Title: Bride of the night
Author: Louise Gerard
Release date: March 23, 2026 [eBook #78276]
Language: English
Original publication: New York: The Macaulay Company, 1930
Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/78276
Credits: an anonymous Project Gutenberg volunteer
BY
LOUISE GERARD
NEW YORK
THE MACAULAY COMPANY
Copyright, 1930
By Louise Gerard
To My Friend
Dorothea Thornton Clarke, F.R.G.S.,
without whose help and constant encouragement
neither this nor any of my books would
have been written
Wild winds! What are the wild winds?
They are love and hate and lust and avarice.
Wild winds that blow through the kingdom of the soul,
Catching us we know not when,
Carrying us we know not where.
“Men will call me unrelenting,
Pitiless, vindictive, stern,
Few will raise a voice dissenting,
Few will better things discern.”
“Shall we count offences or coin excuses,
Or weigh with scales the soul of a man?”
Dr. Atherley’s bungalow was the resort of British officials who passed through Duke Town on their way to and from various posts in West Africa. It was an ugly, hygienic structure of corrugated iron situated on the more civilized side of the Calabar River, facing an expanse of sullen, slow-flowing water on the far bank of which was an endless stretch of mangrove and pandanus swamp.
One day when Atherley returned home from a round of duties at the military hospital, on his veranda he found an acquaintance—an officer from up-country.
“Hello, Fletcher, have you caught your Hyena yet?” he said by way of greeting.
The question brought a look of mingled chagrin and regret to Captain Lindsay Fletcher’s sun-bitten face. The “Hyena” was a mysterious negro sultan, a notorious raider, so-called because of his tribal cry; and for some years the captain had been trying to run him to earth.
“I haven’t,” he replied, “but he’s caught and tortured to death another of my juniors, young Dennis.”
Atherley poured out a dose of whiskey from a bottle standing on a table near.
“That nigger is the very devil,” he remarked.
“I’d give ten years of my life to catch him,” Fletcher said fervently.
“Have you ever thought of looking for him in unlikely places?”
“I’ve looked into every hole and corner of my various districts.”
“Why not spread your net a little farther?”
Captain Fletcher was lying at his ease on a long cane lounge. The doctor’s question made him sit up smartly.
“Have you heard anything?” he questioned quickly.
“Not a thing! But your Hyena interests me. He seems to me a bit too clever to be wholly a product of the wilds. There’s a nigger in this town whose record isn’t any too healthy. It struck me it might be worth your while to probe into his intimate affairs.”
Although Duke Town was hundreds of miles away from the scenes of the mysterious negro chieftain’s raids and massacres, Fletcher did not scoff at his friend’s suggestions.
“Who’s your suspect?” he asked, all attention.
Atherley settled his shriveled, sun-dried self in a long chair.
“His name is Essel Lebrassa. He’s a mulatto. Senior—”
“I always said there was more than a nigger’s brain behind the Hyena’s tactics,” Fletcher interrupted.
“Not so fast. I’m not accusing Lebrassa. I’m only saying—”
“Oh, cut out the preaching and give me full particulars,” Fletcher said with open impatience.
“This Essel Lebrassa is a better educated man than any one here present. He’s the senior partner of the firm of Lebrassa and Cooper. Cooper, by the way, is coal black. They’re enormously wealthy, both of them. Lebrassa holds all sorts of weird, wild orgies in that villa of his on the hill here. And he has a whole harem of colored mistresses. What’s more, he hates a white skin like poison.”
By now Fletcher was weighing facts carefully.
“But none of that points to his having any connection with the fiend who periodically raids our up-country districts,” he said in a despondent manner.
“I’m getting there,” Atherley replied.
He took a sip of whiskey.
“Occasionally this Lebrassa disappears for months on end,” he continued. “Presumably he goes to Europe or America. But I heard from Harding that this buck nigger, who was supposed to be in England last year, joined the outward bound steamer not in Liverpool, but in Lagos! And last year the Hyena was busy in your district.”
“I should rather think he was!” Fletcher said feelingly. “Massacred half my Hausas, not to mention poor Dennis, and raided and burned a score of my villages. But this Lagos incident doesn’t prove anything. Lebrassa may have come out by some previous boat and got off there on business.”
“He may have,” Atherley agreed. “But that little fact made me look into things. And it seems queer that all Lebrassa’s absences coincide with the times when the Hyena gets busy. Anyhow, he left here last week, presumably for England, even mentioning the town he was bound for—Harrogate. As you’re going home by the next steamer, it might be worth your while to see if Lebrassa really is there as reported.”
“What’s he like?” Fletcher asked.
“A big chap. Bigger than you, and that’s saying something. Age, about forty. Not so bad-looking, either, even according to European standards.”
These remarks left Fletcher thoughtful.
“The description tallies,” he said at length, “except that the Hyena is black as soot, but dye could turn a brown skin ebony. And considering he’s been a thorn in the flesh of three governments for twenty years, he can’t be altogether a chicken.”
“Exactly. That’s why I mentioned this Essel Lebrassa to you. With no clue at all as to who and what the Hyena really is, or where he comes from, the merest suspicion is worth following.”
“It certainly makes it worth my while looking in at Harrogate. And if Lebrassa isn’t there. Well—”
Fletcher broke off, and lapsed into thoughtful silence.
“Thus we know not the day, nor the morrow,
Nor yet what a night may bring forth,
Nor the storm, nor the sleep, nor the sorrow,
Nor the strife, nor the rest, nor the wrath.”
In the winter garden of a big hotel in Harrogate the visitors were assembling for tea. One couple sat apart from the rest of the guests; they were the object of many curious and contemptuous glances. The girl was about twenty-seven. She had a weak, worn face, dreamy, gray eyes, and a mass of golden hair. Her companion was a coal-black negro, ostentatiously dressed, who hung over her with an air of possession.
A stir at the far end of the room made her turn to a man near, who was leaning against a pillar watching the assembly in a bored manner.
He was a mulatto of the best type, verging on forty, well but quietly dressed. He stood nearly six feet three in height, but his massive shoulders made him appear less tall than he really was. His was a powerful face, European in feature. The negro taint showed only in the pale brown of his skin, and a peculiar blueness in the whites of his eyes.
“Mr. Lebrassa, I think that’s the post,” she said. “Please go and see if there are any letters for me.”
The request brought his eyes to the couple.
“With pleasure, Miss Seaton,” he replied.
His voice was that of a man of culture; in it was no trace of the stilted, jerky intonation usual with his kind.
Lebrassa passed through the winter garden into a lounge hall beyond, where the letters were being sorted. On making his request he received one addressed to “Miss Molly Seaton”—a letter in a flaming crimson envelope.
The unusual color made him look at it with some curiosity. As he turned it over a name written across the flap caught his eye.
“Leslie Graham.”
On seeing it, he started as if suddenly stung, and from his lips there came a fierce, smothered exclamation of astonishment and triumph.
For a moment he stood with the missive crushed to a red streak in his hand. Then slipping it into his pocket he went back to the winter-garden.
At his return Molly looked up anxiously.
“Is there nothing for me?” she questioned quickly.
“No. Nothing.”
She sighed, and the dreary look on her face deepened.
The mulatto watched her closely.
“You’re disappointed,” he said.
“I was hoping to get a letter from a friend in Paris.”
