Long Odds
by Harold Bindloss · English · Gutenberg #39019 · 586,730 chars · public domain (US)
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Title: Long Odds
Author: Harold Bindloss
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[Illustration: "He watched her go down the stairway."--See page 279.]
LONG ODDS
by
HAROLD BINDLOSS
Author of "Alton of Somasco," "The Cattle-Baron's
Daughter," "The Mistress of Bonaventure,"
"Winston of The Prairie," "Delilah of
The Snows," etc.
[Illustration: SCIRE QVOD SCIENDVM]
Boston
Small, Maynard & Company
1908
Copyright, 1908, by
Small, Maynard & Company
(Incorporated)
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I THOMAS ORMSGILL 1
II RESTITUTION 16
III HIS OWN PEOPLE 29
IV THE SUMMONS 44
V A DETERMINED MAN 60
VI DESMOND MAKES AN ADMISSION 73
VII ORMSGILL KEEPS HIS WORD 86
VIII THE BONDSWOMAN 97
IX ANITA BECOMES A RESPONSIBILITY 108
X ORMSGILL ASKS A FAVOR 118
XI DESMOND VENTURES A HINT 129
XII LISTER OFFERS SATISFACTION 141
XIII HIS BENEFICENT INFLUENCE 152
XIV HERRERO'S IMPRUDENCE 165
XV NARES COUNTS THE COST 176
XVI NEGRO DIPLOMACY 189
XVII THE AMBUSCADE 201
XVIII DOM CLEMENTE LOOKS ON 213
XIX THE DELAYED MESSAGE 225
XX DESMOND GOES ASHORE 237
XXI ON THE BEACH 250
XXII UNDER STRESS 264
XXIII THE SLACKENING OF RESTRAINT 280
XXIV BENICIA MAKES A BARGAIN 294
XXV DOMINGO APPEARS 307
XXVI THE DAY OF RECKONING 320
XXVII AN ERROR OF JUDGMENT 332
XXVIII THE CHEFE STANDS FAST 344
XXIX DOM CLEMENTE STRIKES 356
XXX ORMSGILL BEARS THE TEST 369
XXXI ON HIS TRIAL 381
XXXII BENICIA UNDERTAKES AN OBLIGATION 392
LONG ODDS
CHAPTER I
THOMAS ORMSGILL
It was towards the middle of a sweltering afternoon when Commandant
Dom Erminio roused himself to wakefulness as he lay in his Madeira
chair on the veranda of Fort San Roque, which stands beside a muddy
river of Western Africa. As a rule Dom Erminio slept all the
afternoon, which was not astonishing, since there was very little else
for him to do, and if there had been he would conscientiously have
refrained from doing it as long as possible. It is also very probable
that any other intelligent white man similarly circumstanced would
have been glad to spend part, at least, of the weary day in merciful
oblivion. San Roque is one of the hottest places in Africa, which is
saying a good deal, and at night a sour white steam, heavy with the
exhalations of putrefaction, rises from the muddy river. They usually
bring the white man who breathes them fever of one or several kinds,
while even if he endures them scatheless the steamy heat melts the
vigor out of him, and the black dejection born of it and the monotony
crushes his courage down. San Roque is scorched with pitiless
sunshine during part of the year, but it is walled in by never-lifting
shadow, for all round the dark forest creeps close up to it.
On the afternoon in question the Commandant's rest was prematurely
broken, because his dusky major-domo had not had the basket chair
placed where it would remain in shadow, and a slanting shaft of
sunlight struck hotly upon the sleeper's face. A dull throbbing sound
also crept softly out of the heavy stillness, and it was a sound which
usually promised at least an hour or two's distraction. Dom Erminio
recognized it as the thud of canoe paddles, and sat upright in his
chair looking about him drowsily, a little, haggard, yellow-faced man
in white uniform, with claw-like hands whose fingers-ends were stained
by tobacco. He lived remote from even such civilization as may be met
with on the coast of Western Africa, with a handful of black soldiers
and one white companion, distinctly on sufferance, since the fever and
certain tribesmen who showed signs of resenting the white men's
encroachments might at any time snuff him out. He was, however, of
Iberian extraction, and it was characteristic of him that he did not
concern himself greatly about the possibility of such a catastrophe or
consider it worth while to take any steps to avert it which he might
perhaps have done.
As he glanced round he saw the straggling line of stockade which was
falling down in places, for, being what he was, it had not occurred to
him to mend it; the black soldiers' thatched quarters; and the
ramshackle residency, which was built in part of wood and in part of
well rammed mud. Beyond them rose the forest, black and mysterious,
cleft by the river's dazzling pathway, and a faint look of
anticipation crept into Dom Erminio's eyes as the thud of paddles grew
louder. The river was one stage of the road to civilization, and he
could not quite give up the hope that certain political friends in his
own country would remember him some day. Then his look of interest
died away, for it became evident from the beat of paddles that the
occupants of the approaching canoe were traveling faster than any one
in the Government service usually thought it worth while to do.
Besides that, the Government's messengers were not addicted to
traveling at all in the heat of the afternoon.
"Ah," he said, with a wave of his unlighted cigarette which was
vaguely expressive of resignation, "it is the Englishman Ormsgill or
the American missionary. Perhaps, by a special misfortune, it may be
both of them."
His companion, who leaned upon the balustrade, nodded, for Englishmen
and Americans are not held in great esteem in that country, nor are
missionaries of any kind. They see too much, and some of them report
it afterwards, which, when now and then the outer world pricks up its
ears in transient interest or indignation, is apt to make trouble for
everybody. Still, the Lieutenant Luiz was a lethargic man and a
philosopher in his way, so he said nothing, though he waved the comely
brown-skinned girl who had been sitting near him back into the house.
There was, at least, no occasion to provide a weapon for the enemy,
and Marietta had made several attempts to run away lately.
Commandant Erminio smiled approvingly. "What one suspects does not
count," he said. "In this land of the shadow one suspects everything
and everybody. There are even envious and avaricious men on the coast
down yonder who fling aspersions at me."
If Lieutenant Luiz had been an Englishman he would probably have
grinned, but he was too dignified a gentleman to do anything of that
kind, though there was a faint twinkle in his languid dark eyes. Then
a canoe swung into sight round a bend, and slid on towards the landing
with wet paddles flashing dazzlingly. Four almost naked negroes swung
them, but another man, who wore white duck and a wide gray hat also
plied a dripping blade just clear of the awning astern, which was a
very unusual thing in that region.
"It is certainly the Englishman Ormsgill," said Dom Erminio. "That is
a man the fever cannot kill, which is, perhaps, a pity." Then he waved
his cigarette again. "Still, it is possible that Headman Domingo will
settle with him some day."
The canoe slid up to the pile-bound bank, and the two white men who
got out strode towards the residency, which was characteristic, since
on a day of that kind an Iberian would certainly have sauntered. The
first of them was tall, and thinner even than most white men are who
have had the flesh melted from them in tropical Africa. His face was
hollow, though he was apparently only some thirty years of age, but
it was the face of a strong-willed man, and there was a certain
suggestion of optimism in it and his eyes, which was singularly
unusual in the case of a man who had spent several years in that
country. Even nature is malignant there, and man is steeped in lust
and avarice and cruelty, but in spite of this Watson Nares was an
optimist as well as an American medical missionary.
He returned the Commandant's greeting, which was punctiliously
courteous, and sitting down in the chair a negro brought for him,
waited until his companion, who had turned to give an order to the
canoe boys, came up. The latter was of average height, a strongly
built man of about the missionary's age, with a brick red face, fair
hair thinned by fever, and wrinkles about his gray eyes. They were
steady, observant eyes, though a half-cynical, half-whimsical twinkle
crept into them now and then, as it did when he glanced towards the
Commandant. The latter would have clapped his shoulder, but he avoided
the effusive greeting with a certain quiet tactfulness which was usual
with him.
"The padre and I are going back to the concession," he said in
Portuguese. "If you have any hammock boys we would like to borrow
them."
The Commandant said that this was unfortunately not the case. Two of
his carriers had dysentery, and another a guinea worm in his leg; and
there was only the little twinkle in Ormsgill's eyes to show that he
did not believe him.
"Besides," said Lieutenant Luiz, "the country is not safe. There is a
rumor that the Abbatava men are watching the lower road."
Ormsgill laughed, though he fancied that Dom Erminio had flashed a
quick glance at his subordinate before the latter spoke.
"Still, I scarcely think the Abbatava people will trouble me, and in
any case some of them would be sorry if they did," he said. "Well,
since you have no carriers we will get on again. It is a long way to
the concession, and Lamartine is very ill. I brought up the padre to
see if he could do anything for him."
Dom Erminio shrugged his shoulders. "It is a wasted effort, which is a
thing to be regretted in this land, where an effort is difficult to
make. Lamartine has been ill too often, and if he is ill again he will
certainly die. As you have heard, the bushmen are in an unsettled
state, and there are several sick men here. It is, perhaps, convenient
that the Señor Nares should stay at San Roque."
He made a little suggestive gesture which seemed to indicate that the
road was unsafe, turning towards his subordinate as though for
confirmation, but once more Ormsgill fancied there was a warning in
his glance.
"Of a surety!" said the Lieutenant Luiz. "Lamartine is probably not
alive by now. Still, if the Señor Nares insists on going it is well
that he should take the higher road."
In the meantime the canoe boys had unrolled a canvas hammock and
lashed it to its pole. Nares stood up as they approached the veranda
stairway with the pole upon their wooly crowns.
"I will come back and look at your sick," he said. "We have only the
one hammock, Ormsgill."
Ormsgill smiled. "There is nothing very wrong with my feet, and I
haven't had a dose of fever for some time. It isn't your fault that
you have one now."
He made the two officers a little inclination as he took off his hat,
and Nares, who shook hands with them, crawled into his hammock. He, at
least, had the fever every two or three months or so. Then the boys
struck up a marching song as they swung away with their burden into
the steamy shadow, and the Commandant leaned on the balustrade
listening with a little dry smile until the crackle of trampled
undergrowth and sighing refrain died away.
"When one desires to encourage such men it is generally wise to point
out the difficulties," he said. "One would fancy that they were fond
of them, especially the Señor Ormsgill, who is of the kind the customs
of this world make rebels of."
"And the other?" asked Lieutenant Luiz, who had, not without reason, a
respect for the wisdom of his superior. He had found that it was, in
some ways at least, warranted.
The Commandant lighted his cigarette, and watched the first smoke
wreath float straight up into the stagnant air. "He would be a martyr.
It is a desire that is incomprehensible to you and me, but there are
others besides him who seem to cherish it--and in this land of the
devil opportunities of satisfying it are generally offered them."
He looked at Lieutenant Luiz, and once more the latter's face relaxed
into the nearest approach to a grin his sense of dignity allowed. One
could have fancied there was an understanding of some kind between the
men.
In the meanwhile Nares' bearers were plodding down a two-foot trail
walled in by thorny underbrush and festoons of as thorny creepers that
flowed down in tangled luxuriance between the towering cottonwood
trunks. There was dim shade all about them, and the atmosphere was
like that of a Turkish bath, steamy and almost insufferably hot, only
that there was in it something which checked instead of accelerated
the cooling perspiration. Now and then the bearers gasped, and
Ormsgill's face was flushed as he walked beside the hammock.
"We should get through by to-morrow night if we take the lower road,"
he said. "I believe that would be advisable, though I'm not quite sure
of it. At least, it's the nearer one, and Lamartine was going down
hill very fast when I left him. In fact, he sent two of the boys to
the Mission for Father Tiebout. In one way, the thing's a trifle
invidious, but, you see, Lamartine is of his persuasion."
Nares smiled. "I'm to have the care of his body, and Father Tiebout of
his soul. Well, we have fought as allies on those terms before, and I
guess I don't mind."
"You're quite sure? After all, in one way, the soul of Lamartine would
be something of a trophy."
The American looked up at him with a faint kindling in his eyes.
"Tiebout has so many to his credit--and he could afford to spare me
this one. Still, at least, I can heal the body, if I am called in in
time."
"Which is a good deal. Especially in a land where it is singularly
difficult to believe that men have souls at all."
Nares shook his head. "If I didn't feel quite so played out I'd take
your challenge up," he said. "Guess we'll join issue on that point
another time. You mentioned once or twice that Lamartine was very
sick?"
"There's about one chance in twenty we get there before he's dead.
It's one of the reasons I'm taking the lower road. It's the nearest."
It was characteristic that Ormsgill did not state that it was also one
of the reasons he had traveled for four days and most of four nights
under an enervating heat. Lamartine was an alien of dubious character,
and in some respects distinctly uncongenial habits, but Ormsgill had
not spared himself to give his comrade that one chance for his life.
"Didn't Lieutenant Luiz' recommendation count?" asked Nares.
"No," said Ormsgill, reflectively. "I don't think it did. At least,
not as he meant it to, though I've been trying to worry out what he
did mean exactly. One thing's certain. He wasn't prompted by any
solicitude for our safety. You see, he might have been counting on my
distrust of him, or my usual obstinacy, and wanted me to take the
higher road after all. Or he may have been playing another game. I
don't know. That's why we'll take the nearest way and not worry. When
you're in doubt, it's generally wisest to do the obvious thing."
Nares made a little drowsy gesture of concurrence. "Straight to the
mark--and you get there now and then. At least, it can't be the wrong
path--and if one doesn't finish the journey it's only a falling out by
the way. A good many of us have done that in this country."
Ormsgill said nothing. He had somewhere buried deep in him a vague,
unformulated faith which, however, seldom found expression of any kind
in words, and was tinged with a bitterness against all conventional
creeds, which was not altogether astonishing in the case of a man who
had lived as he had done in the dark land. Still, he had traveled four
days and nights to bring his sick comrade the assistance he felt would
arrive too late and now, when he dragged himself along dead weary
through the steamy shade, he had reasons for surmising that there was
peril somewhere down the winding trail.
Nares was asleep when they passed the forking and held on by the lower
road, and Ormsgill did not tell the boys that he had seen a huddled
black figure lying a few yards back among the undergrowth. He did not
even stop to look at it. Labor is in demand in that country, and when
it is supplied by a dusky contractor who collects the raw material in
the bush the unfortunate who sickens on the long march from the
interior usually dies. Transport on the human head makes provisions
costly in a devastated country, and it is not economy to feed a man
who will bring one nothing in. A white man, as everybody knows, may
not own or sell a slave in any part of Africa under European control,
but he must have labor, and there are in practice ways of getting over
the obvious difficulty. They are not ways which are discussed openly,
and, so far as one can ascertain, are by no means satisfactory to the
negro for whose benefit they are sometimes said to be devised. In
this, and a few other matters, the negro's opinion is not, however,
deferred to. It is his particular business to gather rubber for the
white man and grow his cocoa, and the fact that he is not as a rule
content to recognize this obligation is very seldom taken into
consideration.
It had been dark two hours, and the bearers could go no further
without a rest, when Ormsgill camped on a ridge beneath tall tufted
palms at least a hundred yards from the trail. There was a reason for
this, and also for the fact that he allowed no fires to be made,
though of all things the negro loves a cheerful blaze. The powers of
evil are very real to him, which is by no means astonishing
considering the land he lives in. The boys sat huddled about the empty
hammock among the palms, while the two white men lay upon a waterproof
ground sheet some fifty yards apart from them and nearer the trail.
Ormsgill had had very little sleep during the last four nights, but
he was very wide awake then, and a good magazine rifle, which had been
smuggled through San Roque without the Commandant's notice, lay across
his knees.
He was listening intently, but could hear nothing except an occasional
rustling among the creepers and the heavy splash of moisture on the
leaves. Nor could he see very much, for though here and there a star
shown down between the towering trunks, a sour white steam hung almost
a man's height about the dripping undergrowth. Save for the splash of
moisture it was so still that Nares, with imagination quickened by the
tension the fever had laid upon his nerves, could almost fancy he
could hear things growing. The growth, at least was characteristic of
the country in that it was untrammeled, luxuriant, and destructive
rather than beneficent. Orchids and parasites sucked the life blood
from the trees, and throve upon their ruin; creepers strangled them
and tore them down half-rotten. It was a mad, cruel struggle for
existence, and Ormsgill, whose hot hands were clenched upon the rifle,
clearly recognized that man must take his part in it. As a matter of
fact, he was not averse to doing so. There was a vein of combativeness
in him, and circumstances had hitherto usually forced him well to the
front when there was trouble anywhere in his vicinity.
What he and Nares talked about was of no particular consequence. They
were men whose inner thoughts only became apparent now and then, and
their conversation largely concerned the merits of certain Congolese
cigars. By and by, however, Nares stopped abruptly, as a hand that
evidently did not belong to his companion touched his arm, but it was
characteristic of him that he did not start. He looked round instead,
and saw an indistinct and shadowy figure rise out of the undergrowth.
It pointed up the trail, and Ormsgill, who seemed to listen for a
moment or two, nodded.
"I really think Lieutenant Luiz meant us to take the other road," he
said. "That must be Domingo bringing down another drove, and as it is
evidently a big one it is just as well we didn't meet him on the
trail. Domingo doesn't like either of us, and he has been getting
truculent lately."
Nares said nothing, and a faint patter of naked feet that grew
steadily louder crept out of the silence. It was dragging and
listless, the shuffle of weary and hopeless men; and it was evident
that the hammock boy who sank down again into the undergrowth close
beside Ormsgill was badly afraid. Five minutes later a shadowy figure
appeared among the trees below them where the mist was thinner, grew a
trifle plainer as it slipped across an opening and vanished again, but
there were others behind, and for several minutes a row of half-seen
men flitted by. Here and there one of them draped in white cotton
carried a flintlock gun, but the rest were half-naked, and last of all
a few plodded behind a lurching hammock. They went by without a sound
but the confused patter of weary feet upon the quaggy trail, and left
an impressive silence behind them when they plunged into the gloom
again.
Then Ormsgill smiled grimly as he tapped the breech of his rifle.
"If homicide is ever justifiable it would have been to-night," he
said. "One could hardly have missed that bulge in Domingo's hammock,
and the longing to drive a bullet through it was almost too much for
me."
Nares made no attempt to rebuke him. "That man," he said, "is
permitted to be--one must suppose as part of a great purpose. The
mills of the gods grind slowly, but they do their work thoroughly."
"It seems so," and Ormsgill laughed a little bitter laugh. "Anyway,
the stones are wet with blood, and a good many of us have passed
between them. One wonders now and then how long the downtrodden will
endure that terrible grinding."
"It is for a time only. Day and night the cry goes up in many
tongues."
"And the gods of the heathen cannot hear; and those of the white men
may, it seems, be propitiated by masses in the cathedral and stained
windows bought with cocoa and rubber dividends. Well, one must try to
believe that Domingo's laborers enlisted for the purpose of being
taught agriculture by the white men of their own free will. At least,
that is the comfortable assurance usually furnished the civilized
powers, and as they have their own little problems to grapple with
they complacently shut one eye. I only wonder how many played-out
niggers' throats Domingo has cut on the way. In the meanwhile,
Lamartine is dying, and we may as well get on again."
He called to the hammock boys, who still seemed afraid, and in another
five minutes the little party was once more floundering onwards
through the silence of the steamy bush.
CHAPTER II
RESTITUTION
Darkness had closed down suddenly on the forest, but it was hotter
than ever in the primitively furnished general room of Lamartine's
house, where the lamp further raised the already almost insupportable
temperature. There was also a deep, impressive silence in the bush
that shut the rickety dwelling in, though now and then the sound of a
big drop splashing upon a quivering leaf came in through the open
window with startling distinctness. Lamartine, the French trader, was
dead, and had been buried that afternoon, as was customary, within an
hour or two after the breath has left his body. His career, like that
of most men in his business, had not been a very exemplary one, but he
had, at least, now and then shown that he possessed certain somewhat
fantastic and elementary notions of ethics, which he was in the habit
of alluding to as his code of honor. It was, as Father Tiebout, who
had once or twice given him spiritual advice when he was very sick of
fever, admitted, a rather indifferent one, but very few white men in
that country had any code at all, and, as the good padre said, it was
possible that too much would not be expected from any one who had
lived in that forest long.
In any case, Lamartine had gone to answer for the deeds that he had
done, and the three men who had buried him and had constituted
themselves his executors sat about his little table with the
perspiration dripping from them. There was Nares, gaunt and
hollow-faced, weak from fever and worn with watching; Father Tiebout,
the Belgian priest, little, and also haggard; and Ormsgill, the
gray-eyed, brown-faced Englishman, who sat looking at them with set
lips and furrowed forehead. Their creeds were widely different, but
men acquire a certain wide toleration in the land of the shadow, where
it is exceedingly difficult to believe in any thing beyond the
omnipotence of evil.
