was peopled with heroic memories.

"I should like to have been the first to come this way," Geoffrey had
said with a vexed air, as he twirled the tattered leaves of Burton's
book, which, with Stanley's and Cameron's travels, and Goethe's
"Faust," composed the whole of his library.

"You would always like to be first," Allan answered, laughing. "Is it
not enough for you that you are the mightiest hunter of us three--the
father of meat, as our boys call you--and that finer giraffes and harte
beestes have fallen before your gun than even Patrington can boast,
experienced sportsman though he is?"

Patrington assented with a lazy comfortable laugh, stretched his legs
on the reed mat under the rough verandah, and refilled his pipe.

He was content to take the second place in the record of sport, and to
let this restless fiery spirit satisfy its feverish impulses in the
toils and perils of the jungle or the plain.

Here was a young man with an insatiable love of sport, an activity of
brain and body which nothing tired, and it was just as well to let him
work for the party, while the older traveller, and nominal chief of the
expedition, basked in the February sun, and read "Pickwick."

A little brown-leather bound Bible, which he had used a good many years
before at Harrow, and a dozen or so of Tauchnitz volumes, all by the
same author, and all tattered and torn in years of travel and continual
reperusal, constituted Mr. Patrington's stock of literature. Allan was
the only member of the party who had burdened himself with a varied
library of a dozen or so of those classics which a man cannot read too
much or too often; for, indeed, could any man, not actually a student,
exercise so much restraint over himself as to restrict his reading for
three or four years to a dozen or so of the world's greatest books,
that man would possess himself of a better literary capital than the
finest library in London or Paris can provide for the casual reader,
hurrying from author to author, from history to metaphysics, from Homer
to Horace, from Herodotus to Froude, the wasting years of careless
reading upon those snares for the idle mind--books about books. Half
the intelligent readers in England know more about Walter Pater's
opinion of Shelley or Buxton Forman's estimate of Keats than they know
of the poems that made Shelley and Keats famous.

Dickens reigned alone in Cecil Patrington's literary Valhalla. He
always talked of the author of "Pickwick" as "he" or "him." Like Mr. Du
Maurier's fine gentleman who thought there was only one man in London
who could make a hat, Mr. Patrington would only recognize one humourist
and one writer of fiction.

"How he would have enjoyed this kind of life!" he said. "What fun he
would have got out of those crocodiles! What a word picture he would
have made of our storms, and the Masika rains, and those rolling woods,
that illimitable forest t'other side of Ukonongo! and how he would have
understood all the ins and outs in the minds of our Zanzibaris, and
of the various nigger-chiefs whose society we have enjoyed, and whose
demands we have had to satisfy, upon the road!"

"Have they minds?" asked Geoffrey, with open scorn. "I doubt the
existence of anything you can call mind in the African cranium. Hunger
and greed are the motive power that moves the native mechanism; but
mind, no. They have ferocious instincts, such as beasts have, and the
craving for food. Feed them, and they will love you to-day; but they
will rob and murder you to-morrow, if they see the chance of gaining by
the transaction."

"Oh, come, I won't have our boys maligned. I have lived among them
for years, remember, while you are only a new-comer. Granted that
they are greedy. They are only greedy as children are. They are like
children----"

"Exactly. They are like children. They could not be like anything
worse."

"What!" cried Patrington, with a look of horror, "have you no faith in
the goodness and purity of a child?"

"In its goodness, not a whit! Purity, yes; the purity of ignorance,
which we call innocence, and pretend to admire as an exquisite and
touching attribute of the undeveloped human being. These blackies are
just as good and just as bad as the average child; greedy, grasping,
selfish; selfish, grasping, greedy; ready to kiss the feet of the man
who comes back to the village with an antelope on his shoulder; ready
to send a poisoned arrow after him if on parting company he refuses to
be swindled out of cloth or beads. They are bad, Patrington--if I were
not a disciple of Locke, I would say they are innately bad. But what
does that matter? We are all bad."

"What a pleasant way you have of looking at life and your fellow-men!"
said Patrington.

"I look life and my fellow-man full in the face, and I ask myself if
there is any man living whose nature--noble, perhaps, according to the
world's esteem--does not include a latent capacity for evil. Every
man and every woman, the best as well as the worst, is a potential
criminal. Do you think _that_ Macbeth who came over the heath at
sundown after the battle, flushed with victory, was a scoundrel? Not
he. There was not a captain in the Scottish army more loyal to his
king. He was only an ambitious man. Temptation and opportunity did all
the rest. Temptation, were it only strong enough, and opportunity,
would make a murderer of you or me."

"'Lead us not into temptation.' Oh, wondrous wise and simple prayer,
which riseth every night and morning out of the mouths of babes and
sucklings over all the Christian world, and in a few brief phrases
includes every aspiration needful for humanity!" said Cecil Patrington,
who was in matters theological just where he had been when his boyish
head was bowed under the Episcopal hand on the day of his confirmation.

Far away from new books and new opinions, knowing not the names of
Spencer or Clifford, Schopenhauer or Hartmann, this rough traveller's
religion was the unquestioning faith of Paul Dombey, of Hester
Summerson and Agnes Whitfield and Little Nell, of all the gentlest
creatures in the dream-world of Charles Dickens.

There was leisure and to spare for argument and discussion here in this
quiet settlement on the shore of the great lake. The travellers had
established themselves in a deserted _tembe_, which had been allotted
to them by the Arab chieftain of the land, and which was pleasantly
situated on a ridge of rising ground about a mile from the busy village
of Ujiji. They had done all that laborious ingenuity could do to purify
the rough clay structure, ridding it as far as possible of the plague
of insects that crawled in the darkness below or buzzed in the thatch
above, of the rats which the dusk of evening brought out in gay and
familiar riot, and the snakes that followed in their train, and the
huge black spiders, whose webs choked every corner. They had knocked
out openings under the deep eaves of the thatched roof--openings which
allowed of cross-currents of air, and were regarded by their Zanzibaris
and Unyanyembis with absolute horror. Only once in their pilgrimage had
the travellers found a hut with windows.

"What does a man want in his _tembe_ but warmth and shelter? And how
can these white men be so foolish as to make openings that let in the
cold?" argued the native mind; nor was the native mind less exercised
by the trouble these three white men took to keep their _tembe_ and its
surroundings, the verandah, the ground about it, severely clean, or by
their war of extermination against that insect life whose ravages the
African suffers with a stoical indifference.

The travellers had established themselves in this convenient
spot--close to the port and market of Ujiji--to wait for the Masika,
the season of rain that raineth every day--rain that closes round
the camp like a dense wall of water--such rain as a man must go to
the tropics to see, and which, once having seen, he is not likely to
forget. They could hardly be better off anywhere, when the rains of
April should come upon them, than they would be here. The natives were
friendly; friendly too, friendly and kind and helpful, was the mighty
Arab chief Roumariza, the white Arab, sovereign lord of these regions,
sole master here, where the sceptre of the Sultan of Zanzibar reaches
not: a man whose word is law, and in whose hand is plenty.

Roumariza looked upon Cecil Patrington's party with the eye of favour,
and upon Patrington as an old friend--nay, almost a subject of his own,
so familiar was Patrington's bronzed face in those regions, whither
he had come close upon the footsteps of Cameron, and when that lake
land of tropical Africa was still a new world, untrodden by the white
man's foot, the northern shores of the lake still unexplored, the vast
country of Rua unknown even to the Arabs.

At Ujiji provisions were plentiful and cheap. At Ujiji there were
boat-builders; and canoes and rowers were at hand for the exploration
of the vast fresh-water sea. Indeed, there was only too much
civilization and human life to please that son of the wilderness, Cecil
Patrington.

"I love the unknown better than the known," he said. "We shall never
see the lake again as Burton saw it--before ever the sound of engine
and paddle-wheel had been heard on that broad blue expanse, when the
monkeys chattered and screamed and slung themselves from tree to tree
in a tumult of wonder at sight of the white wayfarer. Nobody can ever
enjoy the sense of rapture and surprise that took Cameron's breath away
as he looked down from the hills and saw the wide-reaching, pale blue
water flashing in the sun. He took the lake itself for a cloud at the
first glance, and a little islet for the lake, and asked his men, with
bitterest chagrin, 'Is this all?' And then the niggers pointed, and
these vast waters spread themselves out of the cloud, and he saw this
mighty sea shining out of its dark frame of mountain and plain forest.
Jupiter, what a moment! _I_ could never enjoy that surprise. I had read
Cameron's book, and he had discounted the situation for me; he had
swindled me out of my emotions. I knew the breadth and length of the
lake to within a mile--no chance of mistake for _me_. Yes, I said. Here
is the Tanganyika, and it is a very fine sheet of blue water; and pray
where is the Swiss porter to take my luggage? or where shall I find the
omnibus for the best hotel? Mark me, lads, before we have been long
underground, there will be hotels and omnibuses and Swiss porters, and
the Cooks and Gazes of the future will deal in through tickets to the
African lakes, and this great heart of Africa will be the Englishman's
favourite holiday ground. Let but the tramway Stanley talks about be
laid from Bagamoyo to the interior, and 'Arry will be lord of Central
Africa, as he is of the rest of the earth."

Idle talk in idle hours beside the camp-fire. Though the days were as
sunny and summer-like as February on the Riviera, the nights were cold;
and after sundown masters and men liked to sit by their fires and watch
the pine-wood crackle and the flames leap through the smoke like living
things, vanish and reappear, fade into darkness or flicker into light
with swifter and more sudden movement than even the thoughts of the men
who watched them.

The porters and servants had their own huts and their own fires. They
had made a rough stockade round the cluster of bee-hive huts--a snug
settlement, which Allan compared to a mediæval fortress, one of the
Scottish castles, whose inhabitants live and move in the pages of the
Wizard of the North. Allan was a devoted worshipper of Scott, whom
he held second only to Shakespeare; and as Cecil Patrington claimed
exactly this position for Charles Dickens, the question afforded an
inexhaustible subject for argument, sometimes mild and philosophical,
sometimes vehement and angry, to which Geoffrey listened yawningly, or
into which he plunged with superior vehemence and arbitrary assertion
if it were his humour to be interested.

In a land where there was no daily record of what mankind were doing,
no newspaper at morning and evening recounting the last pages of
the world's history, telling the story of yesterday's crimes and
catastrophes, sickness and death, wrong and right, evil and good,
adventures, successes, failures, inventions, gains and losses--every
movement near or far in the great mill-wheel of human life--deprived
of newspapers, of civilized society, and of all the business of
money-getting and money-spending, it was only in such discussions
that these exiles could find subjects for conversation. The contents
of the letters and papers that had reached them three months before
at Tabora, brought on from Zanzibar by an Arab caravan bound for the
hunting-grounds of Rua, had been long exhausted; and now there was
only the populace of the great romancers to talk about in the long
chilly evenings, when they were in no mood for piquet or poker, and too
lazy-brained for the arduous pleasures of chess. Then it was pleasant
to lie in front of the fire and dispute the merits of one's favourite
novelist, or some abstract question in the regions of philosophy.
Sometimes the three men's talk would wander from Dickens to Plato, from
Scott to Aristotle, from Macaulay to Thucydides. Allan was the most
bookish of the three, and his knowledge of German enabled him to carry
the lightest of travelling-libraries, in the shape of that handy series
of little paper-covered books which includes the best German authors,
together with translations of all the classics, ancient and modern,
Greek, Latin, Norse, English, French, Italian, at twopence-halfpenny
per volume--tiny booklets, of which he could carry half a dozen in the
pockets of his flannel jacket, and which comprised the literature of
the world in the smallest possible compass.

For more than a year, these three men had been dependent upon one
another's society for all intellectual solace, for all mental comfort;
for more than a year they had looked upon no white faces but their
own, so tanned and darkened by sun and weather that they had come to
talk of themselves laughingly as white Arabs, or semi-negroids, and to
opine that they would never look like Englishmen again. Indeed, Cecil
Patrington, whose fifteen years of manhood had been chiefly spent
under tropic stars, had no desire ever again to wear the sickly aspect
of the home-keeping Englishman, whom he spoke of disparagingly as a
turnip-face. Bronzed and battered, and hardened by the hard life of the
desert, he laughed to scorn the amenities of modern civilization and
the iron bondage of the claw-hammer coat.

"Male humanity is divided into two classes--the men who dress for
dinner, and the men who don't. I have always belonged to the latter
half. We are the freemen; our shoulders have never bent under the
yoke. I ran away from every school I was ever sent to. I played
Hell and Tommy at my private tutor's Berkshire parsonage--set fire
to his study when he locked me in, with an order to construe five
tough pages of 'Thicksides,' for insubordination. I set fire to his
waste-paper basket, lads, and his missus's muslin curtains. I knew
I could put the fire out with his garden-hose, when I had given him
a good scare; and after that little bit of arson, he was uncommonly
glad to get rid of me. The old Herod had insisted on my dressing
for dinner every night--putting on a claw-hammer coat and a white
tie to eat barley-broth and boiled mutton. I wasn't going to stop
in such a _bouge_ as that. Then came the university. I was always
able to scramble through an exam., so I matriculated with flying
colours--passed my Little Go with a flourish of trumpets; and my people
hoped I had turned over a new leaf. So I had, boys--a new leaf in a new
book. I had begun to read the story of African travel--Livingstone,
Burton, Baker, du Chaillu, Stanley. And from that hour I knew what
manner of life I was meant for. I got my kind old dad to give me a
biggish cheque--compounded with him, before my second term at Trinity
was over, for the fifteen hundred my university career would have cost
him--and sailed for the Cape; and from that day to this, except when I
read a paper one night in Savile Row, I have never worn the garment of
the white slave. I have never thrust these hairy arms of mine into the
silk-lined sleeves of a swallow-tail coat."

       *       *       *       *       *

For the eldest traveller those days before the coming of the Masika
left nothing to be desired. The long coasting voyages on the great
fresh-water sea, the canoes following the romantic shores or threading
the southern archipelago where the river Lofu pours its broad stream
into the lake, were enough for exercise, excitement, variety.

For Cecil Patrington--for the man who carried no burden of bitter
memories, whose heart ached not with the yearning for home faces, the
joys of Central Africa were all-sufficing. He had been happy in scenes
far less lovely; happy in arid deserts such as the Roman poet pictured
to himself in the luxurious repose of his suburban villa--deserts to be
made endurable by the presence of Lalage. Cecil Patrington would not
have exchanged his Winchester rifle for the loveliest Lalage; he wanted
to kill, not to be killed. No sweetly smiling, no prettily prattling
society would have made up to him for the lack of big game and the
means of slaughter. Perhaps he, too, had dreamed his dream, even as Mr.
Jaggers had. There is no man so unlikely of aspect that he may not once
have been a lover. Is not the faithfullest, fondest lover in all modern
fiction the hunchback Quasimodo? But if this rough sportsman had ever
succumbed to the common fever, had ever sighed and suffered, his malady
was a thing of the remote past. In his most confidential talk there had
never been the faintest indication of a romantic attachment.

"Why did I never marry?" he echoed, when the question was asked
jestingly, beside the camp-fire, in the early stages of their journey.
"I had neither time nor inclination, nor money to waste upon such an
expensive toy as a wife; a wife who would eat her head off in England
while I was knocking about over here, a wife who would cost me more
than a caravan."

This was all that Mr. Patrington ever said about the matrimonial
question; but marriage is a subject upon which some men never reveal
their real thoughts.

He took life as merrily as if it had been a march in a comic opera;
and in the presence of his cheerfulness the two young men kept their
troubles to themselves.

Had Allan forgotten Suzette under those tropic stars? No, he had not
achieved forgetfulness; but he had learnt to live without love, without
the light of a fair woman's face; and in a modified way to be happy.
The changes and chances, difficulties, accidents, and adventures of the
journey between the coast and Tabora had kept his mind fully occupied.
Fever, and recovery from fever; failure or success with his gun;
difficult negotiations with village sultans; and even an occasional
skirmish in which the poisoned arrows flew fast, and the stern
necessity of firing on their assailants had stared them in the face;
all these things had left little leisure for love-sick dreams, for fond
regrets.




                              CHAPTER V.

                     THE MEETING-PLACE OF WATERS.


At Tabora there had been a long halt, a delay forced upon the
travellers by the conditions of climate, by the sickness and the
idleness of their caravan; but this interval of rest had not been
altogether disagreeable. The place was a place of fatness, a settlement
in the midst of a fertile plan where the flocks and herds, the Arab
population, the pastoral life suggested those familiar pictures
in that first book of ancient history which the child takes into
his newly awakened consciousness; and which the hard and battered
wayfarer--believer or agnostic--loves and admires to the end of life.
In just such a scene as this Rebecca might have given Isaac the fateful
draught of water from the wayside well; upon just such a level pasture
Joseph and his brethren might have tended their flocks and watched the
stars. The visions of the young dreamer would have shown him this pale
milky azure, over-arching the rich level where the sheaves bowed down
to his sheaves; and in just such a reposeful atmosphere would he have
laid himself down for the noontide siesta, and let his fancy slide into
the dim labyrinth of dreamland.

At Tabora there had been overmuch time for thought, and the yearning
for a far-away face must needs have been in the hearts of both those
young Englishmen, whose bronzed features were sternly and steadily set
with the resolute calm of men who do not mean to waste in despair and
die for love of the fairest woman upon earth.

Often and often in the dusk, Allan heard his comrade's rich baritone
rolling out that old song--

    "Shall I, wasting in despair,
    Die, because a woman's fair?
    Or make pale my cheeks with care
    Because another's rosy are?"

The voice thrilled him. What a gift is that music which gives a man
power over his fellow-men? Geoffrey's fiddle talked to them nearly
every night beside the camp-fire, talked to them sometimes at daybreak,
when its owner had been sleepless; for that restless spirit had
watched too many long blank hours in the course of his travels. It had
been hard work to convey that fiddle-case across the rolling woods,
through swamp and river, guarded from the crass stupidity of native
porters--from the obstinacy of the African donkey--the curiosity of the
inhabitants of the villages on the way. Geoffrey had carried it himself
for the greater part of the journey; refusing to trust Arab or Negroid
with so precious a burden. Riding or walking, he had managed to take
care of his little Amati, the smallest but not the least valuable of
all his fiddles.

There were some among his dark followers to whom Geoffrey's Amati
was an enchanted thing, a thing that ought to have been alive if
it was not; indeed, there were some who secretly believed that it
was a living creature. The velvet nest in which he kept the strange
thing, the delicate care with which he laid it in that luxurious
resting-place, or took it out into the light of day; the loving
movement with which he rested his chin on the shining wood, while his
long lissome fingers twined themselves caressingly about the creature's
neck; the strange light that came into his eyes as he drew the bow
across the strings, and the ineffable sounds which those strings gave
forth; all these were tokens of a living presence, a something to be
loved and feared.

When he tuned his fiddle, they thought that he was punishing it, and
that it shrieked and groaned in its agony. Why else were those sounds
so harsh and discordant, so unlike the melting strains which the
thing gave forth when he laid his chin upon it and loved it, when his
lips smiled, and his melancholy eyes looked far away into the purple
distances, across the woods and the plains, to the remoteness of the
mountain range beyond?

If it were not actually alive--if it had neither heart nor blood as
they had, why, then, it was a familiar demon--a charm--by which he who
possessed it could influence his fellow-men. He could rouse them to
savage raptures, to shrieks and wild leaps that were meant for dancing.
He could melt them to tears.

From the first hour when he played by the camp-fire, on the third
night after they left Bagamoyo, Geoffrey's music had given him a hold
over the more intelligent members of the caravan. They had listened at
first almost as the dog listens, and had been ready to lift up their
heads and howl as the dog howls. But gradually those singing sounds had
exercised a soothing influence, they had sprawled at his feet, a ring
of listeners, with elbows on the ground, looking up at him out of onyx
eyes that flashed in the firelight.

Among their followers there were some Makololos from the Shire Valley,
men of superior courage and determination, a finer race than the common
herd of African porters, of the same race as those faithful followers
of Livingstone's first great journey, who afterwards became chiefs and
rulers of the land. These Makololos adored Geoffrey. His music, the
achievements of his Winchester rifle, that ardent fitful temperament of
his, exercised an extraordinary influence over these men; and it seemed
as if they would have followed him without fee or reward, for sheer
love of the man himself; not for meat, and cloth, and beads, and brass
wire.

Never a word said Geoffrey or Allan of that one woman whose image
filled the minds of both. They talked of other people freely enough.
Each spoke of his mother tenderly, regretfully even, Allan taking
comfort from the thought of Lady Emily's delight in her farm, the
occupation and interest which every change of the seasons brought
for her. Such letters as had reached him on his wanderings had been
resigned and uncomplaining, although dwelling sorrowfully upon the
husband she had lost.

"He used to live so much apart, shut in his library day after day,
and only joining me in the evening, that I could hardly have believed
my life could seem so empty without him. But I know now how much his
presence in the house--even his silent, unseen presence--meant for
me; and I realize now how often I used to go to him, interrupting his
dreamy life with my petty household questions, my little bits of news
from the farmyard or the cow-houses, or the garden. He was so kind
and sympathetic. He would look up from his books to interest himself
in some story about my Brahmas or my Cochins, and if he was bored, he
never allowed me to see the faintest sign of impatience. I think he was
the best and truest man that ever lived. And my Allan is like him. May
God protect and bless my dearest, my only dear, in all the perils of
the desert!"