Presently Lebrassa left the winter garden, and made his way upstairs to his private sitting-room. Once there he locked the door. Seating himself in front of the fire, he opened the scarlet letter.
As he drew out the contents a photograph fell to the floor. This he picked up and glanced at. Then putting the picture on the table by his side he started the letter.
It had a Paris address and ran as follows:
My Own Darling Molly,
Things have gone our way at last! I can see your dear eyes opening when you receive this startling epistle, startling as regards color and contents. It is the red letter day of my career, so I speculated in a box of this glowing carmine to celebrate the occasion.
How does £300 a year sound for me, Leslie Graham? At one time living on your bounty, Molly mine. I can’t believe it’s really true, yet provided you come with me the job is mine. It means so much. It means we can always be together now. It means you won’t have to do another day’s work. It means space and color and fresh air and sunshine, all the things you must have and that we’ve always wanted. It really means I’ve got a job as foreign correspondence clerk to a shipping firm in Marseilles.
My gift for languages, the only thing I inherited from my dear old dissipated father, is going to prove as useful to me as it was to him. It found him a job in every corner of the earth, and if it does the same for me we shall get round the world, Molly mine, and your silly old lungs will behave themselves properly in sunny climes.
Now I’ll give you the whole campaign.
When I last wrote I gave you an inkling of it. I stood as good a chance as anyone. I had every qualification they wanted. For two weeks I waited, getting sicker and sicker every day. Messieurs Dupont, Baroche et Cie. made no acknowledgment of my existence. Imagine my surprise and delight when with my coffee and rolls this morning came a letter from the firm, requesting me to present myself at their Paris office at my earliest convenience.
You may be sure I went, tout suite. They examined me in all the required languages and I came off with flying colors. Then they tested my shorthand, bookkeeping and typewriting, and finally had an inquest on my testimonials.
Unfortunately I had one great fault—I was very young.
Then, Molly mine, I told them all about you. That settled it. They were no longer the Inquisition, burning to find some flaw in my composition, qualifications and testimonials, but two really nice, bald-headed, old gentlemen, quite anxious to entrust their foreign correspondence in my keeping provided you are there to vouch for my respectability and keep me anchored to my job.
So, Molly, old thing, in the near future, I hope we shall have a little place all our very own by the sunny Mediterranean. I’m coming to see you on Saturday, and I shall land up at your hotel in time for dinner. So-long.
Always your loving
Leslie.P.S. Enclosed is a photograph of our little lot, so you will see hard work has not aged me beyond recognition. L.G.
Lebrassa read the letter through a second time. Then he got to his feet and went to Cooper’s room. In shirt sleeves the negro was seated before a mirror, vigorously brushing his wool.
On seeing the mulatto he got to his feet.
“Well, Cooper, have you fixed up with your little white girl yet?” Lebrassa asked.
For a moment the negro stared at his visitor in blank astonishment, as if the question were the last he had expected. Then a look of hungry passion came to his face.
“I wish to God I had,” he answered.
“There should be no difficulty,” Lebrassa said. “She’s a weak, easily-persuaded creature. I’ve a reason for wanting her married to you by next Saturday.”
“But that only gives me three days,” Cooper said in a despondent manner.
“Well, if you don’t make her overlook your color before the week is out, there’ll be very little chance for you. An Englishman is coming here on Saturday whose desire is much the same as yours. I’m going to interview him, and I want to tell him among other things that his proposed fiancée has eloped with a nigger. If he’s anything like his father, the news should prove a trifle disconcerting.”
In wild excitement the negro took a step forward.
“Not de Tourville’s son!” he exclaimed.
“Every circumstance points to it. He bears an alias Lionel de Tourville adopted, and possessed a father as dissipated, moreover a man who had been to most parts of the world.”
“Then vengeance is ours at last!” Cooper yelled.
“Possibly,” Lebrassa answered, coolly. “However, this man’s fate is my concern alone. Yours is to carry out my wishes.”
“What about Nanza?” Cooper asked. “He will want a hand in this.”
At the mention of the name the mulatto’s eyes narrowed.
“Nanza!” he said contemptuously. “What of him?”
With a savage, brooding air, Lebrassa returned to his own quarters.
On entering, the photograph lying on the table took his attention. Again he picked it up. Across the back was written in a small, firm hand:
“Puzzle, find Leslie Graham.”
He glanced at the picture. It was a group of eight young people, five men and three girls.
A girl’s face took his attention. She was hardly more than a child, delicate and refined-looking, who was smiling out at the world in rare good fellowship and kindliness. And it seemed to Lebrassa her smile was directed at him!
His glance went from her to the young men. At each in turn he looked, wondering with which he had to deal. Then his gaze came back to the girl’s face and stayed there. Until the dinner gong sounded, he sat looking at it, wondering bitterly if she would smile at him in such a friendly manner if she knew he was a “nigger.”
When the dinner gong went booming through the big hotel, he tore off the rest of the photograph and threw it into the fire. But the small, smiling, friendly face he put carefully into his pocket-book.
“It may be my fancy and nothing more.”
In the lounge hall of the hotel the visitors were assembling. Gathered in little groups, they were talking, smoking and drinking cocktails before going in for dinner. Half hidden in an archway that led to the winter garden, was a girl in a cheap black evening frock.
She was small and slight, with a fair, delicate complexion and big, dark-fringed eyes almost startling in their vivid blueness. Her wavy black hair was worn in thick, tight coils round her ears. There was a tired droop about her childish figure, and deep dark rings under eyes that scanned each late-comer anxiously.
A voice speaking almost at her elbow brought her attention to a couple of men near.
“That’s the fifth nigger I’ve counted within the last five minutes. The place is creeping with them. A nigger wild is the devil’s own production, and to see the beast dressed up like yourself is absolutely sickening.”
In surprise, the girl glanced at the speaker. He was a tall, sunburnt man who looked like an officer home on leave from tropic parts. She wondered why he should have spoken just when that big mulatto was in the act of passing. Several other colored people had gone by, but he had made no comments about them, and they all had been more obviously “niggers” than the man at whom the remarks were leveled.
She looked at the mulatto, knowing he must have heard, and then back at the Englishman who seemed bent on insulting him.
With a casual, indifferent glance at Fletcher, Lebrassa passed on. Halting a yard or so away, he stood talking to a few other colored people.
“There’s a pretty crowd of buck niggers for you,” Fletcher went on, with the same loud, offensive manner. “It’s bad enough to have to deal with them in the land set apart for their sort, but to rub shoulders with them in England is the limit.”
It was impossible for the group not to hear what he said. With smothered hatred one or two negroes glanced at him, but Lebrassa ignored him and his remarks completely.
With indignation the girl glanced at Fletcher. Whatever his private opinion of negroes might be, it was the height of bad taste to insult them publicly. Yet, in spite of his flagrant rudeness, it struck her the Englishman was a type who ought to have known better.
Fletcher showered further abuse on the group of colored men—abuse that drew all eyes but Lebrassa’s to him.
Suddenly the girl moved forward.
An unexpected voice took Fletcher’s attention from the scheme on hand—an effort to break through the mask of bored indifference screening Lebrassa’s face.
“You ought not to talk in that manner,” a sweet voice said with trembling indignation. “They can’t help their color. And you don’t show your superiority by being rude to them.”
Lebrassa glanced at the girl, amazed that she should speak in defence of his color. Her face was vaguely familiar. He wondered who she was, and where he had seen her before.