It was, perhaps, characteristic that it was the priest who tore up
certain papers Ormsgill had selected from the pile upon the table.
"I do not think that anything would be gained by allowing them to come
under the notice of the authorities," he said. "I am not sure that
they might not consider they invalidated the trifling bequest to the
Mission, which with good management should enable us to rescue a few
more of the heathen."
"A very few!" and Ormsgill smiled. "The market's stiff now Domingo has
practically a monopoly as purveyor. Converts will be dearer. One
understands that you buy most of yours."
Father Tiebout's eyes twinkled good-humoredly. "One must use the means
available, and it is, at least, something if we can save their bodies.
But to proceed, our companion will agree with me that repentance must
be followed by restitution or reparation. In the case of the friend we
have buried one must take the will for the deed, and the will was
there. Restitution may also be efficacious if it is vicarious. As you
know, it was the thought of the woman from the interior that most
troubled Lamartine."
Ormsgill glanced at Nares, for both had heard some, at least, of the
dying man's words on that subject, but for a time the American looked
straight in front of him. Then he turned to Ormsgill.
"He seemed to expect you to make that restitution for him. Tell us
what you know. Most of it will not be news to Father Tiebout, but I
haven't his advantages."
"The affair is easily understood. Lamartine bought the girl from the
man who ran the labor supply business before Domingo. She was
decidedly good-looking, a pretty warm brown in color, and had the most
intelligent eyes I've ever seen in an African. The curious thing is
that I believe Lamartine was genuinely fond of her. In any case, he
was furious when one of the boys laid what looked like very conclusive
evidence of her unfaithfulness before him. He meant to administer the
usual penalty."
Father Tiebout made a little gesture. "Ah," he said, "these things
happen. One can only protest."
"Well," said Ormsgill dryly, "as you know, they didn't in this case. I
nearly broke his wrist, but I took the pistol from him. You see, I
rather believed in the girl's innocence. Lamartine compromised the
thing by handing her on to Herrero--though he would take no money for
her. He had, as he was rather fond of mentioning, his code of honor.
There was a trying scene when Herrero sent for her. The girl flung
herself down and clung to Lamartine's knees. It seemed she was fond of
the man, and didn't want to go away, which was, as it happens, wise of
her. Though she was probably not aware of this, Herrero trains the
women who take his fancy with the whip."
He stopped a moment and glared at Nares. "I have no doubt the padre
knows the rest. Lamartine found out not long ago that the boy had
lied, and remembered a little too late that Herrero would in all
probability beat the girl to death in one of his outbreaks. He made
him a very tempting offer if he would send her back, but Herrero
apparently wanted to keep her, and while negotiations were in progress
Lamartine fell sick. I naturally don't know what he told the padre,
but he once or twice assured me that if he knew she could be sent back
safe to her people in the bush he would die more contentedly. In fact,
improbable as it may seem in this country, the thing was worrying him
badly."
It was significant that Nares, who was something of an optimist,
appeared by his expression to consider the fact that such a thing
should have troubled Lamartine very improbable indeed, but Father
Tiebout smiled contemplatively. His profession gave him, as had been
suggested, advantages which Nares did not enjoy, and he was a wise man
in his way.
"Lamartine," he said, "desired to make restitution--but to do it in
his own person was not permitted him."
Then he turned, and sat still with his eyes fixed on Ormsgill, as
though waiting. It was, in fact, an occupation he was accustomed to,
for one who would see the result of his efforts must as a rule wait a
long while in Africa.
Ormsgill met his gaze thoughtfully, with steady gray eyes, and it was
a moment or two before he spoke.
"Whether a vicarious reparation will be of any benefit to the soul of
Lamartine I naturally do not know," he said. "It is enough for me that
he and the padre seemed to fancy it might be, and, as it happens, I
owe Lamartine a good deal. This is why I practically promised to
undertake his responsibility. I am not sure that either of you know I
first arrived in this Colony trimming coal among the niggers in a
steamer's stokehold."
Father Tiebout made a little gesture with his hands which seemed to
imply that there was very little he was not acquainted with, and
Ormsgill went on--
"Still, I do not think you know I was quietly compelled to abandon the
service of a British Colony for a fault I never committed. My friends
at home very naturally turned against me. I had brought them
discredit--and it did not matter greatly whether I was guilty. How I
made a living afterwards along this coast does not concern you; but I
went down in one sense as far as a white man may, and the struggle has
left a mark that will never quite come out on me. Still, I met with
kindness from other outcasts and benighted heathen, as one usually
does from the outcast and the trodden on, and, when I was flung ashore
after nearly pounding the life out of a brutal second engineer,
Lamartine, who had gone down to the coast on business, held out a hand
to me. As I said, I feel that I owe him a little."
He stopped for a moment with a little grim smile. "Herrero has gone
South somewhere, taking the girl with him, but if she is alive I think
I can promise that he will give her up. After that it would not be so
very difficult to send her back to where she comes from in the bush."
"For the repose of the soul of Lamartine!" and Nares glanced at Father
Tiebout, with a challenge in his eyes.
The little priest's gesture seemed to imply that he declined to be
drawn into a controversy, and it was Ormsgill who answered the
American.
"To discharge a debt--among other reasons--and as a protest. I have
been driven to exhaustion myself more than once. Have you any hope at
all to offer these African people, I mean in this world, padre?"
Father Tiebout smiled. "Yes," he said simply. "One does what one can,
and waits patiently. How long, I do not know, but slowly or suddenly,
in our time, or in the time of these people's children, the change
will come."
He looked at Nares, the man of action, who bore with waiting ill, and
he, flushed with fever, laid a hand that was clenched hard upon the
table.
"You expect them to endure to the second generation. I tell you that
they are forging spears in the interior now. A little more, and they
will come down and wipe out every bush mission and garrison, and can
we blame them, who stand by and tolerate the abominable traffic in
black men's souls and bodies? There was more excuse for the old-time
slavery. Horrible as it would be, one could almost welcome the
catastrophe which would force the outside world to recognize what
white men are doing here."
There were, perhaps, men in the outside world who knew it already, and
could suggest no remedy. After all, labor is essential to the
prosperity of any African colony, and while in some which are ruled as
justly as circumstances permit the negro is offered wages for his
services, and can go home with his earnings when he likes, there are
others where more drastic measures are adopted. There the labor
purveyor collects the white man's servants in the bush, and it is not
the business of the Administration to inquire whether they are
prisoners of war or have been sold by their friends. They are bound
down to toil for a term of years, and if they die off during it few
troublesome questions are asked. The African climate is an unhealthy
one, as everybody knows.
In the meanwhile neither of Nares' companions said anything for a
space. They were thinking of the same thing, each in his own way,
while the dense steamy blackness of the African night shut them in.
Ormsgill, who had been driven until the sweat of anguished effort
dripped from him, wondered vaguely what a man with brains and nerve
and money might do on the negroes' behalf in spite of the opposition
of a corrupt administration. The priest was also wondering how much
he could accomplish with Lamartine's bequest, very little of which
would, however, in all probability, be allowed to remain in his
hands, though he knew that it would in any case not go very far,
for he was one who recognized that the new beneficent order must be
evolved slowly, here a little and there a little, with other men to
carry out what he had begun. Father Tiebout seldom rode a tilt at
impossibilities, as Nares and Ormsgill occasionally did. He was a wise
man, and knew the world too well. At last Nares made a little gesture
of weariness.
"Well, the thing may happen, but that hardly concerns us in the
meanwhile, and our work here is done. I wonder if you remember that
you haven't read the letters Father Tiebout brought up, Ormsgill?"
Ormsgill had, as it happened, quite forgotten them. He had arrived
worn out with a long and hasty journey, and Nares and he had then kept
close watch beside his comrade's bed. When at last their watch was
over there was still much to be done, and now for the first time he
had leisure to open the packet the priest had handed him. He took out
a stiff blue envelope with an English postmark, and gazed at it heavy
eyed and vacantly before he broke the cover. Then he slowly
straightened himself in his chair, and incredulity gave place to
bewilderment as he read the letter he shook out. Lamartine's death had
left him an outcast and one obnoxious to constituted authority again.
Five minutes ago he had not known what his next step would be, but the
stiff legal writing held out before him dazzling possibilities. Then
he laid down the letter, and turned to his companions with a curious
little laugh.
"The thing is almost incredible," he said. "A man who I was told would
never forgive the discredit I brought upon the family has died in
England and left me what looks very like a fortune. The other letters
may bear upon it. You'll excuse me."
They watched him in silence for ten minutes, and there was a faint
flush in his bronzed face when he quietly rose and took out a
photograph from a little tin box.
"Padre," he said, "you are the wisest man I know, and, though
distinctions are invidious, Nares is, I think, the honestest. That is
why I am going to put a case before you. Well, I had a good
upbringing, and I think my English friends expected something from me
before I was flung out of the British service and became a pariah.
After that I never troubled them again, which was no doubt a cause of
satisfaction to everybody. There was, however, a thing I had to do
which was not easy, and this picture should make it clear to you. It
was arranged that we should be married when I had brought my laurels
home from Africa."
He handed Nares the photograph. "When I was made a scapegoat I gave
her back her liberty. It is now intimated that she has not so far
profited by it."
Nares bent over the portrait of a young and very comely English girl,
and saw only the fresh, innocent face, and the smiling eyes. Then he
handed it to the little haggard priest, who had a deeper
understanding, and saw a good deal more than that.
"It is a beautiful face," he said when Father Tiebout had gazed at it
steadily, but the latter said nothing, and turned towards Ormsgill, as
though still ready to give him his attention, which he seemed to
understand.
"It is more than four years since I saw her, and I have spent them
with the outcasts," he said. "You can realize what effect that has
upon one, padre. The stamp this country sets on the white man is plain
on you, but you have not lived here as I have been forced to do. Well,
I think the woman is still the same, and I have greatly changed. I do
not know my duty."
Father Tiebout sat silent for at least a minute, looking reflectively
at the man before him. Ormsgill was young still, but his lean face was
furrowed, and there was a suggestiveness in the lines on it. He had
seen death and pestilence, human nature stripped naked, and
unmentionable cruelty; and the priest was quite aware that one cannot
live with the outcast, in Africa, and remain unchanged. Then he looked
at the photograph again, for he knew that the four years had also had
their effect upon the woman.
"Ah," he said, "we all grow, some towards the beneficent light, and
some in the blighting shadow. The training and the pruning we are
subjected to also has its effect. Her people?"
"I almost think you would consider them children of this world," said
Ormsgill dryly.
"And you have been left a good deal of money?"
Ormsgill told him what the amount was, and once more the priest said
nothing for awhile. Quiet and unobtrusive as he was, he never forgot
that he was one of the vanguard of the Church militant, and was ready
to use with skill any weapon that was offered him. It was also
necessary to thrust hard now and then, and he knew that in his hands
the man who had lived with the outcast and the oppressed would prove a
reliable blade. Ormsgill, as he recognized, had capacities. Still, his
counsel had been asked, and he would answer honestly, knowing that he
could afford to do it if his knowledge of human nature, and the girl's
face, had not deceived him. After all, he fancied, whatever he said
the result would be the same, and he was playing a skillful game of
which the stakes were black men's bodies, and, perhaps, human souls.
"With a sum like that there is so much that one could do," he said.
"With discretion--you understand--here and there a little. Domingo put
down, women dying at their tasks redeemed and enfolded in the shelter
of the Mission, men with brutal masters set at liberty, and
concessions where they are driven to death suppressed. One could also
bring about a reckoning with corrupt authority. When admonition is of
no service one may try the scourge."
He saw the little glint in Ormsgill's eyes, and made a deprecatory
gesture with his hands. "Still, you have asked for counsel, and you
have another duty. With us marriage is not a social contract, and the
promise that precedes it is almost as sacred. You are pledged to this
Englishwoman if she has not released you, and that you are changed
will not matter if she loves you. It is your duty to go back to her."
Nares looked up and nodded. "Of course!" he said. "You must go."
Ormsgill's forehead was furrowed, and the perspiration stood in beads
on it. The love that had driven him out to win his spurs in the land
of shadow still in some degree, at least, remained with him; but he
was conscious of the change in him which the girl with her upbringing
might well shrink from. He had lived with the outcasts until he had
become one of them, a hater of conventional formulas and shams, while
there had crept into his nature a trace of the somberness of the dark
land. What, he wondered, would the sunny-tempered English girl he had
left make of such a man. Still, as the priest had said, his duty was
clear, and, what was perhaps more, his inclination marched with it. He
straightened himself suddenly with a little resolute jerk of his
shoulders.
"I will start for the coast to-morrow, and go to Grand Canary," he
said. "As it happens, she is there now with her people. Still, before
I go, padre, I will arrange with the casa Sarraminho to hand you the
equivalent of £200 sterling. With that you can buy the liberty of the
woman Lamartine gave Herrero, and use what is left over as you and
Nares think fit. If Herrero will not part with her, or you find the
thing too difficult, I will come back for a while and undertake it
myself. After all, it is my affair. I owe it to Lamartine."
Then he took the little photograph and replaced it in the tin box,
after which he walked quietly past them and out of the room while,
when they heard him go down the veranda stairway, Father Tiebout
looked at his companion with a curious smile.
"Four years!" he said. "It is a space in a woman's lifetime, and every
year leaves its mark on us. It is decreed that we must grow, but we do
not all grow the same."
In the meanwhile Ormsgill stood in the little compound with the sour
white steam drifting past him. The forest rose out of it, a great
black wall, and its hot, damp smell was in his nostrils. It was a
heady savor, for something that goes with the smell of the wilderness
sinks deep into the hearts of those who once allow it to enter, and is
always afterwards a cause of disquietude and restlessness to some of
them. Ormsgill had had his endurance and all the courage he was born
with taxed to the uttermost in that steamy shade, but now when he was
about to leave it he found the smell of its tall white lilies and the
acrid odors of corruption stirring and shaking him. At last, with a
little jerk of his shoulders, which was a trick he had acquired from
Lamartine, he turned and went back to the lighted room again.
CHAPTER III
HIS OWN PEOPLE
The velvet dusk that crept up from the eastwards was held in check by
the brightening flood of moonlight on the sea when Ormsgill leaned on
the balustrade of the veranda outside the _Hotel Catalina_ in Grand
Canary. Close in front of him the long Atlantic swell broke upon the
hammered beach with a drowsy rumbling, and flung a pungent freshness
into the listless air, for the Trade breeze had fallen dead away. The
fringe of surf ran southwards beside the dim white road to where the
lights of Las Palmas blinked and twinkled in the shadow the great
black peaks flung out upon the sparkling sea.
Ormsgill, who had turned from its contemplation at the sound of a
voice he recognized, had, however, no longer any eyes for the
prospect. He had arrived on an African mail-boat two hours earlier,
and had somehow missed the girl whose voice had sent a little thrill
through him. She had, it seemed, gone in through one of the long,
lighted windows instead of by the door, but the horse she had just
dismounted from was still standing with another, which carried a man's
saddle, just below the veranda. Ormsgill could see that it was one of
the sorry beasts the Spaniards hire to Englishmen, but it was also
jaded and white with lather.
"These English have no consideration," said the peon who held its
bridle, to a comrade. "This horse is old, but when I brought it here
it was not more than a very little lame. Now it is certain I cannot
hire it to anybody to-morrow. They were at Arucas, which for a horse
of this kind is a long way, but they came home by the barranco and
across the sand heaps at the gallop. The Señorita must not be late for
dinner. _Vaya!_ it is a cruelty."
The matter was, perhaps, not a great one in itself, but it had a
somewhat unpleasant effect upon Ormsgill, who knew that the Iberian is
not as a rule squeamish about any cruelty that the lust of gain
renders it necessary to inflict upon his beast. The horse, as he could
see, had certainly been ridden hard, and was very lame. The thing
jarred on him, and as he leaned on the veranda waiting until the
message he had left to announce his arrival should be delivered, a
scene he had looked upon in the dark land forced itself upon his
recollection. It was a line of jaded men staggering under the burdens
on their heads through an apparently interminable sea of scorched and
dusty grass. There was little water in that country at the season, and
they dragged themselves along, grimed with the fibrous dust, in
torments of thirst, with limbs that were reddened by the stabbing of
the flinty grass stems. Then rousing himself he drove the suggestive
vision from his brain and entered the hall of the big hotel.
It blazed with light, there was music somewhere, and already
conventionally attired men and elaborately dressed women were
descending the stairway, and appearing by twos and threes from the
corridors. They were for the most part Englishmen and women, but
Ormsgill was a little astonished to feel that instead of arousing
sympathy their voices and bearing jarred on him. Their conversation
appeared to have no point in it, and their smiles were meaningless.
They seemed shallow and artificial, and he had lived at high pressure,
face to face with grim realities, in the land of the shadow. He stood
a little apart, quietly regarding them, a lonely figure in plain white
duck with a lined brown face, until a burly man in the conventional
black and white strode up to him.
"I'm uncommonly glad to see you, Tom," he said. "Ada will be down in a
minute. I left her and her mother almost too startled to understand
that you had arrived. The man you gave your message to had just
brought it in. You should have let us know what boat you were sailing
by. But I mustn't keep you talking. You have just time to change your
things."
Ormsgill shook hands with him, but was conscious of a lack of
enthusiasm as he did it that irritated him. He had once considered
Major Chillingham a very good fellow, but now there seemed to be
something wanting in his characteristic bluff geniality. Ormsgill
could not tell what it was, but he felt the lack of it.
"I suppose there is," he said with a smile. "Still, you see, I haven't
anything to change into. In fact, my present outfit is a considerably
smarter one than the get-up I have been accustomed to dining in."
Chillingham's gaze was at first expressive of blank astonishment, and
there was a sardonic gleam in Ormsgill's eyes. "You must try to
remember that I've got out of the way of wearing evening clothes. I
think I'd made it clear that I have been down in the depths the past
four years."
His companion's red face flushed a trifle, but he laughed. "Well," he
said, "that's one of the things we needn't talk about, and I'm not
sure that everybody would be so ready to mention it." Then he drew
back a trifle. "Tom, you're greatly changed."
Ormsgill nodded. "Yes," he said, "I dare say I am. In several ways the
thing's not unnatural."
After that Chillingham discoursed about English affairs, and though it
appeared to cost him a slight effort Ormsgill made no attempt to help
him. He stood still, perfectly at his ease, but for all that conscious
that he was an anachronism in such surroundings, while the men and
women who smiled or nodded to his companion as they came into the hall
cast curious glances at him. This duck-clad man with the lined face
and steady eyes was clearly not of their world, which was, in the case
of most of them, an essentially frivolous one.
At last he turned, and strode forward impulsively as the girl he
waited for came down the stairway in a filmy dress of lace-like
texture that rustled softly as it flowed about her. She was
brown-haired and brown-eyed, warm in coloring, and her face, which was
as comely as ever, had a certain hint of disdain in it. That, however,
did not strike Ormsgill then, for she flushed a little at the sight
of him, and laid a slim white hand in his.
"Tom," she said, "I am very glad, but why didn't you cable? Still, you
must tell me afterwards. We are stopping the others, and mother is
waiting to speak to you."
Ormsgill was conscious of a faint relief as he turned to the tall lady
who stood beside the girl, imposing and formal in somber garments. The
meeting he had looked forward to with longing, and at the same time a
vague apprehension, was over. He had, he felt, been reinstated,
permitted to resume his former footing, and the manner of the elder
lady, which was quietly gracious, conveyed the same impression. Then
Mrs. Ratcliffe sent her brother, the Major, on to see that places were
kept for them together, and Ormsgill was thankful that the dinner
which was waiting would render any confidential conversation out of
the question for the next hour. He wanted time to adjust himself to
the changed conditions, for a man can not cut himself adrift from all
that he has been accustomed to and then resume his former life just as
he left it, especially if he has dwelt with the outcast in the
meanwhile.
A chair had been placed for him between Ada Ratcliffe and her mother,
while Major Chillingham sat almost opposite him across the long table.
The glow of light, glitter of glass and silver, scent of flowers and
perfumes, and hum of voices had a curious effect on him after the
silence of the shadowy forest and the primitive fashion in which he
had lived with Lamartine, and some minutes had passed before he
turned to the girl at his side.
"I was a little astonished to hear that you were in Las Palmas," he
said.