Lady Emily's mental picture of Africa represented one far-reaching
waste of level sand, a desert flatness incompatible with a spherical
earth, pervaded by camels, and occasionally varied by a mirage. A
pair of pyramids--like tall candlesticks at the end of a board-room
table--a sphinx and a crocodily river occupied the north-east corner of
this vast plateau, while the south-west was distinguished by a colony
of ostriches, and the place to which Indian officials used to resort
for change of air some fifty years since. To these narrow limits were
restricted Lady Emily's notions of the continent on which her son
was now a wanderer. She feared that if he got out of the way of the
crocodiles he might fall in with the ostriches, which doubtless were
dangerous when encountered in large numbers; and she shuddered at the
sight of her feather fan.

Mrs. Wornock's letters were in a sadder strain. The key was distinctly
minor. She wrote of her loneliness; of the monotonous days; the longing
for the face that had vanished.

"My organ talks to me of you--Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, Mendelssohn, all
tell me the same story. You are far away--away for a long time--and
life is very sad."

There was not a word of Suzette in those letters. If she was ever at
the Manor, if Mrs. Wornock retained her affection and found solace in
her society, there was no hint of that consoling presence. It might
be that the girl hated the house because of that vehement stormy love
which had assailed her there; the love that would not let her be
faithful to a more reasonable lover.

"And yet--and yet!" thought Geoffrey, hardly caring even in his own
mind to put the question positively.

In his innermost consciousness there was the belief that she loved
him--him, Geoffrey Wornock--that she had refused him perversely and
foolishly, out of a mistaken sense of honour. She would not marry Allan
whom she did not love; and she refused to marry Geoffrey whom she did
love, in order to spare her jilted lover the pain of seeing a rival's
triumph.

"But I am not beaten yet," Geoffrey told himself. "When I go back to
England--if I but find her free--I shall try again. Allan's wounds
will have healed by that time; and even her Quixotic temper will have
satisfied itself by the sacrifice of two years of her lover's life."

"When I go back!" Musing sometimes on that prospect of the homeward
journey, whether returning by the road they had come, or dropping down
southward by Trivier's route to the Nyassa and the Zambesi, or by the
more adventurous westward line by the forest and the Congo, the way
by which Trivier had come to the Lake, whichever way were eventually
chosen, Geoffrey asked himself if the three travellers would all go
back?

"One shall be taken and the other left."

Throughout the record of African travel, there is that dark feature
of the story; the traveller who is left behind. Sometimes it is the
fever fiend that lays a scorching hand upon the fearless adventurer,
flings him down to suffer thirst and pain and heaviness, and delirious
horrors, in the foul darkness of a bee-hive hut, to die in a dream
of home, with shadowy faces looking down at him, familiar voices
talking with him. Sometimes he falls in a ring of savage foes, hemmed
round with hideous faces, foes as fierce and implacable as lion or
leopard; foes who kill for the sake of killing; or cannibals, for
whom a murdered man provides the choicest banquet. The hazards of the
pilgrimage take every shape, death by drowning, death by massacre,
death by small-pox or jungle fever, death by starvation, by the
bursting of a gun, by beasts of prey. In every story of travel there
is always that dark page which tells of the man who is left. Dillon,
Farquhar, the two Pococks, Jameson, Bartelott, Weissemburger--the
ghosts that haunt the pathways of tropical Africa are many; but those
melancholy shadows exercise no deterring influence on the traveller who
sets out to-day, strong, elate, hopeful, inspired by an eager curiosity
which takes no heed of trouble or of risk.

"Which of us three is to stay behind?" Geoffrey asked himself in a
gloomy wonder. Not Patrington. He had come to the stage at which the
traveller bears a charmed life. It is seldom the experienced wanderer,
the man of many journeys, who falls by the wayside. Hot-headed youth,
bold in its ignorance of danger, perishes like a bird caught in a trap.
The strong frame of the trained athlete shrivels like a leaf in the hot
blast of fever. The careless boatman tempts the perils of a difficult
passage, and is swept over the stony bed of the torrent, and vanishes
in the fathomless pool. The hardened traveller knows what he is about,
and can reckon with the forces of that gigantic nature which he faces
and defies. It is the tyro who pays the price of his inexperience, and,
in the history of African travel, the survival of the fittest is the
rule.

"Which of us?" That question had entered into the very fabric of
Geoffrey's thoughts. Sometimes, sitting by the camp-fire as the
chillness of night crept round them, a grisly fancy would flash across
his reverie, and he would think that the pale mist that rose about
Allan's figure, on the other side of the circle, was the shroud which
the Highlander sees upon the shoulders of a friend marked for death.

"Would it be Allan?" If it were Allan, he, Geoffrey, would hasten
home to tell the sad story, and then--to claim her whose too-tender
conscientiousness had refused happiness at Allan's expense. Allan gone,
there would be no reason why she should deny her love.

"For I know, I know that she loves me," Geoffrey repeated to himself.

He had been telling himself that story ever since he left England. No
denial from those lovely lips, no words of scorn, would convince him
that he was unloved. He could recall looks and tones that told another
story. He had seen the gradual change in her which told of an awakening
heart.

"She never knew what love means till she knew me," he told himself.
Did he wish for Allan's death? No, there was no such hideous thought
in the dark labyrinth of his mind; or, at least, he believed that
there was not. One must perish! He had so brooded over the story
of former victims that he had taught himself to look upon one lost
life as inevitable. But the lot was as likely to fall upon him as
upon Allan. More likely, since his habits were more reckless and more
adventurous than Allan's. If there was danger to be found, he and his
Makololos courted it. Shooting expeditions, raids upon unfriendly
villages, hand-to-hand skirmishes with Mirambo's brigand tribes; he
and his Makololos were ready for anything. He had travelled over
hundreds of miles with his warlike little gang--exploring, shooting,
fighting--while Patrington and Allan were living in dreamy inaction,
waiting for better weather, or for the recovery of half a dozen
ailing pagazis. Assuredly he who ran such superfluous risks was the
more likely to fall by the way. Well, death is a solution of all
difficulties.

"If I am dead, it will matter to me very little that my bright,
ineffable coquette is transformed into a sober, middle-aged wife,
and that she and Allan are smiling at each other across the family
breakfast-table, in their calm heaven of domestic hum-drum. But while I
live and am young I shall think of her and long for her, and hate the
lucky wretch who wins her. If we should both go back; if Patrington's
tough bones are the bones that are to whiten by the way, and not
Allan's or mine; why, then, we shall again be rivals; and the years of
exile will be only a dream that we have dreamt."

It was a strange position in which these two young men found
themselves. Friends, almost as brothers in the close intimacy of that
solitude of three, only three civilized thinking beings amidst a crowd
of creatures who seemed as far apart as if they had belonged to the
forest fauna--the great antelope family--or the simian race; these two,
so nearly of an age, reared in the same country and the same social
sphere, united and sympathetic at every point of contact between mind
and mind, and yet keeping this one deep gulf of silence between them.

They spoke to each other freely of all things, except of her; and
yet each knew that she was the one absorbing subject in the mind of
the other. Each knew that her image went along with them, was never
absent, never less distinctly lovely, even when the way was fullest of
hardship and peril, when every yard of progress meant a struggle with
thorns that tore them, and brambles that lashed them, and the tough,
rank verdure-carpet that clogged their feet. Neither had ever ceased to
remember her, or to think of these adventurous days as anything else
than exile from her. Whatever interest or enjoyment there might be in
that varied experience of a land where beauty and ugliness alternated
with startling transitions, it was not possible that either Allan or
Geoffrey could forget the reason they were there, far from the fair
faces of women, and from all the ease and pleasantness of civilized
life.

Geoffrey had the better chance of oblivion, since those wild excursions
and explorations of his afforded the excitement of the untrodden and
the hazardous. The caravan road from the coast to Ujiji, with all its
varieties of hardship, was too beaten a track for this fiery spirit.
At every halting-place he went off at a tangent; and if his comrades
threatened not to wait for his return, he would pledge himself to
rejoin them further on, laughing to scorn every suggestion that he and
his little company of Makololos and Wanyamwesis could lose themselves
in the wilderness.

He was more in touch with the men than Allan--as familiar with their
ways and ideas as Patrington after many years of travel. He had learnt
their languages with a marvellous quickness--not the copious language
of civilization and literature, be it remembered, but the concise
vocabulary of the camp and the hunting-ground, the river and the
road. He understood his men and their different temperaments as few
travellers learn to understand, or desire to understand them. And yet
there was but little Christian benevolence at the root of this quick
sympathy and comprehension. Although, as an Englishman, Geoffrey would
have given no sanction to the sale and barter of his fellow-creatures,
these dark servants were to him no more than slaves--so much carrying
power and so much fighting power, subject to his domination. It pleased
him to know their characters, to be able to play upon their strength
and weakness, their ferocity and their greed, just as surely as he
manipulated the stops of the great organ at Discombe.

These Africans gave a name of their own choosing to almost everybody.
They christened the great Sultan of the interior Tippo-Tib, because
of a curious blinking of his eyes. Captain Trivier obtained his
nickname on account of his eye-glass. Another man was named after
his spectacles. The Sultan of Ujiji was called Roumariza--"It is
ended,"--because he had succeeded in reducing belligerent tribes to
peaceful settlement. For the Englishman in particular, Africa could
always find a nickname, based on some insignificant detail of manner or
appearance. For Englishmen in general she had found a nobler-sounding
name. She called them Sons of Fire.

Geoffrey, with his tireless energy, his rapid decision, his angry
impatience of delay, seemed to his followers the very highest exemplar
of the fiery race that can persevere and conquer difficulties which the
native of the soil recoils from as insurmountable.

Sons of Fire! Were they not worthy of the name, these white men, when
far out in midstream, while the boatmen bent and cowered over their
paddles, these Englishmen looked in the face of the lightning and
sat calm and unmoved while day darkened to the pitchy blackness of a
starless midnight, and the thunder reverberated from hill to hill,
with roar upon roar and peal upon peal, like the booming of heavy
batteries, and anon crashed and rattled with a sharper, nearer sound.
Blinding lightning, torrential rain, war of thunder and tempestuous
waters, were all as nothing to these sons of fire. Their spirits rose
amidst hurricane or thunderstorm; they were full of life and gaiety
while the cockleshell canoes were being tossed upon the short, choppy
sea, like forest leaves upon a forest brook, and when every sudden gust
threatened destruction. They laughed at peril, and insisted upon having
the canoes out when their native followers saw danger riding on the
wind and death brooding over the waters. They met the spirit of murder,
and were not afraid. They lay down to sleep in the midst of an unknown
wilderness, with savage beasts lurking in the darkness that surrounded
their tents. They forded rivers that swarmed with crocodiles--horrible
stealthy creatures, swimming deep down below the surface of the water,
the placid, beautiful water, with lotus flowers sleeping in the
sunlight, and scaly monsters waiting underneath in the shadow.

Panther, crocodile, tempest, fever, or sunstroke, poisoned arrows from
murderous foes, were only so many varieties in the story of adventure.
Through every vicissitude the ready wit and calm courage of the
Englishmen rose superior to accident, discomfort, or danger; and to
the native temper these wanderers from a far country, an island which
they had heard of as a speck in a narrow sea, seemed men of iron with
souls of fire.

Geoffrey would admit no malingering, would accept no idle pretexts for
inaction or delay. His little band, picked out from the ruck of their
porters, were always on the move, save in those rainy interludes which
made movement impossible; and even then Geoffrey fretted and fumed, and
was inclined to question the impracticability of a hunting expedition
through those torrential rains.

"Did you ever hear of a fox-hunter stopping at home because of a wet
day?" he asked Cecil Patrington, impatiently.

"Did you ever see such rain as this in a fox-hunting country?" retorted
Patrington, pointing through an opening in the door of the hut to the
sheet of falling water, which blotted out all beyond, and splashed with
a thud into the pool that filled the enclosure.

The deep eaves kept the rain out of the huts, but not without
occasional accident--spoilt provisions, damp gunpowder. It was a rude
awakening from dreams of home to find one's bed afloat on a pond of
rising waters.

Geoffrey had taken upon himself the task of providing meat for the
party, Patrington's lazy, happy-go-lucky temper readily ceding that
post of distinction to the new-comer. A man who had shot every species
of beast that inhabits the great continent could easily surrender the
privilege of finding meat-dinners along the route; so he only used his
gun when the quarry was worthy and his humour prompted; and for the
most part smoked the pipe of peace and read Dickens in the repose of a
day's halt, while Geoffrey roamed off with his Winchester rifle and his
little band of obsequious dark-skins.

And now in this period of waiting there was the great inland sea to
explore; those romantic shores with their wealth of animal life; those
waters teeming with fish, hemmed round and guarded by the majesty
of mountains whose lofty peaks and hollows no foot of man had ever
trodden. There was plenty of scope for movement and adventure here, so
long as the rains held off; and the three men made good use of their
time, and the canoes were rarely idle, or the rowers allowed to shirk
upon the favourite pretence of bad weather.

So long as there was something to be done, Geoffrey and Allan were
happy; but with every interval of repose there came the familiar
heartache, the longing for home-faces, the sense of disappointment and
loss.

Sometimes alone by the lake, while the lamp was shining on the faces of
his two friends yonder in the verandah, where they sat playing chess,
alone in the awful stillness of that vast mountain gorge, the waters
rippling with placid movement, only faintly flecked with whiteness here
and there in the blue distance, Geoffrey's longing for that vanished
face grew to an almost unendurable agony. He felt as if he could bear
this anguish of severance no more. He began to calculate the length
of the homeward journey. Oh, the weariness of it! for him for whose
impatience the fastest express train would be too slow. He shrank
appalled from the contemplation of the distance that he had put between
himself and the woman he loved, the intolerable distance--thousands
and thousands of miles--and the difficulties and vicissitudes of the
journey; all the forces of tropical nature to contend with, dependent
upon savages, subject to fevers that hinder and stop the eager feet,
and lay the weary body low, a helpless log--to waste days and nights
in burning agony--to awaken and find a caravan dwindled by desertion,
luggage plundered, new impediments to progress.

Why had he been so mad as to come here? That was the question which
he asked himself again and again in the stillness of night, when the
mountain-peaks stood out in silvery whiteness and the mountain-chasms
were pits of blackest shadow. Why had he, a free agent, master of his
life and its golden opportunities, made himself a voluntary exile?

"What demon of revolt and impatience drove me out into the wilderness,
when I ought to have followed her and refused to believe in her
unkindness, and insisted upon being heard, and heard again, and
rejected again, only to be accepted later? Did I not know, in my heart
of hearts, that she loved me? And now she will believe no more in my
love. The man who could leave her, who could try to cure himself of
his passion for her--such a man is unworthy to be remembered. Some
one else will appear upon the scene--that unknown rival whom no man
fears or foresees till the hour sounds and he is there--some arrogant
lover, utterly unlike Allan or me--who will not adore her as we have
adored--who will approach her not as a slave, but as a master, who will
win her in a month, in a week, with fierce swift wooing, startle and
scare her into loving him, win her by a _coup de main_. That is the
sort of thing that will happen. It is happening now, perhaps. While
I am standing by these African waters, sick with longing for her. Is
it night and moonlight in England, I wonder? Are she and her new
lover walking in the old sleepy garden? No, it is winter there; they
are sitting at the piano, perhaps, in the lamplight, her little hands
moving about the keys--he listening and pretending to admire, knowing
and caring no more about music than the coarsest of my Pagazis. Oh, it
is maddening to think of how I am losing her! And I came here to cure
myself of loving her. Cure! There is no cure for such a passion as
mine. It grows with absence--it strengthens with time."

And now the Masika, the dreaded rainy season began; the rain-sun burnt
with a sickly oppressive heat; and over all nature there crept the
deathlike silence that comes before a storm. No longer was heard the
wail of the fish-eagle calling his mate, and the answering call from
afar. No diver flitted, black, long, and lanky, over the waters. The
big white and grey kingfisher had vanished from his perch upon the
branches that overhang the lake. Even the ranæ in the sedges, noisiest
of birds for the most part, were mute in anticipatory terror. Thick
darkness brooded over the long line of hills on the further side of
the lake; and from Ujiji nothing could be seen but a waste of livid
waters touched here and there with patches of white. Then through that
dreadful stillness rolled the long low muttering of the thunder, and
lightning flashes, pale and sickly, pierced the overhanging pall of
night-in-day--and then the tempest, in all its majesty of terror, the
roar of winds and waters, the artillery of heaven pealing, crackling,
rattling, booming from yonder fortress of unseen giants, the citadel of
untrodden hills.

And after the storm the rain, the ceaseless, hopeless, melancholy rain,
a wall of water shutting out the world. There was nothing for it but to
sit in the rough shelter of the tembe, and amuse one's self as best one
might, cleaning guns and fishing-tackle, mending nets, playing cards or
chess, reading, talking, disputing, execrating the enforced inaction,
the deadly monotony. For Geoffrey's restless spirit that rainy season
was absolute torture; and it needed all the forbearance and good
nature of his companions to bear with his irritability and fretful
complaining against inexorable nature.

Even Patrington, the best-tempered, most easy-going of men, was
disgusted at Geoffrey's feverish impatience.

"I begin to admire the wisdom of a vulgar proverb--two's company,
three's none," he said to Allan across the chess-board, as they
arranged their men, sitting in the light of the wood fire, while
Geoffrey lay fast asleep in his hammock after the weariness of
sleepless nights. "Your friend is a very bad traveller--a fine-weather
traveller, a man who must have sport and variety and progress all
along the route. That kind of man isn't a pleasant companion in
Central Africa. If courage and activity are essential, patience is no
less needed. Your friend has plenty of pluck; but there's too much
quicksilver in his veins. He exercises an extraordinary influence upon
the men; but he is just the kind of fellow to quarrel with them and
get murdered by them, if he were left too much to his own devices.
It would need very little for them to think that fiddle of his an
evil spirit, and smash his skull with it. On the whole, Carew, I wish
you and I were alone, for with yonder gentleman," pointing to the
motionless figure under the striped rug, "I feel as if I had undertaken
the care of a troublesome child; and Africa, don't you know, isn't the
right place for spoilt brats."

"Geoffrey will be himself again when these beastly rains are over. He's
a splendid fellow, and I know you like him."

"Like him? Of course I like him. Nobody could help liking him. He has
the knack of making himself liked, loved almost, but he's a crank for
all that. Allan, mark my words, that young man is a crank."

Allan's heart sank at this expression of opinion, short, sharp,
decisive. He remembered what he had heard of Geoffrey's birth from the
lips of Geoffrey's mother. Could one expect perfect soundness of brain,
perfect balance of mind and judgment in a man who had entered life in a
world of dreams and hallucinations?




                              CHAPTER VI.

                              KIGAMBO.[1]

[Footnote 1: Kigambo: unexpected calamity, slavery, or death.]


The rainy season was over. The moving wall of water was down. The
travellers were no longer kept awake at night by the ceaseless roar of
the rain. The lake lay stretched before them, sapphire dark under the
milky blueness of the tropical sky. Kingfisher and fish-eagle, and all
the birds that haunt those waters, hovered, or perched on the trees or
along the bank, or skimmed the shining surface of the great fresh-water
sea. And now the canoes were manned, and the three white men and their
followers were setting their faces towards Manyema, the cannibal
country, dreaded by Wangana and Wanyamwesis, and even by the bolder
Makololos.

For this stage of their journey they were travelling in a stronger
company, having accepted the fellowship of an Arab caravan faring
towards the Congo; and this larger troop gave an air of new gaiety to
their train. They had been forced to buy new stores of cloth and beads
at Ujiji, Geoffrey's recklessness in rewarding his men, after every
successful hunting expedition, having considerably reduced their stock.
The cloth bought at Ujiji was dear and bad, and Cecil Patrington took
Geoffrey to task with some severity; but his reproaches fell lightly
upon that volatile nature.

"Remember that the measure of the goods we carry is the measure of our
lives," said the experienced traveller gravely.

"Oh, Providence will take care of us when our goods are gone," argued
Geoffrey. "We shall fall in with some civilized Arabs who know the
value of hard cash. I cannot believe in a country where a cheque-book
is useless. We shall be within touch of the mercantile world when we
get to Stanley Pool."

"When!" echoed Patrington. "Hill and jungle, and desert and river,
mutiny or desertion, pestilence and tempest, have to be accounted with
before you see steamers and civilization. There's no use in glib talk
of what can be done at Brazzaville or at Stanley Pool. Luckily we are
going into a region where food is cheap--such as it is. But then, on
the other hand, we may run out of quinine--and quinine sometimes means
life."

Summer was in the land when they crossed the great lake, stopping for
a night or two on one of the principal islands, under the hospitable
roof of a missionary station, where it was a new sensation to sit upon
a chair, and taste a cup of coffee made in the European manner, and
to see an Englishwoman's pleasant face and neat raiment. There was
an English child also, "a real human child," as Geoffrey exclaimed,
delighted at the phenomenon--a round-limbed, fat-cheeked rosy baby, who
sat and watched the landing of the party from her perambulator, and
patronized them, waving a welcome with chubby hands, as they scrambled
out of the canoes--a child who had entered upon a world of black faces,
and who may have fancied her mother and father monstrosities in a place
where everybody else was black.

What a contrast was this blue-eyed two-year-old to such infancy as
they had seen in villages along their road, the brown naked creatures
rolling and grovelling in the dirt, and looking more like pug-dogs than
children!

When they had bidden good-bye to the friendly missionary and his
domestic circle, they were not without childish life upon their way,
for the Arabs with whom they had joined company had some women in
their train, one a slave with a couple of children; and as the Arab
law does not recognize slavery under adult age, these brats of six and
seven were free, and not being goods and chattels, no provision was
allowed for them, and the mother had to feed them out of her own scanty
rations.

Geoffrey was on more familiar terms with the Arabs than either
Patrington or Allan, and, on discovering the state of things with the
native mother and her sons, he took these two morsels of dusky humanity
into his service, and set them to clean pots and pans, and treated them
as a kind of lap-dogs, and let them dance to his wild fiddle music in
the firelight in front of the tents, and would not allow them to be
punished for their depredations among the pannikins of rice or the
baskets of bananas.