In sudden interest, his mask of indifference dropped. On his face was the haughty arrogance of a savage ruler.
Brief as the unveiling was, it brought a glint of satisfaction to Fletcher’s eyes. He had wanted to catch Lebrassa off his guard, and the girl’s defence had succeeded where his own abuse had failed.
With some amusement he looked at her.
“Really!” he said. “Do you honestly think niggers have feelings that could be damaged by my remarks?”
“This is neither the time nor the place to discuss the subject,” she answered.
Then she turned quickly into the winter garden.
She was sorry she had spoken. Her interference had done no good, and it had drawn unwelcome attention to herself.
Going to a secluded corner, she sat down and tried to compose herself.
Presently, voices talking on the other side of the greenery reached her.
“Well?” one asked.
“I’m pretty certain I’m on the right trail this time.”
“Nonsense! He bears no resemblance to the Hyena.”
“The resemblance is as much as any one could swear to after glimpsing that brute for a moment in the heat of a midnight ambush, and meeting this man three years later, in the dinner garb of civilization with a skin considerably lighter. Besides the look he gave when that little girl spoke was familiar.”
“You see the Hyena in every nigger over six foot,” was the scoffing reply.
“So would you, if you’d had to clean up after him as I have. Of course the resemblance may be a matter of coincidence. For all that I’d like to give him a coat of black paint and a covering no bigger than a handkerchief and see what I thought of him then.”
“What’s that nigger supposed to be?”
“A palm-oil trader, from Calabar, Southern Nigeria. Essel Lebrassa by name. Atherley told me about him, and I came here for the sole purpose of having a look at him.”
“Calabar is far enough from the Hyena’s beat.”
“I’m inclined to think he’s had a finger in every rising in the length and breadth of West Africa for the last twenty years.”
All at once it dawned on the girl she was eavesdropping. To give evidence of her presence, she moved her chair. The sudden sharp scrape along the floor made the voices stop abruptly.
Presently two men came sauntering down the leafy alley where she was sitting. One of them was the sunburnt Englishman whose behavior had aroused her indignation some minutes previously.
On seeing him she realized the topic of their conversation must have been the big mulatto who had won her admiration by his quiet disregard of the Englishman’s rudeness.
“How, let me ask, will it end?”
When the girl in black turned into the winter garden, Lebrassa was conscious of only one thing—a desire to follow and find out who she was. Then the approach of a page took his attention to other matters.
On the salver the boy held was a telegram. Lebrassa opened and read the message. It was from Cooper, saying he had married Molly Seaton by special license in Liverpool that morning.
Putting it into his pocket, Lebrassa turned towards the page.
“Have there been any inquiries for Miss Seaton?” he asked.
“Not that I know of, sir.”
Lebrassa glanced at his wrist watch.
It was quite possible the London train was late. Leslie Graham might not have arrived yet.
“If any one inquires for Miss Seaton, send him to 19 on the first floor,” he said.
“I’ll tell the porter, sir,” the boy replied.
Lebrassa left the hall and went upstairs to his own private sitting-room. It was as silent as the tomb except for the ticking of a clock and the occasional rattle of a cinder on the hearth. The solid door, with its rubber beading and heavy curtain, prevented any noise from entering. And, equally, any noise in the room would not reach the world’s ears.
This last fact must have been in his mind, for the lines of cruelty about his mouth deepened to absolute savagery as he stood waiting for the coming of Leslie Graham.
Suddenly the door swung open.
For a second time that night Lebrassa forgot the business on hand.
Standing on the threshold was the girl who had been his champion barely twenty minutes before.
On seeing him, she came to an abrupt halt, staring at him in blank amazement. Then she made a backward movement.
The action roused him.
He crossed the room hastily.
“Is there anything I can do for you?” he asked quickly.
“I beg your pardon,” she said. “I must have got to the wrong room. I’m afraid I startled you, bursting in like that.”
“You didn’t startle me in the least,” he replied, smiling at her. “And if you tell me what room you want, perhaps I can put you right.”
“In the bureau they said I was to go to 19 on the first floor. But they must have given me the wrong number.”
She had recognized Lebrassa as the man who had been the butt of Fletcher’s rudeness. This second meeting left her wondering at his cultured voice and well-bred ease of manner. And it also brought a desire to show him that all English people were not so rude and offensive as the man who had attacked him in the hall.
Lebrassa’s next remark put a means of compensation into her hands.
“You look very tired,” he said. “Let me go down to the bureau and see if I can solve the mystery for you.”
“It’s most kind of you,” she said gratefully.
“I’m glad to be of any assistance. Won’t you sit down in the meantime?”
Crossing to the fireplace, he drew one of the big, comfortable chairs closer. In a way that was vaguely familiar she smiled at him. Then, with an air of suppressed weariness, she seated herself.
He leant against the chimney-piece, toying with a little metal vase there. At that moment only one fact had any place in his mind. By some lucky chance the girl who so interested him had strayed into his room, and he wanted to keep her as long as possible.
“Whom shall I ask for?” he inquired.
“I’m trying to find Miss Seaton.”
The name brought his thoughts back to the man he was expecting.
He scanned his visitor more closely. She was a gentlewoman, Molly Seaton a very ordinary type of lower middle-class girl clerk. He wondered what the two had in common and how they came to be friends.
“Who shall I say is inquiring?” he asked.
“Leslie Graham.”
A tense, quivering pause greeted her statement. The little brass vase he was toying with crumpled up like an eggshell as his hand clenched round it. He stood as though pressing backwards, with his whole strength, against some wild flood that would have swept him on towards the girl.
“Leslie Graham,” he repeated, in a thick, strained voice.
“You seem surprised,” she said.
“I always thought it was a man’s name,” he said in the same husky way.
“It can be a girl’s too,” she explained. “In fact I’m called after my father.”
“I’ve never heard it as a girl’s name,” he said hoarsely. “Years ago I knew a boy of the name. He would be about grown up, twenty or twenty-one now. I wonder if he was a relative of yours?”
“I had a brother called Leslie, but he died before my day. So he couldn’t have been the boy you mean. Though he would have been about twenty-one now,” she added reflectively.
Lebrassa changed the conversation.
“This is hardly finding your friend for you,” he remarked.
With a quick, fierce movement he turned from her, and went downstairs to make inquiries he knew would be useless.
When he came back, a few minutes later, all trace of his surprise had vanished.
“They tell me, Miss Graham, that your friend left here early this morning for Liverpool and hasn’t returned yet.”
“That’s what they told me. And I can’t make it out at all. It’s so strange she should have gone the very day she knew I’d be coming.”
“Probably she intended to return much earlier, and somehow missed her train,” he suggested.
A look of relief greeted this idea.
“How stupid of me not to think of that! When is the next train due?”
Going to his desk, Lebrassa picked up a railway guide.
“There’s one at half-past eight,” he said a moment or so later. “As you’ve quite half an hour to wait, a very sensible way of passing the time would be by having some dinner. You must be both tired and hungry after your long journey.”
With some surprise Leslie looked at him.
“How do you know I’ve had a long journey?”
Lebrassa was conscious of having made a slip. However, he covered it up very quickly.
“The porter said a lady from Paris was inquiring for Miss Seaton. Naturally I assumed it was you.”
“But why was I sent here?”
In spite of himself a wish to stand well with his visitor seized Lebrassa—a desire to keep her from learning he had taken the scarlet letter.