Ada Ratcliffe looked at him with a smile, and a slight lifting of her
brows. She was perfectly composed, and in one way he was glad of that,
though he vaguely felt that her attitude was not quite what he had
expected.
"Astonished only?" she said. "As you would have had to change steamers
here and wait a few days it would probably have taken you two weeks
more to join us in England. At least, so the Major said."
Ormsgill felt he had deserved this, for he had recognized the inanity
of the observation when he made it. It was evident that his companion
had recognized it, too. Still, it is difficult to express oneself
feelingly to order.
"I should have said delighted," he ventured.
The girl smiled again, and he felt that he had chosen an injudicious
word. "In any case, it isn't in the least astonishing that we are
here. It is becoming a recognized thing to come out to Las Palmas in
the winter, and I believe it is a good deal cheaper than Egypt or
Algeria. That is, of course, a consideration."
"It certainly is," broke in the lady at her side. "When they are
always finding a new way to tax us in, and incomes persist in going
down. Tom is fortunate. It will scarcely be necessary for him to
trouble himself very much about such considerations."
Ormsgill for the first time noticed the signs of care in Mrs.
Ratcliffe's face, and the wrinkles about her eyes. Neither had, he
fancied, been there when he had last seen her in England nearly five
years earlier, but the change in her was as nothing compared to that
in her daughter. Ada Ratcliffe was no longer a fresh and somewhat
simple-minded English girl. She was a self-possessed and dignified
woman of the world, but what else she might be he could not at the
moment tell. He blamed himself for the desire to ascertain it, since
he felt it was more fitting that he should accept her without question
as the embodiment of all that was adorable. Still, he could not do it.
The four years he had spent apart from her had given him too keen an
insight.
"Well," he said, "there are people who believe that the possession of
even a very small fortune is something of a responsibility."
"That," said Mrs. Ratcliffe, "is a mistake nowadays. There are so many
excellent organized charities ready to undertake one's duties for one.
They are in a position to discharge them so much more efficiently."
Ormsgill did not reply to this, though there was a faint sardonic
twinkle in his eyes. He was not, as a rule, addicted to passing on a
responsibility, but he remembered then that he had handed a little
Belgian priest £200 to carry out a duty that had been laid on him. The
fact that he had done so vaguely troubled him. Mrs. Ratcliffe,
however, went on again.
"One of the disadvantages of living here is the number of invalids one
is thrown into contact with," she said. "I find it depressing. You
will notice the woman in the singularly unbecoming black dress yonder.
She insists on drinking thick cocoa with a spoon at dinner."
One could have fancied that she felt this breach of custom to be an
enormity, and Ormsgill wondered afterwards what malignant impulse
suddenly possessed him. Still, the worthy lady's coldly even voice and
formal manner jarred upon him, while the pleasure of meeting the girl
he had thought of for four long years was much less than he felt it
should have been. He resented the fact, and most men's tempers grow a
trifle sharp in tropical Africa.
"Well," he said dryly, "one understands that it is nourishing, and,
after all, we are to some extent cannibals."
"Cannibals?" said Mrs. Ratcliffe with a swift suspicious glance which
seemed to suggest that she was wondering whether the African climate
had been too much for him.
"Yes," said Ormsgill, "cocoa, or, at least, that grown in parts of
Africa where the choicest comes from, could almost be considered human
flesh and blood. Any way, both are expended lavishly to produce it. I
fancy you will bear me out in this, Señor?"
He looked at the little, olive-faced gentleman in plain white duck who
sat not far away across the table. He had grave dark eyes with a
little glint in them, and slim yellow hands with brown tips to some of
the fingers, and was just then twisting a cigarette between them.
Ormsgill surmised that it cost him an effort to refrain from lighting
it, since men usually smoke between the courses of a dinner in his
country. There was a certain likeness between him and the Commandant
of San Roque, sufficient at least, to indicate that they were of the
same nationality, but the man at the table in the _Catalina_ had been
cast in a finer mold, and there was upon him the unmistakable stamp of
authority.
"One is assured that what is done is necessary," he said in slow
deliberate English. "I am, however, not a commercialist."
"You, of course, believe those assurances?"
The little white-clad gentleman smiled in a somewhat curious fashion.
"A wise man believes what is told him--while it is expedient. Some
day, perhaps, the time comes when it is no longer so."
"And then?"
A faint, suggestive glint replaced the smile in the keen dark eyes.
"Then he acts on what he thinks himself. Though I can not remember
when, it seems to me, senhor, that I have had the pleasure of meeting
you before."
"You have," said Ormsgill dryly. "It was one very hot morning in the
rainy season, and you were sitting at breakfast outside a tent beneath
a great rock. Two files of infantry accompanied me."
"I recollect perfectly. Still, as it happens, I had just finished
breakfast, which was, I think, in some respects fortunate. One is
rather apt to proceed summarily before it--in the rainy season."
Ormsgill laughed, and the girl who sat beside the man he had spoken
to flashed a swift glance at him. She was dressed in some thin, soft
fabric, of a pale gold tint, and the firm, round modeling of the
figure it clung about proclaimed her a native of the Iberian
peninsula, the Peninsula, as those who are born there love to call it.
Still, there was no tinge of olive in her face, which, like her arms
and shoulders, was of the whiteness of ivory. Her eyes, which had a
faint scintillation in them, were of a violet black, and her hair of
the tint of ebony, though it was lustrous, too. She, however, said
nothing, and Major Chillingham, who seemed to feel himself neglected,
broke in.
"I'm afraid you were at your old tricks again, Tom," he said. "What
had you been up to then?"
"Interfering with two or three black soldiers, who resented it. They
were trying to burn up a native hut with a couple of wounded niggers
inside it. I believe there was a woman inside it, too."
Chillingham shook his head reproachfully. "One can't help these things
now and then, and I don't know where you got your notions from," he
said. "It certainly wasn't from your father. He was a credit to the
service, and a sensible man. You can only expect trouble when you kick
against authority."
Ormsgill looked at Ada Ratcliffe, but there was only a faint
suggestion of impatience in her face. Then, without exactly knowing
why, he glanced across the table, and caught the little gleam of
sardonic amusement in the other girl's violet eyes. She, at least, it
seemed, had comprehension, and that vaguely displeased him, since he
had expected it from the woman he had come back to marry, instead of
a stranger. Then the man with the olive face looked up again.
"You have it in contemplation to go back to Africa?"
"No," said Ormsgill, who felt that Mrs. Ratcliffe was listening. "At
least, I scarcely think it will be necessary."
"Ah," said the other, with a little dry smile, "It is, one might,
perhaps, suggest, not advisable. There are several men who do not bear
you any great good will in that country."
Ormsgill laughed. "One," he said, "is forced to do a good many things
which do not seem advisable yonder, and I have one or two very
excellent friends."
Then he turned to Ada Ratcliffe, and discoursed with her and her
mother on subjects he found it difficult to take much interest in,
which was a fresh surprise to him, for he had considered them subjects
of importance before he left England. The effort he made to display a
becoming attention was not apparent, but it was a slight relief to two
of the party when the dinner was over. Another hour had, however,
passed before he had the girl to himself, and they sauntered down
through the dusty garden and along the dim white road until they
reached a little mole that ran out into the harbor. The moon had just
dipped behind the black peaks, and they sat down in the soft darkness
on a ledge of stone, and listened for a while to the rumble of the
long Atlantic swell that edged to the strip of shadowy coast with a
fringe of spouting foam. Both felt there was a good deal to be said,
but the commencement was difficult, and it was significant that the
man gazed westwards--towards Africa--across the dusky heaven, until he
looked round when his companion spoke to him.
"Tom," she said quietly, "you have not come back the same as when you
went away."
"I believe I haven't," and Ormsgill's voice was gentle. "My dear, you
must bear with me awhile. You see, there are so many things I have
lost touch with, and it will take me a little time to pick it up
again. Still, if you will wait and humor me, I will try."
He turned, and glanced towards a great block of hotel buildings that
cut harsh and square against the soft blueness of the night not far
away. The long rows of open windows blazed, and the music that came
out from them reached the two who sat listening through the deep-toned
rumble of the surf. It was evident that an entertainment of some kind
was going on, but Ormsgill found the signs of it vaguely disquieting.
"One feels that building shouldn't be there," he said. "They should
have placed it in the city. It's too new and aggressive where it is,
and the ways of the folks who stay in it are almost as out of place."
He stopped a moment with a little laugh. "I expect I'm talking
nonsense, and it's really not so very long since that kind of thing
used to appeal to me. After all, there must be a certain amount of
satisfaction to be got out of purposeless flirtation, cards, dining,
and dancing."
It was not very dark, and, when he looked round, the shapely form of
his companion was silhouetted blackly against the sky on the step
above him. There was something vaguely suggestive of an impatience
that was, perhaps, excusable in her attitude.
"Oh," she said, "there is not a great deal. I admit that, but one must
live as the others do, and have these things to pass the time. You
know there is nothing to be gained by making oneself singular."
Ormsgill smiled, though once more the smell of the wilderness, the
odors of lilies and spices, and the sourness of corruption, was in his
nostrils. Men grappled for dear life with stern and occasionally
appalling realities there, and he was one in whom the love of conflict
had been born.
"No," he said, "I suppose there isn't. At least, it usually involves
one in trouble, and, as you say, one must have something to pass the
time away. Still, Ada, for a while you will try to put up with my
little impatiences and idiosyncrasies. No doubt I shall fit myself to
my surroundings by and by."
Ada Ratcliffe had a face that was almost beautiful, and a slim,
delicately modeled form in keeping with it, but perhaps they had been
given her as makeweights and a counterbalance for the lack of more
important things. At times, when her own interests were concerned, she
could show herself almost clever but she fell short of average
intelligence just then, when a sympathetic word or a sign of
comprehension would have bound the man to her.
Leaning a little towards him she laid her hand on the sleeve of his
duck jacket. "I would like you to do it soon," she said. "Tom, to
please me, you won't come in to dinner dressed this way again."
There was a suggestion of harshness in Ormsgill's laugh, but he
checked himself. "Of course not, if you don't wish it. If there is a
tailor in Las Palmas I will try to set that right to-morrow. Now we
will talk of something else. You want to live in England?"
It appeared that Ada did, and she was disposed to talk at length upon
that topic. She also drew closer to him, and while the man's arm
rested on her shoulder discussed the house he was to buy in the
country, and how far his means, which were, after all, not very large,
would permit the renting of another in town each season. He listened
gravely, and saw that there were no aspirations in the scheme. Their
lives were evidently to be spent in a round of conventional
frivolities, and all the time he heard the boom of the restless sea,
and the smell of the wilderness, pungent and heady, grew stronger in
his nostrils. Then he closed a hand tighter on the shoulder of the
girl, in a fashion that suggested he felt the need of something to
hold fast by, as perhaps he did.
"There is one point we have to keep in view, for the thing may be
remembered against me still," he said. "I was turned out of the
service of a British Colony."
"Ah," said the girl, "I felt it cruelly at the time, but, after all,
it happened more than four years ago--and not very many people heard
of it."
Ormsgill sat still a minute, and his grasp grew a trifle slacker on
her arm. "I told you I didn't do the thing they accused me of," he
said.
"Of course! Still, everybody believed you did, and that was almost as
hard to bear. The great thing is that it was quite a long while ago.
Tom," and she turned to him quickly, "I believe you are smiling."
"I almost think I was," said Ormsgill. "Still, I don't know why I
should do so. Well, I understand we are to stay here a month or two,
and we will have everything arranged before we go back to England."
It was half an hour later when his companion rose. "The time is
slipping by," she said. "There is to be some singing, and one or two
of the people we have met lately are coming round to-night. I must go
in and talk to them. These things are in a way one's duty. One has to
do one's part."
Ormsgill made no protest. He rose and walked quietly back with her to
the hotel, but his face was a trifle grave, and he was troubled by
vague misgivings.
CHAPTER IV
THE SUMMONS
The month Ormsgill spent at Las Palmas was a time of some anxiety to
Mrs. Ratcliffe. He had, as she complained to her brother, no sense of
the responsibility that devolved upon a man of his means, and was
addicted to making friends with all kinds of impossible people, grimy
English coaling clerks, and the skippers of Spanish schooners, and,
what was more objectionable, now and then bringing them to the hotel.
He expressed his regret when she pointed out the undesirability of
such proceedings, but, for all that, made no very perceptible change
in his conduct.
Major Chillingham as a rule listened gravely, and said very little,
for his sister was one who seldom welcomed advice from anybody, and
though not a brilliant man he was by no means a fool. On the last
occasion he, however, showed a little impatience.
"Well," he said, "he seems to have got hold of a few first-class
people, too. There is that Ayutante fellow on the Governor's staff,
and the Senhor Figuera, the little, quiet man with the yellow hands,
is evidently a person of some consequence in his own country. You
can't mistake the stamp of authority. After all, it's no doubt just
as well he and the girl have gone. Tom seemed on excellent terms with
them."
Mrs. Ratcliffe looked indignant. "A Portuguese with a powdered face,
and no notion of what is fitting!"
"An uncommonly good-looking one," and the Major grinned. "A woman with
brains enough to get the thing she sets her mind on, too, and I have
rather a fancy that she was pleased with Tom. Still, that's not the
question, and anyway she's back again in Africa. Now, if you'll take
advice from me you'll keep a light hand on him, and not touch the
curb. If you do he's quite capable of making a bolt of it."
"That," said the lady, "would be so disgraceful as to be
inconceivable--when Ada has waited more than four years for him."
Her brother's eyes twinkled. "In one way, I suppose she did. Still, of
course, Urmston didn't get the Colonial appointment he expected, and,
one has to be candid, young Hatherly seemed proof against the
blandishments you wasted on him."
"A marriageable daughter is a heavy responsibility," said Mrs.
Ratcliffe with a sigh.
"No doubt," said the Major. "That is precisely why I recommended the
judicious handling of Tom Ormsgill. If he hasn't quite as much as you
would like, it's enough to keep them comfortably, and in several ways
he's worth the other two put together. The man's straight, and quiet.
In fact, I'm not sure I wouldn't prefer him with a few more
gentlemanly dissipations. They act as a safety valve occasionally."
His sister raised her hands in protest, and Chillingham withdrew with
a chuckle, but she was rather more gracious to Ormsgill than usual
that day, and during the next one accompanied him with her daughter
and one or two acquaintances in a launch he had borrowed to look at
the wreck of a steamer which had gone ashore a night or two earlier.
The unfortunate vessel afforded a somewhat impressive spectacle as she
lay grinding on the reef with the long yeasty seas washing over her,
and the little party spent some time watching her from the launch
which swung with the steep, green swell.
It was, however, very hot and dazzling bright, and no protests were
made when Ormsgill, who it seemed knew all about steam launches,
leaned forward from the helm and started the engines. The little
propeller thudded, and they slid away with a long, smooth lurch across
the slopes of glittering water that were here and there flecked with
foam, for the beach they skirted lies open to the heave of the
Atlantic. The Trade breeze fanned their faces pleasantly, and Ada
Ratcliffe sat almost contented for the time being at Ormsgill's side.
It was refreshing that hot day, to listen to the swish of sliding
brine, and there was a certain exhilaration in the swift smooth
motion, while she realized that the man she was to marry appeared to
greater advantage than he did as a rule in the drawing room of the big
hotel.
He was never awkward, or ill at ease, but she had noticed--and
resented--the air of aloofness he sometimes wore when he listened to
her companions' pointless badinage and vapid conversation. Now as he
sat with a lean brown hand on the tiller controlling the little
hissing craft he seemed curiously at home. There was also, as
generally happened when he was occupied, a suggestion of reserved
force in his face and attitude. He was, she realized, a man one could
have confidence in when there were difficult things to be done. This
however, brought her presently a vague dissatisfaction, for she felt
there were certain aspects of his character which had never been
revealed to her, and she was faintly conscious of the antagonism to
and shrinking from what one cannot quite understand which is not
infrequently a characteristic of people with imperfectly developed
minds.
The fresh Trade breeze which blew down out of the harbor from the
black Isleta hill was, however, evidently much less pleasant to the
Spanish peons who toiled at the ponderous sweeps of an empty coal
lighter the launch was rapidly drawing level with. She was floating
high above the flaming swell, and the perspiration dripped from the
men's grimy faces as they labored, two of them at each of the huge
oars. Indeed Ormsgill could see the swollen veins stand out on their
wet foreheads, and the overtaxed muscles swell on their half-covered
chests and naked arms, for the barge was of some forty tons, and it
was very heavy work pulling her against the wind. She had evidently
been to a Spanish steamer lying well out beyond the mole, and there
was, as he noticed, no tug available to tow her back again, while the
sea foamed whitely on a reef close astern of her. It was only by a
strenuous effort that the men were propelling the big clumsy craft
clear of the reef, and there were signs that they could not keep it up
much longer.
He glanced at the little group of daintily attired, soft-handed men
and women on board the launch, to whom the stress of physical labor
was an unknown thing, and then looked back towards the coal-grimed
toilers on the lighter. As yet they worked on stubbornly, with tense
furrowed faces, under a scorching sun, taxing to the uttermost every
muscle in their bodies, but it seemed to him that the lighter was no
further from the reef. He flung an arm up, and hailed them, for he had
acquired a working acquaintance with several Latin languages on the
fever coast.
"You can't clear that point," he said. "Have you no anchor?"
"No, señor," cried one of the peons breathlessly. "The tug should have
come for us, but she is taking the water boat to the English steamer."
Ormsgill turned to his companions. "You won't mind if I pull them in?
They're almost worn out, and it will not detain us more than ten
minutes."
One of the men made a little gesture of concurrence which had a hint
of good-humored toleration in it, but Mrs. Ratcliffe appeared
displeased, and Ada flushed a trifle. One could have fancied she did
not wish the man who belonged to her to display his little
idiosyncrasies before her friends.
"One understands that all Spaniards avoid exertion when they can," she
said. "Perhaps a little hard work wouldn't hurt them very much."
There was a slight change in Ormsgill's expression. "I fancy the men
can do no more."
Then he waved his hand to the peons. "Get your hawser ready."
He was alongside the lighter in another minute, but she rolled wildly
above the launch, big and empty, and the sea broke whitely about her,
for now the men had ceased rowing she was drifting towards the reef.
The hawser was also dripping and smeared with coal dust when Ormsgill,
who seemed to understand such matters, hauled it in, and while the sea
splashed on board the launch, streams of gritty brine ran from it over
everything. Then he stirred the little furnace with an iron bar before
he pulled over the starting lever, and a rush of sparks and thin hot
smoke poured down upon his companions as the little craft went full
speed ahead. Ada, perhaps half-consciously, drew herself a little
farther away from him. There was coal grit on his wet duck jacket, and
he had handled hawser and furnace rubble like one accustomed to them,
in fact as a fireman or a sailor would have done. That was a thing
which did not please her, and she wondered if the others had noticed
it. It became evident that one of them had.
"You did that rather smartly," he said.
Ormsgill's smile was a trifle dry. "I have," he said, "done much the
same thing before professionally."
There was a struggle for the next few minutes. Launch and lighter had
drifted into shoal water while they made the hawser fast, and the
swell had piled itself up and was breaking whitely. The little launch
plunged through it with flame at her funnel and a spray-cloud blowing
from her bows, and as she hauled the big lighter out yard by yard a
little glint crept into Ormsgill's eyes. Ada Ratcliffe almost resented
it, for he had never looked like that at any of the social functions
she had insisted on his taking a part in, but her forbearance was
further taxed when they crept slowly beneath the side of a big white
steam yacht. A little cluster of men and daintily dressed women sat
beneath the awning on her deck, and one or two of them were people her
mother had taken pains to cultivate an acquaintance with.
One man leaned upon her rail and looked down with a little smile.
"Have you been going into the coal business, Fernside?" he said.
"Considering the figure they charged Desmond it ought to be a
profitable one."
The man in the launch he addressed laughed, and Ormsgill towed the
lighter on until at last he cast the tow rope off, and a very grimy
peon stood upon her deck. He took off his big, shapeless hat, and as
he swung, cut in black against the dazzling sea, there was in his
poise a lithe gracefulness and a certain elaborate courtesy.
"Señor," he said, "our thanks are yours, and everything else that
belongs to us. May the saints watch over you, and send you a friend if
ever your task is too heavy and the breakers are close beneath your
lee."
Ormsgill took off his hat gravely, as equal to equal, but he smiled a
little as the launch swept on.
"Well," he said, "after all, I may need one some day."