They crossed the swift and turbid Luama river, and encamped for a night
upon its shores. And then came the harassing march in single file
through the dense jungle--a hopeless monotony of rank foliage taller
than the tallest of the travellers, a coarse and monstrous vegetation
which lashed their faces and rent their clothing and caught their feet
like wire snares set for poachers. Vain was it to put the porters with
their loads in the forefront of the procession. The rank inexorable
jungle closed behind them as they passed; and a four-hours' march
through this pitiless scrub was worse than a ten-hours' tramp in the
open.

The days were sultry. The travellers deemed themselves lucky if the
evening closed without a thunderstorm; and the storms in those regions
were deadly. A fired roof and a blackened corpse in a hut next that
occupied by the three friends testified to the awfulness of an African
thunderstorm. The thatch blazed, the neighbours looked on, and the
husband of the victim sat beside the disfigured form in a curious
indifference, which might mean either bewilderment or want of feeling.

"Twenty years ago the catastrophe next door would have been assuredly
put down to our account," said Patrington, as they sat at supper after
the storm, "and we should have had to pay for that poor lady with our
persons or our goods--our goods, for choice, so much merikani, or so
many strings of sami sami. But since the advent of the Arabs, reason
has begun to prevail over unreason. The influence of Islam makes for
civilization."

They found the people of Manyema, the reputed man-eaters, friendly,
and willing to deal. Provisions were cheap. Fowls, eggs, maize, and
sweet potatoes were to be had in abundance. The natives were civil,
but curious and intrusive; and the sound of Geoffrey's amati was the
signal for a crowd round the camping-place, a crowd that could only
be dispersed by the sight of a revolver, the nature of which weapon
seemed very clearly understood by these warriors of the lance and the
knife. When the admiring throng waxed intrusive, and the black faces
and filthy figures crowded the verandah, Cecil Patrington took out his
pistols, and gave them a little lecture in their native tongue, with
the promise of an illustration or two if they should refuse to depart.

Or, were Geoffrey in the humour, he would push his way, playing,
through that savage throng, and, like the Pied Piper of Hamelin, would
lead those human rats away towards hill or stream, jungle or plain,
playing, playing some diabolical strain of Tartini's, or some still
wilder war-song of the new Sclavonic school--Stojowski, Moszkowski,
Wienianwowski--something thrilling, plaintive, frightening, appealing,
which set those savage breasts on fire, and turned those savage heads
like strong drink.

"One shall be taken and the other left." That text would flash across
Geoffrey Wornock's thoughts at the unlikeliest moments. It might have
been a fiery scroll projected on the dark cloud-line of the thunderous
eventide. It might have been the sharp shrill cry of some bird crossing
the blue above his head, so unexpectedly, so strangely did the words
recur to him. So far, in all the vicissitudes of the journey, the
little band had held firmly on, with less than the average amount of
suffering and inconvenience. There had been desertion, there had been
death among their men; but on the Unyamwesi route it had been easy to
repair all such losses, and their Wanyamwesis were in most respects the
superiors of the Wangana they had lost by the way.

So far, despite of some baddish bouts of fever, the dark, inexorable
Shadow had held aloof. The dread of death had not been beside their
camp-fires or about their bed.

But now, in this region of tropical fertility, amidst a paradise of
luxuriant verdure, sheltered by the vast mountain citadel that rises
like a titanic wall above the western border of the Tanganyika, they
came upon a spot where the fever-fiend, the impalpable, invisible,
inexorable enemy reigned supreme. Geoffrey was the first to feel the
poisonous influence of the atmosphere. He laid down his fiddle, and
flung himself upon his bed, with aching back and weary limbs, one
evening, after a day of casual roaming along the banks of a tributary
stream.

"I've been walking about too long," he said. "That's all that there is
the matter with me."

       *       *       *       *       *

"That's all!" But when daylight came he was in the unknown
fever-country, the dreadful topsy-turvy world of delirium. He had two
heads, and he wanted to shoot one of them. He tried to stand up and go
across the hut to fetch the rifle that hung against the opposite wall,
but his limbs refused to obey him. He lay groaning, helpless as an
infant, muttering that the other head wouldn't let him sleep. The pain
was all in that other head. In the long agony that followed all things
were blank and dark; until, after five days of raging fever, the pulse
grew regular again, the scorching body cooled down to the temperature
of healthy life, and weak and wan, but rejoicing in freedom from pain,
the patient came back to everyday life, and looked into the faces of
his companions with eyes that saw the things that were, and not the
spectral forms that people delirious dreams.

"'One shall be taken,'" he muttered to himself, as he looked from Allan
to Cecil, and back again. "I thought it was I. Then we are all three of
us alive?" he said, with a catch in his voice that was almost a sob.

"Very much alive, and we hope to remain so," answered Patrington,
cheeriest of travellers. "You've had a bad spell of the cursed
mukurungu, which I suppose must have its fling for the next decade or
two, until railroads, and hotels, and scientific drainage, and Swiss
innkeepers have altered the climate for the better. You've been pretty
bad, and you've kept us in a very unhealthy district, so as soon as
ever you've picked up your strength, we'll move on."

"I can start to-morrow morning. I feel as strong as a lion."

"Does a lion's paw shake as your hand is shaking now? My dear Geoff,
you are as weak as water. We'll give you three days to recruit. I
am too hardened a subject for the mukurungu, which is a fever of
acclimatization, for the most part, and I've been dosing Allan with
quinine, and I've been doing a good deal of ambulance surgery among
the natives, and we're a very popular party. They have seldom seen
three white men in a bunch. Your fiddling, my medicine-chest and
sticking-plaster, and Allan's good manners have made a great effect.
The blackies are assured that we are all three sultans in our own
country."

"And our Arab friends?"

"Oh, they have gone on. We have only our own men with us now. Your
Makololos have been miserable about you."

They spent a jovial night, Geoffrey's spirits rising to wild gaiety,
with that lightness which comes when a fever-patient has struggled
through the thick cloud of strange fancies, the agony of throbbing
brain and aching back.

He tuned the fiddle that had been lying mute in its velvet nest. He
tucked it lovingly under his chin, and laid his bow along the strings
with light fingers that trembled a little in the rapture of that
familiar touch.

"Shall I bore you very much if I play?" he asked, looking at his elder
companion.

"Bore us! Not a jot. I have sadly missed your wild strains. There has
been a voice wanting--a voice that is almost human, and which seems so
much a part of you that while _that_ was dumb you seemed to be dead.
Begin your spells. Play us something by one of your 'Owskis,--Jimowski,
Bilowski, Bobowski--whichever you please."

Geoffrey drew his bow across the strings with a swelling chord, a
burst of bass music like the sudden pealing of an organ, and began a
Walachian dirge.

"Does that give you the scene?" he asked, pausing and looking round
at them, after a tremendous presto movement. "Does it conjure up the
funeral train, the wild wailing of the mourners, the groaning men,
the shrieking women, even the whining and whimpering of the little
children, the stormy sky, the thick darkness, the flare of the torches,
the trampling of iron-shod hoofs? I can hear and see it all as I play."
And then he began the slow movement, the awful ghostly adagio with
its suggestion of all things horrible, its eccentric phrasing, and
dissonant chords, shaping a vision of strange unearthly forms.

"It's a very jolly kind of music," Cecil Patrington said thoughtfully;
"I mean jolly difficult, don't you know. But if you want my candid
opinion as to what it suggests, I am free to confess it sounds to me
like your improvised notion of the mukurungu--all fever and pain and
confusion."

"The mukurungu! Not half a bad name for a descriptive sonata!" laughed
Geoffrey, putting his fiddle to bed.

And then they brought out the cards, and played poker for cowries,
Cecil Patrington, as usual, the winner, by reason of that inscrutable
countenance of his, which had hardened itself in all the hazards of
an adventurous career. They were particularly jovial that evening,
and flung care to the winds that sobbed and muttered along the shore.
Geoffrey's gaiety communicated itself to the other two. They drank
their moderate potations; they smoked their pipes; and Patrington
discoursed of an ideal settlement where the surplus population of
Whitechapel and Bermondsey were to come and work in a new Arcadia, a
place of flocks and herds and coffee-fields, under a smokeless heaven.

"For my own satisfaction, I would have Africa untrodden and unknown,
a world of wonder and mystery," he said; "but the beginning has been
made, and the coming century will see every missionary settlement
of to-day develop into a populous centre of enterprise and labour.
Crowded-out England will come here, and thrive here, as it has thriven
in less fertile lands. Englishmen will flock here for sport and
pleasure and profit."

"And these native sultans--these little kings and their peoples?"

"Ah, that is the problem! God grant there may be a bloodless solution!"

That was the last night these three travellers ever sat together over
their cards and pipes, ever laughed and talked together with hearts at
ease. They were to resume their journey next morning; but when all was
ready for the start, Allan discovered that Cecil Patrington was too ill
to walk.

"I've had a bad night," he confessed; "the kind of night that lets
one know one has a head belonging to one. But the men can carry me in
a litter. I shall be all right to-morrow. I'd much rather we jogged
along. This is a vile, feverish hole."

There was no question of jogging along for this hardy traveller. The
oppressive drowsiness, which is sometimes the first stage of malarial
fever, held him like a spell. He looked at his companions dimly, with
eyes that sparkled and yet were cloudy with involuntary tears. He could
hardly see their anxious faces.

"I'm afraid I'm in for it," he faltered. "I thought I was fever-proof."

He sank upon the narrow camp-bed in a shivering fit, and Geoffrey
and Allan spread their blankets over him. They heaped every woollen
covering they possessed over those shaking limbs, but could not quiet
the ague fit or bring warmth to the icecold form.

Dreary days, dreadful nights, followed the sad waking of that sultry
morning. The two young men nursed their guide and captain with
unceasing watchfulness and devotion. Geoffrey developed a feminine
tenderness and carefulness which was touching in so wild and fitful a
nature. But they could do so little! And he whom they watched and cared
for knew not, or only knew in rare brief intervals, of their loving
care.

They tried to sustain each other's courage. They told each other that
malarial fever was only a phase of African travel; an unpleasant phase,
but not to be avoided. They knew all about the fever from bitter
experience; and here was Geoffrey but just recovered, and doubtless
Patrington would mend in a day or two, as he had mended.

"I don't suppose he's any worse than I was," said Geoffrey.

Allan shook his head sadly.

"I don't know that he's worse, but the symptoms seem different somehow.
He doesn't answer to the medicines as you did."

The symptoms developed unmistakably after this, and the fever showed
itself as typhus in the most deadly form. Swift on this revelation came
the end; and in the solemn stillness of the forest midnight they knelt
beside the unconscious form, and watched the parched, quivering lips
from which the breath was faintly ebbing. One last sobbing sigh, and
between them and the captain of their little company there stretched
a distance wider than the breadth of Africa, further than from the
Zambesi to the Congo. A land more mysterious than the Dark Continent
parted them from him who was last week their jovial, hardy comrade,
sharing the fortunes of the day, thinking of death as of a shadowy
something waiting for him far off, at the end of innumerable journeys
and long years of adventurous activity--a quiet haven, into which his
bark would drift when the timbers were worn thin with long usage, and
the arms of the rower were weary of plying the oar.

And death was close beside them all the time, lying in wait for that
gallant spirit, like a beast of prey.

"O God, is there another Africa, where we shall meet that brave,
good man again?" cried Allan. "Which of our modern teachers is
right?--Liddon, who tells us that Christ rose from the dead; or
Clifford, who tells us there is nothing--nothing: no Great Companion,
no Master or Guide: only ourselves and our faithful service for one
another--only this poor humanity?"

He looked up appealingly, expecting to see Geoffrey's face on the other
side of the bed; but he was alone. Geoffrey had fled from the presence
of death. He had rushed out into the wilderness. It was late in the
following afternoon when he came back. The men had dug a grave under a
great sycamore, and Allan was about to read the funeral service, when
his fellow-traveller reappeared.

White, haggard, with wild eyes, and clothes stained with mire and
sedge, the red clay of the forest paths, the green slime of swamp and
bog, Allan could only look at him in pitying wonder.

"Where in Heaven's name have you been?" he asked, looking up from the
rough basket-work coffin--bamboo and bulrush--interwoven by native
hands.

"I don't know. Out yonder, between the plain and the river. I was a
craven to fly from the face of death--I, a soldier," with a short,
ironical laugh. "I don't know how it was with me last night. I couldn't
bear it. I had been thinking of that verse in the gospel--'One shall be
taken,' but I didn't think it would be that one--the hardy, experienced
traveller. It might have been you or I. Not he, Allan. It was a blow,
wasn't it?--a blow that might shake a strong man's nerves!"

Allan stretched out his hand to his comrade in silence, and they
clasped hands, heartily on Allan's part; and his grip was so earnest
that he did not know it clasped a nerveless hand.

"It was a crushing blow," he said gravely. "I don't blame you for being
scared. You have come back in time to see him laid in his grave, and
to say a prayer with me."

Geoffrey shrugged his shoulders, with a hopeless look.

"Where do our prayers go, I wonder? We know no more than the natives,
when they sacrifice to their gods. Isn't it rather feeble to go on
praying when there never comes any answer? I saw you praying last
night--wrestling with God in prayer, as pious people call it. I saw
your forehead damp with agony, your lips writhing--every vein in your
clasped hands standing out like whipcord. I watched you, and was sorry,
and would have given ten years of my life to save his; but I couldn't
pray with you. And, you see, there came no answer. Inexorable Nature
worked out her own problem in her own way. Your prayers--my silence;
one was as much use as the other. Nobody heeded us; nobody cared for
us. The blow fell."

"Ah, we know not, we know not! There is compensation, perhaps. We shall
see and know our friends in heaven, and look back and know that we
were children groping in the dark. Try to believe, Geoffrey. Belief is
best."

"Belief. The pious mourner's anodyne, the Christian's patent
pain-killer. Yes, belief is best; but, you see, some people can't
believe. I can't. And I see only the hideous side of death--the dull
horror of annihilation. A week ago we had a man with us, the manliest
of men--all nerve, and fire, and brain-power, brave as a lion,
ready to do and endure--and now we have only--that," with a look of
heart-sickness, "which we are impatient to put out of sight for ever.
Put it in the ground, Allan; fill in the grave; trample it down; let us
forget that there was ever such a man."

He flung himself upon the ground and sobbed out his grief. There had
been something in the blunt, dogged straightforwardness of Cecil
Patrington's character which had attached this wayward nature to him
with hooks of steel.

"I loved him," he muttered, getting up, calm and grave even to
sullenness. "And now you and I are alone."

He stood beside the grave where native hands had gently lowered the
rough coffin, and where Allan had scattered flowers and herbs, whose
aromatic odours hung heavy on the still sultriness of the atmosphere.
He looked at Allan, and not with looks of love.

"Only we two," he muttered, "and these black beasts of burden."




                             CHAPTER VII.

                          MAMBU KWA MUNGU.[2]

[Footnote 2: Mambu kwa mungu: "It is God's trouble."]


One had been taken. That which seemed to Geoffrey Wornock inevitable
in the history of African travel had been accomplished. The Dark
Continent had claimed its tribute of human life. Africa had chosen her
victim. Not the expected sacrifice. She had chosen her prey in him who
had dared the worst she could do--not in one pilgrimage, but in long
years of travel--who had looked her full in the face and laughed at
her dangers, and had wooed her with a masterful spirit, telling her
that she was fair, stepping with light, careless foot over her traps
and pitfalls, lying down within sound of her lions, drenched with her
torrential rains, tossed on her chopping seas, blinded with the fierce
glare of her lightnings--always her lover, her master, her champion.

"There is no land like Africa. There is nothing in life so good as the
wild, free day of the wanderer," he had said again and again.

And now he had paid for his love with his life. He had laid himself
down, like Mark Antony at the foot of his dead mistress.

He was gone, and the two young men were alone in the wide wilderness,
among the mountain paths between the great lake and the far-off western
sea; and in long pauses of melancholy silence by the camp-fire, or in
the noontide rest, Geoffrey looked into the face that was like and yet
not like his own, and thought of the woman they both loved, and of that
duel to the death which there must needs be when two men have built all
their hopes of happiness upon the love of one woman. A duel of deadly
thoughts, if not of deadly weapons.

"If we go back, it will be to fight for her love," he thought,
"to fight as the wild stags in the mountains fight for the chosen
hind--forehead to forehead, fore feet planted like iron, antlers
locked, clashing with a sound that is heard afar off. Yes, we shall
fight for her. The battle will have to begin again. We shall hate each
other."

Wakeful and unquiet in the deep, dead silence of the tropical night, he
would sit outside hut or tent, mending the fire, looking listlessly at
the circle of sleeping porters, listening mechanically for the qua-qua
of the night-heron, or the grunt of the hippopotamus coming up from
the river. The loss of Patrington's cheery companionship had wrought a
dark change in Geoffrey's mind and feelings. While Patrington was with
them, there had been ever-recurring distractions from sullen brooding
on the inner self. Patrington was eminently a man of action, practical,
matter-of-fact; and love-sick dreaming was hardly possible in his
company. He was as energetic in conversation as in action, would
argue, and philosophize, and quote his master of fiction, and dose them
with Pickwick and Weller as he dosed them with quinine.

He was gone; and in the deep melancholy that had fallen upon the
travellers after the sudden shock of bereavement, Geoffrey's thoughts
dwelt with a maddening iteration upon one absorbing theme.

They had left the poor village of bee-hive huts, near which their
comrade lay at rest under the great sycamore. They had travelled
slowly, ten miles in a day at most, uphill and downhill, by jungle and
swamp, too depressed for any strenuous effort, Geoffrey still weak
after his attack of fever, and harassed with rheumatic aches after his
night of reckless wandering in marsh and wilderness, in peril of being
devoured by the panthers that abound in that region. They were not more
than fifty miles from the great lake, and now they were delayed again
by the illness of some of their porters, and perhaps also by their own
listlessness--the hopeless inertia that follows a great sorrow, a state
of mind in which it seems not worth while to make any effort.

They had lost their captain and guide; but they had their plans all
laid down--plans discussed again and again during the rains at Ujiji.
After a good deal of talk about going south to Nyassa, and back to the
east coast by the Zambesi-Shire route, they had finally decided on
following Trivier's route to Stanley Pool, and there to wait for the
steamer. The idea of crossing the great continent from east to west
pleased the younger travellers better than that notion of doubling back
to the more civilized region, the Arcadia of Nyassaland, a place of
Christian missions, and flocks, and herds, and prosperous homesteads,
and frequent steamers.

But now life in the desert had lost its savour, and Allan and Geoffrey
looked over their rough sketch-maps dully, and wished that the journey
were done.

"Wouldn't it be better to turn back and take the easiest route, by
Nyassa and the Shire?" Allan asked despondently.

"No, no; we must see the Congo. What should we do if we went back
to England? Have either you or I anything that calls us back to
civilization and its deadly monotony?" Geoffrey asked, watching his
companion's face with eager eyes.

"No, there is very little. My mother would be glad to see me back
again. It seems hard to desert her now she is left alone. And Mrs.
Wornock--her life is just as solitary--she must long for your return."

"Oh, she is accustomed to my rambling propensities. Yes, Lady Emily
would be glad, no doubt; and my mother would be glad; but at our age
men don't go back to their mothers. If you have no one else to think
about--if there is no other attraction?"

"You know there is no one else," Allan answered with a sigh.

The Amati was not silent in those dreary evenings, amidst the smoke
of the fire that rose up towards the rough roof of the hut, where
the lizards disported themselves among the rafters and rejoiced in
the warmth. The voice of the fiddle was as lugubrious as the wailings
of the native women for their dead. Funeral marches; Beethoven,
Chopin, Berlioz, all that music knows of sadness and lamentation, were
Geoffrey's themes in that solitude of two. The music itself had an
unearthly sound; and the face of the player, sharpened and wasted by
illness and by grief, had an unearthly look as the firelight flashed
upon it, or the shadows darkened it.

While those lonely days wore on, Allan began to have a curious feeling
about his companion, the consciousness of a gulf that was gradually
widening between them; a something sinister, indefinite, indescribable.
It would be too much to say that he felt he was with an enemy; but he
felt that he was in the presence of the unknown.

He woke one night, turning wearily on his Arab bed--the mat spread on
the ground, which use had taught him almost to like. He woke, and
saw Geoffrey sitting up on his mat on the other side of the hut, his
back against the wall, his eyes looking straight at Allan with an
inscrutable expression. Was it dislike or was it fear that looked out
of those widely opened eyes? Why fear?

"What's the matter?" Allan asked quickly. "Have you just awakened from
a bad dream?"

"No. Life is my bad dream; and there is no awakening from that. There
is only the change to dreamless sleep."

"What were you thinking about, then?"

"Life and death, and love and hate, and all things sad and strange
and cruel. Do you remember Livingstone's description of a Bechuana
chieftain's burial? His people dig a grave in his cattle-pen, and bury
him there; and then they drive the cattle round and over the spot till
every trace of the newly filled-in grave is obliterated. We are not as
candid as the Bechuana men. We put up a statue of our great man--or,
at least, we talk about a statue; but in six months he is as much
forgotten as if the cattle had pranced and trampled over his body."

"Primrose Day belies your cynicism."

"Primrose Day! A fashion as much as the November bonfire. Of all the
people who wear the Beaconsfield badge three-fourths could not tell you
who Beaconsfield was, or how much or how little he did for England."

"Do you remember something else in Livingstone's book, how the
tribes who met him said, 'Give us sleep'? It was their prayer to the
wonder-worker. Give me sleep, Geoff. I'm dead beat."