“I rather expected a friend this evening. Probably the porter mixed up the names,” he said suavely.
In a friendly way Leslie smiled at him.
“It’s very good of you to have taken so much trouble on my account,” she said.
She got to her feet.
“It’s been a pleasure, not a trouble,” he assured her. “And I’m hoping you’ll let me have that pleasure a little longer. I’m a solitary animal with no defined social status—a sort of rogue elephant usually left to my own devices. Will you relieve my solitude to-night, and dine with me?”
His request filled her with dismay. All she had heard earlier in the evening concerning his sort and color flashed back to her mind. It was one thing to stand up for a despised race on an impulse, but quite another to dine tête-à-tête with a “nigger” under the gaze of nearly two hundred people.
This Leslie realized when Lebrassa issued his invitation.
He saw the dismay on her face, and the bitter, cruel lines about his mouth deepened.
Then her innate sense of justice brought other thoughts to her head.
It wasn’t fair to condemn him for a cause no fault of his own. His manners and style were perfect. No prince could be better behaved. He couldn’t help his color. He had been very hard hit once that evening. If she refused his invitation, he would guess why.
She cast a quick glance at him as he loomed, big, over her, his bored face showing nothing of what was passing in his mind.
To the girl he seemed vaguely familiar; as if behind him lurked the shadow of some one she knew. She had the queer feeling, too, that she must be kind to him, for a reason quite apart from the insults heaped on him by that man in the hall; as if there was something between them that demanded her pity and understanding.
The feeling made her decide in his favor.
Just when Lebrassa was expecting a refusal she looked up at him.
“I’m quite grateful to you for asking me,” she said. “I don’t know a soul here, and I hate going into a strange dining-room alone.”
It was a gracious and cordial acceptance.
It appeared to leave him a trifle nonplussed, almost as if he would rather she had said “no” and so given him some grievance against her.
When Leslie entered the dining-room she was well aware that her unusual companion caused more than the average number of curious eyes to be turned in her direction. As she went up the room, Lebrassa in her wake, she knew two men, both slightly familiar, were scanning her closely.
Whilst Lebrassa gave his order to the waiter, Leslie studied the couple. All at once it dawned on her they were the two whose conversation she had overheard in the winter garden.
“Mr. Lebrassa, can you tell me who those men are?” she asked, glancing at the watching couple.
At her question his eyes narrowed. With veiled suspicion he watched her, wondering how she knew his name and why she should ask him to identify that special pair.
“All I know about them is that the taller one is the man who tried to pick a quarrel with me just before dinner,” he said cautiously.
“I’d recognize him, but I was wondering who and what they were.”
“I’ll do my best to find out for you.”
Beckoning the head waiter, Lebrassa made inquiries.
“The taller one, sir, is a Captain Fletcher. The other a Mr. Mellors. They came here this afternoon, from Liverpool. Just home from Northern Nigeria.”
Lebrassa gave Leslie time to digest this information.
Then, watching her closely, he said:
“I’m curious to know who told you my name.”
The underlying tone of command in his voice surprised Leslie. She wondered why he should take so seriously a subject she had broached out of sheer nervousness.
Considering the happenings of the evening, and that she was in a way indebted to him for the trouble he had taken over Molly’s absence, she had no wish that he should learn how very much she would rather not have accepted his invitation. This, combined with nervousness, made her treat him in the friendly way she would have treated a man of her own class and color.
Her face assumed a gravity equalling his. But in spite of all efforts a dimple twitched into her left cheek.
“They told me. In fact, they told me quite a lot of dreadful things about you, but I was so worried that I’d forgotten all about it. Seeing them reminded me.”
The suspicious, thoughtful look in Lebrassa’s eyes deepened.
“If you’re on such friendly terms with them as to discuss me wholesale, why did you put me to the trouble of finding out their names?”
“I don’t know them any more than you do. Quite accidentally I overheard them talking about you.”
His dark, compelling eyes were fixed on her tired face as if all the power of his will were behind them.
“What were they saying about me?” he asked in a casual manner.
Leslie was too tired and worried to realize she was being “pumped.”
“They were connecting you with some one called the Hyena, whoever he may be. But I’ve forgotten most of what they said,” she replied.
With a little grating noise the mulatto’s teeth set.
“They flattered me,” he said a moment later.
“In what way?”
“The Hyena, Miss Graham, is the nom-de-guerre of the most blood-thirsty villain in West Africa, so-called from his tribal cry—a man three Governments have been after for years. He’s the ruler of a band of miscreants whose headquarters haven’t yet been discovered. A savage African sultan with a price on his head, who is always ready to take a hand in any and every rising against the whites, to raid and burn and do murder, for no reason that can be discovered, unless a sheer hatred of their color.”
“He sounds a very terrible person. How absurd of them to think you might be the man. Whatever made them do that?”
“I really don’t know. However, if they persist in their opinion, I shall have no difficulty in convincing them otherwise.”
He turned the conversation.
As the meal went on he sat listening to Leslie’s voice, watching her small, white hands. A wild desire to laugh aloud seized him as he realized she was his enemy, whom he had sworn to kill, the daughter of a man who had injured him irreparably. This scrap of a girl who had spoken in defence of him and his color; who rather than hurt his feelings had swallowed her pride and accepted his invitation to dinner.
He studied her closely. In no way did she resemble her dead father. The girl Cooper had married was more like that thief and murderer.
Then a surge of wild negro hatred went coursing through Lebrassa at the thought of who and what Leslie was. With it came the desire to take her by the throat and wring the life out of her.
And through the surge of savage anger her voice reached him, talking in a frank, friendly manner, and gradually the wild flood subsided, leaving him chill and thoughtful.
Presently he was watching her in a strained, anxious way, thankful that only he knew the alias Lionel de Tourville had adopted, of the fact of the son’s death, and of the existence of this daughter.
Then he remembered that Cooper had married her friend. The negro might gather enough to connect the man whose visit to the hotel he, Lebrassa, had spoken of, and this girl.
The idea made the lines of thought on his powerful face deepen.
A further remark of Leslie’s penetrated the maze in which his mind was moving.
“It’s nearly half past eight,” she was saying with an air of suppressed relief. “If you’ll excuse me, I’d like to be in the hall when Miss Seaton comes in.”
Getting to her feet, with a friendly nod she left the table.
As she went down the room, Lebrassa stood with his eyes on her.
For a brief half hour a girl of a type as far beyond his reach as the stars, had sat and talked to him just as if he were as other men.
Lionel de Tourville’s daughter!
Loath to leave the table that seemed still sweet with her presence, he seated himself again.
A violet, that must have dropped from the bunch on her shoulder, lay half hidden in a dish of fruit.
Picking it out he held it almost caressingly. The faint perfume reached him. For a time he looked at the little flower thoughtfully. Then he crushed it fiercely, rubbing it up and down between his thumb and finger until only a purple stain remained. Yet the scent was sweeter and stronger than ever.
“Our hopes are wild imaginings,
Our schemes are airy castles.”
Leslie Graham and Molly Seaton were comrades of some years’ standing, who had met under unusual circumstances. Business had taken Molly to one of the big London railway stations. On a bench in the waiting room she noticed a child sitting all alone. The little girl looked worried, so Molly had asked what the matter was. A sweet voice that had taken Molly’s gentle heart by storm had explained the situation.