They were back in the hotel in another half-hour, and Mrs. Ratcliffe
took him to task as they sat on the shady veranda. Ormsgill lay back
in his big Madeira chair, with half-closed eyes, and listened
dutifully. He felt he could afford it, for the few minutes of tense
uncertainty when he had hauled the lighter out of the grasp of the
breakers had been curiously pleasant to him.
"There was, of course, no harm in the thing itself," she said at last.
"No," said Ormsgill with an air of deep reflection, "I almost think
that to save a fellow creature who is badly worn out an effort he is
scarcely fit to make isn't really very wrong. Still, the men were
certainly very dirty--I suppose that is the point?"
The lady, who looked very stiff and formal in the black she persisted
in wearing, favored him with a searching glance, but there was only
grave inquiry in his steady eyes.
"The point is that things which may be commendable in themselves are
not always--appropriate," she said.
"Expedient--isn't it?" suggested Ormsgill languidly.
"Expedient," said Mrs. Ratcliffe with a little flush in her face.
"In this world one has to be guided by circumstances, and must
endeavor to fit oneself to that station in life to which one has
been--appointed."
"I suppose so," said Ormsgill. "The trouble is that I really don't
know what particular station I have been appointed to. I was thrown
out of the Colonial service, you see, and afterwards drove a steam
launch for a very dissolute mahogany trader. Then I floated the same
kind of trees down another river with the niggers, and followed a few
other somewhat unusual occupations. In fact, I've been in so many
stations that it's almost bewildering."
His companion got away from the point. She did not like having the
fact that he had been, as he expressed it, thrown out of the Colonial
service forced upon her recollection.
"One has, at least, to consider one's friends," she said. "We are on
rather good terms with two or three of the people who came out with
Mr. Desmond, whom I have not met yet, in the _Palestrina_. In fact,
Ada is a little anxious that you should make their acquaintance. You
will probably come across them in England."
"Well," said Ormsgill cheerfully, "I really don't think Dick Desmond
would mind if I took up coal heaving as an amusement. He isn't a
particularly conventional man himself."
"You know him?"
"Oh, yes. I know him tolerably well."
"Then didn't you consider it your duty to go off and call upon him?"
"I suppose it was," said Ormsgill meditatively. "Still, as a rule, I
rather like my friends to call on me. I've no doubt that Dick will do
it presently. He only arrived here yesterday, as you know. The people
he brought out came on from Teneriffe, I think. Somebody told me the
_Palestrina_ lay a week there with something wrong with her engines."
Mrs. Ratcliffe smiled approvingly at last. "Yes," she said, "in one
way the course you mention is usually preferable. It places one on a
surer footing."
Then she discussed other subjects, and supplied him with a good deal
of excellent advice to which he listened patiently, though he was
sensible of a certain weariness and there was a little dry smile in
his eyes when she went away. As it happened, Desmond, who owned the
_Palestrina_, came ashore that evening and was received by Mrs.
Ratcliffe very graciously. The two men had also a good deal to say to
each other, and the meeting was not without its results to both of
them.
It was late the following afternoon when a little yellow-funneled
mail-boat with poop and forecastle painted white steamed into the
harbor with awnings spread, and an hour or two later a waiter handed
Ormsgill a letter. His face grew intent as he read it, and the curious
little glint that Ada Ratcliffe had noticed when he towed the coal
lighter clear of the surf crept back into his eyes. It was also
significant that, although she and her mother were sitting near him on
the veranda, he appeared oblivious of them when he rose and stepped
back through an open window into the hotel. Five minutes later they
saw him stride through the garden and down the long white road.
"I think he is going to the little mole," said Ada. "I don't know why
he does so, but when anything seems to ruffle him he generally goes
there."
Then she flashed a quick questioning glance at her mother. "That
letter was from Africa. I saw the stamp on it."
Mrs. Ratcliffe shook her head. "I don't think there is any reason why
you should disturb yourself," she said. "After all, one has to excuse
a good deal in the case of men who live in the tropics, and though the
ways Tom has evidently acquired there now and then jar on me I venture
to believe he will grow out of them and become a credit to you with
judicious management. It would, perhaps, be wiser not to mention that
letter, my dear."
Ada said nothing, though she was a trifle uneasy. She had seen the
sudden intentness of Ormsgill's face, and was far from sure that he
would submit to management of any kind. Nobody acquainted with her
considered her a clever woman, but, after all, her intelligence was
keener than her mother's.
In the meanwhile Ormsgill sat down on the steps of the little mole. It
was pleasantly cool there, and he had already found the rush and
rumble of frothing brine tranquilizing, though he was scarcely
conscious of it as he took out the letter and read it again. It was
from the missionary Nares.
"Father Tiebout has just come in very shaky with fever," he read. "It
appears that Herrero, who will not let her go, has gone back towards
the interior with the woman Lamartine gave him, and has been
systematically ill-using her. There is another matter to mention.
Soon after you went Domingo seized the opportunity of raiding
Lamartine's station, and took all the boys away while we were
arranging to send them home as you asked us to do. It will, in view of
the feeling against us, be difficult or impossible to bring the thing
home to him, but I understand from Father Tiebout that you engaged the
boys for Lamartine and pledged your word to send them home when the
time agreed upon expired. Father Tiebout merely asked me to tell you.
He said that if you recognized any responsibility in the matter you
would not shrink from it."
Ormsgill crumpled up the letter and sat very still, gazing into the
dimness that was creeping up from Africa across the sea. The message
was terse, and though the writing was that of Nares he saw the wisdom
of Father Tiebout in it. Nares when he was moved spoke at length and
plainly, but the little priest had a way of making other folks do what
he wanted, as it were, of their own accord, and without his prompting
them.
It grew rapidly darker, but Ormsgill did not notice it. The deep
rumble of the surf was in his ears, and the restlessness of the sea
crept in on him. He had heard that thunderous booming on sweltering
African beaches, and had watched the filmy spray-cloud float far
inland athwart the dingy mangroves, and a curious gravity crept into
his eyes as he gazed at the Eastern haze beyond which lay the shadowy
land. Life was intense and primitive there, and his sojourn in the big
hotel had left him with a growing weariness. Then there was the debt
he owed Lamartine, and the promise he had made, and he wondered
vaguely what Ada Ratcliffe would say when he told her he was going
back again. She would protest, but, for all that, he fancied she would
not feel his absence very much, though there were times when her
manner to him had been characterized by a certain tenderness. As he
thought of it he sighed.
By and by a boat from the white steam yacht slid up to the foot of the
steps, and a man who ascended them started when he came upon Ormsgill.
He was tall and long-limbed, and his voice rang pleasantly.
"What in the name of wonder are you doing here alone?" he asked.
"I think I'm worrying, Dick," said Ormsgill. "The fact is, I'm going
back yonder."
Desmond looked hard at him--but it was already almost dark. "Well," he
said, "we're rather old friends. Would it be too much if I asked you
why?"
"Sit down," said Ormsgill. "I'll try to tell you."
He did so concisely and quietly, and Desmond made a little sign of
comprehension. "Well," he said, "if you feel yourself under an
obligation to that Frenchman I'm not sure it isn't just as binding now
he's dead."
"I was on my beam-ends, without a dollar in my pocket, when he held
out his hand to me. Of course, neither of us know much about these
questions, and, as a matter of fact, it's scarcely likely that
Lamartine did, but he seemed to believe what the padre told him, and
there's no doubt it was a load off his mind when he understood I'd
have the woman set at liberty."
Desmond sat silent for a minute. Then he said, "There are two points
that occur to me. Since you are willing to supply the money, can't the
priest and the missionary arrange the thing?"
"Nares says they can't. After all, they're there on sufferance, and
every official keeps a jealous eye on them. You couldn't expect them
to throw away all they've done for several years, and that's very much
what it would amount to if they were run out of the Colony."
"Then suppose you bought the woman back, and got those boys set free?
From what I've heard about the country somebody else would probably
lay hands on them again. Since the Frenchman has broken them in they'd
be desirable property."
"That's one of the things I'm worrying over," said Ormsgill
reflectively. "I had thought of running them up the coast and turning
them loose in British Nigeria. They'd be reasonably well treated, and
get wages at the factories there. Still, I'd have some trouble in
getting them out of the country, especially as I'm not greatly tempted
to buy the boys. If I was it's quite likely that Domingo, who is not a
friend of mine, wouldn't let me have them. You see, I'd have to get
papers at the port, though there are plenty of lonely beaches where
one could get a surf-boat off. I had a notion of trying to pick up a
schooner at Sierra Leone or Lagos."
Again Desmond said nothing for a few moments. Then he laughed. "Well,"
he said, "there's the _Palestrina_, and when we shake her up she can
do her fourteen knots. You can have her for a shooting expedition at a
pound a month. Now don't raise any--nonsensical objections. I'm about
sick of loafing. The thing would be a relief to me."
"There's your father," said Ormsgill suggestively.
"Just so! There's also the whole estimable family, who have made up
their minds I'm to go into Parliament whether I'm willing or not.
Well, it seems to me that if I'm to have a hand in governing my
country it will be an education to see how they mismanage things in
other ones."
Then the scion of a political family who could talk like a fireman,
and frequently did so, laughed again. "If I get into trouble over it
it will be a big advertisement. Besides, it's two years since I had a
frolic of any kind. Been nursing the constituency, taking a benevolent
interest in everything from women's rights to village cricket clubs,
and I'm coming with you to rake up brimstone now. After all, though
I've had no opportunity of displaying my abilities in that direction
lately, it's one of the few things I really excel in."
Ormsgill was far from sure that this was what he desired, but he knew
his man, and that, for all his apparent inconsequence, he was one who
when the pinch came could be relied upon. Then Desmond's effervescence
usually vanished, and gave place to a cold determined quietness that
had carried him through a good many difficulties. This was fortunate,
since he was addicted to involving himself in them rather frequently.
"Well," said Ormsgill, "I'll be glad to have you, but it's rather a
big thing. I think they're expecting you at the hotel. We'll talk of
it again."
He rose, and as they went back together Desmond said reflectively. "I
suppose you understand that it's scarcely likely your prospective
mother-in-law will be pleased with you?"
"I wasn't aware that you knew her until you came across her here,"
said Ormsgill.
"I didn't. My cousins do. Perhaps you won't mind my saying that they
seem a little sorry for you. From what they have said about Mrs.
Ratcliffe it seems to me that you may have trouble in convincing her
of the disinterestedness of your intentions."
Ormsgill felt that this was very probable, though he said nothing.
CHAPTER V
A DETERMINED MAN
It was the following afternoon when Ormsgill stood on the wide veranda
outside Mrs. Ratcliffe's room. That lady sat somewhat stiffly facing
him in a big basket chair, while her daughter lay close by in one of
canvas with her eyes also fixed upon the man languidly. She was
dressed in white, and looked very cool and dainty, though her face was
almost expressionless. In fact, her attitude was characterized by a
certain well-bred serenity which is seldom without its effect when it
is an essential part of the person who exhibits it, though a passable
imitation of it may be cultivated.
Then one sometimes wonders what may lie behind it, though an attempt
to ascertain is not always advisable. In some cases there is nothing,
and in others things which it is wiser to leave unseen.
Ormsgill had, as it happened, been busy that morning with an English
lawyer whom he had met at the hotel, and had taken him over to the
office of the Vice-Consul, who signed a document the lawyer drew out.
He had also made other preparations for a journey, but he had sent the
priest no word that he was going back to Africa. This, he felt, was
not necessary, since Father Tiebout would expect him. He leaned
bareheaded against the rails, with the furrows showing plainly on his
bronzed face, while the Trade breeze, which was fresh that afternoon,
swept the cool veranda and piled the long Atlantic swell rumbling on
the beach. He could see the spray fly high and white, and the dust
whirl down the glaring road that led to the Spanish city, and once
more he felt his blood stir in harmony with the throb of restless life
in the frothing sea. Still, the task before him was difficult, and he
set about it diffidently.
It was, as he realized, a very lame story and one open to serious
misconception that fell from his lips. He could, of course, say
nothing in favor of Lamartine's mode of life, though it was by no
means an unusual one, and he had to mention it. The subject was a
somewhat delicate one in itself, but it was not that alone which
brought a faint flush to his face. Mrs. Ratcliffe's pose grew
perceptibly primmer as he proceeded, and he recognized that any
confidence she might have had in him was being severely shaken. Still,
he had not expected her to understand, and he glanced at her daughter
with a certain anxiety. The girl's languid indifference was less
marked now, for there was a spot of color in her cheek, and her lips
were set disdainfully. Ormsgill closed one lean hand a trifle, for
these things had their significance, and he had expected that she, at
least, would have found his assurance sufficient.
"I think you will agree with me that I must go," he said.
Mrs. Ratcliffe's tone was sharp and she looked at him steadily.
"I'm afraid I don't," she said. "The man was on your own showing an
altogether depraved person."
"No," said Ormsgill dryly. "I should be sorry to admit as much. But if
he had been, would that have rendered a promise to him less binding?"
"Yes," said the elder lady sturdily. "If he really felt any remorse at
all--of which I am very dubious--he brought it upon himself. One
cannot do wrong without bearing the consequences. Still, I do not
suppose it was penitence. It was more probably pagan fear of death.
The man, you admit, was under priestly influence. Of course, if he had
been brought up differently----"
Ormsgill could not help a little smile. "He would have considered
repentance sufficient, and left the woman to bear the consequences?
Somehow I have a hazy notion that restitution is insisted on. But if
we dismiss that subject there are still the boys. You see, I pledged
myself to send them home again."
Ada Ratcliffe looked up, and her expression was quietly disdainful.
"Half-naked, thick-lipped niggers. Would it hurt them very much to
work a little and become a trifle civilized? One understands that
there is no actual slavery in any part of Africa under European
control."
Ormsgill winced, and it was, perhaps, only natural that Mrs. Ratcliffe
should not understand why he did so. Then his face grew a trifle hard,
but he answered quietly.
"I have no doubt there are folks who would tell you so, but there is,
at least, something very like it in one or two colonies," he said.
"Still, that is not quite the point."
The girl laughed. "I am a little afraid there is no point at all."
She rose languidly, and the way she did so suggested collusion, though
Ormsgill had not noticed that her mother made her any sign. She swept
past him with a swish of filmy fabric, and he turned to the elder
lady, who made a little gesture of resignation.
"It seems," she said, "you are determined to go, and in that case
there is something to be said. As you are bent on exposing yourself to
the hazards of a climate I have heard described as deadly, one has to
consider--eventualities."
"Exactly!" and Ormsgill found it difficult to repress a sardonic
smile. "I have endeavored to provide against them in the one way
possible to me. An hour ago I handed Major Chillingham a document
which will place Ada in possession of a considerable proportion of my
property in six months from my death. The absence of any word from me
for that period is to be considered as proof of it. I have no
relatives with any claim on me, and I think I am only carrying out an
obligation."
"You are very generous," and his companion's tone was expressive of
sincere satisfaction. "Though it is, of course, painful, one is
reluctantly compelled to take these things into consideration."
She said rather more to the same effect, and the man's face, which was
a trifle hard when she went away, suggested that some, at least, of
her observations had jarred on him. He was also somewhat astonished
to find Ada waiting for him when he strolled moodily into the big
drawing-room.
"Tom," she said, "you won't go back there, after all. I don't want you
to."
There was a tinge of color in her cheeks and a tense appeal in her
eyes, and for a moment Ormsgill was almost tempted to forget his
promise and break his word. It seemed that she did care, though he had
scarcely fancied that she would feel the parting with him very much a
little while ago, and something suggested that she was apprehensive,
too. He stood very still, and she saw him slowly close one of his
hands.
"My dear," he said, "I have to go."
The girl looked at him steadily a moment, and then made a little
hopeless gesture of resignation.
"In that case I should gain nothing by attempting to urge you," she
said with a curious quietness. "Still, Tom, you will write to me when
you can."
Ormsgill was stirred, as well as a trifle astonished. She had seldom
shown him very much tenderness, and he had said nothing that might
lead her to believe that he was undertaking a somewhat dangerous thing
or that the country was especially unhealthy. Still, he could not help
feeling that she was afraid of something. Then, as it happened, they
heard her mother speaking to somebody in the corridor, and making him
a little sign she slipped out softly. Ormsgill sat where he was,
wondering why she had done so, until a rustle of dresses suggested
that she and the people she had apparently spoken to had moved away.
Then he went out, and met Desmond in front of the hotel.
"Been having it out with Mrs. Ratcliffe?" he said. "I saw you on the
veranda. Found it rather difficult? I couldn't stand that old woman."
"It was not exactly pleasant," said Ormsgill, dryly.
Desmond grinned. "Told her what you were going back for--and she
didn't believe a word of it? As a matter of fact, you could hardly
expect her to. Still, you needn't be unduly anxious. It wouldn't
matter very much what you did out there. She might be horrified when
she heard of it, but she wouldn't let you go."
The blood rose to Ormsgill's face. He fancied his companion was right
in this, but it suggested another thought, and it appeared impossible
that the girl's views should coincide with her mother's. It was
painful to feel that she might have placed an unfavorable construction
upon his narrative, but that she should believe him a libertine and
still be willing to marry him because he was rich was a thing he
shrank with horror from admitting. He was aware that women now and
then made such marriages, but although he did not as a rule expect too
much of human nature, he looked for a good deal from the woman he
meant to make his wife. He could not quite disguise the fact that
there were aspects of her character which did not altogether please
him.
"Well," he said grimly, "we will talk about something else. You are
still determined on going with me?"
"Of course," said Desmond.
Ormsgill took him into his room, and by and by unrolled a chart upon
the table.
"There's shelter off this beach in about six fathoms under the point,"
he said. "She will roll rather wildly, but the holding's excellent,
and a surf-boat could get off most days in the week. As some of the
mail-boat skippers will probably see you and mention it, you will call
and report yourself to the Commandant and the customs on your way down
the coast. Bring one or two of them off to dinner and inquire about
the sport to be had. As a matter of fact, there is something to shoot
a few days' march back from the beach, and there is no reason why you
shouldn't go after it."
"You haven't said very much about yourself," observed his companion.
"I'm going direct by mail-boat. There is to be no apparent connection
between us. If you are at the beach by the date I mentioned and wait
there fourteen days, it will be sufficient. If I don't join you by
that time something will have gone radically wrong."
"Then," said Desmond cheerfully, "I'll fit the whole crowd out down to
the firemen with elephant guns and rifles, and go ashore to fetch you,
if we have to sack every bush fort in the country."
Ormsgill only laughed, and going out together they swung themselves on
a passing steam tram and were whirled away to the steamship offices in
the Spanish city through a blinding cloud of dust.
Two days later Ormsgill boarded a yellow-funneled steamer, which crept
out of harbor presently with the Portuguese flag at the fore, and
faded into a streak of hull and a smoke trail low down on the dazzling
sea. From the veranda of the hotel, Ada Ratcliffe watched it slowly
melt, with her lips tight set and a curious look in her eyes, until
when the blue expanse was once more empty she rose with a little sigh.
There was, of course, nothing to be gained by sitting there
disconsolate, and she had to array herself becomingly for an excursion
to a village among the black volcanic hills. She also took a prominent
part in it very gracefully, while a quiet brown-faced man leaned on a
little wildly-rolling steamer's rail, looking southwest across the
dazzling white-flecked combers towards the shadowy land.
He reached it in due time, and one afternoon two or three days after
he arrived at a little decadent city, sat talking to the olive-faced
gentleman he had met at the Las Palmas hotel. The latter now wore a
very tight white uniform, and a rather high and cumbrous kepi lay on
the chair at his side. He was singularly spare in figure; his face,
which was a trifle worn and hollow, was in no way suggestive of
physical virility, and the brown-tipped fingers of the hand which
rested on his knee very much resembled claws; but, as Major
Chillingham had noticed, he wore the unmistakable stamp of high
authority.
"Ah," he said in Portuguese, "you are not as most of your countrymen,
and seem to understand that haste is not always advisable--especially
in this land."
Ormsgill smiled a little as he gazed down on the straggling city. The
room he and his companion sat in had no front to it. A row of slender
pillars with crude whitewashed arches between them served instead, and
he could look out on the curiously jumbled buildings below. Some were
of wood and had red iron roofs and broad verandas, others of stone, or
what appeared to be blocks of sun-baked mud, and these were mostly
glaringly whitewashed and roofed with tiles, though a few were flat
topped. Some stood in clusters, but as a rule there were wide spaces,
strewn with ruins and rubbish, between them. Scarcely a sound rose
from any of them. Here and there a white-clad figure reclined in a big
chair on a veranda, and odd clusters of negroes, some loosely draped
in raw colors, and some half-naked, slept in the shadow. Everything
was so still that one could have fancied the place was peopled by the
dead. Beyond the long strip of land across the harbor the glaring
levels of the Atlantic stretched away, and the hot air quivered with
the dull insistent roar and rumble of the surf.