"Why, we did nothing yesterday; a beggarly eight miles."

"Perhaps it was the thunderstorm that took it out of me."

"Well, sleep away. The tribes were right. There is no better gift.
Would it help you if I played a little, very softly? I have a devil
to-night which only music will cast out."

"Yes, play, but don't be too lugubrious. My heart is one great ache."

Without moving from his mat, Geoffrey stretched a thin hand towards
the fiddle-case that lay beside his pillow, opened it noiselessly and
took out the Amati; then, with his haggard eyes still fixed on the
reclining figure opposite him, he drew a long sobbing chord out of the
strings, and began a nocturne of Chopin's, delicatest melody played
with exquisite delicacy, the very music of sleep and dreams.

"I am talking to her," he murmured to himself softly; "across the great
continent, across the great sea, over burning desert and tropical
wilderness, my voice is calling to her. I am telling her the story of
my heart, as I used to tell her in the dear days at Discombe, the dear
unheeding days, when my bow talked to her half in sport, when I hardly
knew if the wild thrill that ran along my veins meant a lifelong love."

The music served as a lullaby for Allan, and it soothed Geoffrey, whose
brain had been over-charged with hideous fancies, as he sat up in his
bed, listening to the ticking of the watch that hung against the wall,
and looking at his slumbering companion.

Darkest thoughts, thoughts of what might happen if this throbbing brain
of his were to lose its balance. He had been thinking of the narrow
wall between reason and unreason, and of the madness that may come out
of one absorbing idea. Where did a passionate love like his end and
monomania begin? Was it well that they two should be alone together,
with only these black beasts of burden?

He thought of one of the men, a grinning good-natured-looking animal,
the best of their porters, of whom it was told that setting out on a
journey with one of his wives he arrived at his destination without
her. It might have been his honeymoon. He explained that wild beasts
had eaten the lady; but it was known afterwards that he had killed her
and chopped her up on the way. Anger, jealousy, convenience? Who knows?
The man was a good servant, and nobody cared about this episode in his
career.

Was murder so easy, then? Easy to do, easy to forget?

A great horror came over him at thought of the deeds that had been done
in the world by men of natures like his own; by despairing lovers,
by jealous husbands, by men over whose ill-balanced minds one idea
obtained the mastery. And, under the dominion of such ghastly fancies,
he looked forward to the journey they two were to make, a journey
that, all told, was likely to last the greater part of a year. Alone
together, seeing each other's faces day after day, each thinking the
same thoughts, and not daring to speak those thoughts; each with fonder
and more passionate yearning as the time drew nearer when they should
meet the woman they loved; each knowing that happiness for one must
mean misery for the other. Friends in outward seeming, rivals and foes
at heart, they were to go on journeying side by side, day after day,
lying down beside the same fire night after night, waking in the
darkness to hear each other's breathing, and to know that a loaded
rifle lay within reach of their hands, and that a bullet would end all
their difficulties.

It was horrible.

"I was an idiot to undertake the impossible, to believe that I could be
happy and at ease with this man. If I were to go home alone, she would
have me," he told himself. "It was only for Allan's sake she hung back.
So tender, so over-scrupulous, lest she should pain the lover she had
jilted."

If he were to go home alone! Was not that possible without the
suggestion of darkest iniquity? If he could go home, and gain, say half
a year, before his rival reappeared upon the scene, would not that
half-year suffice for the winning of his bride?

"If she loved me as I think she loved me, and if she is as noble of
nature as I believe her to be, two years of severance will have tried
and strengthened her love. She will love me all the dearer for my
wanderings. And if Allan is not there to remind her of his wrongs, to
appeal to her too-scrupulous conscience, I shall win her."

To go back alone, to divide their resources, to divide their followers,
and each to set out on his own way. Useless such a parting as that; for
Allan might be the first to tread on English soil, the first to clasp
Suzette's hands in the gladness of friends who meet after long absence.

"If he were to be the first, she might deceive herself in the joy of
seeing a familiar face, and think she loved him, and give him back her
promise in a fit of penitent affection. There are such nice shades in
love. She must have had a certain fondness for him. It might revive
were I not there--revive and seem enough for happiness. I must be
first! I must be first, and alone in the field."

He hated himself for the restless impatience which had made him join
fortunes with Allan. What had he to do with the rejected lover, he who
knew that he was loved?

They crept slowly on. Allan was ailing, and unable to stand the fatigue
of a long march through a close and difficult country. That week of
watching beside Patrington's sick-bed, and the agony of losing that
kindly comrade, had shattered his nerves and reduced his physical
strength almost as much as an actual illness could have reduced him.
He felt the depressing influence of the climate as the days grew more
sultry and the thunderstorms more frequent. All the spirit and all
the pleasure seemed to have vanished out of the expedition since the
digging of that grave under the sycamore.

Their day's journey dwindled and their halts grew longer. At the
rate they were now travelling it would take them a year to reach the
Falls. They had left Ujiji more than a month, and they were still a
long way to the east of Kassongo, the busy centre of Arab commerce and
population, where they could make any purchases they wanted, refit
for the rest of their journey, or, perhaps, make a contract with the
mighty Tippoo, who would provide them with men and food till the end
of the land journey for a lump sum. While Patrington lived they had
looked forward to the halt at Kassongo with keen interest; but now zest
and pleasurable curiosity were gone, and a dull lassitude weighed like
an actual burden upon both travellers. Both were alike spiritless; and
even Geoffrey's raids in quest of meat were neither so frequent nor so
far afield as they had been, and his men began to lose something of
their admiration for him. He was growing over-fond of that kri-kri of
his, over-fond of sitting at the door of his tent talking with that
curious, tricksy spirit, now drawing forth sobbing cries like funeral
dirges, now with frisking, flickering touch that danced and flashed
across the strings, with hand as rapid as light, with fingers that
flew, and eyes that flashed fire.

These wild dances were grasshoppers, he told them; and when he began
the wailing music that thrilled and pained them, his Makololos would
lie down at his feet and entreat him to change it to a grasshopper.

"We hate him when he cries," they said of the fiddle. "We love him when
he leaps and dances."

"And you would follow him and me anywhere across the land?" Geoffrey
asked, laughing down at the brown faces.

"Anywhere, if you promise us your guns at the end of the journey."

Two days later Allan succumbed to the feeling of prostration which
had been growing upon him during the last four or five stages of the
journey, and confessed himself unable to leave the native hut in which
they had camped at sunset.

It was in the freshness of dawn. The mists were creeping off the manioc
fields, and the wide stretches of tropical foliage beyond the patch of
rude cultivation. The brown figures were moving about in the pearly
light, women fetching water, children sprawling on the rich red earth,
their plump shining bodies only a little browner than the soil, happy
in their nakedness and dirt, placid and unashamed. The porters were
shouldering their loads, the lean, long-legged mongrels were yelping,
the frogs croaking their morning hymn to the sun.

"I'm afraid it's hopeless," Allan faltered, as he leant against one
of the rough supports of the verandah, wiping the moisture from his
forehead. "I'm dead beat. I can't go on unless you carry me in a
litter; and that's hardly worth while with our small following. You'd
better go on to Kassongo, Geoff, and leave me here till I'm able to
follow. If I don't turn up within a few days of your arrival, you can
get the chief to send some of his men to fetch me, with a donkey, if
there's one to be had. The villagers will take care of me in the mean
time. It isn't fever, you see," holding out his cold moist hand to his
friend. "It's not the mukunguru this time. I'm just dead beat, that's
all. There's no good fighting against hard fact, Geoff. _Mambu kwa
mungu_--it is God's trouble! One must submit to the inevitable."

Geoffrey looked at him curiously.

"Leave you to these savages in the Manyema country? No; that would
be a beastly thing to do," he said, with his cynical laugh. "I'm not
quite bad enough for that, Allan. How do I know they wouldn't eat
you? They've been civil enough so far, but I believe it's because of
my fiddle. They take me for a medicine-man, and my little Amati for
a capricious devil that can give them toko if they don't act on the
square. I won't leave you--like that; but I'll tell you what I'll do.
We'll divide forces for a bit. I'll leave you the larger party, and I
and my Makololos will go and look for big game."

Allan crept into the hut and sank down upon his mat while his comrade
was talking. He had hardly strength to answer him. He lay there white
and dumb, while Geoffrey spread the blanket over him, and wiped his
forehead with a silk handkerchief.

"Do what you like, Geoff," he murmured, "and do the best for yourself.
I don't want to spoil your sport."

He turned his body towards the wall, with an obvious effort, as if his
limbs were made of lead, and presently sank into a sleep which seemed
almost stupor.

"My God!" muttered Geoffrey, looking down at him, "is he going to die?
Can death come like that, as if in answer to a wicked wish?"

He went out and talked to the men, giving them stringent orders as to
what they were to do for the sick Musungu. He was going on a shooting
expedition with only four men--the rest, a round dozen, would remain
with the other Musungu, and nurse him, and take care of him, and obey
his orders when he was well enough to move; and, above all, not attempt
robbery or desertion, as they--the two Musungus--had letters from the
Sultan of Zanzibar to Nzigue, the Arab chief at Kassongo, and any evil
treatment would be bitterly expiated. "You know how small account the
white Arabs make of a black man's life," he concluded.

Yes, they knew.

He went back to the hut, and to the store of quinine and other drugs,
and he prepared such doses as it would be well for Allan to take at
fixed periods; and then he instructed the leader of the porters--a
Zanzibari, who had been with Burton, and afterwards with Stanley--as
to the treatment of the sick man. He was to do this, and this, once,
twice, thrice, between sunrise and sundown, the division of the day by
hours not having yet been revealed to these primitive minds.

"Say, how often are you hungry in the day, and how often do you eat?"

"Three times."

"Then every time you are hungry, and before you sit down to eat, you
will give the Musungu his medicine--one of the powders, as I put them
ready for you--mixed with water, as he has often given them to you. And
if you forget, or don't care to give him his medicine, evil will come
to you--for I shall put a spell upon the door, and wicked spirits will
hurt you if you don't obey me."

After this he called his Makololos and one of the Wanyamwesis, for
whom he had shown a liking, and who worshipped him with a slavish
subjugation of all personal will-power. He told them he was going on
a hunting expedition that might last many days--and they must take
baggage enough to assure themselves against being left to starve upon
the way. He counted the bales of cloth, the bags of beads, brass-headed
nails, brass wire; and he set apart about a fourth of the whole stock;
and with these stores he loaded his men. And so in the full blaze of
the morning sun this little company went out into the jungle, turning
their faces eastward, towards the mountains that rose between them and
the sea of Ujiji.




                             CHAPTER VIII.

                     WHERE THE BURDEN IS HEAVIEST.


The deep-toned organ pealed through the empty manor-house in the gloom
of a rainy summer afternoon. Not once in the long dull day had the sun
looked through the low, dull sky; and Mrs. Wornock, always peculiarly
sensible of every change in the atmosphere, felt that life was just a
little sadder and emptier than it had been for her in all the long slow
years of a lonely widowhood.

What had she to live for? The brief romance of her girlhood was all
she had ever known of the love which for most women means a life
history. For her it had been only the beginning of a chapter--ending in
self-sacrifice, as blind and piteously faithful to duty as Abraham's
obedience to the Divine command. And after all those years of fond
fidelity to a memory, she had seen her lover again--once for a few
minutes--by stealth, through an open window, undreamt of by him.

What had she to live for? A son whose restless spirit would not allow
him to be her companion and friend--in whose feverish life she was of
so little value that he could leave her for a pilgrimage to Central
Africa, with a brief good-bye; as if it were a small thing for mother
and son to live with half the world between them. It seemed to her
sometimes, brooding upon the past year, that Allan Carew had cared for
her more, was more in sympathy with her, than that very son--as if some
hereditary sentiment, some mystic link with the father who had loved
her, brought the son nearer to her heart.

And now they were both so distant that she thought of them almost as
mournfully as if they were dead. Dark clouds of trouble hung over their
forms, as she tried to see them in that far-off world, ever impending
dangers which haunted her in her dreams, until the words of St. Paul
burnt themselves into her brain, and she would awake from some dream of
horror, hearing her own voice, with that awful sound of the dreamer's
voice, repeating--

"In journeyings ... in perils of waters, in perils of robbers ... in
perils by the heathen ... in perils in the wilderness, in perils in the
sea ... in weariness and painfulness ... in hunger and thirst."

       *       *       *       *       *

Suzette had been absent for nearly a year, and Suzette's absence had
increased the sense of loss and deepened the gloom of the rambling old
house, and those picturesque gardens, where the girl's bright face and
graceful figure flitting in and out from arch to arch, between the
walls of ilex or yew, had been a living gladness that seemed only a
natural accompaniment to spring flowers, sulphur butterflies, and the
deepening purple of the beeches, in the joyous awakening of the year.
But Suzette had returned from her travels nearly a year since, and
had taken up the thread of life again, and with it her old friendship
for Mrs. Wornock, feeling herself secure from the risk of all violent
emotions in her friend's house, now that Geoffrey was a good many
thousand miles away.

Suzette had brought comfort to the lonely life. Together she and Mrs.
Wornock had read books of African travel, explored maps, and followed
the route of the travellers. General Vincent was a fellow of the
Geographical Society, and the monthly report issued by that society
kept his daughter informed of the latest progress in the history of
exploration, while the Society's library was at her disposal for
books of travel. It seemed to Suzette in that quiet year after her
home-coming that she read nothing but African books, and began almost
to think in the Swahili language--picking up words in every chapter,
till they became as familiar as French phrases in a society novel.

She was quieter than of old, people said: less interested in golf:
caring nothing for a church bazaar which was the one absorbing topic
in that particular summer; wrapped up in her musical studies, and
practising a great deal too much, as officious friends informed General
Vincent.

"Suzette must do what she likes," he said; "she has always been my
master."

But egged on by the same officious friends, he bought his daughter a
horse, and insisted on her riding with him, and they went for long
rides over the downs, and sometimes were lucky enough to fall in with
the hawks, and see a few innocent rooks slaughtered high up in the blue
of an April sky.

He shrank from questioning his daughter about the young men who
were gone. She had been very ill--languid, and white, and wan, and
spiritless--when he carried her off to Germany, and had required a
good deal of patching up before she became anything like the happy,
active, high-spirited Suzette of the Indian hills--who had charmed
everybody, old and young, by her bright prettiness and joy in life.
German waters, German woods and hills, followed by a winter on the
Riviera, and a long holiday by the Italian lakes, had set her up again;
and General Vincent was content to wait till time should unravel the
mystery of a maiden's heart.

"Those young men will come back," he told his sister; "and then I
shouldn't wonder if Geoffrey were to renew his offer--and to be
accepted; for since she gave Allan the sack without any provocation, I
conclude it's Geoffrey she cares for."

"I wash my hands of her and her love affairs," Mrs. Mornington retorted
waspishly. "She might have married Allan--a young man who adored
her--and a very good match. _Very_ good now his father's gone. She
jilted Allan--one would suppose solely because she was in love with
Geoffrey. Oh dear no! She refuses Geoffrey, and sends two excellent
young men--each an only son, with a stake in the country--to bake
themselves black in a wilderness where they will very likely be eaten
after they are baked. I have no patience with her."

"Don't be cross, Molly. There's no use worrying about her lovers. Thank
God she has recovered her health, and is my own sweet little girl
still."

"Sweet little fiddlestick, coquette, weathercock, jilt! That's what she
is."

"Take my word for it. Wornock will come back again when he's tired of
Africa--and propose again."

"Not if he has a grain of sense. Young men don't come back to girls who
treat them badly."

The General took things easily. He had his daughter, and his daughter
would be comfortably provided for when his day was done. He was more
than content with the present arrangement of things; and he felt that
Providence had been very good to him.

       *       *       *       *       *

Suzette came in upon Mrs. Wornock's loneliness that rainy afternoon
like a sudden burst of sunlight; so fresh, after her walk through the
rain, so daintily neat in the pretty blue-and-white pongee frock which
her waterproof cloak had preserved from all harm.

"I did not think you would come to-day, dear!"

"Did you think the rain would frighten me? The walk was lovely in spite
of a persistent drizzle, the woods are so fresh and sweet, and every
little insignificant wild-flower sparkles like a jewel. I have a tiny
bit of news for you."

"Not bad news?"

"No, I hope not. Lady Emily is at Beechhurst. She came late last night.
The cook at the Vicarage saw her arrive, and Bessie Edgefield told me
this morning. Do you think it means that Allan is expected home?"

"And Geoffrey with him? Would to God it meant that! I am getting very
weak Suzette, weary to death. My anxiety is like a wearing, physical
pain. It is so long since we have heard anything of them."

"Yes, it seems very long!" Suzette murmured, soothingly.

"It _is_ very long--quite four months since I had Geoffrey's last
letter!"

"Do you think it is really as much as that?"

"I know it is--and there is the post-mark to convince you," glancing at
the secretaire where she kept those treasured letters. "Geoffrey seldom
dates a letter. I have read this last one again and again and again.
They were at Ujiji--the place seemed almost civilized, as he described
it; but they were to cross the lake later on--the great lake, like an
inland sea--to cross in an open boat. How do I know that they were not
drowned in that crossing? He told me the natives were afraid of going
on the lake in a storm. And he is so foolhardy, so careless of himself!
He may have over-persuaded them----"

"Hark!" cried Suzette, "a visitor! What a day for callers to choose!
They must really wish to find you at home."

There was the usual delay caused by the leisurely stroll of a footman
from the servants' quarters to the hall-door, and then the door of the
music-room was opened, and the leisurely butler announced Lady Emily
Carew.

Lady Emily shook hands with Mrs. Wornock, with a clinging, almost
affectionate air, and allowed herself to be led to an easy-chair
near the hearth where some logs were burning, to give a semblance of
cheerfulness amidst the prevailing grey of the outside world. There
was a marked contrast in the lady's greeting of Suzette, to whom she
vouchsafed no handshake, only the most formal salutation. The mother of
an only son, whom she deems perfection, cannot easily forgive the girl
who goes near to breaking his heart.

"I was so surprised to hear you were at Beechhurst," said Mrs. Wornock.
"I hope you bring good news--that the travellers are nearing home."

Lady Emily could hardly answer for her tears.

"Indeed, no," she said piteously. "My news is very bad; I could
not rest at home. I thought you might have heard lately from Mr.
Wornock----"

"My latest letter is four months old."

"Ah, then you can tell me nothing. Allan has written later. He wrote
the night before they left Ujiji----"

"But the news--the bad news? What was it?"

"Very, very bad. They are alone now--our sons--alone among savages--in
an unknown country--friendless, helpless. What is to become of them?"

"But Mr. Patrington--surely he has not deserted them?"

"No, no, poor fellow; he would never have deserted them. He is dead.
He died of fever. The news of his death was cabled to his brother by
Allan. The message came from Zanzibar; but he died on his way from
the Lake to Kassongo. That was Allan's message. Died of fever on the
journey to Kassongo. Allan's last letter was from Ujiji. They were
all well when he wrote, and in good spirits, looking forward to the
journey down the Congo; and now their leader is dead, the man who knew
the country; and they are alone, helpless, and ignorant."

"They are men," Suzette flashed out indignantly, her eyes sparkling
with tears. "They will fight their way through difficulties like men
of courage and resource. I don't think you need be frightened, Mrs.
Wornock; nor you, Lady Emily."

"It is very good of you to console me, Miss Vincent," replied Allan's
mother; "but if you had known your mind a little better, my son need
never have gone to Africa."

"I am sorry you should think me so much to blame; but what would you
have thought of me if I had not told Allan the truth?"

"Well, you have sent him away--and he is dead, perhaps--dead in the
wilderness--of fever, like poor Cecil Patrington."

Suzette bowed her head, and was silent under this reproof. She could
feel for the mother, and was content to bear unmerited blame. She went
to the organ, and occupied herself in putting away the scattered
sheets of music, with that deft neatness which, in her case, was an
instinct.

The two mothers sat side by side, and talked, and wept together. They
could but speculate upon the condition and the whereabouts of the
wanderers. Those few words from Zanzibar told them so little. Cecil
Patrington's elder brother had written to Lady Emily enclosing a copy
of the message, with a polite hope that her son would find his way
safely home. There was no passionate grief among his relations at home
for the wanderer who lay in his final halting-place under the great
sycamore. Long years of absence had weakened family ties; and the
head of the house of Patrington was a busy country squire, with an
increasing family and a diminishing rent-roll.

Suzette put on her hat and wished Mrs. Wornock good-bye. She would have
left with only a little bend of the head to Lady Emily; but that kindly
matron had repented herself of her harshness, and held out her hand
with a pathetic look which went straight to the girl's heart.

"Forgive me for what I said just now," she pleaded. "I am almost beside
myself with anxiety. You were not to blame. Truth is always the best.
But my poor Allan was so fond of you, and you and he might have been so
happy--if you had only loved him."

"I did love him--once," faltered Suzette. "But later it seemed as if my
love were not enough--not enough for a lifetime."

"Ah, but there was some one else--we know, Mrs. Wornock--some one who
is like my poor son, but cleverer, handsomer, more fascinating. It was
Mr. Wornock's return that changed you----"

"No, no, no!" Suzette protested eagerly. "If it had been, I might have
acted differently. Please don't talk about me and my folly--not to know
myself or my own heart. They are both away. God grant they are well and
happy, and enjoying the beauty and the strangeness of that wonderful
country. Why should they not be safe and happy there? Think how many
years Mr. Patrington had spent in Africa before the end came. Why
should they not be as safe as Cameron, Stanley, Trivier?"

Her heart sank even as she argued in this consoling strain, remembering
how with Stanley, with Cameron, with Trivier there was one left behind.
But here, perhaps, the Fates were already appeased. One had fallen by
the way. The sacrifice had been made to the cruel goddess of the dark
land.