That day she and her father had arrived in England from New Zealand. He had left her in the station while he went to transact some business outside. He had said he would not be more than an hour, and she was to wait on the seat until he came back. Three hours had passed and he had not returned.
That night a black-haired little girl cried herself to sleep in Molly’s arms, in a bed-sitting-room Brixton way, and the elder Leslie Graham’s disappearance had been reported to the police.
A week passed, but nothing was heard of him. Molly was advised to get rid of the child. This she refused to do, for Leslie clung to her as the one sure thing in a world suddenly turned upside down.
Very little of the lost man’s history could be found out, and that little was mostly what his daughter had to tell. Leslie had spent the first ten years of her life in a Spanish convent. She had not seen her father until two years ago when he had taken her from school to the store in New Zealand where he was employed. Beyond the fact that he belonged to the army of educated wastrels drifting about the world, nothing more was culled. It was more than likely the name was an assumed one, for Leslie had never heard of any relatives—except a brother who had died before she was born.
A deserted child is not of rare occurrence or much account. Molly was advised to let her protegée go to the poorhouse. She refused to do so. Instead, for two years she kept the little girl.
When Leslie was fourteen, she secured employment as a typist in Molly’s office, but she did not rest long in this position. Her knowledge of languages stood her in good stead. She quickly out-distanced her benefactress in both position and salary. At sixteen she was foreign correspondence clerk in the shipping house where they were both employed.
When Leslie was eighteen, Molly, never very strong, was seriously ill. For three months the younger girl went to the office alone and Molly stayed at home fretting over her uselessness.
However, with the summer, things looked up again.
Then winter came, and, with it, the darkest days of all.
Molly was ill again, so ill that she had to leave London, if possible go to the South of France. And just when money was most needed their firm amalgamated with another and Leslie was numbered with the unemployed. Molly was sent to Harrogate. Leslie went to Paris as a teacher in a school of languages, the first post that presented itself. And she went wondering what would happen when their savings ran out, for the care Molly needed could not be got out of two pounds a week.
Then the sky cleared again, and Leslie sat in the hall of the hotel in a fever of impatience waiting to impress upon the still truant Molly the greatness of this stroke of luck.
Full of suppressed excitement she watched the hands of the clock creep slowly round to half-past eight. She wondered why Molly had not wired to account for her absence, but she knew her friend’s easily agitated and flustered ways too well to take much notice of this.
As Fletcher and Mellors left the dining-room, the sight of Leslie sitting small and erect with eyes for nothing beyond the clock and the entrance, brought the Captain to a halt.
“I tell you she’s no more a friend of that villain’s than I am,” he said with some heat. “Does she look the sort of girl to take up with a nigger? He’s taken advantage of her impulsive action and thrust himself upon her, and she’s too much of a child to know how to get out of the situation. As far as I can see she hasn’t a friend in the place. If rumor is to be believed one girl from here has just gone and made an unholy mess of her life by marrying a nigger. At the risk of a snub, I’ll give that kid a word in season.”
“Let her alone,” Mellors replied. “If she has no more respect for herself than to be seen with Lebrassa, she’s not worth troubling about.”
“If she were ten years older I wouldn’t give the matter a second thought. But a child like that, loose on the world, is everybody’s concern.”
Mellors shrugged his shoulders. Captain Lindsay Fletcher crossed the hall.
A voice well above her head brought Leslie’s gaze back from the entrance.
“I owe you an apology,” it said in a conciliatory tone. “I’d no idea you were standing within earshot on that occasion before dinner, or I wouldn’t have expressed myself quite so forcibly.”
Fletcher experienced a nervous tremor as two vivid purple eyes were switched on him. He stood expecting the snub he had laid himself open to.
“You owe me no apology,” she said. “But you certainly owe one to the people you were so rude to.”
“I’d a reason for what I said. But had I known Lebrassa was a friend of yours I shouldn’t have said a word.”
“I can hardly claim Mr. Lebrassa as a friend—except perhaps a friend in need.”
Fletcher braced himself up.
“For a friend in need you’d be wiser to stick to your own sort and not apply to the black people here. I’ve had dealings with niggers for over twelve years and the less white women have to do with them the better. If you’ll take my advice, you’ll avoid Lebrassa. If he endeavors to thrust himself on you, I shall be only too pleased if you’ll use me as an excuse.”
Leslie was dumbfounded.
“How dare you come and talk to me?” she managed to gasp. “The man you call a ‘nigger’ at least knows how to behave himself properly.”
Fletcher stuck to his guns.
“Certainly our two meetings can’t have impressed you favorably. As your opinion of me can’t be any worse than it is, I may as well have my say out. To begin with, this Lebrassa is half a negro, he’s known to be a bad lot, he—”
“He’s not the Hyena, anyhow, because he told me so himself.”
There was a tense silence as Fletcher realized all it meant if Lebrassa had an inkling of his suspicions.
He had deemed it improbable that the girl sitting in the winter garden had heard or put any meaning to his conversation with Mellors. With an alarming rush it dawned on him she had.
“Surely you’ve not added to your follies by telling Lebrassa what I was saying to Mellors?”
For the first time it occurred to Leslie that she ought not to have repeated the conversation she had overheard accidentally. The fact that she had, took all anger from her. The sudden pallor of her face told Fletcher the worst before she met his angry gaze unflinchingly.
“I’m sorry, but—I did.”
All the pretty color had faded from her cheeks, all the brightness from her eyes. For the first time he realized how tired and worried she was. The knowledge made him put his own anger and sense of defeat in the background.
The few cold, wrathful words Leslie was expecting did not come.
Instead, Fletcher seated himself beside her.
“I think you need a friend now if ever you did. Won’t you tell me what the trouble is?” he asked in a kindly tone.
His unexpected change of front brought a tremor to her voice.
“I… I’ve been waiting for a friend ever since a quarter to seven. In spite of what Mr. Lebrassa says, I think something must have happened to her.”
“What did Lebrassa say?”
“That she must have missed the Liverpool train and wouldn’t be here before half-past eight. But it’s a quarter to nine and… and she still hasn’t come.”
“Probably the train’s late. They often are.”
“But I can’t make out why she went at all, the very day she knew I’d be coming.”
Just then Fletcher’s only idea was to comfort his companion and to stay with her until the arrival of the belated friend put her into safe hands.
“There’s no accounting for what some people will do,” he said, pouncing on the first topic of conversation that came to his mind. “One of my reasons for speaking to you now was because of what’s been going on here. There was a girl staying in this place, all alone as you seemed to be. She got friendly with one of these niggers, a man named Cooper, Lebrassa’s partner in fact, not knowing that to give their sort an inch means they’ll try for an ell. This Cooper got such a hold over her that rumor says she’s eloped with him. You wouldn’t care for people to say the things about you that are being said about this Miss Seaton. And it started—”
“What are you talking about? Molly wouldn’t elope with a nigger.”
This sudden interruption made Fletcher stop abruptly. As he gazed at Leslie’s blank, unbelieving face, the truth of the situation dawned on him.
“Believe me, I’d no idea she was your friend,” he said quickly.
“Tell the manager to come,” Leslie said sharply. “I’ll ask him about it.”
“He’ll tell you the same thing, child. The place is buzzing with the scandal.”
In a bewildered way, she got to her feet. In her weary mind there was only one idea. This man, who had been saying things against people all evening, had now started on Molly. Some one must be found who would contradict his statements.