"It is certainly as I suggested," said the little olive-faced
gentleman. "You have been here three days, and I do not even know what
you expect from me yet."
"It is very little. A concession of exploitation in the country
inland."
"In which district?"
Ormsgill mentioned it, and his companion looked at him with a little
smile. "The request can be granted, but I gave you good advice once
before, and I venture to offer it again. This Africa is not a healthy
country, and it is not, I think, advisable that you should stay here,
especially up yonder in the bush. There are gentlemen of some
importance there whom you have offended, and we are, it seems, not all
forgiving. It is, perhaps, a fact to be deprecated, but one to be
counted on."
"One has occasionally to do a thing that doesn't seem advisable," said
Ormsgill reflectively.
"In this case the reasons cannot be financial. I heard of your good
fortune in Las Palmas."
Ormsgill was not pleased at this, but he laughed. "A little money is
not always a fortune. Perhaps it would be permissible for me to
express my pleasure that your administrative genius has been
recognized?"
Dom Clemente made him a little grave inclination. "I hold authority,
but the man who does so seldom sleeps on roses, especially in this
country. Well, you still want the concession of exploitation, though
the region you mention is not a productive one?"
"There are articles of commerce which come down that way from the
interior."
Dom Clemente looked at him steadily. "Ah," he said, "if one could tell
what went on there. Still, as you say, there are things we have need
of that come down from the interior."
Ormsgill's face was expressionless, though he was not pleased to see a
little smile creep into his companion's eyes, but just then another
man of very dusky color came up the outside stairway with a big
clanking sword strapped on to him, and Dom Clemente rose.
"I make my excuses, but the permit will be ready to-morrow," he said.
"In the meanwhile my daughter, who is in the patio, would thank you
for several courtesies at Las Palmas."
Ormsgill turned away, and went down to the little pink-washed patio
which was filled with straggling flowers and was, at least,
comparatively cool. The girl who lay in a big chair did not rise, but
signed to him to take another near her side, and then looked up at him
with big violet eyes. It did not occur to Ormsgill that there was any
significance in the fact that the only two chairs in the patio should
be close together, but it struck him that Benicia Figuera was a very
well-favored young woman, and very much in harmony with her
surroundings. Colorless as her face was, there was a scintillation in
her eyes, and a depth of hue in her somewhat full red lips, which with
the sweeping lines of her lightly-draped, rounded form suggested that
there was in her a full measure of the warm and vivid life of the
tropics. Her voice was low and quiet, and her English passable.
"I believe my father has been giving you good advice," she said.
"Why should you think that?" asked Ormsgill, lightly.
His companion's gesture might have meant anything. "You feel the
advice is excellent, but you do not mean to take it? It is not a thing
you often do. In one way I am sorry."
Ormsgill laughed. "Might one ask why you should take so much interest
in an obstinate stranger?"
The girl moved her hands, which were white and very shapely, in a
fashion which seemed to imply a protest. Ormsgill noticed that they
had also the appearance of capable hands, and he fancied that their
grasp could be tenacious.
"Ah," she said, "there were little courtesies shown us at Las Palmas,
things that made our stay there pleasanter, and I think there was,
perhaps, no great reason why you should have done them for my father."
Then her eyes twinkled. "I am not sure that all your friends were very
pleased with you."
Ormsgill did not smile this time. He recollected now that Ada
Ratcliffe had been distinctly less gracious and her mother more formal
than usual after one or two of the trifling courtesies he had shown
Dom Clemente and the girl, but it had not occurred to him to put the
two things together.
"I wonder," he said reflectively "how you come to speak such excellent
English."
The girl laughed.
"My mother's name was O'Donnel, though she was rather more Portuguese
than I am. She was born in the Peninsula. It seems I have gone back
two or three generations. They assured me of it once in Wicklow.
Still, all that does not interest you. You are going into the
interior."
Ormsgill said he was, and the girl appeared thoughtful for a moment or
two.
"Then one might again advise you to be careful. There are, at least,
two men who do not wish you well. One of them is a certain Commandant,
and the other the trader Herrero."
"I wonder if you could tell me where the trader Herrero is?"
"If I can I will send you word to-morrow."
Ormsgill thanked her and took his leave ceremoniously, but he was a
little annoyed to find that his thoughts would wander back to the cool
patio as he strolled through the dazzling, sun-scorched town. He felt
it would have been pleasant to stay there a little in the shadow, and
that Benicia Figuera would not have resented it. There was something
vaguely attractive about her, and she had Irish eyes in which he had
seen a hint of the reckless inconsequent courage of that people. This,
he reflected, did not concern him, and dismissing all further thought
of her he went about his business. Still, when the concession was sent
to him next morning the negro who brought it also handed him a little
note. It had no signature, and merely contained the name of a certain
village on the fringe of the hills that cut off the coast levels from
the island plateaux.
CHAPTER VI
DESMOND MAKES AN ADMISSION
Two months had slipped by since Ormsgill and his carefully chosen
carriers had vanished into the steamy bush which climbs the slopes of
the inland plateaux, when the _Palestrina_ steamed in towards the
straggling, sun-scorched town. She came on at half-speed, gleaming
ivory white, in a blaze of brightness, with a man strapped outside her
bridge swinging the heavy lead, until Desmond, who swept the shore
line with his glasses, raised his hand. Then the propeller whirled
hard astern and she stopped amidst a roar of running chain. Next the
awnings were stretched across her aft, and after a beautiful white gig
sank down her side, a trimly uniformed crew pulled Desmond ashore to
interview the men in authority.
He found them courteous. Though that is not a coast which English
yachts frequent, one had called there not very long before, and they
had a pleasant recollection of the hospitality they had enjoyed on
board her. Besides, it was very soon evident that this red-faced
yachtsman was not one of the troublesome Englishmen who demand
information about social and political matters which do not concern
them. Desmond took the authorities off to dinner, and showed them his
sporting rifles and one or two letters given him by gentlemen of
their own nationality whom he had similarly entertained at Funchal
Madeira. His young companion with the heavy sea-bronzed face was even
more ingenuous, and there was no doubt that the wine and cigars were
excellent.
Strangers with any means were also singularly scarce in that town, and
its rulers finding Desmond friendly made much of him, and supplied him
freely with the information he required respecting the localities
where one might still come across big game. He was, in fact, a social
success, and contrived to spend a fortnight there very pleasantly.
Still, there was one of his new friends who considered it advisable to
take certain precautions, which came indirectly to the knowledge of
the latter's daughter.
It also happened that Desmond's companion, Lister, who went ashore
alone now and then, enjoyed himself in his own fashion. He was a young
man whose tastes and idiosyncrasies had caused his friends at home
some anxiety, and they had for certain reasons prevailed upon Desmond
to take him to sea for a few months out of harm's way. Lister
submitted unwillingly, but he discovered that even that sweltering
African town had pleasures to offer him, and determined on making the
most of them.
It was a very hot evening when he sat in the patio of a little
flat-topped house which bore a legend outside announcing that it was a
_caffee_. A full moon hung above the city and flooded half the little
square round which the building rose with silvery light. The summit of
the white walls cut sharply against the cloudless blue, and the land
breeze flowed in through a low archway heavy with heat and smells. Now
and then the roar of the Atlantic surf swelled in volume and rolled
across the roofs in a deep-toned rumbling. Lister, however, naturally
noticed very little of this.
He lay in a Madeira chair near a little table upon which stood several
flasks of wine and glasses, as well as a bundle of cigarettes. A lamp
hung above him, and his light white clothing displayed the fleshiness
of his big, loosely-hung frame. His face was a trifle flushed, and
there was a suggestive gleam in his eyes when he glanced towards the
unglazed square of lighted window behind which a comely damsel of
somewhat dusky skin was singing to a mandolin, but the occasional
bursts of hoarse laughter made it evident that the lady had other
companions, and there was then a little but rather painful punctured
wound in one of Lister's hands. She had made it that afternoon with a
slender silver-headed strip of steel which she wore in her dusky hair,
and Lister could take a hint when it was plain enough.
As it happened, a partial acquaintance with one or two Latin languages
had been drilled into him in preparation for a certain branch of his
country's service to which prejudiced persons had eventually denied
him admission, and he had afterwards acquired sundry scraps of
Portuguese in Madeiran wine-shops. As the result of this, his
companions understood part, at least, of what he said. Two of them who
had very yellow hands and somewhat crisp black hair were shaking dice
upon the table, while a third lay quietly in a basket lounge watching
the Englishman with keen dark eyes. The latter threw a piece of paper
money down on the table.
"It's against me," he said. "I'll double on the same odds you don't
shake as high again. Pass your friend the wine, Dom Domingo."
The quiet man made this a trifle plainer, and thrust the wine flask
across the table, but Lister did not notice that one of the others
looked at him as if for permission or instructions before he flung the
dice back into the box.
"One who knows the game would not give quite such odds," he said in
passable French. "It is the cards you play on board the steamer?"
"No," said Lister, who had consumed a good deal of wine, "not often. I
wish we did. It would pass the time while we lie waiting off your
blazing beaches."
"Ah," said the little man, "you wait for somebody, then?"
Lister's little start was quite perceptible, but he grinned. "You
can't go inland without taking somebody who knows the way. I think I
told you we were going up country to kill big game."
"But certainly!" and the other spread out his hands. "This is,
however, not the season when one usually sets out on such a journey.
It would be wiser to make it in a month or two. For good heads you
must also go inland a long way. You start from--?"
"The Bahia Santiago," but Lister recollected next moment, and looked
at his companion truculently with half-closed eyes. "It seems to me
you have a good many questions to ask. Besides, you stop the game."
The little man waved his hand deprecatingly, and answered one of the
others' inquiring glance with a just perceptible motion of his head.
"Your pardon, señor," he said. "It was good advice I gave you about
the odds."
He rose and slowly sauntered across the patio, but Lister did not
notice that he stopped in the black shadow of the archway. Neither did
the other men, one of whom shook the dice again.
"Ah!" he said. "The luck is once more against you."
Lister poured himself out another glass of wine. He was feeling a
trifle drowsy, and the patio was very hot, but he wished to rouse
himself enough to watch one of the player's thick-fingered yellow
hands. Then flinging down another piece of paper money he reached out
and took the box himself. His lips had shut tight, and though his face
had flushed more deeply his eyes were keen.
They threw twice more while the other man, who appeared to relinquish
his share in the proceedings, good-humoredly looked on, and then
Lister leaned forward suddenly and seized the yellow hand. The box
fell with a clatter, and Lister clutched one of the little spotted
cubes that rolled out upon the table. Then the player's companion
swung out his right arm with a flick of his sleeve, and Lister caught
the gleam of steel. Loosely hung and a trifle slouching as he was, he
was big, and had, at least, no lack of animal courage. He said
nothing, but he flung the man whose hand he held backward upon the
table, which overturned in front of his companion, and snatching a
heavy wine flask from one close by, swung it by the neck.
The man with the knife was a moment recovering his footing, and then
he moved forward, half-crouching, with a cat-like gait. The veins rose
swollen on Lister's forehead, but he stood still, and his big red hand
tightened savagely on the neck of the heavy vessel, which held a quart
or two. The tinkle of the mandolin had ceased abruptly, and for a few
moments there was not a sound in the little patio. Then there was a
sharp command, and the man with the knife slunk backward, as a figure
moved quietly out of the shadow beneath the archway. It was the man
who had questioned Lister, and he laid his hand upon the flask the
latter held.
"With permission I will take it from you," he said. "It is, I think,
convenient that you go back to your steamer."
Lister fancied that he was right, and when three or four men who had
now come out from the lighted room made way for them he followed his
companion out through the archway. The latter called to a man in
dilapidated white uniform, and they proceeded together to where a boat
was waiting. They put Lister on board her, and stood still a minute or
two watching while a couple of negroes rowed him off to the
_Palestrina_. Then one of them laughed.
"There are many fools in this world but one has perhaps no cause to
pity them," he said. "It is as a rule their friends they bring to
grief."
Twenty minutes later he called at Dom Clemente's residence, and was
not exactly pleased when he was shown into the presence of Benicia
Figuera.
"My father is on board the yacht. You have come about the Englishman
you have been watching?" she said.
The man made a little deprecatory gesture. "It is not permissible to
contradict the señorita."
Benicia laughed. "It would not be worth while, my friend. You will
leave your message."
"It is a report for Dom Clemente," and again the man spread out his
hands. One could have fancied he felt it necessary to excuse himself
for such an answer.
"Then," said the girl, "it is, as I think you know, quite safe with
me."
There was no smile in her eyes this time, and her companion thought
rapidly. Then, after another gesture which expressed resignation, he
spoke for some three or four minutes until the girl checked him with a
sign.
"If Dom Clemente has any questions to ask he will send for you," she
said. "If not, you must not trouble him about the matter. I think you
understand?"
It was evident that the man did so, for he went out with a respectful
gesture of comprehension, and then turned and shook a yellow fist at
the door which closed behind him. He could foresee that to do as he
was bidden might involve him in difficulties, but Benicia Figuera was
something of a power in that country, and he knew it was seldom
advisable to thwart her. She, as it happened, sat still thinking for a
time, and as the result of it when Desmond's gig went ashore next
morning a negro handed one of her crew a little note. That afternoon
Desmond dressed himself with somewhat unusual care before he was rowed
ashore, and on being ushered into a white house by a uniformed negro
was not altogether astonished to find Benicia Figuera waiting for him
alone in a big cool room. He had met her in Las Palmas, and she smiled
at him graciously as she pointed to a little table where wine and
cigarettes were laid out.
"They are at your disposal. Here one smokes at all times and
everywhere," she said.
Desmond sat down some distance away from her, for as he said
afterwards, she was astonishingly pretty as well as most artistically
got up, and he was on his guard.
"I almost fancy it is advisable that I should keep my head just now,
and it already promises to be sufficiently difficult," he said with a
twinkle in his eyes. "Dom Clemente is presumably not at home. That is
why you sent for me?"
Now the compliments men offer a lady in the Iberian Peninsula are as a
rule artistically involved, but the girl laughed.
"He will not be back until this evening, but the excellent Señora
Castro in whose charge I am is now sitting on the veranda," she said.
"You need not put your armor on, my friend. It would be useless
anyway."
"Yes," said the man reflectively, "I almost think it would be."
"And my intentions are friendly."
Desmond spread his hands out as the men of her own nationality did.
"The assurance is a relief to me, but I should feel easier if you told
me what you wanted. After all, it could not have been merely the
pleasure of seeing me."
Benicia nodded approvingly. His keenness and good-humored candor
appealed to her. It was also in some respects a pleasure to meet a man
who could come straight to the point. Her Portuguese friends usually
spent an unreasonable time going around it.
"Well," she said, leaning forward and looking at him with eyes which
he afterwards told Ormsgill were worth risking a fortune for, "I will
tell you what I know, and I leave you to decide how far it is
desirable for you to be frank with me. In the first place, you are not
going inland to shoot big game. You are going to wait at the Bahia
Santiago for somebody."
Desmond's face grew a trifle red. "If I had Lister here I think I
should feel tempted to twist his neck for him."
The girl laughed. "It would be an interesting spectacle. I suppose you
know that last night he broke a man's wrist?"
"I did not," said Desmond dryly. "When he amuses himself in that way
he seldom tells me--but, to be quite frank, I've almost had enough of
him. It's rather a pity the other fellow didn't break his head.
Still, perhaps, that's a little outside the question."
"The question is--who are you going to wait for at the Bahia
Santiago?"
"Ah," said Desmond, "I almost think you know."
Benicia smiled. "It is, of course, Mr. Ormsgill. He is a friend of
yours. Now, as you can recognize, it is in my power or that of my
father to involve you in a good many difficulties. I wish to know what
Ormsgill went inland for. It was certainly not on a commercial
venture."
Desmond thought hard for the next half-minute. He was a man who could
face a responsibility, and it was quite clear to him that Miss Figuera
already knew quite enough to ruin his comrade's project if she thought
fit to do so. Still, he felt that she would not think fit. He did not
know how she conveyed this impression, or even if she meant to convey
it, for Benicia Figuera was a lady of some importance in that country,
and, as he reflected, no doubt recognized the fact. She sat
impassively still, with her dark eyes fixed on him, and there was a
certain hint of imperiousness in her manner, until he suddenly made
his mind up.
"Well," he said, "I will try to tell you, though there are, I think,
people who would scarcely understand the thing."
He spoke for some ten minutes, and Benicia sat silent a while when at
last he stopped abruptly. Then she made a little gesture of
comprehension.
"Yes," she said simply, "I think your friend is one of the few men who
could be expected to do such things." Then she laughed. "The girl he
is to marry, the one I saw in Las Palmas, is naturally very vexed with
him?"
"That," said Desmond gravely, "is a subject I scarcely feel warranted
in going into. Besides, as a matter of fact, I don't know. There is,
however, another point I am a little anxious about."
"The course I am likely to take?" and Benicia rose. "Well, it is
scarcely likely to be to your disadvantage, and I think you are wise
in telling me. Still, as you see, I do not bind myself to anything."
Desmond stood up in turn, and made her a little grave inclination. "I
leave it in your hands with confidence. After all, that is the only
course open to me."
"Yes," said Benicia, "I believe it is. Still, you seem to have no
great fear of me betraying you."
"I certainly haven't," said Desmond. "I don't know why."
His companion laughed, and held out her hand to him, and in a few more
minutes Desmond was striding down the hot street towards the beach.
When he reached the boat he turned a moment and looked back towards
the big white house.
"It looks very much as if I'd made a fool of myself, and spoiled the
whole thing, but I don't think I have," he said.
It was two or three hours later, and darkness had suddenly closed down
on the sweltering town, when the scream of a whistle broke through the
drowsy roar of the surf as a mail-boat ringed with blinking lights
crept up to the anchorage. Then Desmond sent for Lister, and drew him
into the room beneath the bridge.
"There doesn't appear to be anything very much for that boat, and
she'll probably clear for the north to-morrow," he said. "You had
better get your things together."
Lister gazed at him with astonishment in his heavy face. "I don't
quite understand you," he said.
"The thing's perfectly simple. You're going north in her. In one or
two respects I'm sorry I have to turn you out, but, to be quite
straight, you're not the kind of man I want beside me now. You're too
fond of company, and have a--inconvenient habit of talking in your
cups."
Lister flushed. "I presume you are referring to my conversation with
that slinking yellow-handed fellow I came across last night? He was a
little inquisitive, but I didn't tell him anything."
"No," said Desmond dryly, "I don't suppose you did. It's often the
points a man of your capacity doesn't mention one deduces the most
from. He generally makes it evident that he's working away from them.
That, however, wouldn't strike you, and any way it doesn't affect the
case. I'm sorry I can't offer to accommodate you on board the
_Palestrina_ any longer. I told your folks I'd keep an eye on you, but
it's becoming too big a responsibility."
Lister gazed at him almost incredulously. "Of course, I'll have to go
if you really mean it. Still, I would like to point out that in some
respects you're not exactly a model yourself."
"That," said Desmond dryly, "is a fact I'm naturally quite aware of. I
like a frolic now and then as well as most other men, but I've sense
enough not to indulge in it when I'm out on business. The trouble is
that what you have done you will very probably do again, and that
wouldn't suit either me or Ormsgill. I'm afraid you'll have to take
the boat north to-morrow."
CHAPTER VII
ORMSGILL KEEPS HIS WORD
Forest and compound were wrapped in obscurity, and the night was
almost insufferably hot, when Nares, who had arrived there during the
afternoon, sat in a room of the Mission of Our Lady of Pity. The
little, heavily thatched dwelling stood with the mud-built church and
rows of adherents' huts on the shadowy frontier of the debatable land
whose dusky inhabitants were then plotting a grim retribution for
their wrongs, and on the night in question black, impenetrable
darkness shut it in. Though the smell of wood smoke was still in the
steamy air, the cooking-fires had died out an hour ago, and there was
no sound from any of the clustering huts. Nares, who sat, gaunt and
worn in face, by an open window, could not see one of them. Still, he
was looking out into the compound, and his attitude suggested
expectancy. One could have fancied that he was listening for
something.