"Will you come to Beechhurst with me, Suzette?" pleaded Allan's mother.
"It would be so kind if you would come and stay with me till to-morrow
morning. I shall leave by the first train to-morrow. I want to be at
home again, to be there when Allan's letter comes. There must be a
letter soon. It is so lonely at Beechhurst. I think General Vincent
could spare you for just one night?"

Suzette proposed that Lady Emily should dine at Marsh House; but she
seemed to take a morbid pleasure in her son's house in spite of its
loneliness, so Suzette drove back to Matcham with her, took her to tea
with the General, and obtained his permission to dine and sleep at
Beechhurst, and did all that could be done by unobtrusive kindness and
attention to console and cheer Allan's mother.




                              CHAPTER IX.

                            ALL IN HONOUR.


It was nearly a month after Lady Emily's appearance at Discombe, and
there had been no letter from Geoffrey. Every day had increased Mrs.
Wornock's anxiety, and in the face of an ever-growing fear there had
been a tacit avoidance of all mention of the absent son, both on the
part of his mother and of Suzette. They had talked of music, of the
gardens, of the poor, and of the latest developments in that science of
the supernatural in which Mrs. Wornock's interest had never abated, and
in which her faith had never been entirely shaken.

Once, in the midst of discussing the last number of the _Psychical
Magazine_ with Suzette--a sad sceptic--she said quietly--

"Whatever has happened, I know he is not dead. I must have seen him. I
must have known. There would have been some sign."

Suzette was silent. Not for worlds would she have dashed a faith which
buoyed up the fainting spirit. Yet it needed but some dreadful dream,
she reflected, a dead face seen amidst the clouds of sleep, to change
this blind confidence into despair.

It was in the evening following this conversation that Suzette was
sitting at her piano alone in her own drawing-room, playing from
memory, and losing herself in the web of a Hungarian nocturne, which
was to her like thinking in music--the composer's learned sequences and
changes of key seeming only a vague expression of her own sadness. Her
father was dining out--a man's dinner--a dissipation he rarely allowed
himself; and Suzette was relieved from her evening task of playing
chess, reading aloud, or listening to tiger-stories, which had lost
none of their interest from familiarity, the fondly loved father being
the hero of every adventure.

She was glad to be alone to-night, for her heart was full of dread of
the news which the next African letter might bring. She had tried to
make light of the leader's death; yet she, too, thought with a shudder
of the two young men alone, inexperienced, and one of them, at least,
reckless and daring even to folly.

The wailing Hungarian reverie with its minor modulations seemed to
shape itself into a dream of Africa, the endless jungle, the vastness
of swamp and river, the beauty and the terror of gigantic waterfalls,
huge walls of water, a river leaping over a precipice into a gulf of
darkness and snow-white foam. The scenes of which she had been reading
lately crowded into her mind, and filled it with aching fears.

"Suzette!"

A voice called to her softly from the open window. She looked up,
trembling and cold with an awful fear. His voice--Geoffrey's--a
spectral voice; the voice of a ghost calling to her, the unbeliever,
from the other side of the world--calling in death, or after death, to
the woman the living man had loved.

She rose, with a faint scream, and rushed to the window, and was
clasped in the living Geoffrey's arms, on the threshold, between the
garden and the room. Had she flung herself into his arms in her fear
and great surprise? or had he seized her as she ran to him? She could
not tell. She knew only that she was sobbing on his breast, clasped in
two gaunt arms, which held her as in a grasp of iron.

"Geoffrey, Geoffrey! Alive and well! What delight for your poor mother!
Was she not wild with happiness?" she asked, when he released her,
after a shower of kisses upon forehead and lips, which she pretended to
ignore.

She could not begin quarrelling with him in these first moments of
delighted surprise.

He followed her into the room, and she saw his face in the light of the
lamp on the piano--worn, wan, haggard, wasted, but with eyes that were
full of fire and gladness.

"Suzette, Suzette!" he cried, clasping her hands, and trying to draw
her to his heart again, "it was worth a journey over half the world to
find you! So sweet, so fair! All that my dreams have shown me, night
after night, night after night! Ah, love, we have never been parted.
Your image has never left me."

"Africa has done you no good. You are as full of wild nonsense as
ever," she said, trying to take the situation lightly, yet trembling
with emotion, her heart beating loud and fast, her eyes hardly daring
to meet the eyes that dwelt upon her face so fondly. "Tell me about
your mother. Was she not surprised--happy?"

"I hope she will be a little glad. I haven't seen her yet."

"Not seen--your mother?"

"No, child. A man can't have two lode-stars. I came straight from
Zanzibar to this house. I came home to _you_, Suzette."

"But you will go to the Manor directly? Your poor mother has been so
miserable about you. Don't lose a minute in making her happy."

"Lose! These minutes are gold; the most precious minutes of my life.
Oh, Suzette, how cruel you were! Why did you drive me from you?"

She was in his arms again, held closely in those wasted arms, caught in
the coils of that passionate love, she scarcely knew how. He was taking
everything for granted; and she knew not how to resist him. She had no
argument to offer against that triumphant love.

"Cruel, cruel, cruel Suzette! Two years of exile--two wasted lonely
years--years of fond longing and looking back! Why did you send me
away? No, I won't ask. It was all in honour, all in honour. My dearest
is made up of honourable scruples, and delicate sympathies, which this
rough nature of mine can't understand. But you loved me, Suzette.
You loved me from the first, as I loved you. Our hearts went out to
meet each other over the bridge of my violin--flew out to each other
in a burst of melody. And we will go on loving each other till the
last breath--the last faint glimmer of life's brief candle. Ah, love,
forgive me if I rave. I am beside myself with joy."

"I think you are a little out of your mind," she faltered.

She let him rave. She accepted the situation. Ah, surely, surely it was
this man she loved. It was this eager spirit which had passed like a
breath of fire between her and Allan; this masterful nature which had
possessed itself of her heart, as of a mere chattel that must needs
be the prize of the strongest. She submitted to the tyranny of a love
which would not accept defeat; and presently they sat down side by side
in the soft lamplight, close to the piano which she loved only a little
less than if it were human. They sat down side by side, his arm still
round the slim waist, plighted lovers.

"Poor Allan!" she sighed, with a remorseful pang. "Has he gone down to
Suffolk?"

"To Suffolk? He is on the Congo--past Stanley Falls, I hope, by this
time."

"On the Congo! You have left him! Quite alone! Oh, Geoffrey, how could
you?"

"Why not? He is safe enough. He knows the country as well as I. I left
him near Kassongo, where he could get as big a train and as many stores
as he wanted; though we have done nowadays with long trains, armies of
porters, and a mountainous load of provisions."

"What will Lady Emily say? She will be dreadfully unhappy. I could not
have believed you and Allan would part company--after Mr. Patrington's
death."

"Why not? We were both strangers in the land. He knows how to take care
of himself as well as I do."

"But two men--companions and friends--surely they would be safer than
one Englishman travelling alone?" said Suzette, deeply distressed at
the thought of what Allan's mother would suffer when she knew that her
son's comrade had left him.

"Do you think two men are safer from fever, poisoned arrows, the
bursting of a gun, the swamping of a canoe? My dearest, Allan is just
as safe alone as he was when he was one of three. He had learnt a good
deal about the country, and he knew how to manage the natives, and he
had stores and ammunition, and the means of getting plenty more. Don't
let me see that sweet face clouded. Ah, my love, my love, I shall never
forget your welcoming smile--the light upon your face as you ran to the
window. I had always believed in your love--always--even when you were
cruellest; but to-night I know--I know that I am the chosen one."

He let his head sink on her shoulder, and nestled against her, like
a child at rest near his mother's heart. How could she resist a love
so fervent, so resolute--a spirit like Satan's--not to be changed by
place or time. It is the lover who will not be denied--the selfish,
impetuous, unscrupulous lover who has always the better chance; and in
a case like this it was a foregone conclusion that he who came back
first would be the winner. The first strong appeal to the heart that
had been tried by absence and anxiety, the first returning wave of
romantic love. It was something more than a lover's return. It was the
awakening of love from a long sleep that had seemed dull and grey and
hopeless as death.

"I thought you would never come back," sighed Suzette, resigning
herself to the tyranny of the conqueror, content at last to be taken
by a _coup de main_. "I was afraid you and Allan would be left in
that dreadful country. And I had to make believe to think you as safe
as if you were in the next parish. I had to be cheerful and full of
hopefulness, for your mother's sake. Your poor mother," starting up
suddenly. "Oh, Geoffrey, how cruel that we should be sitting here while
she is left in ignorance of your return; and she has suffered an agony
of fear since she heard of poor Mr. Patrington's death. It is shameful!
You must go to her this instant."

"Must I, my queen and mistress?"

"This instant. It will be a shock to her--even in the joy of your
return--to see how thin and haggard you have grown. What suffering you
must have gone through!"

"Only one kind of suffering--only one malady, Suzette. I was sick
for love of you. Love made me do forced marches; love kept me awake
of nights. Impatience was the fever that burnt in my blood--love and
longing for you. Yes, yes, I am going," as she put her hand through his
arm and led him to the window. "I will be at my mother's feet in half
an hour, kneeling to ask for her blessing on my betrothal. There will
be double joy for her, Suzette, in my home-coming and my happiness. I
left her a restless, unquiet spirit. I go back to her tamed and happy."

"Yes, yes, only go! Remember that every minute of her life of late has
been a minute of anxiety. And she loves you so devotedly, Geoffrey. She
has only you to love."

"I am going; but not till you have told me how soon, Suzette."

"How soon--what?"

"Our marriage."

"Geoffrey, how absurd of you to talk about that, when I hardly know
that we are engaged."

"I know it. We are bound and plighted as never lovers were, to my
knowledge, since Romeo and Juliet. How long did Romeo wait, Suzette?
Twenty-four hours, I think. I shall have to wait longer--for a special
licence."

"Geoffrey, unless you hurry away to the Manor this instant, I will
never speak civilly to you again."

"Why, what a fury my love can be! What an exquisite termagant! Yes, I
will wait for the licence. Come to the gate with me, Suzette."

They went through the dusky garden to the old-fashioned five-barred
gate which opened on to a circular drive. The night was cool and grey,
and the white bloom of a catalpa tree gleamed ghost-like among the dark
masses of the shrubbery. A bat wheeled across the greyness in front of
the lovers, as they kissed and parted.

"Until I can get the licence," he repeated, with his happy laugh.
"We'll wait for nothing else."

"You will have to wait for me," she answered, tossing up her head, and
running away, a swift white figure, vanishing in the bend of the drive
as he stood watching her.

"Thank God!" he ejaculated. "The reward is worth all that has gone
before."




                              CHAPTER X.

                          "AM I HIS KEEPER?"


Before the sun had gone down upon the second day after Geoffrey's
return, his engagement to Miss Vincent had become known to almost
every member of Matcham society who had any right to be posted in the
proceedings of the _élite_.

Mrs. Mornington, dropping in at her brother's house after breakfast,
and before her daily excursion to the village, was transformed into
a statue of surprise on the very threshold of the hall at hearing
fiddling in her brother's drawing-room, unmistakably fiddling of a
superior order; a fiddle whose grandiose chords rose loud and strong
above the rippling notes of a piano--a quaint old melody of Porpora's,
in strongly marked common time--a fairy-like accompaniment of delicate
treble runs, light as a gauzy veil flung over the severe outlines of a
bronze statue.

"She must be having accompanying lessons," thought Mrs. Mornington.
"Some fiddler from Salisbury, I suppose."

She marched into the drawing-room with the privileged unceremoniousness
of an aunt, and found Geoffrey Wornock standing beside the piano, at
which Suzette was sitting fresh as a rose, in a pale green frock, that
looked like the calix of a living flower.

"Home!" cried Mrs. Mornington, with a step backward, and again becoming
statuesque; "and I have been picturing you as eaten by tigers, or
tomahawked by savages!"

"The African tiger is only a panther, and there are no tomahawks,"
answered Geoffrey, laying down his bow, and going across the room to
shake hands with Mrs. Mornington, the Amati still under his chin.

"And Allan? Where is Allan?"

"I left him on his way to the Congo."

"You left him!--came back without him?"

"Yes. He wanted to extend his travels--to cross Africa. I was not so
ambitious. I only wanted to come home."

His smile, as he turned to look at Suzette, told the astute matron all
she desired to know.

"So," she exclaimed, "is the weathercock nailed to the vane at last?"

"The ship which has been tossing so long upon a sunless sea, is safe in
her haven," answered Geoffrey.

Mrs. Mornington's keen perceptions took a swift review of the position.
A much better match than poor Allan! Discombe, with revenues that had
accumulated at compound interest during a long minority, must be better
than Beechhurst, a mere villa, and an estate in Suffolk of which Mrs.
Mornington knew very little except that it was hedged in and its glory
overshadowed by the lands of a Most Noble and a Right Honourable or
two. Discombe! The Squire of Discombe was a personage in that little
world of Matcham; and the world of Matcham was all on the earthward
side of the universe for which Miss Mornington cared.

Suzette's shilly-shallying little ways had answered admirably, it
seemed, after all. How wisely Providence orders things, if we will only
fold our hand and wait.

"Don't let me interrupt your musical studies, young people," exclaimed
the good lady. "I only came to know if Suzette was going to the
golf-ground."

"Of course I am going, auntie, if you are walking that way and want
company."

It was the kind of day on which only hat and gloves are needed for
outdoor toilette; and Suzette's neat little hat was ready for her in
the hall. They all three went off to the links together, along the
dusty road and through the busy little village--busy just for one
morning hour--and to the common beyond, the long stretch of common
that skirted the high-road, and which everybody declared to have been
created on purpose for golf.

Mrs. Mornington talked about Allan nearly all the way--her regret that
he had extended his travels, regret felt mostly on his mother's account.

"I think he always meant to cross from sea to sea," Geoffrey answered
carelessly. "His mother ought to have been prepared for that. He read
Trivier's book, and that inspired him. And really crossing Africa means
very little nowadays. One's people at home needn't worry about it."

"Mr. Patrington did not find it so easy."

"Poor Patrington! No; he was unlucky. There is no reckoning with fever.
That is the worst enemy."

"Did you bring home a letter for Lady Emily?"

"No. Allan wrote from Ujiji. That letter would reach England much
quicker than I could."

"But you will go to see her, I dare say. No doubt it would be a comfort
to her to talk to you about her son--to hear all those details which
letters so seldom give."

"I will go if she ask me. Suzette has written to tell her of my return."

"She will ask you, I am sure. Or she may come to Beechhurst, as she
came only a month ago, in the hope of hearing of Allan's movements from
your letters to your mother."

"I was never so good a correspondent, or so good a son, as Allan."

They were at the golf-ground by this time, and here Mrs. Mornington
left them; and meeting five of her particular friends on the way, told
them how a strange thing had happened, and that Geoffrey Wornock, who
had left England broken-hearted because Suzette had rejected him, had
come back suddenly from Africa, and had been accepted.

"He took her by storm, poor child! But, after all, I believe she always
preferred him to poor Allan."

       *       *       *       *       *

There seemed nothing wanting now to Mrs. Wornock's happiness. Her son
had returned, not to restlessness and impatience, not to weary again
of his beautiful home, but to settle down soberly with a wife he adored.

His mother was to live with him always. The Manor House was still
to be her home, the music-room her room, the organ hers. In all
things she was to be as she had been--plus the son she loved, and
the daughter-in-law she would have chosen for herself from all the
daughters of earth.

"If it were not that I am sorry for Allan, there would not be a cloud
in my sky," she told her son, on the second night after his return,
when he had quieted down a little from that fever of triumphant
gladness which had possessed him after his conquest of Suzette.

"Dear mother, there is no use in being sorry for Allan. We could not
both be winners. To be sorry for him is to grudge me my delight; and I
could easily come to believe that you are fonder of Allan than of me."

"Geoffrey!"

"Well, I'll never say so again if you'll only leave off lamenting about
Allan. He will have all the world before him when he comes back to
England. Somewhere, no doubt there are love and sympathy, and beauty
and youth waiting for him. When he knows that Suzette has made her
choice, he will accept the inevitable, and fall in love with somebody
else--not at Matcham."

There was the faintest touch of irritation in his reply. That incessant
reference to Allan began to jar upon his nerves. Wherever he went, he
had to answer the same questions--to explain how he wanted to come home
and Allan wanted to go further away; and how for that reason only they
had parted. He began to feel like Cain, and to sympathize with the
first murderer.

But the worst was still to come. In the midst of a sonata of De
Beriot's--long, brilliant, difficult--a _tour de force_ for Suzette,
whose fingers had not grappled with such music within the last two
years, the door of the music-room was opened, and Lady Emily Carew was
announced, just as upon that grey afternoon a month ago.

"Forgive me for descending upon you again in this way," she said
hurriedly to Mrs. Wornock, who came from her seat by the window to
receive the uninvited guest. "I couldn't rest after I received Miss
Vincent's letter."

Nothing could have been colder than the "Miss Vincent," except the
stately recognition of Suzette with which it was accompanied. "Mr.
Wornock"--turning to Geoffrey, without even noticing his mother's
outstretched hand--"why did you leave my son?"

"I thought Suzette had told you why we parted. He wished to go on. I
wanted to come home. Is there anything extraordinary in that?"

"Yes. When two men go to an uncivilized country, full of dangers and
difficulties, and when the third, their guide and leader, has been
snatched away--surely it is very strange that they should part; very
cruel of the one whose stronger will insisted upon parting."

"If you mean to imply that I had no right to come back to England
without your son, I can only answer that you are very unjust. If you
were a man, Lady Emily, I might be tempted to express my meaning in
stronger language."

"Oh, it is easy enough for you to answer me, if you can satisfy your
own conscience; if you can answer to yourself for leaving your friend
and comrade helpless and alone."

"Was he more helpless than I? We parted in the centre of Africa. If I
chose the easier and shorter route homeward, that route was just as
open to him as to me. It was his own choice to go down the Congo River.
No doubt his next letter, whenever it may reach you, will tell you all
you can want to know as to his reasons for taking that route. When I
offered myself as your son's companion, I accepted no apprenticeship. I
was tired of Africa; he wasn't. There was no compact between us. I was
under no bond to stay with him. He may choose to spend his life there,
as Cecil Patrington chose, practically. I wanted to come home."

"Yes, to be first; to steal my son's sweetheart!" said Lady Emily, pale
with anger, looking from Geoffrey to Suzette.

"Lady Emily, you are unreasonable."

"I am a mother, and I love my son. Till I see him, till I hear from
his own lips that you were not a traitor--that you did not abandon him
in danger or distress, for your own selfish ends; till then I shall
not cease to think of you as I think now. Your mother will, of course,
believe whatever you tell her; and Miss Vincent, no doubt, was easily
satisfied; but I am not to be put off so lightly--nor your conscience,
as your face tells me."

She was gone before any one could answer her. She waited for no
courtesy of leave-taking, for no servant to lead the way. Her own
resolute hand opened and shut the door, before Mrs. Wornock could
recover from the shock of her onslaught. Indeed, in those few moments,
Mrs. Wornock had only eyes or apprehension for one thing, and that was
Geoffrey's white face. Was it anger or remorse that made him so deadly
pale?

While his mother watched him wonderingly, filled with a growing fear,
his sweetheart was too deeply wounded by Lady Emily's scornful speech
to be conscious of anything but her own pain. She went back to her
place at the piano, and bent her head over a page of music, pretending
to study an intricate passage, but unable to read a single bar through
her thickly gathering tears.




                              CHAPTER XI.

                       A SHADOW ACROSS THE PATH.


No more was seen or heard of Lady Emily at Matcham. Except the one
fact that she had returned to Suffolk on the morning after her brief
appearance at the Manor, nothing more was known about that poor
lonely lady, whom adverse fate had cut adrift from all she loved.
At Beechhurst closed shutters told of the master's absence; and the
inquiries of the officious or the friendly elicited only the reply that
Mr. Carew was still travelling in Africa, and that no letters had been
received from him for a long time. He was in a country where there were
no post-offices, the housekeeper opined, but she believed her ladyship
heard from him occasionally.

Geoffrey's return, and the news of his engagement to Miss Vincent,
made a pleasant excitement in the village and neighbourhood. An early
marriage was talked about. Mr. Wornock had told the Vicar that he was
going to be married in a fortnight--had spoken as if he were sole
master of the situation.

"As if such a nice girl as Suzette would allow herself to be hustled
into marriage without time for a trousseau," persisted Bessie
Edgefield, who assured her friends that there would be no wedding that
year. "It may be in January," she said; "but it won't be before the New
Year."

Geoffrey had pleaded in vain. He had won his sweetheart's promise; but
his sweetheart was not to be treated in too masterful a fashion.

"God knows why we are waiting, or what we are waiting for," he said,
in one of those fits of nervous irritability, which even Suzette's
influence could not prevent. "Hasn't my probation been long enough?
Haven't I suffered enough? Haven't you kept me on the rack of
uncertainty long enough to satisfy your love of power? You are like all
women; you think of a lover as a surgeon thinks of a rabbit, too low
in the scale for his feelings to be considered--just good enough for
vivisection."

"Can't we be happy, Geoffrey? We have everything in the world that we
care for."

"I can never be happy till I am sure of you. I am always dreading the
moment in which you will tell me you have changed your mind."

"I have given you my promise. Isn't that enough?"

"No, it is not enough. You gave Allan your promise--and broke it."

She started up from her seat by the piano, and turned upon him
indignantly.

"If you are capable of saying such things as that, we had better bid
each other good-bye at once," she said. "I won't submit to be reminded
of my wrong-doing by you, who are the sole cause of it. If I had
never seen you, I should be Allan's wife this day. You came between
us; you tempted me away from him; and now you tell me I am fickle
and untrustworthy. I begin to think I have made a worse mistake in
promising to be your wife than I made when I engaged myself to Allan."