White and dazed, Leslie stood looking for a face she knew.
Seeing Lebrassa sauntering across the hall made her start in his direction. Guessing where she was going, Fletcher followed. At that moment only the girl’s reputation had any place in his mind; he did not wish her to be seen for a second time alone with the mulatto.
Her anxious voice made the latter turn around.
“Mr. Lebrassa, is it true Miss Seaton has eloped with your partner?”
Ignoring Fletcher, he glanced at Leslie.
“I regret to say it is true, Miss Graham,” he said quietly.
“Then you knew all the time!”
“I heard it rumored only. It’s been said before without foundation. In case it shouldn’t be true this time, I took the liberty of asking you to dine with me. The subject would have been freely discussed by the white people here and you might have been alarmed unnecessarily.”
The episode of the dinner invitation was turned off with a skill and diplomacy that left Fletcher inwardly fuming. He knew Lebrassa had noted his interview with Leslie. Now, the mulatto had construed his invitation into consideration for the girl. Moreover, he had succeeded in making him, Fletcher, appear an even greater cad in her sight.
As he glanced from the worried, anxious girl to the mulatto, back to his mind flashed a remark made at a neighboring table during dinner—to the effect that Lebrassa had seemed as anxious for Molly Seaton to marry Cooper, as Cooper had been to marry the girl; in fact he had done his best to assist the negro toward this end.
A feeling of something lying behind it all suddenly seized Fletcher. And the fact of Lebrassa standing cool and unconcerned when he must know he was under suspicion, made the Englishman doubt the theory he was evolving.
Yet Fletcher could not quite free himself of the idea that Lebrassa might be the “wanted” man; his present behavior savored of the Hyena’s reckless daring.
Leslie gazed back at Lebrassa’s dark, unmoved face almost defiantly.
“I don’t believe it. Molly wouldn’t marry a… a colored man.”
“It may be a little difficult to believe, but it’s true nevertheless, for I’ve just had a telegram from Cooper, my partner, now her husband, telling me they were married in Liverpool this morning by special license.”
“You let her marry a—nigger!”
The amazed disgust in Leslie’s voice brought a flicker of amusement to the mulatto’s face.
“You forget I’m a ‘nigger’ myself, Miss Graham. Cooper is wealthy. If your friend were willing to overlook his color it was hardly for me to interfere.”
In stunned bewilderment Leslie looked from one man to the other. Then, with an effort she pulled herself together.
“I’m sorry to have troubled you both,” she said in a stiff, strained manner. “I must apologize for doubting what you both said, but it was—rather unexpected.”
Small and erect, with only the dazed pallor of her face to show what a blow the news had been, she crossed the hall, making for the refuge of her bedroom.
Ignoring each other completely, the two men watched her until she was lost round a bend in the stairs.
“If our best intentions pave the way
To a place that is somewhat hot,
Can our worst intentions lead us, say,
To a still more sultry spot?”
London was enveloped in a lowering gray cloud. All day a cold rain had been pouring down, showing no signs of abating as the afternoon wore on.
At about six o’clock, when shops and offices were closing, one figure showed up in sharp contrast to the rest of the hurrying pedestrians: that of a girl who went along at a slow walk, with hands thrust deep into the pockets of her mackintosh.
Four months had passed since the news of Molly Seaton’s elopement had fallen with the suddenness of a thunderbolt on Leslie Graham.
The following day she had left the hotel. Fletcher had tried to find out her address and more about her, but he learned nothing except that she had come from Paris. Lebrassa had taken Leslie’s departure more coolly. Within a week he, himself, had left the hotel for West Africa.
Dr. Atherley kept Fletcher posted on Essel Lebrassa’s every movement. At length the captain heard that the mulatto was again visiting England. This news shattered most of the hopes concerning the Hyena. Moreover, the intervening correspondence had almost proved that Lebrassa was nothing more than the senior partner of the firm of “Lebrassa & Cooper,” whose long absences were due only to business and pleasure trips to Europe and America.
However, Fletcher decided to have the mulatto watched during his visit to England, await his return to Africa and travel back by the same boat. The captain wanted to satisfy himself completely that Lebrassa was only the wealthy half-breed trader whose orgies had made him notorious throughout the Bight of Biafra.
To Leslie the months had passed very slowly. She had returned to Paris hoping to hear something from Molly.
Lebrassa’s remark, “Cooper is wealthy,” was constantly before her. Sometimes she wondered if this could be the explanation.
As the post in Marseilles had fallen through owing to her lack of a chaperon, at the end of a few weeks Leslie had returned to London, to take a position in an office there. Then, just when the wound was healing a little, a letter came from Molly in Africa, forwarded from Leslie’s Paris address. It had reached her the previous morning, and the contents had been in her mind ever since.
It was all a mistake! Molly had never had her letter! She had only married that dreadful man in order to be no further burden on her, Leslie.
Thoughts went in steady procession through Leslie’s brain, drummed and marshaled by one quivering, heartbroken cry.
“How did the letter go astray?”
It was all too terrible! Poor, sensitive little Molly tied for life to a nigger. All because a letter had not reached its destination!
Through mud and rain Leslie trudged on, trying to think the matter out calmly, too preoccupied to notice a man lingering outside her office, who, on seeing her, had followed in her wake.
She turned into a cheap café for a cup of tea. Once seated, awaiting the arrival of her order, she drew out Molly’s letter and read it through again.
It bore a West African address and ran as follows:
Dear little Leslie,
What years, centuries, it seems since I last called you that. And it’s not more than six months! I meant to drop out of your life entirely—to tell you nothing. I knew you’d hear sooner or later what had happened. And I hoped you’d despise me and forget all about me. I couldn’t be a drag on you any longer, dear. When you mentioned that position in Marseilles, I cried with relief. And I prayed that you would get it. But you never wrote. So I guessed it had fallen through. You could swim alone, but the weight of me would swamp you. I used to sit thinking until my head ached, trying to find a way out.
Then a way came. Such a way!
I think I must have died and gone to hell. A hell full of negroes. They are all around me. I can’t get away from them. And so hideously real. So real that it makes me scream. Then one, my husband, the constant and most vivid of them all, comes and kisses me and asks me what the matter is!
I always wonder how I brought myself to marry him, but the color bar did not seem so insurmountable then. And I thought the climate would kill me. But it hasn’t. I’ve only been married four months and I can’t stand it. I want to come back to England, but my husband won’t hear of it. Everything is mine for the asking—everything except a little time away from him, the only thing I want.
He says I may have one of my girl friends out here if I wish. Leslie, in the horror of it all I turn to you. I want you to come out and stay with me before I go absolutely mad. I want one little bit of the old world, the white world, to cling to. Some one to talk to who is not black, brown or yellow. Some one white who will not despise me. I want to make you come and I know it’s wrong. If you come to me the few white women in the place will cut you. And the men will do the same. Or worse still, look at you in a way that makes you feel you’ve lost something that can never be regained. If I were not so weak and cowardly I’d bear my burden alone, or go down to the river and put an end to everything. But I can’t. I’m afraid of both. So afraid that I write to you, to drag you down to the depths of my black hell.