"My boys heard in the last village we stopped at that there was
another party coming up behind us, and it's quite likely that there
is," he said. "The bushmen are generally right in these things. I've
seen a whole village clear out half a day before a section or two of
troops arrived, though it's hard to understand how they could possibly
have known."
Father Tiebout, who lay in a canvas chair with the perspiration
trickling down his forehead, smiled. "There are many other things
beyond our comprehension in this country," he said, with a trace of
dryness. "We have our senses and our reason. The negro has them, too,
but he has something more--shall we call it the blind instinct of
self-preservation? It is, at least, certain that it is now and then
necessary to him. So you did not come by San Roque or the new
outpost?"
"I did not. Still, how did you deduce it?"
The priest spread out his hands. "It is simple. One does not find an
inhabited village within easy reach of a fort, my friend. The cause
for that is obvious. You are listening for the other party?"
"Anyway, I was wondering whose it could be."
Father Tiebout smiled. "If there is a white man with the boys it is
Thomas Ormsgill. I have been expecting him the last week. He will be
here within the next two--if he is alive."
He spoke with a quiet certainty, as though the matter admitted of no
doubt, and Nares added,
"Yes," he said, "that is a man who keeps his promise, but you could
give him another week. One knows when the mail-boats arrive, but there
might be difficulties when he got ashore. Anybody who wishes to go
inland is apt to meet with a good many, especially if he isn't looked
upon with favor by the Administration."
Father Tiebout said nothing further. It was almost too hot to talk,
though the silence that brooded over the little gap in the forest was
unpleasantly impressive. It would not be broken until the moon rose
and the beasts awoke. There were also times when Nares, who was not a
nervous man, felt a curious instinctive shrinking from the blackness
of the bush. It was too suggestive. One wondered what it hid, for that
is a land where the Powers of Darkness are apparently omnipotent. It
is filled with rapine and murder, and pestilence stalks through it
unchecked.
At last a faint sighing refrain stole out of the silence, sank into
it, and rose again, and Nares glanced at his companion, for he
recognized that a band of carriers were marching towards the mission
and singing to keep their courage up.
"I think you're right. They're coast boys," Father Tiebout said.
It was some ten minutes later when there was a patter of naked feet in
the compound, and a clamor from the huts. Then a white man walked
somewhat wearily up the veranda stairway into the feeble stream of
light. It was characteristic that Nares was the first to shake hands
with him, while Father Tiebout waited with a little quiet smile.
Ormsgill turned towards the latter.
"Have you a hut I can put the boys in? That's all they want," he said.
"They're fed. We stopped to light our fires at sunset."
The greeting was not an effusive one in view of the difficulties and
privations of the journey, but neither of Ormsgill's companions had
expected anything of that kind from him. It was also noticeable that
there was none of the confusion and bustle that usually follows the
arrival of a band of carriers. This was a man who went about all he
did quietly, and was willing to save his host inconvenience. The
priest went with him to a hut, and the boys were disposed of in five
minutes, and when they came back Ormsgill dropped into a chair.
"Well," he said, "I'm here. Caught the first boat after I got your
letter. I think it was your letter, padre, though Nares signed it."
"At least," said Father Tiebout, "we both foresaw the result of it.
But you have had a long march. Is there anything I can offer you?"
"A little cup of your black coffee," said Ormsgill.
Nares laughed softly. "He's a priest, as well as a Belgian. I believe
they teach them self-restraint," he added. "Still, when I saw you
walking up that stairway I felt I could have forgiven him if he had
flung his arms about your neck."
"You see I had expected him," and Father Tiebout set about lighting a
spirit lamp.
"With a little contrivance one can burn rum in it," he added. "There
are times when I wish it was a furnace."
Ormsgill smiled and shook his head. "You and other well meaning
persons occasionally go the wrong way to work, padre," he said. "Would
you pile up the Hamburg gin merchants' profits, or encourage the folks
here to build new sugar factories? You can't stop the trade in
question while the soil is fruitful and the African is what he is."
"What the white man has made him," said Father Tiebout.
"I believe the nigger knew how to produce tolerably heady liquors and
indulged in them before the white man brought his first gin case in,"
said Ormsgill reflectively. "In any case, Lamartine was a trader,
which is, after all, a slightly less disastrous profession to the
niggers here than a government officer, and I did what I could for
him. From your point of view I've no doubt I acquired a certain
responsibility. Could you do anything useful with £200 or £300
sterling, padre?"
"Ah," said the little priest, "one cannot buy absolution."
Nares smiled. It was seldom he let slip an opportunity of inveigling
Father Tiebout into a good-humored discussion on a point of this kind.
"I fancied it was only we others who held that view," he said. Then he
turned to Ormsgill. "He is forgetting, or, perhaps, breaking loose
from his traditions. After all, one does break away in Africa. It is
possible it was intended that one should do so."
"Still," persisted Ormsgill, "with £300 sterling one could, no doubt,
do something."
Father Tiebout, who ignored Nares' observations, tinkered with his
lamp before he turned to Ormsgill with a little light in his eyes.
"Taking the value of a man's body at just what it is just now one
could, perhaps, win twenty human souls. Of these three or four could
be sent back into the darkness when we were sure of them. Ah," and
there was a little thrill in his voice, "if one had only two or three
to continue the sowing with."
"In this land," said Ormsgill, "the reaper is Death. Their comrades
would certainly sell them to somebody or spear them in the bush. The
priests of the Powers of Darkness would see they did it."
"Where that seed is once sown there must be a propagation. One can
burn the plant with fire or cut it down, but it springs from the root
again, or a grain or two with the germ of life indestructible in it
remains. Flung far by scorching winds or swept by bitter floods, one
of those grains finds a resting place where the soil is fertile. Here
a little and there a little, that crop is always spreading."
Ormsgill turned to Nares. "You could do something with the sum alluded
to?"
Nares shook his head, and there was a shadow of pain in his lean face.
"I am not fixed as Father Tiebout is," he said. "His faith is the
official one. They dare not steal his followers from him. Besides, I
have never bought the body of a man. Sometimes I heal them, and if
they are grateful they are driven away from me." He broke off for a
moment with a curious little laugh. "I am an empty voice in the
darkness that very few dare listen to. Still, I will take a case of
London packed drugs from you."
The Belgian spread his thin hands out. "Four villages snatched from
the pestilence! It was his care that saved them. How many men's bodies
he has healed he can not tell you, but I think that a careful count is
kept of all of them."
"Well," said Ormsgill quietly, "there is £600 to your joint credit in
Lisbon. You should get the bank advices when the next mail comes in.
You can apportion it between you."
Nares stood up with a flush in his worn face, and spoke awkwardly, but
Father Tiebout sat very still. A little glow crept into his eyes, and
he said a few words in the Latin tongue. Then Ormsgill thrust his
chair back noisily and moved towards the lamp.
"I almost think that coffee should be ready," he said.
Father Tiebout served it out, and when the cups were laid aside Nares
looked at Ormsgill with a little smile.
"You have not been long away, but one could fancy you were glad to get
back again," he said.
Ormsgill's face hardened. "In some respects I am. The folks I belonged
to were not the same. My views seemed to pain them. It cost them an
effort to bear with me. Still, that was perhaps no more than natural.
One loses touch with the things he has been used to in this country."
"Sometimes," said Father Tiebout, "one grows out of it, and that is a
little different. Our friend yonder once went home, too, but now I
think he will stay here altogether, as I shall do, unless I am sent
elsewhere."
Nares smiled. "The padre is right, as usual. I went home--and the
folks I had longed for 'most broke my heart between them. It seemed
that I was a failure, and that hurt me. They wanted results, the tale
of souls, and I hadn't one that I was sure of to offer as a trophy.
One, they said, could heal men's bodies in America. As you say, one
falls out of line in Africa."
There was a wistfulness which he could not quite repress in his voice,
and Ormsgill nodded sympathetically.
"Oh," he said, "I know. It hurts hard for awhile. We are most of us
the cast-offs and the mutineers here. Still, in one respect, I
sometimes think Father Tiebout's people are wiser. They don't ask for
results."
The little priest once more spread his hands out. "The results," he
said, "will appear some day, but that is not our concern. It is
sufficient that a man should do the work that is set out for him. And
now we will be practical. Have you any news of Herrero?"
"He is a hundred miles north of us in Ugalla's country, and I am going
on there. You will have to find me a few more carriers. It was Miss
Figuera told me."
"Perhaps one can expect a little now Dom Clemente is in authority. He
is honest as men go in Africa, and at least he is a soldier. Well, you
shall have the carriers in a week or so."
Ormsgill laughed. "I want them to-morrow. There is a good deal to do.
I have the boys Domingo stole to trace when I have bought the woman
back from Herrero."
"Bought!" said Father Tiebout with a twinkle in his eyes. "If Herrero
is not willing to sell?"
"Then," said Ormsgill dryly, "I shall have considerable pleasure in
making him."
He stretched himself wearily with a little yawn. "And now we will talk
about other matters."
It was an hour later when he retired to rest and, hot as it was, sank
into sound sleep within ten minutes, but although he rose early and
roused the little priest to somewhat unusual activity, several days
had passed before his new carriers were collected and ready to march.
They were sturdy, half-naked pagans, and appeared astonished when he
gave them instructions in a few words of the bush tongue and bore with
their slow comprehension instead of applying the stick to their dusky
skin, which was what they had somewhat naturally expected from a white
man.
He shook hands with Nares and Father Tiebout in the sloppy compound
early one morning when the mists were streaming from the dripping
forest, and looked at the little priest with a twinkle in his eyes.
"I haven't asked you how you got those boys," he said. "Still, it must
have cost you something to secure the good will of whoever had the
privilege of supplying them."
He turned to Nares as if to invite his opinion, which was
unhesitatingly offered him. The latter, at least, would make no
compromise.
"It certainly did," he said. "I am glad you did not ask me to hire you
the boys. The system under which he obtained them is an iniquity."
Father Tiebout smiled. "The object, I think, was a pious one. One has
to use the means available."
"Anyway," said Ormsgill, "the responsibility and the cost is mine."
The priest shook his head. "At least, you can take this gift from me,"
he said. "It is not much, but one does with pleasure what he can."
It was offered in such a fashion that Ormsgill could only make his
grateful acknowledgments, though he had grounds for surmising that the
gift would cost the giver months of stringent self-denial, and there
was already very little sign of luxury at the Mission. Then he called
to his carriers, who swung out of the compound with their burdens in
single file, slipping and splashing in the mire. The two men he had
left behind stood watching them until the last strip of fluttering
cotton had vanished into the misty forest when Father Tiebout looked
at his companion with a little smile.
"One could consider the venture our friend has undertaken a folly, but
still I think he will succeed," he said. "One could almost fancy that
the Powers above us hold the men who attempt such follies in their
special keeping."
Nares, as it happened, had been almost uncomfortably stirred during
the last ten minutes, but he was Puritan to the backbone, and usually
endeavored, at least, to prevent what he felt carrying him away. He
was also as a rule ready to join issue with the little priest on any
point that afforded him an opportunity.
"There is a difficulty," he said. "I'm not sure he would admit the
existence of all the Powers you believe in. There are so many of them.
One would fancy that faith was necessary."
Father Tiebout smiled at him again. "Ah," he said, "they who know
everything have doubtless a wide charity."
CHAPTER VIII
THE BONDSWOMAN
A small fire burned on the edge of the ravine, flinging out pale red
flashes and an intolerable smoke, for the wood was green and wet. It
had been raining heavily, and the whole forest that rolled down the
slopes of the plateau was filled with a thick white steam. Filmy wisps
of it drifted out of the darkness which hid the towering trunks, and
streamed by the girl who crouched beside the fire cooking her white
lord's evening meal. She was comely, though her face and uncovered
arms were of a warm brown. A wide strip of white cotton fell from one
shoulder, and half revealed the slenderness of her shapely form. It
also covered certain significant discolored bruises on the soft brown
skin. The look in her eyes just then, perhaps, accounted for them, for
it vaguely suggested intelligence, and a protest against her fate, in
place of the hopeless apathy which, after all, saves the native of
that country a great deal of trouble. He has been taught drastically
that any objection he might reasonably make would certainly be futile
and very apt to produce unwished-for results.
A wall of dripping forest rose above the fire, but behind the girl the
ground sloped sharply to the brink of a swollen river which rose in
the plateaux of the interior, and a little, tattered tent was pitched
on the edge of the declivity. In front of it two somewhat ragged white
men lay listlessly upon a strip of waterproof ground sheeting. They
were worn with travel and a long day's labor, for they had been
engaged since sunrise in raft building and ferrying their equipment
and trade goods across the river, and, as it happened, had lost most
of their provisions in the process. They were of widely different
birth and character, and cordially disliked each other, though they
had both first seen the light in Africa and community of interest held
them together.
Gavin was tall and lean and hard, with an expressionless bronzed face,
the son of an English ostrich farmer who had married a Boer woman. He
had come into that country on foot with one other survivor of the
party he had started with after a difference of opinion with the Boer
administration. The others had died with their oxen during their two
years' wandering in the wilderness. His companion Herrero passed for a
Portuguese, though his hair would curl and his lips were a trifle
thick. He was spare in form, and his face was of a muddy yellow with
the stamp of sensuality and cruelty in it. He had also been drinking
freely, though that is not as a rule a Latin vice, and was still very
wet from his labors in the river. He had lower legs like broomsticks,
and his torn, drenched trousers clung tightly about his protuberant
knees.
"One could fancy that we have been bewitched," he said. "Trouble has
followed us all the journey. There was a native woman who looked at
us as we left San Roque, and she made a sign."
Gavin laughed contemptuously. "The loads," he said, "were too heavy.
It is not economical to overdrive these cattle. One must remember the
trek-ox's back."
Herrero blinked at the forest with something that suggested
apprehension in his eyes, and it was not difficult to fancy that it
and all it held was hostile to the white man. It seemed to crowd in
upon him menacingly as the fire leapt up, vague, black, and
impenetrable, an abode of unformulated terror and everlasting shadow.
"I have brought up the same loads with fewer boys before," he said.
"They did not fall lame or die, as some of these have done. It is
known that there is black witchcraft in this bush. There are white men
who have gone into it and did not come out again."
"They were probably easier with their carriers than is advisable," and
Gavin smiled grimly as he dropped a big hand on a cartridge in his
bandolier. "This is a certain witchcraft cure. Still, you have to make
your mind up. We can not go on, and take all the trade goods, without
provisions."
His companion raised one shoulder in protest against the trouble fate
had heaped upon them, for the trade goods were worth a good deal in
the country that lay before them.
"It takes almost as much to keep a man in strength whether he marches
light or loaded," he said. "It would ruin me if we left any more
behind. Boys are scarce just now. One could, perhaps, get provisions
in another week's march."
"The boys can not make it," and it was evident that Gavin was
languidly contemptuous of his comrade's indecision. "You must leave a
few here or you will lose half of them on the way."
He, at least, could face a crisis resolutely, but it was clear that
he, too, regarded the carriers as chattels that had a commercial value
only, for he was quite aware that, since that was one of the sterile
belts, those who were left behind would in all probability die. The
men whose fate they were discussing lay among the wet undergrowth
apart from them, and Herrero, who appeared to be glancing towards
them, raised himself a trifle suddenly.
"Something moves. There in the bush," he said.
"One of the boys," said Gavin, who saw nothing, though his eyes were
keen. "Lie down. You have been taking more cognac than is wise
lately."
Herrero shrugged his shoulders. "There is always something in the
bush. It comes and goes when the boys are asleep," he said. "It is not
pleasant that one should see it."
Gavin scarcely smiled. He was growing a trifle impatient with his
comrade, who could not recognize when it was necessary to make a
sacrifice, and he was ready for his meal. By and by Herrero called to
the girl, who filled a calabash from the iron cooking pot hung above
the fire, and laid it down in front of him with two basins. The trader
lifted a portion of the savory preparation in a wooden spoon and
smelled it.
"The pepper is insufficient. How often must one tell you that?" he
said, and rising laid a yellow hand upon her arm.
The girl shrank back from him, but he followed her, still holding her
arm, and nipped it deeply between the nails of his thumb and
forefinger. He did it slowly, and with a certain relish, while his
face contracted into a malicious grin. For a moment a fierce light
leapt into the girl's eyes, but the torturing grip grew sharper, and
it faded again. The man dropped his hand when at last she broke into a
little cry, and stooping for the calabash she went back towards the
fire. Gavin, who had looked on with an expressionless face, turned to
his comrade.
"If you do that too often I think you will be sorry, my friend," he
said. "She will cut your throat for you some day."
"No," said Herrero, "it is not a thing that is likely to happen if one
uses the stick sufficiently."
His companion smiled in a curious fashion, but said nothing. His
mother's people had long ruled the native with a heavy hand, and he
had no hesitation in admitting that leniency is seldom advisable.
Still, he recognized that in spite of his apathetic patience one may
now and then drive the negro over hard, so that when life becomes
intolerable he somewhat logically grows reckless and turns upon his
oppressors in his desperation, which was a thing that Herrero
apparently did not understand.
In the meanwhile the girl crouched silently by the fire, stirring the
blistering peppers into the cooking pot, a huddled figure robed in
white with meekly bent head and the marks of the white man's brutality
upon her dusky body. Every line of the limp figure was suggestive of
hopelessness. She might have posed for a statue of Africa in bondage.
Still, as it happened, she and the boys who lay apart among the
dripping undergrowth glanced now and then towards the forest with
apathetic curiosity. Gavin's ears were good, but, after all, he had
not depended upon his hearing for life and liberty, as the others had
often done, and their keenness of perception was not in him. They knew
that strangers were approaching stealthily through the bush. Indeed,
they knew that one had flitted about the camp for some little while,
but they said nothing. It was the white man's business, and nothing
that was likely to result from it could matter much to them.
The fire blazed up a little, but, save for its snapping and the roar
of the swollen river, there was silence in the camp, until Gavin rose
to one knee with a little exclamation. He had heard nothing, but at
last his trained senses had given him a sub-conscious warning that
there was something approaching. Just then the girl stirred the fire,
and the uncertain radiance flickered upon the towering trunks. It
drove an elusive track of brightness back into the shadow, and Herrero
scrambled to his feet as a man strode into the light.
He stopped and stood near the fire, dressed in thorn-rent duck, with
the wet dripping from him and a little grim smile in his face, and it
was significant that although he had nothing in his hands Gavin
reached out for the heavy rifle that lay near his side. Strangers
are usually received with caution in that part of Africa, and he
recognized the man. As it happened, the girl by the fire recognized
him, too, and ran forward with a little cry. After all, he had been
kind to her while she lived with Lamartine, and it may have been that
some vague hope of deliverance sprang up in her mind, for she stopped
again and crouched in mute appeal close at his side. Ormsgill laid a
hand reassuringly upon her brown shoulder.
[Illustration: "Ormsgill laid a hand reassuringly upon her brown
shoulder."--See page 103.]
He had not spoken a word yet, and there was silence for a moment or
two while the firelight flared up. It showed Gavin watching him
motionless with the rifle that glinted now and then on his knee,
Herrero standing with closed hands and an unpleasant scowl on his
yellow face, and the boys clustering waist-deep in the underbrush.
Then the trader spoke.
"What do you want?" he said.
"This woman," said Ormsgill simply. "I am willing to buy her from
you."
Herrero laughed maliciously. "She is not for sale. You should not have
let her slip through your fingers. It is possible you could have made
terms with Lamartine."
Ormsgill disregarded the gibe. Indeed, it was one he had expected.
"That," he said, "is not quite the point. Besides, one could hardly
fancy that you are quite correct. Everything is for sale in this part
of Africa. It is only a question of the figure. You have not heard my
offer."
"In this case it would not be a great temptation," and Herrero's grin
was plainer. "The girl is now and then mutinous, and that lends the
affair a certain piquancy. When she has been taught submission I shall
probably grow tired of her and will give her to you. Until then the
breaking of her in will afford me pleasure. In fact, as I have never
been defied by a native yet I feel that to fail in this case would be
a stain on my self-respect."
"I almost think my offer would cover that," said Ormsgill dryly. "It
seems to me your self-respect has been sold once or twice before."
Herrero disregarded him, though his face grew a trifle flushed.
"Anita," he said, "come here."
The girl rose when Ormsgill let his hand drop from her shoulder, and
gazed at him appealingly. Then as he made no sign she turned away with
a little hopeless gesture, moved forward a few paces, and stopped
again when the trader reached out for a withe that lay on the ground
sheet not far from where he stood.