"That means that you are regretting him--that you wish he were here
now--in my place."

"Not in your place; but I wish he were safe in England. It makes me
miserable to be so uncertain of his fate, for his mother's sake."

"Well, he will be in England soon enough, I dare say. But you will be
my wife by that time; and I shall be secure of my prize. I shall be
able to defy a hundred Allans."

And then he sat down by her side, and pleaded for her pardon, almost
with tears. He hated himself for those jealous doubts which devoured
him, he told her--those fears of he knew not what. If she were but his
wife, his own for ever, that stormy soul of his would enter into a
haven of peace. The colour of his life would be changed.

"And even for Allan's sake," he argued, "it is better that there
should be no delay. He will accept the situation more easily if he
find us man and wife. A man always submits to the inevitable. It is
uncertainty which kills."

He pleaded, and was forgiven; and by-and-by Suzette was induced to
consent to an earlier date for her marriage. It was to be in the
second week of December--five months after Geoffrey's return, and the
honeymoon was to be spent upon that lovely shore where there is no
winter; and then, early in the year, Suzette and her husband were to
establish themselves at Discombe; and the doors of the Manor House were
to be opened as they had never been opened since old Squire Wornock was
a young man. Matcham was in good spirits at the prospect of pleasant
hospitalities, a going and coming of nice people from London. Nobody
in the immediate neighbourhood could afford to entertain upon a scale
which would be a matter of course for Geoffrey Wornock.

"December will be here before we know where we are," said Mrs.
Mornington, and her constitutional delight in action and bustle of
all kinds again found a safety-valve in the preparation of Suzette's
trousseau.

Again she was confronted by a chilling indifference in the young lady
for whom the clothes were being made. She advised Suzette to spend
a week in London, in order to get her frocks and jackets from the
best people. Salisbury would have been good enough for Allan, and
Beechhurst; but for Squire Wornock's wife--for the Riviera--and for
Discombe Manor, the most fashionable London artists should be called
upon for their best achievements.

"I suppose you'll want to look well when you show yourself at Cannes
as Mrs. Wornock? You won't want to be another awful example of an
Englishwomen wearing out her old clothes on the Continent," said Mrs.
Mornington snappishly.

As the General was also in favour of a week in town, Suzette consented,
and bored herself to death in the family circle of an aunt who was
almost a stranger, but who had been offering her hospitality ever
since she could remember. At this lady's house in Bryanstone Square,
she spent a weary week of shopping, and trying on, always under the
commanding eye of Aunt Mornington, who delighted in tramping about
London out of the season, a London in which one could do just what one
liked, without fear or favour of society.

And so the trousseau was put in hand; the wedding-gown chosen; the
wedding-cake ordered; Mrs. Mornington taking all trouble off her
brother's hands in the matter of the reception that was to be held
after the wedding. Everybody was to be asked, of course; but the
invitations were not to go out till a fortnight before the day.

"I don't want people to suppose I am giving them plenty of time to
think about wedding-presents," Suzette explained, when she insisted
upon this short notice.

All these arrangements were made in October--the marriage settlement
was drafted, and everybody was satisfied, since Geoffrey's liberality
had required the curb rather than the spur.

For the rest of the year the lovers had nothing to think of but each
other, and those great spirits of the past whose voices still spoke to
them, whose genius was the companion of their lives. Beethoven, Mozart,
Mendelssohn, Chopin, Schubert, were the friends of those quiet days;
and love found its most eloquent interpreters in the language of the
dead.

Sometimes, with a dim foreboding of evil, Suzette found herself
wondering what she would do with that fiery restless spirit, were
it not for that soothing influence of music; but she could not
imagine Geoffrey dissociated from that second voice which seemed
more characteristic of him than any spoken language--that voice of
passionate joys and passionate regrets, of deepest melancholy, and of
wildest mirth. Music made a third in their lives--the strongest link
between them, holding them aloof from that outside world to which the
mysteries of harmony were unknown. Matcham society shrugged shoulders
of wonder, not unmixed with disdain, when it was told how Miss Vincent
practised five hours a day at home or at Discombe, and how she was
beginning to play as well as a professional pianist. There had been a
little dinner at the Manor House, and Geoffrey and his betrothed had
played a duet which they called a Salterello, and Mrs. Mornington was
complimented on her niece's gifts. Her execution was really surprising!
No other young lady in Matcham could play like that. The girls of the
present day lived too much out-of-doors to aspire to "execution." If
they could play some little thing of Schumann's or the easiest of
Chopin's or Rubinstein's valses, they were satisfied with themselves.

The hunting season began, but Geoffrey only hunted occasionally. He
went only when General Vincent and his daughter went, not otherwise.
Suzette had three or four hunters at her disposal now, and could have
ridden to hounds three times a week had she so desired. Geoffrey's
first care had been to get some of his best horses ready for carrying
a lady; and she had her own thoroughbred, clever and kind, and able to
carry her for a long day's work. But Suzette was not rabid about riding
to hounds in all weathers, and at all distances. She liked a day now
and then when her father was inclined to take her; but she had no idea
of giving up her whole life--books, music, cottage visiting, home, for
fox-hunting. Geoffrey gave up many a day's sport in order to spend the
wintry hours in the music-room at Discombe, or in long rambles in the
woods, or over the downs, with his betrothed.

Was he happy, having won his heart's desire? Suzette sometimes
found herself asking that question, of herself, not of him. He was
a creature of moods: sometimes animated, eloquent, hopeful, talking
of life as if doubt, sorrow, satiety were unknown to him, undreamt
of by him; at other times strangely depressed, silent and gloomy, a
dismal companion for a joyous high-spirited girl. Those moods of his
scared Suzette; but she was prepared to put up with them. She had
chosen him, or allowed herself to be chosen by him. She had bound
herself to life-companionship with that fitful spirit. For him she
had forsaken a lover whose happier nature need never have caused her
an hour's anxiety--a man whose thoughts and feelings were easy to
read and understand. She had taken the lover whose caprices and moods
had awakened a romantic interest, had aroused first curiosity, then
sympathy and regard. It was because he was a genius she loved him; and
she must resign herself to the capricious varieties of temperament
which make genius difficult to deal with in everyday life.

No news of Allan reached Matcham till the beginning of November, when
Mrs. Mornington took upon herself to write to Lady Emily about him, and
received a very cold reply.

"I heard from my son last week," Lady Emily wrote, after a stately
acknowledgment of Mrs. Mornington's inquiry. "He has been laid up with
fever, but is better, and on his way home. He wrote from Brazzaville.
It is something to know that he did not die in the desert, neglected
and alone. Even on the eve of her marriage, your niece may be glad
to hear that my son has survived her unkindness, and Mr. Wornock's
desertion; and that I am hoping to welcome him home before long."

Mrs. Mornington showed the letter to Suzette, whose mind was greatly
relieved by this news of Allan.

"It is such a comfort to know that he is safe," she told Geoffrey,
after commenting upon the unkindness of Lady Emily's letter.

The news which was so cheering to her had a contrary effect upon her
lover. There was a look of trouble in Geoffrey's face when he was
told of Allan's expected arrival, and he took no pains to conceal his
displeasure.

"I am sorry you have suffered such intense anxiety," he said
resentfully. "Did you suspect me of having murdered him?"

"Nonsense, Geoffrey! I could not help thinking of all possible
dangers; and it distressed me to know that other people thought you
unkind in leaving him."

"Other people have talked like fools--as foolishly as his mother, in
whom one forgives folly. I was not his nurse, or his doctor, or his
hired servant. I was only a casual companion; and I was free to leave
him how and when I pleased."

"But not to leave him in distress or difficulty. _I_ knew you could not
have done that. I knew that you could not act ungenerously. I think
Lady Emily ought to make you a very humble apology for her rudeness,
when she has her son safe at home."

"She may keep her apologies for people who value her opinion. I shall
be a thousand miles away when her son returns."

He was silent and gloomy for the rest of the morning, and Suzette felt
that she had offended him. Was he so jealous of her former lover that
even the mention of his name--a natural interest in his safety--could
awaken angry feelings, and make a distance between them? Even their
music went badly, and Mrs. Wornock, from her seat by the fire,
reproached them for careless playing.

"That sonata of Porpora's went ever so much better last week," she
said, on which Geoffrey threw down his bow in disgust.

"I dare say you are right. I am not in the mood for music. Will you
come for a ride after lunch, Suzette? I can drive you home, and the
horses can follow while you are getting on your habit. We might fall in
with the hounds."

Suzette declined this handsome offer. She was not going to say to lunch.

"Father complains that I am never at home," she said, putting away the
music.

"Your father is out with the hounds. What is the use of your going back
to an empty house?"

"I would rather be at home to-day Geoffrey."

"To think about Allan, and offer a thanksgiving for his safety?"

"I am full of thankfulness, and I am not ashamed of being glad."

She went over to Mrs. Wornock, who had been too much absorbed in her
book to be aware that the lovers were quarrelling, till Suzette's brief
good-bye and rapid departure startled her out of her tranquillity.

"Aren't you going to walk home with her, Geoffrey?" she asked when
her son returned to the music-room, after escorting his sweetheart no
further than the hall-door.

"No," he answered curtly; "we have had enough of each other for to-day."

He went to the library, where the morning papers were lying unread, and
turned to the second page of the _Times_ for the list of steamers, and
then to the shipping intelligence.

Zanzibar? Yes, the Messageries Maritimes steamer _Djemnah_, was
reported as arriving at Marseilles yesterday morning. Allan was in
England, perhaps. If all went well with him, he would come by the
first ship after the mail that brought his letter. The _Rapide_ would
bring him from Marseilles in time for the morning mail from Paris. He
was in England--he whom Geoffrey had cruelly, treacherously deserted,
helpless, and alone.

"All is fair in love," Geoffrey told himself; "but I wonder what
Suzette will think of her future husband when she knows all? Her
future husband! If I were but her actual husband, I could defy Fate.
Who knows? something may have happened to hinder his return--a fit of
fever, a difficulty on the road. Three more weeks, and he may come back
safe and sound; it won't matter to me; I have no murderous thoughts
about him. He may tell her the worst he can about me. Once my wife, I
can hold and keep her in spite of the world. I will teach her that the
man who sins for love's sake must be forgiven for the sake of his love."

He was consumed with a fever of anxiety which would not let him rest
within four walls. He walked to Beechhurst, and unearthed a caretaker,
who came strolling from the distant stables, where he had been
enlivening his idleness by gossip with the grooms. The blinds and
shutters were all closed. Nothing had been heard from Mr. Carew.

"If he were in England you would have heard from him, I suppose?" said
Geoffrey.

"Yes, sir; he would have wired, no doubt. My wife is housekeeper, and
she would have had notice to get the house ready."

"Even if Mr. Carew had gone to Suffolk, in the first instance?"

"I should think so, sir. He would know we should want time to prepare
for him."

There was relief in this. Perhaps the _Djemnah_ had carried no such
passenger as the man whose return Geoffrey Wornock dreaded.

He went back to the Manor in the gloom of a November evening. The
darkness and loneliness of the road suited his humour. He wanted to be
alone, to think out the situation, to walk down the devil within him.

Matcham Church clock was chiming the third quarter after five when he
opened the gate and went into Discombe Wood; but when the Discombe
dressing-bell rang at half-past seven--an old-fashioned bell in a
cupola, which gave needless information to every cottager within half a
mile of the Manor House--Geoffrey had not come in.

His valet waited about for him till nearly dinner-time, and then went
down to the drawing-room to ask Mrs. Wornock if his master was to dine
at home.

"He is not in his dressing-room, ma'am. Will you wait dinner for him?"

"Yes, yes, of course I shall wait. Tell them to keep the dinner back."

The dinner was kept back so long that nobody eat any of it, out of
the servants' hall. Mrs. Wornock spent a troubled evening in the
music-room, full of harassing fears; while grooms rode here and
there--to Marsh House, to inquire if Mr. Wornock was dining there; to
Matcham Road Station, to ask if he had left by any train, up or down
the line; to the Vicarage, a most unlikely place, and to other houses
where it was just possible, but most improbable, that he should allow
himself to be detained; but nowhere within the narrow circle of Matcham
life was Mr. Wornock to be heard of.

"Pray don't be anxious about Geoffrey," Suzette wrote, in answer to
Mrs. Wornock's hastily scribbled note of inquiry; "you know how erratic
he is. He was vexed at something I said about Allan this morning, and
he has gone off somewhere in a huff. Keep up your spirits, chère mère.
I will be with you early to-morrow morning. _I_ am not frightened."

"She is not frightened! If she loved him as I do, she would be as
anxious as I am," commented Mrs. Wornock, when she had read Suzette's
letter.




                             CHAPTER XII.

                          "IT IS THE STARS."


Morning brought no relief of mind to Mrs. Wornock, since it brought no
news of her son; but before night there was even greater anxiety at
Beechhurst, where Allan Carew's mother arrived late in the evening,
summoned by a letter from her son, despatched from Southampton on the
previous day, announcing his arrival, and asking her to join him at
Beechhurst.

"I would go straight to Suffolk," he wrote, "knowing how anxious my
dear, tender-hearted mother will be to welcome her wanderer home,
only--only I think you know that there is some one at Matcham about
whose feelings I have still a shadow of doubt, still a lingering hope.
I go there first, where perhaps I may meet you; and if I find that
faint hope to be only a delusion, I know you will sympathize with my
final disappointment.

"I have passed through many adventures and some dangers since I left
the great lake. I have been ill, and I have been lonely; but I come
back to England the same man who went away--unchanged in heart and
mind. However altered you may find the outer man, the inner man is the
same."

Having telegraphed from Waterloo to announce her arrival at Matcham
Road Station, Lady Emily was bitterly disappointed at not finding her
son waiting for her on the platform. She looked eagerly out into the
November darkness, searching for the well-known figure among the few
people standing here and there along the narrow platform. There was no
Allan, and there was no Beechhurst carriage waiting for her.

The station-master recognized her as she alighted, and came to assist
in the selection of her luggage, while a porter ran off to order a fly
from the inn outside.

"Mr. Carew was expected home yesterday. Did he come?" asked Lady
Emily, with that faint sickness of despair which follows on such a
disappointment.

She had pictured the moment of reunion over and over again during the
journey--had fancied how he would look, what he would say to her, and
the delight of their long confidential talk on the drive home, and the
pleasure of their _tête-à-tête_ dinner. The only shadow upon her happy
thought of him was her knowledge of what his faithful heart must needs
suffer when he found that Suzette had engaged herself to his rival.

The station-master informed Lady Emily that Mr. Carew had arrived the
day before, by this very train. He had evidently sent no notice of
his arrival, as there was no carriage to meet him. He had very little
luggage with him--only a portmanteau and a bale of rugs and sticks,
which had been sent to Beechhurst by the station 'bus. Mr. Carew had
walked home.

He was at home, then. The gladness of reunion was only delayed for an
hour. His mother tried to make light of her disappointment and of his
neglect. He had given an order to the stable, perhaps, and it had been
forgotten. There was a mistake somewhere, but no unkindness on his part.

"Was my son looking in pretty good health?" she asked the
station-master.

"Yes, my lady, allowing for the wear and tear of a sea-voyage, Mr.
Carew looked pretty well; but he looked pulled down a bit since he went
away. You mustn't be surprised at a little change in that way."

"Yes, yes, no doubt he is altered. Years of travel and fatigue and
danger. Ah, there is the fly; they have been very quick. Come, Taylor,"
to the middle-aged, homely Suffolk abigail who stood on guard over her
mistress's luggage.

The drive through the November night seemed longer to the lady inside
the carriage, sitting alone and longing for the sight of her son's
face, than to her maid on the box beside John coachman, of the Station
Inn, chatting sociably about the improvements in the neighbourhood
and the prospects of the hunting season. And, oh, bitter agony of
disappointment when the door of Beechhurst was opened, and Lady Emily
saw only a half-lit hall and staircase, and the stolid countenance of
butler and caretaker, whose informal attire too plainly showed her that
his master was not in the house.

"Has Mr. Carew gone away again?" she asked, as the man helped her out
of the carriage, thinking vaguely that Allan might have started off for
Suffolk that morning, and that she and he were travelling to and fro at
cross purposes.

"Mr. Carew has not been home, my lady."

"Not been home? Why, he arrived yesterday by the train I came by
to-night. The station-master told me so."

"Then he must be visiting somewhere in the neighbourhood, my lady. Some
luggage was brought at nine o'clock; but my master has not been home."

She stood looking at the man dumbly, paralyzed by apprehension. Where
could Allan be? what could he have done with himself? His letter had
asked her to meet him in that house. He had arrived at the station
twenty-four hours before he could expect her; he had sent home his
luggage, and had walked out of the station in the most casual manner,
saying that he was going home. Was it credible that he would go to
anybody else's house, straight from the station, luggageless, newly
landed after a long sea-voyage? No man in his senses would so act. Yet
there was but one course for an anxious mother to take, and Lady Emily
returned to the fly, and ordered the man to drive to Marsh House.

Allan might have gone straight to Suzette. Who could tell what effect
the news of her approaching marriage might have upon his mind? His
letter told his mother that he still hoped; and the change from hope to
despair would be crushing. He might have hurried away from the scene
of his disappointment, careless how or where he went, so long as he got
himself far away from the place associated with his fickle sweetheart.

Suzette was at home, and received Lady Emily kindly, forgetting all
that had gone before in her compassion for the mother's distress.

Allan had called at Marsh House on the previous evening during
Suzette's absence. He had been told that she was at the Manor, and the
servant had understood him to say that he was going on to the Manor. He
had seemed put out at hearing where she was, the soldier servant had
told his young mistress.

"And were you not at the Manor when he called?" Lady Emily asked.

"No; I left before lunch; but instead of coming home, where I was not
expected, I spent the afternoon at the Vicarage and on the golf-ground
with Bessie Edgefield."

"And Mr. Wornock was with you most of the time, I suppose?"

"Not any of the time."

"Is he away, then?"

"No. If you must know the truth, we had--well, I can hardly say, we had
quarrelled; but Geoffrey had been very disagreeable, and I was glad to
leave him to himself for the afternoon."

"You are good friends again now, no doubt?"

"We have not seen each other since. Geoffrey has gone away, without
letting any one know where he was going, and his poor mother is anxious
and unhappy about him. He is so impetuous--so erratic."

"And you, his sweetheart, are still more anxious, no doubt?"

"I am anxious chiefly for his poor mother's sake. She is too easily
frightened."

"Can they have gone away together, anywhere?" said Lady Emily.

"Together--Allan and Geoffrey!" exclaimed Suzette. "No, I don't think
they would do that."

"Why not? They were together for two years in Africa."

"Yes, but that was different. I don't think, in Geoffrey's state
of mind, that he would have gone on a journey with your son. He
has a jealous temper, I am sorry to say, and he was irritable and
unreasonable yesterday when he heard of--Mr. Carew's return. Is it
likely that he would have gone off on any expedition with your son to
London or anywhere else?"

"Then where is my son? He was here at this hour yesterday. He left here
to go to the Manor; and now you tell me that Mr. Wornock is missing,
and that my son has not been heard of since he left your door."

"He has not been at the Manor. Mrs. Wornock would have told me if he
had called. I was with her all this morning. She is wretched about
Geoffrey. They are both safe, I dare say; but their disappearance is
very alarming."

"Alarming, yes. It means something dreadful--something I dare not
think of--unless, indeed, Allan changed his mind on finding the state
of things here, and went off to Suffolk, intending to anticipate my
journey. Oh, I dare say I am frightening myself for nothing. Will you
let me write a telegram?" looking distractedly round the room for pens
and ink.

"Dear Lady Emily, pray don't be too anxious. One is so often frightened
for nothing. My father has only to be an hour later than usual on a
hunting day in order to make me half distracted. Please sit down by the
fire, here in this comfortable chair. I'll write your telegram, and
send it off instantly."

She rang the bell, and then seated herself quietly at her
writing-table, while Allan's mother sank into a chair, the image of
helplessness.

"What shall I say?"

    "To Allan Carew, Fendyke, Millfield, Suffolk.

    "I am miserable at not finding you here. Reply immediately, with
    full information as to your plans.

                                                         "EMILY CAREW."

"God grant I may hear of him there," said Lady Emily, when she had read
message and address with a searching eye, lest Suzette's writing should
offer any excuse for mistakes. The telegram was handed to the servant
with instructions to take it himself to the post-office; and then Lady
Emily kissed Suzette with a sad remorseful kiss, and went back to the
fly.

"Discombe Manor," she told the man, with very little consideration for
the hard-working fly-horse.

"Yes, my lady; it'll be about as much as he can do."

"He? What do you mean?"

"The horse, my lady. He's been on his legs two hours a'ready, and the
Manor's a good three mile; but I suppose I shall be able to wash out
his mouth there before I takes him home?"

"Yes, yes; you may do what you like; only get me to the Manor as fast
as you can."

Allan had not been seen at the Manor. No one had rung the hall-door
bell yesterday after luncheon. Mrs. Wornock's monastic solitude was
not often intruded upon by visitors; and yesterday there had been no
one. The door had not been opened after Miss Vincent went out, Geoffrey
Wornock's impatient temper always choosing an easier mode of egress
than that ponderous hall door, which required a servant's attendance,
or else closed with a bang that reverberated through the house.
Whatever Allan's intention might have been when he left Marsh House, he
had not come to Discombe.

Lady Emily and Mrs. Wornock were softened in their feelings for each
other by a mutual terror; but Allan's mother dwelt upon the fact that
the two young men, as travellers of old, might have started off upon
some expedition; a run up to London to see some new production at
the theatre; a billiard match; anything in which young men might be
interested.