I want to tempt you, to make you come. You have been my strength for so long. Think of all the strange wild sights you would see, all the glories of the tropics. I am writing this out on the balcony, in the moonlight. Such a moon, such a mass of molten glory that I almost forget the price! And such stars! Great things of silver set in a low arch of purple velvet. So near to the earth too, that by standing on my chair I fancy I could touch them. On the skyline is the forest, dark and uncanny, fearsome and haunted, black against a flood of moonlight. The wind comes moaning down from the unknown, bringing the whispering sigh of a hundred exotic trees, the scent of orange blossom and magnolia and a dozen other strange, languorous perfumes. They smother the scent of the roses growing round the balcony, and I am glad. It is all white—white with a perfect whiteness. And black—black with an utter everlasting blackness.
Below at the foot of the hill are the twinkling lights of the town, set in a bower of vegetation. Farther away are bonfires blazing in the native quarter, showing up scattered mud huts and a host of savage figures. Beyond is the river, all white and still and peaceful. And the sounds that drift up to me here! The splash and ripple of the silvered water, the hoot of an owl, the uncanny whispering rustle of the bamboos, the hoarse bellow of a distant crocodile, the beating of tom-toms, wild negro melodies, the stealthy pad of unshod feet as the servants go to and fro, and the hundred wild, weird whispers that go to make up tropical night.
But, above all, my husband’s voice talking to his partner. Leslie, don’t come, you’ll be a pariah too.
My husband’s partner, Mr. Lebrassa, says he saw you in Harrogate, at the hotel! Ever since he told me I have been wondering why you came. He said you thought I would be expecting you! It has puzzled me so much. I can think of nothing else. He has been so kind to me since I came here. He’s not a bit like my husband, but almost an Englishman. This used to be his bungalow, but he has given it over to Horten, my husband, because it is higher and healthier and better for me than down over the factory where Horten used to be. He’s always trying to make my lot easier. I know he suggested I ought to have a companion, that being alone all day when my husband was at the factory was not good for me. But that was only the nice way to put it. I think he knows the long evenings alone with Horten are getting more than I can stand. He leaves for England the day after to-morrow, by the same boat as this letter. I told him I’d written to the one friend who loved me enough to overlook what I had done, and perhaps come out here and stay with me. He asked me who that was and I told him your name and where you were living. Then he said he’d met and talked to you at the hotel the very day I was married! He is only going to stay a few weeks in England, and if you can forget the loss of caste and come out here to me he will be able to look after you. It is selfish of me to ask you, to try and pull you down to what I am now, but the horror of it all is getting more than I can bear alone.
Leslie darling, don’t take any notice of my ravings, stay where you are.
Molly.
As Leslie sat brooding on the letter, some one halting at her table brought her mind back to the present. Glancing up she stayed staring in open surprise at the man standing beside her.
“Why, Mr. Lebrassa, how did you get here?” she asked. “I was just reading about you—quite nice things.”
Her greeting made the cruel lines about his mouth relax a little.
“Were you? I’m glad of that. People as a rule haven’t a good word to say for me. And what would you say if I told you I’d been cold-bloodedly stalking you—stalking you with intent to capture?”
“I should say I knew why.”
“Why then?” he asked.
“I’ve just heard from my friend, saying she’d given you my Paris address. I could never make out why she wasn’t at the hotel that night, and it seems she never got my letter.”
“Was it so important that she’d have postponed her wedding in order to wait for you?”
It was on the tip of Leslie’s tongue to say that, had she arrived twelve hours sooner at the hotel, there would have been no wedding. To explain forcibly and pointedly to Lebrassa it was not Cooper’s money that had made Molly commit such a degrading action.
But Molly was married. No amount of explanation could undo that. It was no use going over matters nothing could rectify, which this man might repeat to his partner, and perhaps make Molly’s lot even worse.
“It was a business letter and of importance to both of us,” she answered.
There was a brief pause.
Leslie was the first to break it.
“Won’t you sit down?” she asked rather nervously. “There’s a lot I want to say to you.”
Seating himself, Lebrassa stayed watching her in brooding silence. Then suddenly he put a hand on her soaked raincoat.
“Why are you sitting in that wet thing?” he asked.
At his touch, she drew back quickly. Her action made him laugh in a savage, bitter manner.
“Sometimes I wonder what I should have been like if I hadn’t been—a nigger,” he said in a dreary manner.
Leslie knew she had hurt him by shrinking from his touch.
She poured herself out a cup of tea, and as she drank it she watched his hand which lay, brown and powerful, on the table.
Just then her one idea was to make amends for the pain she had unwittingly inflicted.
Presently, she laid her hand on his. Just for a moment it settled on his dark one, and was off again with the nervous flutter of a butterfly. The touch, light and slight as it was, made him suddenly shiver.
“Mr. Lebrassa, something is worrying you,” she said.
He smiled, a smile that made Leslie’s heart ache with its hopelessness.
“It’s nothing more than what has worried me for the last thirty-six years. I thought I’d got over it, but I find I haven’t—quite.”
Leslie said nothing. But now she realized what his “worry” was.
“Now tell me what Mrs. Cooper had to say to you? I can make a fair guess,” he went on quickly. “And if you take my advice—don’t go.”
“I’ve made up my mind to go,” she replied. “I sent a cablegram this afternoon.”
“Well, don’t say I didn’t warn you.”
“I don’t understand you.”
“I don’t understand myself,” he answered grimly.
Then once more he lapsed into brooding silence.
“In my ears, like distant washing
Of the surf upon the shore,
Drones a murmur, faintly splashing,
’Tis the splash of Charon’s oar.”
Two hours later Leslie was sitting before a gas fire in a bedroom of a Bloomsbury boarding-house. During the last few months two men, both strangers, both met in the most casual manner, both entirely different from any who had come into her life before, had taken it upon themselves to give her advice. And, in each case, she had preferred her own immature judgment. Moreover, Mr. Lebrassa had not taken any part of the ell mentioned by Captain Fletcher. The mulatto had not shown any desire to meet her again, or invited her out to dinner or a theater, or even attempted to pay for her tea, as she had feared he might. He had merely said that, if she insisted on going to Mrs. Cooper, he had been instructed to book a passage for her and take charge of her on the way out. And he had left saying he would write and let her know the boat and the time of sailing, and would meet her in Liverpool, if she persisted in her foolish decision.
About a month later Leslie stepped out of a train in one of the principal Liverpool stations.
“You see I’ve come, Mr. Lebrassa, in spite of your advice,” was her greeting to the man who came forward to meet her.
“So I see, but it’s still not too late to turn back.”
“I never intended to do anything but go from the moment I got that letter.”
Rather abruptly he turned away to see after her luggage.
“Would you rather walk or ride down to the boat, Miss Graham?” he asked when this was disposed of. “We’ve two hours yet before sailing; I suggest walking so that you can take a last, long, lingering farewell of England.”
“Why a last farewell?”
“West Africa, I fancy, has a higher European death rate than any place on earth. Haven’t you heard our rhyme?
“ ‘Beware, take care of the Bight of Benin,
Where for one that comes out there are forty stay in.’ ”
“But I’m not going there,” she replied. “I’m going to the Bight of Biafra.”
“That’s next door.”
“You are cheerful. I’d better walk and make the most of being alive now, for you seem to think I’m going to swell the forty. Who knows? I may prove to be the fortunate one who comes out.”
In a grim way, Lebrassa smiled. Then he piloted his charge out of the busy station into the street beyond.
“I’m so glad I’m going to Molly,” Leslie said. “I’d put up with anything to be with her.”