"It would," he said with a vindictive smile, "have saved her trouble
if you had stayed away."
"Stop," said Ormsgill sharply, and striding forward stood looking at
him. "You have shown how far you would go, which was in one way most
unwise of you since you have made it a duty to take the girl from you.
What is more to the purpose, it will certainly be done. There are two
ways of obtaining anything in this country. One is to buy it, and the
other to fight for it. I am willing to use either."
Herrero who saw the glint in his eyes, backed away from him, and
flashed a warning glance at Gavin, who turned to Ormsgill quietly.
"I am," he said in English, "willing to stand by, and see fair play,
since it does not seem to be altogether a question of business. Still,
if it seems likely that you will deprive me of my comrade's services I
shall probably feel compelled to take a hand in. He has a few good
points though they're not particularly evident, and I can't altogether
afford to lose him."
Herrero, who glanced round the camp, waved his hand towards the boys.
"I will call them to beat you back into the bush."
Ormsgill raised his voice, and there was a sharp crackling of
undergrowth, while here and there a dusky figure materialized out of
the shadow.
"As you see, they have guns," he said.
Gavin smiled and tapped his rifle. "Still, they can't shoot as I can.
Hadn't you better send them away again, and if you have any offer to
make Mr. Herrero get on with it? One naturally expected something of
this kind."
Ormsgill made a little gesture with his hand, and the men sank into
the gloom again.
"Well," he said, "for the last week I have been trailing you, and as I
did not know how long I might be coming up with you, I have plenty of
provisions. Yours, it is evident from one or two things I noticed, are
running out, and you can't get through the sterile belt without a
supply. It was rather a pity the San Roque people burned the village
where you expected to get some. I'm open to hand you over all the
loads I can spare in return for the girl Anita."
"How many loads?"
Ormsgill told him, and Gavin nodded, "It is a reasonable offer," he
said. "I will engage that our friend makes terms with you. Bring in
the provisions, and you shall have the girl."
Herrero protested savagely until his companion dryly pointed that
since his objections had no weight he was wasting his breath. Then
Ormsgill turned away into the bush, and came back with a line of
half-naked carrier boys who laid down the loads they carried before
the tent. After that he touched the girl's shoulder, and pointed to
the hammock two of the boys lowered.
"You are going back to your own village," he said.
The girl gazed at him a moment in evident astonishment, and then waved
her little brown hands.
"I have none," she said. "It was burned several moons ago."
It was evident that this was something Ormsgill had not expected, and
was troubled at, and Gavin, who watched him, smiled.
"If she belongs to the Lutanga people, as one would fancy from her
looks, what she says is very likely correct," he said. "One of the
plateau tribes came down not long ago and wiped several villages out.
Domingo told me, and from what he said the tribe in question is
certainly not one I'd care about handing over a woman to. She would
probably have to put up with a good deal of unpleasantness if she
went back there. Besides, it seems to me that what you had in view
would scarcely be flattering to the lady. It isn't altogether what she
would expect from her rescuer."
Ormsgill had already an unpleasant suspicion of the latter fact, for
woman's favor is not sought but purchased or commanded in most parts
of Africa. Still, he once more pointed to the hammock, and walked
behind it without a word when the bearers hove the pole to their wooly
crowns.
Then as they flitted into the shadowy bush Gavin turned to Herrero
with a little laugh. "There are a few men like him, men with views
that bring them trouble," he said. "My father was one. He threw away a
big farm on account of them. He would not make obeisance to his new
masters when his nation turned its back on him. That, however, is a
thing one could scarcely expect you to understand."
Then he called one of the boys and sent him to the fire. "And now we
will have supper. After all, I'm not very sorry you lost that girl, my
friend."
CHAPTER IX
ANITA BECOMES A RESPONSIBILITY
It was two weeks later when Ormsgill reached the Mission with his
boys, footsore, ragged, and worn with travel. He had avoided Anita's
hammock as far as possible on the way, and it was with a certain
relief he saw her safely installed in one of the dusky adherents'
huts. Then he arrayed himself in whole, clean clothes, and when he had
eaten sat on the shadowy veranda talking with his host, a somewhat
ludicrous figure since Father Tiebout's garments were several sizes
too small for him. It was then the hottest part of the afternoon. The
perspiration trickled down their faces, and the little priest blinked
when he met the blazing sunlight with dazzled eyes.
They spoke in disjointed sentences, sometimes mixing words of three
languages, but it was significant that although neither expressed
himself with clearness his companion seldom failed in comprehension,
for priest and rash adventurer were in curious sympathy. Both of them
had borne heat, and fever, and bodily pain, and proved their courage
in a land where the white man often sinks into limp dejection. Each
had also in his own way done what he could for the oppressed, and had,
perhaps, accomplished a little here and there. It was, however,
inevitable that their conversation should turn upon the girl Anita.
"I had not heard of the raid up yonder," said the priest. "I am not
sure that I am sorry. After all, one hears enough. Still, it no doubt
took place. Herrero's companion would have no motive for deceiving
you. The question is what is to be done with the woman. To be frank,
she cannot stay here."
"Why?" and Ormsgill's face grew a trifle grave, for Anita was rapidly
becoming a cause of anxiety to him.
His companion made a little gesture. "She would prove an apple of
discord; she is too pretty. One must not expect too much of human
nature, and one wife alone is permitted. There is not now a boy she
could marry. In the second place, Herrero would probably attempt to
seize her here."
It occurred to Ormsgill that Anita might not be anxious or even
willing to marry anybody. In fact, he felt it would be an almost
astonishing thing if she was. Still, he realized with a vague
uneasiness that it is, after all, very often difficult to foresee the
course a woman would adopt.
"Then," he said, "I don't know what can be done with her."
"You are not one who would leave a task half finished?"
"At least, I cannot turn this woman adrift."
Father Tiebout wrinkled his brows. "There is, I think, only one place
where she would be safe, and that is on the coast. There are also
friends of mine who could be trusted to take good care of her in the
city, and she could be sent down from the San Thome Mission. It is,
however, a long journey."
"If it is necessary," said Ormsgill, "I must make it."
His companion's little gesture seemed to indicate that he believed it
was, and Ormsgill dismissed the subject with a smile.
"In that case I will start again to-morrow," he said.
He set out in the early morning, taking two letters from Father
Tiebout, one for the man who directed the San Thome Mission, and one
to be sent on from there to certain friends of his host's on the
coast, and it was two days later when he lay a little apart from his
carriers in a glade in the bush. Blazing sunshine beat down into it.
There was an overpowering heat, and a deep stillness pervaded the
encircling forest, for the beasts had slunk into their darkest lairs
in the burning afternoon. The snapping of the fire made it the more
perceptible, and Ormsgill could see the blue smoke curl up above a
belt of grass behind which the boys were cooking a meal. Anita, who
was with them, would, he knew, bring him his portion, and in the
meanwhile he felt it was advisable to keep away from her. She had
talked very little with him during the last two days, but that was his
fault, and he fancied that she failed to understand his reticence. In
fact, the signs of favor she had once or twice shown him had rendered
him a little uncomfortable.
For all that, his face relaxed into a little dry smile as he wondered
what the very formal Mrs. Ratcliffe would think of that journey. He
remembered that he had always been more or less of a trial to his
conventional friends even before he had been dismissed from his
country's service for an offense he had not committed, but he was one
of the men who do not greatly trouble themselves about being
misunderstood. It is a misfortune which those who undertake anything
worth doing have usually to bear with.
He was, however, a little drowsy, for they had started at sunrise and
marched a long way since then. There was only one hammock, which
somewhat to the carriers' astonishment Anita had occupied, for this
was distinctly at variance with the customs of a country in which
nobody concerns himself about the comfort of a native woman. It would
also be an hour before the boys went on again, and he stretched
himself out among the grass wearily, but, for all that, with a little
sigh of content. He had found the restraints of civilization galling,
and the untrammeled life of the wilderness appealed to him. The need
of constant vigilance, and the recognition of the hazards he had
exposed himself to, had a bracing effect. It roused the combativeness
that was in his nature, and left him intent, strung up, and resolute.
The task he had saddled himself with had become more engrossing since
it promised to be difficult.
He did not think he slept, for he was conscious of the pungent smell
of the wood smoke all the time, but at last he roused himself to
attention suddenly, and looked about him with dazzled eyes. He could
see the faint blue vapor hanging about the trunks, and hear the boys'
low voices, but except for that the bush was very still. Yet he was
certainly leaning on one elbow with every sense strung up, and he knew
that there must be some cause for it. What had roused him he could not
tell, but he had, perhaps, lived long enough in that land to acquire a
little of the bushman's unreasoning recognition of an approaching
peril. There was, he knew, something that menaced him not far away.
For a moment or two his heart beat faster than usual, and the
perspiration trickled down his set face, and then laying a restraint
upon himself he rose a trifle higher, and swept his eyes steadily
round the glade. There was one spot where it seemed to him that the
outer leaves of a screen of creepers moved. He did not waste a moment
in watching them, but letting his arm fall under him rolled over
amidst the grass which covered him, for it was evidently advisable to
take precautions promptly. Just as the crackling stems closed about
him there was a pale flash and a detonation, and a puff of smoke
floated out from the creepers.
Ormsgill was on his feet in another moment, and running his hardest
plunged into them, but when he had smashed through the tangled, thorny
stems there was nobody there, and except for the clamor of the boys
the bush was very still. Still, this was very much what he had
expected, and looking round he saw the print of naked toes and a knee
in the damp soil before his eyes rested on the brass shell of a spent
cartridge. He picked it up and turned it over in his hand,
recognizing it as one made for a heavy, single-shot rifle of old
fashioned type, which had its significance for him. He fancied his
would-be assassin had been lent the rifle by a white man who in all
probability knew what he meant to do with it. Then he glanced at the
cartridge again, and noticed a slight outward bending of its rim.
There was a portentous little glint in his eyes as he slipped it into
his pocket.
"Some day I may come across the man who owns that rifle," he said.
He stood still for another few moments, grim in face, with his jacket
rent, and a little trickle of blood running from one hand which a
thorn had gashed. Every nerve in him tingled with fierce anger, but he
knew that the man who runs counter to established customs has usually
more than misconception to face in Africa, especially if he
sympathizes with the oppressed, and he was one who could wait. Then
the boys came floundering through the undergrowth, one or two with
heavy matchets, and one or two with long flintlock guns, but Ormsgill,
who recognized that pursuit would certainly prove futile even if they
were willing to undertake it, drove them back to the fire again.
"We will start when I have eaten," was all he said.
Anita brought him his meal, and stood watching him curiously while he
ate, but Ormsgill said nothing, and in half an hour they went on again
and spent the rest of that day and a number of others floundering
amidst and hacking a way through tangled creepers in the dim shadow of
the bush. It was a relief to all of them when at last the thatched
roofs of San Thome Mission rose out of a little opening into which the
dazzling sunlight shone. Ormsgill was received by an emaciated priest
with a dead white face and the intolerant eyes of a fanatic, who
supplied him and the boys with a very frugal meal and took Anita away
from him. Then he read Father Tiebout's letters, and after he had done
so sat with Ormsgill on the veranda.
"Father Tiebout vouches for you--and your purpose," he said, watching
his companion with doubt in his eyes.
"If he had not done so I should probably not have been welcome?" said
Ormsgill, smiling.
The priest made a little gesture which seemed to imply that he did not
intend to discuss that point. "The girl would be safe with the people
he mentions. They are good Catholics."
"I am not sure that is quite sufficient in itself," said Ormsgill
reflectively. "Still, Father Tiebout would scarcely have suggested
sending her to them unless he had felt reasonably certain that they
would show her kindness."
His companion's face hardened. "They are people of blameless lives.
There are, perhaps, two or three such in that city. You could count
upon the woman receiving kindness from them, but one would have you
quite clear about the fact that my recommendation is necessary. It is,
of course, in my power to withhold it, and if it is given you will
undertake not to claim the woman again?"
Ormsgill looked at him with a little smile. "I have no wish to claim
her, though I have only that assurance to offer you, and I must tell
you that I am going to the coast. There are, however, one or two
conditions. She must be treated well, and paid for her services."
"That would be arranged. It is convenient that she should understand
what would be required of her. I will send for her."
Ormsgill made a sign of concurrence, and in another five minutes Anita
stood before them, slight and lithe in form, and very comely, but with
apprehension and anxiety in her brown face. The priest spoke to her
concisely in a coldly even voice, and it was evident that the course
he mentioned was one she had no wish to take. Then he turned from her
to Ormsgill as she stretched out her hands with a little gesture of
appeal towards the latter.
"It is your will that I should go away and live with these people?"
she said.
Ormsgill knew that the priest was watching him, and that there was
only one answer, but he shrank from uttering it. The girl's eyes were
beseeching, and she looked curiously forlorn. She was a castaway
without kindred or country, one who had lived the untrammeled life of
the bush, and he feared that she would find the restraints of the city
intolerably galling.
"It is," he said gravely.
The girl stood very still a moment or two looking at him, and Ormsgill
felt the blood creep into his face. He was, in all probability, the
only man who had ever shown her kindness, and he recognized that she
too had misunderstood his motives and regarded him as rather more than
her rescuer. Then as he made no sign she flung out her hands again,
hopelessly this time, and slowly straightened herself.
"I go," she said simply and turned away from them.
Ormsgill watched her cross the compound, a forlorn object, with the
white cotton robe that flowed about her gleaming in the dazzling
sunlight, and then turn for a moment in the shadowy entrance of a
palm-thatched hut. He was stirred with a vague compassion, but putting
a firm restraint upon himself he sat still, and the girl turning
suddenly once more vanished into the dark gap. It also happened that
he never met her again.
"One's powers are limited, Father. After all, there is not much one
can do for another," he said.
The priest looked hard at him, and then made a little grave gesture.
"It is something if one can ease for a moment another's burden. I
have, it seems, to ask your pardon for a misconception that was,
perhaps, not altogether an unnatural one, Señor."
Ormsgill saw little more of him during the day, and started for the
coast early next morning. He had only accomplished half his purpose,
and that in some respects the easier half, but it was necessary for
him to procure further supplies and communicate with Desmond. Before
he started, however, he sent home most of the boys Father Tiebout had
obtained for him, keeping only two or three of them, for these and
the others he had brought up with him could, he fancied, be relied
upon. They were thick-lipped, wooly-haired heathen, stupid in all
matters beyond their acquaintance, but after the first few weeks they
had, at least, done his bidding unquestioningly.
This quiet white man with the lined face had never used the stick on
one of them, and did not, so far as they were aware, even carry a
pistol. When they slept at a bush village or obtained provisions there
he made the headman a due return before he went away, which was not
the invariable custom of other white men they had traveled with. In
fact, they looked upon him as somewhat of an anachronism in that
country, but since the one attempt a few of them had made to disregard
his authority had signally failed they obeyed him, and little by
little became sensible of a curious confidence in him. What he said he
did, and, what was rather more to the purpose, when he told them that
a certain course was expected from them they usually adopted it, even
when it was far from coinciding with their wishes.
There are a few men of Ormsgill's kind and one or two women who have
made adventurous journeys in the shadowy land unarmed, and carried
away with them the dusky tribesmen's good will, while others have
found it necessary to march with a band of hired swashbucklers and
mark their trail with burnt villages and cartridge shells. As usual, a
good deal depended upon how they set about it.
CHAPTER X
ORMSGILL ASKS A FAVOR
A silver lamp burned on the little table where two diminutive cups of
bitter coffee were set out, but its indifferent light was scarcely
needed in the open-fronted upper room of Dom Clemente's house. A full
moon hung above the Atlantic, and the clear radiance that rested on
the glittering harbor streamed in between the fretted arches and
slender pillars. Throughout tropical Africa all there is of grace and
beauty in man's handiwork bears the stamp of the unchanging East, and
one finds something faintly suggestive of the art of olden days where
the eye rests with pleasure on any of its sweltering towns, which is,
however, not often the case. It is incontrovertible that most of the
towns are characterized by native squalor and that some of them are
unpleasantly filthy, but, after all, filth and squalor are usual in
the East, and serve by contrast to enhance the elusive beauty of its
cities.
It was almost cool that evening, and Ormsgill, looking down between
the slim pillars across the white walls and flat roofs, though some
were ridged and tiled, towards the blaze of moonlight on the harbor,
was well content to be where he was after his journey through the
steamy bush and across the sun-scorched littoral. He had arrived that
afternoon, and had spent the last hour with Benicia Figuera, who had
shown herself gracious to him. She lay not far away from him in a big
Madeira chair, loosely draped in diaphanous white attire which
enhanced the violet depths of her eyes and the duskiness of her hair,
and her face showed in the moonlight the clear pallor of ivory.
Ormsgill fancied that her attendant the Señora Castro sat in the room
behind them from which a soft light streamed out through quaintly
patterned wooden lattices, though he had seen nothing of the latter
lady since the comida had been cleared away.
He had said very little about his journey, though he intended to tell
Dom Clemente rather more, but he presently became conscious that
Benicia was regarding him with a little smile. He also noticed, and
was somewhat annoyed with himself for thinking of it, that she had
lips like the crimson pulp of the pomegranate, the grandadilla which
figures in the imagery of the Iberian Peninsula as well as in that of
parts of Africa, where it is seldom grown. Ormsgill was quite aware of
this, and it had its associations of Eastern mysticism and sensuality,
for he was a man of education and the outcasts he had lived with had
not all been of low degree. Among them there had been a certain
green-turbaned Moslem who had taught him things unknown to his kind at
home. He felt that it was advisable to put a restraint upon himself.
"You are not sorry you have come back to us?" said Benicia.
Ormsgill was by no means sorry, and permitted himself to admit as
much. He had accomplished part, at least, of his purpose
successfully, and that in itself had a tranquilizing effect on him,
while after the weary marches through tall grass and tangled bush
under scorching heat it was distinctly pleasant to sit there cleanly
clad, in the cool air with such a companion. Benicia, it almost
seemed, guessed his thoughts, for she laughed softly.
"It is comforting to feel that one has done what he has undertaken,"
she said. "Still, you were, at least, not alone by those campfires in
the bush."
Ormsgill flushed a little, though he contrived not to start. He had
naturally not considered it necessary to tell Miss Figuera anything
about Anita.
"No," he said simply. "I don't know how you could have heard about it,
but I was not alone."
It was characteristic of him that he offered no explanation, and was
content to leave what he had done open to misconception. In fact, he
had a vague but unpleasant feeling that the latter course might be the
wiser one. Benicia turned her dark eyes full upon him, and there was a
faint sparkle in the depths of them.
"My friend, I hear of almost everything," she said. "As it happens, I
know what you went up into the bush for."
"Well," said Ormsgill reflectively, "perhaps, I should not be
surprised at that. It was only natural that I should be watched."
He met her gaze without wavering, and, though he was not aware of
this, his eyes had a question in them. It was one he could not have
asked directly even if he had wished, but remembering that Anita was
to live in that city he took a bold course.
"I wonder if one could venture to mention that your interest in the
woman I brought down from the bush would go a long way?" he said. "It
is, I think, deserved, and in case of any difficulty would ensure her
being left in quietness here, though, perhaps, the favor is too much
to expect."
"No," said the girl, "not when you make the request. Frankly, in the
case of others I should have found what I have heard incredible. It
suggests the Knight of La Mancha. Are there many in your country who
would do such things?"
Ormsgill felt his face grow a trifle hot. After all, Benicia Figuera
was, in that land, at least, a great lady, and he remembered that his
own people had doubted him. He laughed somewhat bitterly.
"If I remember correctly, the famous cavalier was more or less crazy,"
he said.
The girl turned a trifle in her chair, and he saw a little gleam
kindle in her dark eyes.
"Ah," she said, "perhaps it is a pity there are so many who are wholly
sensible."
She sat very close to him, dressed in filmy white which flowed in
sweeping lines about a form of the statuesque modeling that is one of
the characteristics of the women of The Peninsula, but it was
something in her eyes which held Ormsgill's attention. They were Irish
eyes, with the inconsequent daring of the Celt in them, though she had
also the lips of the Iberian, full and red and passionate. The hot
blood of the South was in her, and, though she never forgot wholly
who and what she was, and there was a certain elusive stateliness in
her pose, it was clear to the man that she was one who could on
occasion fling petty prudence to the winds and ride as reckless a tilt
at conventionalities and cramping customs as he had done. Such a woman
he felt would not expect to be safeguarded by a man, but would bear
the stress of the conflict with him, if she loved him, not because his
quarrel might be an honorable one but because it was his. Then she
made him a little grave inclination.