"They must be much better friends than before they went to Africa--much
closer companions," urged Lady Emily. "I feel there is less reason for
fear now that I know your son is missing as well as Allan."

Mrs. Wornock tried to take the same hopeful view; but she was of a
less hopeful temperament, and she knew too much of Geoffrey's jealous
distrust of his rival to believe that there had been any companionable
feeling between the two young men since Allan's return.

"Oh, I am afraid, I am afraid!" she moaned piteously, wringing her
hands in an agony of apprehension.

"What is it you fear? What calamity can have happened which would
involve both your son and mine? Surely nothing dreadful could happen to
both our sons, and yet no tidings come either to you or to me. Wherever
they were--if any accident happened--one or other of them would be
recognized. Some one would bring us the news. No; I have been anxious
and unhappy; but I am sure now that I have been needlessly anxious. We
shall hear from them--very soon."

Mrs. Wornock clasped Lady Emily's hand in silence, and shook her head
despondently.

"What is it you fear?" asked Allan's mother.

"I don't know--but I am full of fear for Geoffrey--for both of them."

Lady Emily left her, depressed and dispirited by the fear which shrunk
from shaping itself in words. The disposition to take a hopeful view
of the case did not last in the face of Mrs. Wornock's mysterious
agitations, and Allan's mother went back to Beechhurst stupefied with
anxiety, able only to walk about the house, in and out of the empty
rooms, in helpless misery.

That state of not knowing what to fear ended suddenly soon after nine
o'clock, when there came the sound of wheels, and a carriage stopped
at the hall door. Lady Emily rushed to the door and opened it with her
own hands, before any one had time to ring the bell; opened it to find
herself face to face with the woman she had left only two hours before.

Mrs. Wornock was stepping out of her carriage as the hall door opened.
She wore neither bonnet nor cloak, only a shawl wrapped round her head
and shoulders.

"He is found!" she said, agitatedly. "Will you come with me?"

"Your son?"

"No; Allan Carew. Ah, it is dreadful to think of, dreadful to tell you.
I came myself; I wouldn't let any one else----"

"He is dead!" cried Lady Emily, her heart feeling like ice, her knees
trembling under her.

"No, no! Dreadfully hurt--but not dead. There is hope still--Mr.
Podmore does not give up hope. I have sent a messenger to Salisbury.
We shall have Dr. Etheridge to-morrow morning--or I will send to
London----"

"Where is my son--my murdered--dying son?"

"No, no, no--not dying--not murdered. Don't I tell you there is hope?
He is at Discombe--they have put him in Geoffrey's room. Everything is
being done. He may recover--he will, he must recover."

Lady Emily was seated in the brougham, unconscious of the movements
that had conveyed her there; the butler was at the hall door by this
time, staring in blank wonder, not knowing what to think of this rapid
departure.

"Send your mistress's maid to the Manor with her things," ordered
Mrs. Wornock, hurriedly. And then to her own servant, waiting at the
carriage door, "Home--as fast as he can drive."

"Why was he taken to your house, and not to his own?" asked Lady Emily,
in a dull whisper, when the carriage had driven out of the gates.

"Because it was so much nearer to bring him. He was found in our
woods--robbed--and hurt, cruelly hurt. There is a dreadful wound upon
his head, and there are signs of a desperate struggle--as if he had
fought for his life----"

"Oh, God, that he should be murdered--here in England--within an hour's
walk of his own house! And I have dreamt of him in some dreadful
danger--from savage beasts, savage men--night after night, in those
dreary years he was away--and that he should come home--home--to love,
and happiness, and safety, as I thought--to meet the fate I had been
fearing! I prayed God day and night for him--prayed that he might be
brought back to me in safety. And he came back--came back only to die,"
wailed the unhappy woman, her head sunk upon her knees, her hands
working convulsively amongst her loosened hair.

"He will _not_ die," cried Mrs. Wornock, fiercely. "Don't I tell you
that he will not die? The wound need not be fatal; the doctor said it
was not a hopeless case. Why do you go on raving--as if you wanted him
to die--as if you were bent on being miserable--and driving me mad?"

"You! What have you to do with it? He is not your son. Your son is safe
enough, I dare say. Your son--who left him in the desert--who came
home to steal his comrade's sweetheart. Your son is safe. Such a man as
that is never in danger."

Mrs. Wornock bore this insulting speech in silence; and there was no
word more on either side for the rest of the journey.

       *       *       *       *       *

Not without hope! Looking down at the motionless form lying on Geoffrey
Wornock's bed, in the large airy room, the hand on the coverlet
as white as the lawn sheet, the face disfigured and hardly to be
recognized as Allan's face under the broad linen bandage which covered
forehead and eyes, the lips livid and speechless--looking with agonized
heart at this spectacle, Allan's mother found it hard to believe the
doctor's assurance that the case was not, in his humble opinion,
utterly hopeless.

"We shall know more to-morrow," he said.

"Are they trying to find the wretch who did it?" asked Lady Emily. "God
grant he may be hanged for murder, if my son is to die."

"I shall go from here to the police-station, and take all necessary
steps, if I have your ladyship's authority for doing so. The keeper who
found your poor son sent a lad off to give information."

"Yes, yes. And you will offer a reward--a large reward. My
poor boy--my dear, dear son--to see him lying there--quite
unconscious--speechless--helpless. My murdered boy! Where did they find
him--how----"

"Lying in a little hollow among the underwood, within a few paces of
the path. There is a gate in the fence opening into the high-road, and
a footpath, and cart-track, which cut into the main drive four or five
hundred yards from the gate. It is a point at which he might be likely
to meet a tramp--as it is so near the road--and a long way from any of
the lodge gates. The drive would be in Mr. Carew's straight course from
Marsh House here."

"Yes, yes! And it was a tramp--you are sure of that--a common
robber--who attacked him?"

"Evidently. His pockets were turned inside out--his watch was gone."

"There was a day when no one man would have dared to attack my son."

"There may have been two men. The ground was a good deal trampled, the
keeper told me; but they would be able to see very little by the light
of a couple of lanterns brought from the stables to the north lodge. We
shall see the footsteps, and be able to come to a better idea of the
struggle, to-morrow morning."

"Send for a London detective--the best that can be got," Lady Emily
interrupted eagerly.

"Be sure we will do all that can be done."

"He has no father to take his part," she went on, distractedly; "no
wife--no sweetheart even--to care for him--only a poor, weak mother. If
he should die, there will be only one broken heart in the world--only
one----"

"Dear lady, why anticipate the worst?" remonstrated the doctor.

"Yes, yes, I am wrong. I must cast myself upon God's mercy. I am not
an irreligious woman. I will pray for my son. There is nothing else
in the world that I can do. But while I am praying you will work--you
will find the wretch who did this cruel deed. You will send for the
cleverest doctor in London--the one man of all men who can cure my poor
boy."

"You may trust me, Lady Emily. Nothing shall be forgotten or deferred."

       *       *       *       *       *

It was not till the following morning that the news of Allan Carew's
condition, and his presence at Discombe, reached General Vincent and
his daughter. Mrs. Mornington was the bearer of those dismal tidings.
Always active, alert, and early afoot, she heard of the tragedy from
the village tradesmen, and was told three conflicting versions of the
story--first at the grocer's, where she was assured that Mr. Carew had
breathed his last five minutes after he was carried into the Manor
House; next from the butcher's wife, a very ladylike person, rarely
seen except through glass, in a little counting-house, giving on to
the shop--and who opened her glass shutter on purpose to inform Mrs.
Mornington that both young gentlemen had been picked up for dead in
the copse at Discombe; Mr. Wornock shot through the heart, Mr. Carew
with a bullet in his left temple, the result of a duel to the death.
A third informant, taking the air in front of the coachbuilder's
workshop--where everybody's carriages went sooner or later for
repairs--assured Mrs. Mornington that there hadn't been much harm done,
and that Mr. Carew, who had had his pockets picked by a tramp, had been
more frightened than hurt.

Mrs. Mornington was not the kind of person to languish in uncertainty
about any fact in local history while she possessed the nerves of
speech and locomotion. Before the coach-builder finished his rambling
story, she had despatched a village boy to the Grove to order her
pony-cart to be brought her as quickly as the groom could get it
ready; and her orders being always respected, the honest bay cob met
her, rattling his bit and whisking his tail from joyous freshness, at
the bend of the village street, within a quarter of an hour of the
messenger's start. The boy had run his fastest; the groom had not lost
a moment; for Mrs. Mornington was one of those excellent mistresses who
stand no nonsense from their servants.

The cob went to Discombe at a fast trot, and returned stablewards still
faster, indulging in occasional spurts of cantering, which his mistress
did not check with her usual severity.

She saw no one but servants at the Manor House. Mrs. Wornock was in her
own room, quite prostrate, the butler explained; Lady Emily was with
Mr. Carew, who had passed a bad night, and was certainly no better this
morning, even if he were no worse.

"Is it very serious, Davidson?" Mrs. Mornington asked the trustworthy
old servant.

"I'm afraid it couldn't be much worse, ma'am. The doctor from Salisbury
was here at nine o'clock, and was upstairs with Mr. Podmore very near
an hour; but he didn't look very cheerful when he left--no more did Mr.
Podmore. And there's another doctor been telegraphed for from London.
If doctors can save the poor gentleman's life, he'll be spared. But I
saw his face last night when he was carried upstairs, and I can't say
_I've_ much hopes of him."

"Never mind your hopes, Davidson, if the doctors can pull him through.
A young man can get over a good deal."

"If he can get over having his head mashed--and lying for twenty-seven
hours in a wood--he must have a better constitution than ever I heard
tell of."

"The wretch who attacked him has not been found yet, I suppose?"

"No, ma'am, not yet, nor never likely to be, so far as I can see.
He had seven and twenty hours' start, you see, ma'am; and if a
professional thief couldn't get off with that much law, the profession
can't be up to much; begging your pardon, ma'am, for venturing to
express an opinion," concluded Davidson, who felt that he had been
presuming on an old servant's licence.

Mrs. Mornington told him she was very glad to hear his opinion, and
then handed him cards for the two ladies, on each of which she had
scribbled assurances of sympathy; and with this much information from
the fountain-head, she appeared in the drawing-room at Marsh House,
where she found Suzette sitting by the fire in a very despondent
mood. Her lover's mysterious disappearance after something which was
very like a quarrel, was not a cheering incident in her life; and now
Lady Emily's anxiety about her son--the fact that he, too, should be
missing--increased her trouble of mind.

She listened aghast to her aunt's story.

"What does it mean?" she faltered. "What can it mean?"

"The meaning is plain enough, I think. This poor young man was waylaid
in the dusk on Thursday evening--attacked and plundered."

"By a tramp?"

"By one of the criminal classes--a ticket-of-leave man, perhaps,
rambling from Portland to London, ready to snatch any opportunity on
the way. There's very little use in speculating about a wretch of that
class. There are plenty of such ruffians loose in the world, I dare
say."

"But it would have served a robber's purpose just as well to have only
stunned him."

"Oh, those gentry don't consider things so nicely. No doubt Allan
showed fight. And the ruffian would have no mercy."

"Do you think he will die? Oh, aunt, how terrible if he were to die.
And Geoffrey still away--Mrs. Wornock miserable about him!"

"Yes, that's the strangest part of the business! What can have induced
Geoffrey to take himself off in that mysterious way? Have you any idea
why he went?"

"No. I have no idea."

"If he is keeping away of his own accord--if nothing dreadful has
happened to him--his conduct is most insulting to you."

"Never mind me, aunt; while there is this trouble at Discombe--for poor
Lady Emily."

"I am very sorry for her; but I am obliged to think of you. His
behaviour places you in such an awkward position--a ridiculous
position. Your wedding-day fixed--hurried on with red-hot impatience by
this young man--and he, the bridegroom, missing! What do you suppose
people will say?"

"I have no suppositions about people outside our lives. I can only
think of the sorrow at Discombe. People can say anything they like,"
Suzette answered wearily.

Her father had been questioning her, and had talked very much in the
same strain as her aunt. She was tired to heart-sickness of talk about
Geoffrey. All had grown dark in her life; and darkest of all was her
thought of her betrothed.

There had been that in his manner when she parted with him which had
filled her with a shapeless dread, a terror not to be lightly named,
a terror she had not ventured to suggest even to her father. And here
was her aunt teasing her about other people--utterly indifferent
people--and their ideas.

"What will people _not_ say?" exclaimed Mrs. Mornington, after a
troubled pause, in which she had poked the fire almost savagely, and
pulled a chairback straight. "I must have a serious talk with your
father. Is he at home?"

"No. He is out shooting."

"Shooting? It is scarcely decent of him in the present state of
affairs. Any more presents?"

"I don't know. Yes; there was a box came this morning. I haven't opened
it. Please don't talk of presents. It is too horrid to think of them."

"Horridly embarrassing," said Mrs. Mornington. "You had better come to
the Grove, Suzette. There's no good in your moping alone here. And you
may have visitors in the afternoon prying and questioning."

"Thanks, aunt, I would rather be at home. I shall deny myself to
everybody except Bessie Edgefield."

"Ah, and you'll tell her everything, and she will tell everybody in
Matcham."

"I have nothing to tell--nothing that Bessie cannot find out from other
people. But she is not a gossip; and she is always _simpatica_."




                             CHAPTER XIII.

                           MADNESS OR CRIME?


Days grew into weeks, and the slow, anxious hours brought very little
change in Allan's condition, and certainly no change which the doctors
could call a substantial improvement. Physician and surgeon from
London, famous specialists both, came at weekly intervals and testified
to the good fight which the patient was making, and the latent power of
a frame which had been strained and wasted by the hardships of African
travel, and which was now called upon to recover from severe injuries.
Consciousness had returned, but not reason. The young man had not once
recognized the mother who rarely left his bedside, but whose bland
and pleasant countenance was so sorely altered by grief and anxiety
that even in the full possession of his senses he might hardly have
known her. The power of speech had returned, but only in delirious
utterances, or in a strange gibberish, which poor Lady Emily mistook
for an African language, but which was really the nonsense-tongue of a
disordered brain.

The doctors pronounced the case not utterly without hope; but they
would commit themselves to nothing further than this. It was a wonder
to have kept him alive so long. His recovery would be almost a miracle.

Two trained nurses from the county hospital alternated the daily and
nightly watch by the sick-bed, and Lady Emily shared the day's, and
sometimes the night's, duty, humbly assisting the skilled attendants,
grateful for being permitted to aid in the smallest service for the son
who lay helpless, inert, and unobserving on that bed which even yet
might be his bed of death.

No one but those three women and the doctors was allowed to enter
Allan's room. Mrs. Wornock was very kind and sympathetic, in spite
of torturing anxieties about her son's unexplained absence; but she
expressed no desire to see Allan, and she seldom saw Lady Emily for
more than a few minutes in the course of the day. The whole house was
ordered with reference to the sick-room. Organ and piano were closed
and dumb, and a funereal silence reigned everywhere.

And so the wintry days went by, and rain and rough weather made a
sufficient excuse for Suzette's staying quietly at home, and seeing
very little of the outer world. Mrs. Mornington took the social aspect
of the crisis entirely on her own hands, and informed her friends that
the wedding had been deferred, partly on account of Allan's illness,
and for other reasons which she was not at liberty to explain.

"My niece is very capricious," she said.

"I hope she has not sent Mr. Wornock off to Africa again!" exclaimed
Mrs. Roebuck. "Such a brilliant young man, with a house so peculiarly
adapted for entertaining, should not be allowed to become an absentee.
It is too great a loss for such a place as this, where so few people
entertain."

Mrs. Roebuck's estimate of her acquaintance was always based upon their
capacity for entertaining, though she herself, on this scale, would
have been marked zero.

"No, I don't think he will go back to Africa. But my niece and he have
agreed to part--for a short time, at any rate. She is sending back all
her wedding-presents this week."

"Oh, pray don't let her send me that absurd Japanese paper-knife! I
only chose it because it is so deliciously ugly and queer. And I knew
that, marrying a man of Mr. Wornock's means, she wouldn't want anything
costly or useful--no fish-knives or salt-cellars."

"Well, if it really is off, or likely to be off," Mr. Roebuck said,
with a solemnly confidential air, "I don't mind saying in confidence
that I think your niece has acted wisely. The young man is a genius,
no doubt; but he's a little bit overstrung--_fanatico per la musica_,
don't you know. And one never knows whether that sort of thing won't
go further," tapping his forehead suggestively.

"Oh, _das macht nichts_; the poor dear young man is _toqué_, only
_toqué_, not _fêlé_," protested Mrs. Roebuck, who affected a polyglot
style.

"Ah, but the mother, don't you know! That's where the danger comes in.
The mother has never been quite right," argued her husband.

"I am not going to accept congratulations," said Mrs. Mornington. "I'm
very sorry the marriage has been postponed. Mr. Wornock and Suzette are
admirably adapted for each other, and he is no more cracked than I am.
And remember the marriage is put off--not broken off."

"All the more reason why she should not send me back that Japanese
absurdity," said Mrs. Roebuck, as if the paper-knife were of as much
consequence as the marriage.

       *       *       *       *       *

Suzette saw Mrs. Wornock nearly every day during that time of
trouble--sometimes at Discombe, where they sat together in the
music-room, or paced the wintry garden, saying very little to each
other, but the elder woman taking comfort from the presence of the
younger.

"I am miserable about him," she told Suzette; and that was all she
would ever say of her son.

She had no suggestions to offer as to the cause of his disappearance.
She uttered no complaint of his unkindness.

Suzette inquired if the police had made any discovery about Allan's
assailant.

No, nothing; or, at least, Mrs. Wornock had heard of nothing.

"Lady Emily may know more than she cares to tell me," she said.

"Oh, I think not! Living in your house, indebted so deeply to your
kindness, she could not be so churlish as to keep anything back."

"She thinks of nothing but her son. She would have no mercy upon any
one who had injured him."

Her tone startled Suzette, with the recurrence of a terror which she
had tried to dismiss from her mind as groundless and irrational.

"No, no; of course not. Who could expect her to have mercy? However
hard the law might be, she would never think the sentence hard enough.
Her only son, her idolized son, brought to the brink of the grave,
perhaps doomed to die, in spite of all that can be done for him."

Suzette tried to shut out that horrible idea--the hideous fancy that
the ruffian who had attacked Allan Carew was no casual offender,
extemporizing a crime on the suggestion of the moment, for the chance
contents of a gentleman's purse, and an obvious watch and chain.
Murder so brutal is not often the result of a chance encounter. Yet
such things have been; and the alternative of a private vengeance--a
vindictive jealousy culminating in attempted murder--was too horrible.
Yet that dreadful suspicion haunted Suzette's pillow in the long winter
nights--nights of wakefulness and sorrow.

Where was he, that miserable man, who had won her heart in spite of
her better reason, and in loving whom she had seldom been without
the sense of trouble and fear? His want of mental balance had been
painfully obvious to her even in their happiest hours; and she had felt
that there was peril in a nature so capricious and so intense. She had
discovered that for him religion was no strong rock. He had laughed
away every serious question, and had made her feel that, in all the
most solemn thoughts of life and after-life, they were divided by an
impassable gulf: on his side, all that is boldest and saddest in modern
thought: on her side, the simple, unquestioning faith which she had
accepted in the dawn of her reason, and which satisfied an intellect
not given to speculate upon the Unknowable. She had found that, not
only upon religious questions, but even on the moral code of this life,
there were wide differences in their ideas. Dimly, and with growing
apprehension, she had divined the element of lawlessness in Geoffrey's
character, revealed in his admiration of men for whom neither religion
nor law had been a restraining influence--men for whom passion had been
ever the guiding star. Lives that to her seemed only criminal were
extolled by him as sublime. Such, or such a man, whose unbridled will
had wrought ruin for himself and others, was lauded as one who had
known the glory of life in its fullest meaning, who had verily lived,
not crawled between earth and heaven.

In her own simple, unpretentious way, Suzette had tried to combat
opinions which had shocked her; and then Geoffrey had laughed off
her fears, and had promised that for her sake he would think as she
thought, he would school himself to accept a spiritual guide of her
choosing.

"Who shall my master be, Suzette? Shall I be broad and liberal with
Stanley, severe with Manning, intense with Liddon, mystical with
Newman? 'Thou for my sake at Allah's shrine, and I----' You know the
rest. I will do anything to make my dearest happy."

"Anything except pretend, Geoffrey. You must never do that."

"Mustn't I? Then we had better leave religion out of the question;
until, perhaps, it may grow up in my mind, suddenly, like Jonah's
gourd, out of my love for you."

In all the weary time while Allan was lying at the gate of death, and
Geoffrey had so strangely vanished, Suzette had never doubted the
love of her betrothed. The possibility of change or fickleness on his
part never entered into her mind. Of the truth and intensity of his
affection she, who had been his betrothed for nearly half a year, could
not doubt. Her fears and anxieties took a darker form than any fear of
alienated feelings, or inconstancy. Suicide, crime, madness, were the
things she feared, though she never expressed her fears. Her father
heard no lamentations from those pale lips; but he could read the marks
of distress in her countenance, and he was grieved and anxious for her
sake.

He too invoked the powers of the detective police, but quietly, and
without anybody's knowledge. He went up to London, and put the case
of Geoffrey's disappearance before one of the sagest philosophers who
had ever adorned the detective force at Scotland Yard, now retired and
practising delicate investigations on his own account.

"Do you suppose there has been a fatal accident, or that he has been
keeping out of the way on purpose?" asked the General, after all
particulars had been stated.

"An accident would have been heard of before now. No doubt he is
keeping out of the way. Have you any reason to suppose him mentally
afflicted?"