"I venture to make you my compliments, Señor Ormsgill," she said.
The man set his lips for a moment, and she saw it with a little thrill
of triumph. It was borne in upon her that she desired the love of this
quiet Englishman who for a whimsical idea had undertaken such a task.
She also felt that she could take it, for she had seen the woman he
was pledged to, and knew, if he did not, that he would never be
satisfied with her. Then she suddenly remembered her pride, and
quietly straightened herself again. Ormsgill sat still looking at her,
and though the signs of restraint were plain on his lined face, she
saw a curious little glint creep into his eyes. Still, she felt that
he did not know it was there.
"What shall I say?" he asked. "I don't think there are many people who
would see anything commendable in what I have done. In fact, those who
heard about it would probably consider it a piece of futile rashness,
and it is very likely that they would be right. After all, the
restraints of the city may become intolerable to the girl."
"Then why did you undertake it?"
Ormsgill laughed, though there was a faint ring in his voice, for he
saw that she had not asked out of idle curiosity. "I don't exactly
know. For one thing, I had made a promise, but to be candid I think
there were other reasons. You see, I have borne the burden myself. I
have been plundered of my earnings, driven to exhaustion, and have
fought against long odds for my life. It left me with a bitterness
against any custom which makes the grinding of the helpless possible.
One can't help a natural longing to strike back now and then."
Benicia nodded. It was not surprising that there was a certain vein of
vindictiveness in her, which rendered it easy for her to sympathize
with him, and once more the man noticed that where Ada Ratcliffe would
in all probability have listened with half-disdainful impatience she
showed comprehension.
"Still," she said, "in a struggle of this kind you have so much
against you. After all, you are only one man."
"I almost think there are a few more of us even in Africa and, as
Father Tiebout says, it is, perhaps, possible that one man may be
permitted to do--something--here and there."
He spoke with a grave simplicity which curiously stirred the girl. It
is possible that the sorrows of the oppressed did not in themselves
greatly interest her, for she had certainly never borne the burden,
but the attitude of this quiet man who, it seemed, had taken up their
cause, and was ready to ride a tilt against the powers that be,
appealed to her. She had, at least, courage and imagination, and there
was Irish blood in her.
"Ah," she said, "the fight is an unequal one, but though there will be
so many against you I think you have also a few good friends--as well
as the Señor Desmond."
Ormsgill started. Her knowledge of his affairs was disconcerting, but
he forgot his annoyance at it when she leaned forward a trifle looking
at him. Her mere physical beauty had its effect on him, and the soft
moonlight and her clinging white draperies enhanced and etherealized
it, but it was not that which set his heart beating a trifle faster
and sent a faint thrill through him. It was once more her eyes he
looked at, and what he saw there made it clear that the reckless,
all-daring something that was in her nature was wholly in sympathy
with him. He also understood that she had asked him to count her as
one of his friends. His manner was, however, a little quieter than
usual.
"It is a matter of gratification to me to feel that I have," he said.
"Still, what do you know about Desmond?"
Benicia laughed. "Not a great deal, but I can guess rather more.
Still, I do not think you need fear that I will betray you. In the
meantime I venture to believe that this is another of your friends."
She rose and turned towards the door as her father came in. He shook
hands with Ormsgill, and then taking off his kepi drew forward a
chair. Benicia said nothing further, but went out and left them
together. Dom Clemente lighted a cigarette before he turned to his
guest with a little dry smile.
"Trade," he said, "is not brisk up yonder?"
"I do not know if it is or not," said Ormsgill simply.
"Then, perhaps, you have accomplished the purpose that took you
there?"
"A part of it. Because I have ventured to ask your daughter's interest
in a native woman I brought down I will tell you what it was."
He did so, and the olive-faced soldier nodded. "I think you have done
wisely in making me your confidant," he said. "At least, the woman
will be safe here. It is also possible that I shall have a few words
to speak to our friend Herrero some day." Then his tone grew a trifle
sharper. "I have heard that there are rifles in the hands of some of
the bushmen up yonder."
Ormsgill took a cartridge from his pocket and pointed to the dint in
the rim. "One might consider this as a proof of it. You will notice
the caliber, and I fancy I should recognize the rifle it was fired out
of. In that case the man who carries it will have an account to render
me."
"Ah," said the little soldier quietly, "it is a confirmation of
several things I have heard of lately. I think I mentioned that the
bush was not a desirable place for you to wander in. Still, you are
probably going back there again?"
"I believe I am."
His companion looked at him with a little smile. "It is what one would
expect from you. One may, perhaps, venture to recall the circumstances
under which I first met you. Two soldiers brought you before me--and,
as it happened, I had, fortunately, finished breakfast. You made
certain damaging admissions with a candor which, though it might have
had a different effect a little earlier, saved you a good deal of
unpleasantness. I said here is an unwise man whose word can be
depended on. You know what the people of this city say of me?"
"That you are a great soldier."
Dom Clemente's eyes twinkled. "Also that like the rest I am willing to
abuse my office if it will line my pockets. The latter, it seems, is
the purpose which influences me in the unpopular things I do. I make
no protestations, but after all it is possible that I may have another
one. In any case, I have received you into my house, and admitted a
certain indebtedness to you. In return, I ask for your usual
frankness. You have heard of a native rising up yonder?"
The question was sharp and incisive, and Ormsgill nodded.
"To be precise," he said, "I heard of two."
"Then we will have your views about the first one. It is not what one
could call spontaneous?"
"At least, it is scarcely likely to take place without a little
judicious encouragement. The results, it is expected, would be
repression and reprisal. It seems that a lenient native policy does
not please everybody."
This time Dom Clemente nodded with the twinkle a trifle plainer in his
eyes. "There are, one may admit, certain trading gentlemen in this
city who do not like it, but I will tell you a secret," he said.
"There are also a few well meaning people of some influence in my
country who can not be brought to believe that commercial interests
should count for everything. They seem to consider one has a certain
responsibility towards the negro. I do not say how far my views
coincide with theirs. That may become apparent some day. But the
second rising?"
"Will, at least, be genuine, and, I almost fancy, formidable. It is a
little curious that the people who are most interested in the other do
not seem to foresee it. It may break upon them before they are quite
ready with the bogus one."
Dom Clemente smoked out his cigarette before he answered, and then he
waved one of his hands.
"Now and then," he said, "things happen that way. Perhaps, the Powers
who direct our little comedy can smile on occasion. At least, we
frequently afford them the opportunity. It is certain that there is no
fool like the over-cunning man. But we will talk of something else. In
the meantime, and while you stay here, you will consider this house of
mine your home, and those in it your friends and servants."
"Thanks," said Ormsgill. "And when I go away?"
His host made a little gesture. "Then it will depend upon where you go
and what you do. We may be friends still, or our ideas of what is
expected from us may render that impossible. Perhaps, it is
unfortunate when one has any ideas upon that point at all. Still, that
is a subject one must leave to the priests and those who reckon our
work up afterwards. Being simply a soldier, I do not know."
CHAPTER XI
DESMOND VENTURES A HINT
It was blowing hard, and the deluge which had blotted out the dingy
daylight and beaten flat the white spouting along the hammered beach
had just ceased suddenly when Desmond lay upon a settee at the head of
the _Palestrina_'s companion stairway. Though the long, sandy point to
the north of her afforded a partial shelter, she was rolling savagely
with a half-steam ready and two anchors down. Desmond had wedged
himself fast with his feet against the balustrade, but he found it
somewhat difficult to remain where he was, and the little room was
uncomfortably hot, though one door and the lee ports were open. The
two that looked forward were swept by spray that beat on them like a
shot, and overhead funnel-guy and wire rigging screamed in wild
arpeggios under the impact of the muggy gale.
The _Palestrina_'s owner was, however, used to that. It rains and
blows somewhat hard on that coast at certain seasons, and he had lain
there several weeks growling at the heat and the weather, for he was
also one of the men who can keep a promise. Just then he had an
unlighted pipe and a letter which he had received from Las Palmas a
month earlier in one hand. It was from an Englishman he had brought
out to Grand Canary, and though its contents did not directly concern
him he had given it a good deal of thought once or twice already. His
forehead grew a trifle furrowed as he opened it again.
"We have been wondering what Lister came back for, and the general
notion is that you had had enough of him," said his friend. "In any
case, he seems quite content with Las Palmas, and the British colony
are watching his proceedings with quiet interest. After cleaning out
several Spaniards at the casino he has apparently devoted himself to
Miss Ratcliffe's service. It is not evident that he receives a great
deal of encouragement from the lady herself, but her mother is
ostentatiously gracious to him. She may have a purpose in this."
Desmond crumpled the letter in one hand. "Crosbie always was
a--tattler, but it's more than possible that he's right," he said.
Then he sighed. "And I put Lister on board the mail-boat and sent him
there! If I'd only known what the result would be I'd have drowned
him."
He lay still for another few moments filling his pipe, and then flung
the tobacco pouch across the room, for a sojourn off those beaches
would probably try the temper of most white men, and the Hibernian
nature now and then came uppermost in him.
"Damp," he said. "Reeking, dripping, putrid, like everything else on
this forlorn coast! It would be a boon to humanity if somebody bought
the besotted continent and scuttled it."
He rose to his feet as a man in bedraggled white uniform appeared in
the doorway.
"You were speaking, sir?" he said.
"I was," said Desmond. "I suggested that it was a pity somebody
couldn't torpedo this benighted continent. Any word from the men you
sent ashore?"
"They've signaled from the rise," said the _Palestrina_'s mate. "No
sign of him yet. I don't expect them off until to-morrow. The surf's
running steep." Desmond made a gesture of concurrence as he glanced at
the filmy spray-cloud that drove like smoke up the wet and glistening
beach. It was flung aloft by a wild white welter of crumbling seas,
and he realized that the boat's crew who had gone ashore could not
rejoin the _Palestrina_ before the morning, at least. They went every
day to watch for a lumbering ox team or a band of carriers plodding
seaward across the littoral, and it seemed they had once more signaled
that there was no sign of either. Then he moved towards the door
bareheaded, with only an unbuttoned duck jacket over his thin singlet,
and the mate ventured a deprecatory protest.
"She's throwing it over her in sheets forward," he said.
Desmond disregarded him, and staggering clear of the deck-house stood
with feet spread well apart gazing at the stretch of leaden sea while,
as the _Palestrina_'s bows went up, the spray that whirled in over her
weather rail wet him to the skin. He saw the livid tops of the combers
that rolled by the point and heard the jarring cables ring, and then
turned his eyes shorewards and gazed across the waste of misty
littoral.
"It's a cheerful place, but now and then you feel you might get to
like it," he said. "Perhaps it's the uncertainty as to when the fever
will get you that gives living here a zest. When you come to think of
it, some of us have curious notions."
He appeared to be considering the point as they edged back under the
lee of the deck-house, and the mate grinned.
"The men don't take kindly to it, sir," he said. "They've been
worrying me lately as to how long we're stopping here."
"A week," said Desmond. "Ormsgill's time is running out, and he'll be
here or send us word by then. He said he would, and what that man says
you can count on being done."
Something in his tone suggested that the question might be considered
as closed, and they discussed other matters while the deck heaved and
slanted under them until a man forward flung up an arm and turned
towards them with a cry which the wind swept away. In another moment
Desmond scrambled half-way up the bridge ladder, and clung there with
the mate close beneath him gazing at the white welter where the seas
swept by the point. There was a sail just outshore of it, a little
strip of gray canvas that appeared and vanished amidst the serried
ranks of tumbling combers. It drew out of them and drove furiously
towards the _Palestrina_, and when a strip of white hull grew into
visibility beneath it Desmond looked down at his mate.
"A big surf-boat. It's Ormsgill," he said.
There was certainty in his tone, as well as a little ring of
satisfaction which was, perhaps, warranted, for it is, after all,
something to be the friend of a man who does just what he has promised
and never arrives too late. In the meanwhile the object they were
watching had grown into a bellying lug-sail that reeled to lee and to
weather with the sea streaming from the foot of it, and a patch of
foam-swept hull. The boat came on furiously, and when the mate sprang
from the ladder roaring orders Desmond could see three or four black
figures through the spray that whirled over her. There was also
another man in white garments standing upright in her stern, and
Desmond was wholly sure of his identity. Then she was lost for awhile,
and only swept into sight again abreast of the _Palestrina_'s dipping
bows, hove high with half her length lifted out of the crest of a
breaking sea.
She drove forward with it, the foam standing half a man's height above
her stern and the foot of the slanted lug-sail washing in the brine,
while a bent white figure struggled with the great steering oar. She
swooped like a toboggan plunging down an icy slide when she was level
with the _Palestrina_'s bridge, and some of the men who watched her
from the latter's rail held their breath as the smoking sea passed on
and another gathered itself together astern of her. The helmsman, they
knew, must bring the dripping, half-swamped boat on the wind to reach
the strip of lee beneath the steamer's stern, and when he did it
there was every prospect of her rolling over.
In another moment several black objects rose and grappled with the
lug-sail sheet, and the big boat tilted until all one side of her was
in the air. Then she went up in the midst of a white spouting as the
slope of water behind fell upon her. Still, the slanted lug-sail rose
out of it, and then came down thrashing furiously while naked black
figures half-seen in the spray bent from her gunwale with swinging
paddles as she drove towards the _Palestrina_'s quarter. After that
there was a hoarse shouting, and the lines flew from the reeling
taffrail as she slid under the steamer's stern.
In another minute or two Ormsgill swung himself on board through the
gangway. He had no hat, and the water ran from him, but he shook hands
with Desmond unconcernedly.
"Ask them to hand that fellow up," he said pointing to a man who sat
huddled in the water that swirled up and down inside the plunging
boat. "We took rather a heavy one over two or three hours ago, and he
brought up on the after thwart when the big oar jumped its crutch. As
he's the only Kroo among them, I took the helm myself after that. I
don't fancy he has broken anything."
Desmond hustled him into the deck-house when the negro had been
brought on deck and the dripping boat rode astern, and an hour later
he sat at dinner with his comrade in the little white saloon. Darkness
had closed down in the meanwhile, and the lamp that swung above their
heads flung a soft light across the table, where dainty glassware and
silver glittered on the snowy cloth. Ormsgill smiled as he glanced at
it and the glowing blotch of color in his wine glass.
"After all, this kind of thing has its advantages, especially when one
has been accustomed to squatting in the wood smoke over a calabash of
palm oil or some other unhallowed nigger compound," he said. "It's a
trifle pleasant to wear clothes that fit you, too. Father Tiebout's
and those Dom Clemente lent me didn't. I had to cut the wrists off the
latter's jacket."
Desmond looked at him reflectively over his cigar, for he had
something to say, and was a trifle uncertain as to how he should set
about it.
"Well," he said, "I suppose it is nice for a while, especially, as you
say, when it's a change. The point is, would it satisfy you long?"
"A dinner like this one is generally acceptable."
"We'll admit it. The trouble is that these civilized comforts are apt
to cost you something. I mean one has usually to give up something
else for the sake of them. You begin to understand?"
"I'm not sure that I do," said Ormsgill. "I'll ask you to go on."
Desmond laughed, though he did not feel quite at ease. He remembered
the letter in his pocket, and felt that there was a responsibility on
him, and that was a thing which, inconsequent as he was, he seldom
shrank from. This was not a man who talked about his duty; in fact,
any reference to the subject usually roused in him a sense of
opposition. He contented himself with doing it when he recognized it,
and since singleness of purpose is not invariably an efficient
substitute for mental ability, it was not altogether his fault when at
times he did it clumsily. There was also a subtle bond between him and
the man who sat opposite him. Affection was not the right term, and it
was more than _camaraderie_, an elusive something that could not be
defined and was yet in their case a compelling force.
"Well," he said, "those quagmires and forests up yonder appeal to you.
It's a little difficult for any reasonable person to see why they
should, but they certainly do. So does the sea. The love of it's in
both of us."
He stopped with a lifted hand, and, for the ports were open, Ormsgill
heard the deep rumble of the eternal surf on the hammered beach. He
also heard the onward march of the white hosts of tumbling seas, and
the shrill scream of the wire rigging singing to the gale. It was the
turmoil of the elemental conflict that must rage in one form or
another by sea and in the wilderness while the world endures, and
there is a theme in its clashing harmonies that stirs the hearts of
men. Ormsgill felt the thrill of it, and Desmond's eyes glistened.
"Lord," he said, "we're curiously made. What in the name of wonder is
it that appeals to us in driving a swamping surf-boat over those
combers, or standing on the bridge ramming her full speed into it with
the green seas going over her forward and everything battened down?
Still, there is something. While we can do that kind of thing we can't
stay at home."
Ormsgill smiled curiously. He was acquainted with some of the
characteristics of the wild Celtic strain, and knew that his comrade
now and then let himself go. "I think," he said, "considering where
you come from, you should understand it more readily than I can do."
"You're not exempt," said Desmond, "you cold-blooded Saxons. What did
you run that boat down the coast under the whole lug-sail for when
she'd have gone nearly dry with two reefs tied down?"
"I don't know. Still, she lost the wind in the hollows. One had to
keep her ahead of the seas."
Desmond laughed scornfully. "Is that it? When the boy went down with
the breath knocked out of him as she took in a green sea, something
came over you as you grabbed the steering oar. You went suddenly
crazy, fighting crazy. You'd have rolled her over or run her under
before you tied a reef in."
He stopped a moment, and made a little gesture as of one throwing
something away. "Still, you'll have to give all that up when you marry
and settle down, though it's a little difficult to imagine you going
round in a frock coat and tight patent boots, growing fat, and
overfeeding yourself like a--Strasburg goose. I suppose it is your
intention to be married some day?"
"I believe it is," said Ormsgill quietly.
Desmond laid down his cigar and looked at him. "Well, I may be on
dangerous ground, but when I get steam up I seldom allow a thing like
that to influence me. Anyway, I've been worrying over you lately. The
question is--are you going to marry the right girl, one who would take
you as you are and encourage you to be more so? It isn't every woman
who could put up with a man of your kind, but there are a few."
His comrade's expression might have warned another man, but Desmond
went on.
"I don't know if my views are worth anything, and some of my friends
doubt it, but you shall have them. After all, the matter's rather an
important one. The wife for you is one who would sympathize with your
notions even if she knew they were crazy ones, because they were
yours, and when they led you into lumber, as such notions generally
do, stand beside you smiling to face the world and the devil. There
are such women. I've met one or two."
There was silence for a moment or two when he stopped, and Ormsgill,
gazing straight before him with vacant eyes, saw a dark-eyed girl with
dusky hair and a face of the pale ivory tint sitting where the
moonlight streamed in between a colonnade of slender pillars. As it
happened, Desmond saw her, too, and sighed. Then Ormsgill seemed to
rouse himself.
"I am," he said, "going to marry Miss Ratcliffe, as I think you must
be quite aware."
Desmond could have laughed. He fancied that it would have been almost
warranted, but he laid a restraint upon himself. "Then," he said, "if
you have both made up your minds and the thing is settled what in the
name of wonder are you wandering about Africa for? The fact that you
like it doesn't count. Why don't you go back--now--to her? It would
be considerably wiser."
Ormsgill looked at him with half-closed eyes. "I'll have to ask you to
speak plainly."
"I'll try," and Desmond made a little deprecatory gesture. "There are
women it isn't wise to leave too long alone. They were not made to
live that way, and if they find it insupportable you can't blame them.
How many years is it since Miss Ratcliffe has had more than a few
weeks of your company, and is it natural that a young woman should be
quietly content while the man she is to marry wanders through these
forests endeavoring to throw his life away? Besides that, the thing
might very possibly not commend itself to her mother."
The lines grew a trifle deeper on Ormsgill's forehead, and his eyes
were grave. "I have," he said, "been a little afraid of what her
mother might do myself."
"Then why don't you go across to Grand Canary and make sure she
doesn't try to influence the girl? Isn't it only reasonable that she
should expect you to be there and save her all unpleasantness in case
of anything of that kind happening?"
Ormsgill said nothing for several minutes, but it was borne in upon
his comrade that his efforts had been thrown away. He had, however,
after all, not expected them to be successful. At length Ormsgill
spoke quietly.
"I can't go," he said. "Domingo has carried those boys away into the
interior and I pledged myself that they should go home when their
time was up. As it is, unless I can take them from him they will be
driven to death in a few years. For that, I think, I should be held
responsible."
He rose with a l
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