"Afflicted, no. Eccentric, perhaps, though I should hardly call him
that--capricious, somewhat whimsical. Mentally afflicted? No, decidedly
not."

"Ah! That trick of keeping out of the way is a very common thing in
madness. If he is not mad, there must be some strong reason for his
disappearance. He must have done something to put himself in jeopardy."

"Impossible! No, no, no. I can't entertain the idea for a moment,"
cried the General, thinking of that murderous attack in the wood.

"Do you wish us to make inquiries?"

"No, no, better not--the young man's mother is having everything done.
I am not a relation--I only wanted the benefit of a professional
opinion. I thought you might be able to throw some light----"

"No two cases are quite alike, sir; but I think you will find I am
right here, and that in this case there is lunacy, or there has been a
crime."

"Madness or crime," mused the General, as he left the office. "I can't
go back to Suzette and tell her that. I must take her away again."

He announced his intention of starting for the Riviera next morning at
the breakfast-table; but his daughter implored him piteously to let her
stay at Matcham.

"It would be so heartless to go away while Allan is hovering between
life and death, and while----"

She left the sentence unfinished. She could not trust herself to speak
of Geoffrey.




                             CHAPTER XIV.

              "HE HATH AWAKENED FROM THE DREAM OF LIFE."


It was the day which was to have seen Suzette's wedding--the thirteenth
of December, a dull, mild December, promising that green Christmas
which is said to people churchyards with new-comers; a December to
gladden the heart of the fox-hunter, and disappoint the skater.

Sitting in melancholy solitude by the drawing-room fire, on this grey,
rainy morning, Suzette was glad to remember that she had prevented the
sending out of invitation cards, and that very few people in Matcham
knew the intended date of that wedding which was never to be. There
were not many to think of her with especial pity on this particular
day, sitting alone in her desolation, in her dark serge frock, with
the black poodle, Caro, and her piano for her only companions. Even the
companionship of that beloved piano had failed her since Geoffrey's
disappearance. Music was too closely associated with his presence.
There was not a single composition in her portfolio that did not recall
him--not an air she played that did not bring back the words he had
spoken when last her fingers followed the caprices of the composer.
He had been her master as well as her lover--he had taught her the
subtleties of musical expression--had breathed mind into her music.

Bessie Edgefield knew the date; but Bessie was sympathetic, and
never officious or obtrusive. She would drop in by-and-by, no doubt,
pretending not to remember anything particular about the day. She would
be full of some little bit of village news, or a new book from Mudie's,
or Mrs. Roebuck's last bonnet.

The wedding was to have been at two o'clock, a sensible, comfortable
hour; giving the bride ample leisure in which to put on her wedding
finery. The hours between breakfast and luncheon seemed longer than
usual that morning, a long blank weariness, after Suzette had seen her
father mount and ride away on his favourite hunter. The hounds met on
the other side of the downs, on the borders of Hampshire. It would be
late, most likely, before she would welcome that kind father to the
comfortable fireside, and listen, or at least pretend to listen, to the
varying fortunes of an adventurous day. And in the meantime she had the
day all before her, to dispose of as best she might, that day which was
to have seen her a bride.

Was she sorrowing for the lover who had forsaken her, as she sat
looking with sad, tearless eyes into the fire? Was she regretting the
happiness that might have been, thinking of a life which should have
been cloudless? No, she had never contemplated a life of cloudless
happiness with Geoffrey Wornock. She had loved that fiery spirit. Her
love had been conquered by a mind stronger than her own, and she had
submitted, almost as a slave submits to her captor. Mentally she had
been in bondage, able to see all that was faulty and perilous in the
character of her conqueror, yet loving him in spite of his faults.

But to-day his image was associated with a great terror--a terror
of undiscovered crime--the fear that when next she heard his name
spoken she would hear of him as an arrested criminal; or as a suicide,
self-slaughtered in some quiet spot, where the searchers must needs be
slow to find him.

Two o'clock. She had tried all her best-loved books in the endeavour to
forget the dark realities of life; but books did not help her to-day.
She never went into the dining-room for a formal luncheon when her
father was out for the day; preferring some light refreshment of the
kind which one hears of in Miss Austen's novels as "the tray," a modest
meal of cake and fruit, with nothing more substantial than a sandwich.
To-day even the sandwich was impossible. Her lips were dry with an
inward fever. Her hands were cold as ice, her forehead was burning.
"Was it raining?" she asked the servant. "No, the rain had ceased an
hour ago," the man told her. She started up with a feeling of relief
at the idea of escape from the dull, silent house; put on her hat and
jacket, and went out by the glass door into the garden, where the mild
winter had left a few flowers, pale Dijon roses, amidst the thick
foliage of honeysuckle and magnolia on the south wall, a lingering
chrysanthemum here and there in a sheltered bend of the shrubbery. The
air was full of the sweetness of herbs and flowers, and the freshness
of the rain. Yes, it was a relief to be walking about, looking at the
shrubs, shaking the rain from the feathery branches of the deodaras,
searching for late violets behind a border of close-clipped box. It
was a comfortable, old-fashioned garden, full of things that had been
growing for the best part of a century, a garden of broad gravel
walks, and square grass plots, espaliers hiding asparagus-beds, the
scent of sweet herbs conquering the more delicate odours of violets and
rare roses--a dear old garden to be happy in, and a quiet retreat in
which to walk alone with sorrow.

Suzette walked alone with her sorrow for nearly an hour, thankful for
the hazard which had carried her energetic aunt to Salisbury two days
before, on a visit to her friends in the Close, and had thus spared
her Mrs. Mornington's society on this particular day. To have been
comforted, or to have been bewailed over, would have added to her
burden. To walk alone in this dull old garden was best.

Not alone any more! She heard the rustling of branches at the other
end of the long green alley, and a footstep--a heavier footfall than
Bessie Edgefield's--on the moist gravel. Her heart throbbed with a
startled expectancy. Joy or fear? She had no time to know which feeling
predominated before she saw her lover coming quickly towards her. He
was dressed, not as she had been accustomed to see him in the corduroy
waistcoat, short tweed coat, and knickerbockers of rustic out-of-door
life, but in a frock-coat, light grey trousers, and white waistcoat,
and was wearing a tall hat. She had time to note these details, and
the malmaison carnation in his coat, and the light gloves which he was
carrying, before he was at her side, looking down at her with wild,
bloodshot eyes, grasping her arm with a strong hand, while those smart
lavender gloves dropped from his unconscious grasp, and fell on the wet
gravel, to be trampled underfoot like weeds.

"Why were you not at the church? Why are you wearing that dingy frock?
You and your bridesmaids ought to have been ready an hour ago. I have
been waiting for you. Have you forgotten what this day means?"

"Geoffrey! have not _you_ forgotten? What madness to come back like
this! What have you been doing with your life since the fourteenth of
November? Where have you been hiding?"

"Where? Hiding! Nonsense! I have been travelling. I took it into
my head, when Allan was coming back, that you didn't care for me,
that he was the favoured lover, in spite of all. I had extorted your
promise--and you were sorry you had ever given it. And I thought the
best thing for me would be to make myself scarce, to go to Africa,
Australia, anywhere. The world is big enough for two people to give
each other a wide berth, but not big enough for Allan and me, if you
liked him better than me. I was a fool, that's all: a fool to doubt my
dearest! But there's no time to lose. We must be married before three.
Come to the church as you are. What does it matter? I've put on my
war-paint, you see. My valet seemed to think I was mad."

"You have seen your mother?"

"Yes, she has been plaguing me with questions. I gave her the slip.
Allan is there, in my house. The irony of fate, isn't it? Hovering
between life and death, my mother told me. How long will he hesitate
between two opinions? I left them wondering, and hurried to the church
to meet you, only to find emptiness. No one there! Not even the sexton.
But there is still time. We can be married--you and I--with the sexton
and pew-opener for witnesses, and can start for the other end of the
world to-night."

"Geoffrey, why did you go away?" she asked, looking up at that wild
face with infinite terror in her own.

The restless eyes, the convulsive working of the dry hot lips told
their story only too plainly, the story of a mind distraught.

"Dear Geoffrey!" she said gently, with unspeakable pity for this
human wreck, "there can be no marriage to-day. We are all in great
trouble--about Allan."

"About Allan--always about Allan!" he interrupted savagely. "What has
Allan to do with the matter? It is our wedding-day, yours and mine. I
don't want Allan for my best man."

"There can be no marriage while Allan is ill, lying in your house, so
nearly murdered; perhaps even yet to die from that cruel usage. They
are looking for his murderer, Geoffrey. Was it wise for you to come
back to this place, knowing that?"

"Knowing what?"

"That Allan's mother is determined to find the man who so nearly killed
her son."

"What have I to do with her determination? I shall neither hinder nor
help her."

Oh, the crafty smile, the malice and the cunning in that face, a look
which Suzette had never seen till now! A look which made that once
splendid countenance seem the face of a stranger.

She shrank from him involuntarily. He saw the sudden look of repulsion,
and tightened his grasp upon her arm, until she gave a cry of pain.

"Did I hurt you?" loosening his grasp with a laugh. "What a fluttering
little dove it is; so easily scared, so easily hurt. Come, Suzette, you
are not going to cheat me, are you? This is the thirteenth of December.
Do you hear? the thirteenth, the date fixed and appointed by you, by
your very self. You shall not evade your own appointment. Come, love,
come."

He took a few rapid steps forward, dragging her along with him, lifting
her off her feet in his vehemence, but stopping suddenly when he found
she was nearly falling.

"Geoffrey, how rough you are!"

"I didn't mean to be rough. But there's not a moment to lose. Why won't
you come?"

"I am not coming. It is sheer madness to talk of our wedding. You have
been away for a whole month of your own accord. Our marriage has been
put off indefinitely. Poor Geoffrey!" looking at his haggard face with
sudden tenderness, "how dreadfully ill you look! worse than the night
you arrived from Zanzibar. I will go back to the Manor with you, and
see you safe and at rest with your dear mother."

"No, no, I am never going back to the Manor where that dead man lies."

"Dead! Oh, God! He is not dead! What do you mean?"

"I don't want their dead man there. Well, he may be alive still,
perhaps. I don't want him there. His presence poisons my house, as his
influence has poisoned my life. He has been a blight upon me. Like me,
they say--like me, but of a different fibre. I know how to fight for
my own hand. Will you come with me to the church quietly, of your own
accord?"

"No, no. Impossible."

"Then I'll make you," he cried savagely, seizing her in his arms. "I
won't be fooled. I won't be cheated. I am here to fulfil my part of the
bond. I have not forgotten the date."

Then with a swift change of mood he loosened his angry hold upon her,
fell on his knees at her feet, crying over the poor little hand which
he clasped in both his own.

"Pity me, Suzette, pity me! I am the most miserable wretch in the
world. I have been wandering about England like a criminal; a hateful
country, no solitude, people staring and prying everywhere; a miserable
over-crowded place where a man cannot be alone with his troubles, where
there is no space for thought or memory. But I did not forget you. Your
image was always there," touching his forehead; "_that_ never faded.
Only I forgot other things, or hardly knew which were dreams, or which
were real. That grey afternoon in the wood, and the words that were
said, and his face when I struck him! A dream? Yes, a dream! And then
only yesterday the date upon a newspaper seen by accident--I have read
no newspapers since I left Discombe--reminded me of to-day. I was at
Padstow yesterday afternoon, an out-of-the-way village on the Cornish
coast; and it has taken me all my time to get here to Discombe to-day
in time to dress for my wedding. You should have seen my servant's
face when I rang for him. I went into the house by the old door in the
lobby, and walked up to my dressing-room without meeting a mortal. One
never does meet any one at Discombe. The house is like the tomb of the
Pharaohs--long passages, emptiness, silence."

He had risen from his knees at Suzette's entreaty, and was walking
by her side, walking fast, speaking with breathless rapidity, eager,
self-absorbed, holding her, lightly now, by the arm, as they paced the
gravel walk.

"Higson was always a fool. I could see what he was thinking when I made
him put out my frock-coat. The fellow thought I was mad. He wanted me
to take a warm bath, and lie down for a bit before I saw my mother. He
talked in the smooth wheedling way common people use with lunatics, as
if they were children; and then he ran off to fetch my mother; and she
came, poor soul, and kissed and cried over me, and thanked God with
one breath for my return, and with the next wailed about Allan. Allan
was there, close by, in my room. I was not to speak above my breath,
lest I should disturb him. I went to another room to dress, but I
had ever so much trouble with Higson before I could get the things
I wanted--London things he called them--and wouldn't I have this, or
that, anything except what I asked for? So you see I had a lot of
trouble, and then I walked to the church, and found it was two o'clock,
and not a soul there."

"Geoffrey, what could you expect?"

"I expected you to keep your word. This is our wedding-day. I expected
to find my bride."

"We must wait, Geoffrey. There is plenty of time."

"No, there is no time. I want to take you with me to the Great Lake,
far away from this cramped narrow country, these teeming over-crowded
cities, a soil gridironed with railways, shut in with streets and
houses, not one wide horizon like that inland sea. Ah, how you would
adore it, as I do, in storm or in calm, always beautiful, always grand,
a place made for the mind to grow in, for the heart to rest in. Ah,
how often in the deep of the moonlight nights I have wandered up and
down those smooth sands, thinking of you, conjuring up your image in
such warm reality that it froze my blood when I looked round and saw
that the real woman was not at my side. You will go to Africa with me,
Suzette?"

"Yes, dear, yes; by-and-by."

"Ah, that's what Higson said when I told him to put out a frock-coat,
'By-and-by.' But I answered with a 'Now!' that made him jump. Hark!
there's some one coming; a step on the gravel."

A light step, a girl's quick footfall. It was the vicar's daughter,
fresh and blooming in winter frock and winter hat. A creature of the
kind that is usually nailed flat on a barn door was coiled gracefully
round the little felt hat, pretending to have come from Siberia.

At the first sight of Geoffrey, she started and looked aghast.

"Mr. Wornock! I thought you were hundreds of miles away."

"So I was, yesterday afternoon; but I happened to remember my
wedding-day, and here I am, only to find that other people had
forgotten."

"Oh, you happened to remember!" said Bessie, still staring at the white
waistcoat, the malmaison carnation, the light grey trousers stained
with rain and mud from the knee downwards, and worst of all the haggard
countenance of the wearer. "You only remembered yesterday. How funny!"

Miss Edgefield would have made the same remark about a funeral in her
present startled condition of mind.

       *       *       *       *       *

Matcham had plenty of stuff for conversation within the next few days;
for by that subtle process by which facts or various versions of
facts are circulated in a rustic neighbourhood, people became aware
of Geoffrey Wornock's return to Discombe, and of dreadful scenes that
had occurred at Marsh House, where he had stayed for a couple of days,
during which period Suzette was living at the Grove under her aunt and
uncle's protection.

Yes, there had been scenes, tragical scenes, at Marsh House. Mrs.
Wornock had been hastily summoned there, and had stayed under General
Vincent's roof till her unhappy son was removed in medical custody,
whither Matcham people knew not, though there were positive assertions
as to locality on the part of the more energetic talkers. A physician
had been summoned from London, a man of repute in mental cases; and
Mrs. Wornock's brougham had driven away from Marsh House in wintry
dusk, with a pair of horses, and had not returned to the Manor till
late on the following day; whereby it was concluded that the journey
had been at least twenty miles.

Mr. Wornock had been taken away, placed under restraint, people told
each other, arriving at the fact by the usual inductive process, and
on this occasion unhappily accurate in their deduction. Geoffrey was
in a doctor's care; a madman with lucid intervals; not violent, except
in brief flashes of angry despair, but with occasional hallucinations,
that delirium without fever which constitutes lunacy from the
standpoint of law and medicine.

Before he passed into that dim under-world of the private lunatic
asylum, he had, in more than one wild torrent of self-accusation,
confessed his treacherous desertion of Allan in Africa, his savage
assault upon Allan in the wood. They had met, and Allan had upbraided
him for that treacherous desertion, and for stealing his sweetheart.
Suzette's name had been like a lighted fuse to an infernal machine;
and then the latent savage which is in every man had leapt into life,
and there had been a deadly struggle, a fight for existence on Allan's
part, a murderous onslaught from Geoffrey.

It needed not the opinion of the detective police, nor yet the
discovery of Allan's watch and signet-ring under the rotten leaves
in the deep hollow of an old oak half a mile from the spot where he
himself had been found, to substantiate Geoffrey's self-accusation. His
unhappy mother, who was with him at Marsh House throughout those last
dreadful hours of raving and unrest, had never doubted his guilt from
the time of his reappearance at Discombe.

       *       *       *       *       *

It was months before Allan returned to the world of active life; but he
left the Manor long before actual convalescence.

Not once, during those slow hours of returning health, did he allude
to the cause of his terrible illness; and, on his mother timidly
questioning him, he professed to have no recollection of the assault
which had been so nearly fatal.

"Let the past remain a blank, mother. No good can come by trying to
remember."

He was especially gentle and affectionate to Mrs. Wornock on her rare
visits to his room during the earlier stages of his convalescence.
Geoffrey's name was not spoken by either; but Allan's sympathetic
manner told the unhappy mother that he knew her grief and pitied her.

Lady Emily was by no means ungrateful for the lavish hospitality with
which Mrs. Wornock's house and household had been devoted to her
son, yet she shrank with a natural abhorrence from a scene which was
associated with Allan's peril and Geoffrey's crime. No kindness of
Mrs. Wornock's could lessen that horror; and Lady Emily did her utmost
to hasten the patient's removal to his own house, short of risking a
relapse. When she saw him established in his cheerful bedchamber at
Beechhurst, she felt as if she had taken him out of a charnel-house
into the pleasant world of the living and the happy; a world to which
Geoffrey Wornock was fated never to return.

"Quite hopeless," was the verdict of medical authority.

Mrs. Wornock left Discombe, and was said to be living in complete
seclusion, attended upon by two or three of the oldest of the Manor
servants, in a cottage near the private asylum where her son was a
prisoner for life.

Before midsummer Allan's health was completely restored, and mother
and son left for Suffolk, for the pastures and pine-woods, the long
white roads and sandy commons, the wide horizons and large level spaces
flooded with the red and gold of sunsets that are said to surpass the
splendour of sunsets in more picturesque scenery. Lady Emily would have
been completely happy in this quiet interlude, this tranquil pause in
the drama of life, had not Allan talked of going back to Africa before
the end of the year.

"Why not?" he asked, when she remonstrated with him. "There is nothing
for me to do in England, and Africa doesn't mean a lifelong separation,
mother, or I would not dream of going there. Every year shortens
the journey. Six weeks, I think Consul Johnstone called it, to Lake
Tanganyika. If I go, I promise to return in less than two years. You
would hardly have time to miss me in your busy days here----"

"Busy about such poor trifles, Allan? Do you think my farm could fill
the place of my son? If you were away, one great care and sorrow would
fill every hour of my life. And think what an anxious winter I went
through--a season of fear and trembling."

This plea prevailed. He could not disregard the care and love that had
been lavished upon him. No, he would not allow himself to be drawn back
to that dark continent which is said to exercise a subtle influence
over those who have once crossed her far-reaching plains, and rested
beside her wide waters, and lived her life of adventure and surprise.
No, it was too soon for the son to leave his mother, she having none
but him. He had done with love; but duty still claimed him; and he
stayed.

A quiet winter at Beechhurst, with his mother to keep house for him,
a good deal of hunting, and so much attention and kindly feeling from
everybody in the neighbourhood, that he could not altogether play the
hermit. He was forced into visiting, and into entertaining his friends,
and Lady Emily was very happy in playing her part of hostess in the
livelier circle of Matcham, while the shutters were closed at Fendyke,
and the bailiff had full sway on the white farm, allowed to do what
he liked there, which was generally something different from what his
mistress liked.

Life was made easier for Allan that winter by the absence of Suzette,
who was travelling with her father--easier, and emptier, for the one
presence which would have given a zest to life was wanting. He told
himself that it was better so, better for his peace, since she could
never be anything to him. The disappearance of his rival would make no
difference in her feelings for Allan; for no doubt her affection for
Geoffrey would only be strengthened by their tragical separation and
her lover's miserable fate.

"If she should ever care for any one else, it will be a stranger,"
Allan told himself in those long reveries which the mere sight of a
well-known garden wall, or the chimneys of Marsh House seen above the
leafless elms as he rode past, could evoke. "She will never waste a
thought upon me."

Other people were more hopeful. Mrs. Mornington told her friends in
confidence that her niece's acceptance of that unfortunate young man
had been a folly, into which she had been entrapped by Geoffrey's
dominant temper, and by her passion for music.

"She never loved that unhappy young man as she once loved Allan Carew."

"And now, no doubt, she and Mr. Carew will make it up and marry," said
the confidant, male or female, as the case might be.

"Not now: but some day, yes, perhaps," replied Suzette's aunt, with a
significant nod.

And the day came--when Geoffrey Wornock's passionate heart was still
for ever--had been stilled for more than two years--and when to him, at
rest in the silence of the family burial-place at Discombe, by the side
of the mother who had only survived him by a few weeks, the sound of
Suzette's wedding-bells, the knowledge of Allan's happiness could bring
no pain.

Allan's day came--long and late, after years of patient waiting, when
Suzette had attained the sober age of six and twenty; but it was a day
of cloudless happiness, which promised to last to the end of life. No
fear of the future marred the joy of the present. The later love that
had grown up in Suzette's heart for her first lover, was too strongly
based upon knowledge and esteem to suffer the shadow of change.


                               THE END.


         LONDON: PRINTED BY WILLIAM CLOWES AND SONS, LIMITED,
                  STAMFORD STREET AND CHARING CROSS.


      [Transcriber's Note: Inconsistent hyphens left as printed.]





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