Lebrassa, however, appeared to be lost in thoughts of his own. For the next few minutes he answered her remarks in a very haphazard manner. Presently, in one of the main thoroughfares, a large florist’s shop brought him to a halt.
“Miss Graham, may I buy you a flower before you leave England?”
His request was followed by a moment’s silence. Then Leslie thought of the inch that had never been exceeded.
“What a nice idea,” she said. “It’ll take away the taste of that dreadful Bight of Benin you spoke about.”
On entering the shop Lebrassa appeared to want rosebuds—small white rosebuds, and only one of these. But he had every specimen in the place brought out for his inspection.
Leslie watched him as he went over them, examining each carefully.
“You’re very difficult to please,” she said at length.
“I can’t find what I want—one with just two petals curled back, quite white and without a flaw.”
“What about this?” she inquired, putting a finger on a perfect specimen he had just discarded.
“It’s not absolutely white. The one I want must have no tinge of color.”
“Really suitable for my funeral wreath,” she suggested.
In a grim, mirthless manner he smiled.
“That I’ve not quite decided,” he replied.
He continued his search.
“There,” he said at length, placing a flower on the counter before her.
As Leslie pinned it on her coat, in a contemplative way he watched her.
“Out in Africa I’ve a rose garden,” he said presently. “It has been my hobby and recreation for nearly twenty years. But I’ve never had my flowers quite white. They’ve always had a tinge of color. Some day, perhaps, you may see it.”
“Is it near Calabar?” she asked.
“Near Calabar!” he echoed.
Then, in a savage manner, he laughed.
“It’s some distance from Calabar,” he finished with peculiar emphasis.
For some reason she could not fathom, Leslie shivered.
“For now they are so few indeed
(Not more than three in all)
Who e’er will think of me or heed
What fate may me befall.”
On board the S.S. Batava, outward bound for West Africa, all was bustle and confusion. On the lower deck a couple of men stood, one of whom was watching the passengers coming off the last tender.
“Well,” he remarked presently, “your little girl with the ‘clematis’ eyes married him in spite of the word in season.”
The remark made Captain Fletcher turn sharply.
“What the devil are you talking about?” he asked.
“Here comes your latest Hyena with the little white lamb you were so anxious about.”
Fletcher’s gaze followed Mellors’. He saw a girl with a pair of eyes that he, in a weak and sentimental moment, had likened to a clematis.
“Poor kid! She must have been all alone in the world or that wouldn’t have happened.”
“Well, there’s no need for you to waste any further thought or sympathy on her,” Mellors replied. “She looks perfectly pleased with her bargain. But it’s surprising what some women will swallow provided it’s sufficiently gilded.”
Fletcher watched the two coming along the deck. Lebrassa was the first to see him and over his dark face there crept a vestige of sardonic amusement.
He made some remark to Leslie that brought her attention to the two men.
For an instant the vivid eyes that had haunted Fletcher for the last few months looked straight at him. But the girl made no acknowledgment of his presence, unless the sudden rush of color to her face counted as such.
“The cut direct,” Mellors murmured as she passed on.
There he was wrong. It was the act of a child caught doing what it knew it ought not to do, moreover, what it had been told not to do, very anxious to attract no further attention to itself.
Lebrassa’s remark, “There are two friends of yours,” had made Leslie look round in quick curiosity.
Fletcher and Mellors were the last people she had expected to see. She knew they had recognized her. With an unpleasant rush their presence brought back every word Fletcher had said about colored men. And the look of contempt on Mellors’ face told her, for the first time, what she might have to put up with on the voyage out, and what certainly would be her lot in Calabar.
By the time she was two steps away it dawned on her that she might have saved herself some future unpleasantness had she given Fletcher the barest recognition. Having once cut him she could hardly smile upon him the next time they met. Then all he had said about Lebrassa, which had proved absolutely false, made her glad she had treated him in the way he deserved.
A prey to a variety of emotions, Fletcher watched her go, the principal being that their former meetings had left her with such an unfavorable impression of himself that his advice counted for nothing.
In gloomy silence he stood watching her retreating figure, then he left his friend and went to the saloon to study the passenger list.
He returned to Mellors with a buoyancy in his step that had not been there when he left.
“You’re wrong,” he said. “She’s not married to that nigger.”
“What the deuce is she doing with him then?”
“I want to know what he’s doing with her,” Fletcher replied, “because she’s going to Calabar.”
For the rest of the day Fletcher kept a sharp lookout for Leslie, but he saw nothing more of her. Out in the Irish Sea the worst gale of the season was raging, and all but the most seasoned travelers sought the refuge of their cabins.
One afternoon about two days later, he came across what looked to be a bundle of rugs stretched out on a deck chair. As he neared it, it took shape and became a girl asleep in the sun. The sight brought him to an abrupt halt, for he had determined to make, not one, but many efforts to gain the confidence of this friendless little girl, and the opportunity seemed favorable.
Leaning on a rail near, he waited until Leslie awoke.
All at once she opened her eyes, but seeing him on guard there, closed them again before he had time to speak.
Fletcher knew she had seen him. Also, he knew she was now keeping her eyes shut deliberately, for the sole purpose of not seeing him.
Leslie was very conscious of the big man leaning against the rail near. Angrily she wondered why he should take it upon himself to stand just there, and she was waiting for him to move before she sat up.
She had made up her mind to ignore everybody on board except Lebrassa. Already her destination was being whispered about. To feel herself despised and an object of contempt was a new sensation.
Fletcher had heard rumors of where she was going, and it had made him all the more determined to come between her and her folly.
Presently the vigorous ringing of the tea bell, almost in her ear, made any further pretense impossible.
Leslie sat up, ready for the fray, knowing Fletcher was going to speak to her.
“I hope you’re feeling better, Miss Graham,” he said.
“I’m quite well, thank you,” she replied in a frosty manner.
“I think you must have forgotten me,” he continued, ignoring her icy tone, “so I’ve taken the liberty of recalling myself.”
“I remember seeing you in Harrogate.”
The reply was not encouraging. It said plainly she had no desire for his acquaintance.
Fletcher’s jaw set in the way it did when he was leading a forlorn hope.
“I’m going to Calabar,” he said stiffly. “If I can be of any use to you either there or during the voyage, I’m always at your service.”
“I don’t think I shall have to avail myself of your offer,” she said in a cutting one.
Fletcher was sorry he had spoken. He had wanted her to know she had at least one friend on board, and he had only succeeded in annoying her.
“May I tell the steward to bring you some tea?” he asked prior to departure.
“Mr. Lebrassa will do that.”
Fletcher knew she had said this purposely, to show him how much either he, his opinion, or advice were worth in her estimation.
For three days Leslie pursued her own way, ignoring everybody but Lebrassa, and herself ignored by most people.
The climax came the evening before the steamer reached Grand Canary.
A dance was taking place on the saloon deck, and the strains of the music were wafted over the calm, starlit sea. Leslie was alone on the deserted lower deck, gazing rather wistfully over the shrouded water.
She was learning that the lot of a pariah is not enviable.
All at once a figure loomed up beside her with a silence that made her jump and broke the current of her thoughts.
“How you made me jump, Mr. Lebrassa,” she said, smiling up at him.
“What are you thinking about, all alone here?” he asked.
“I was thinking—how nice and quiet it was.”
The reply made Lebrassa smile.
In spite of her trying position no word of complaint had ever passed the girl’s lips.
“Then you were not thinking you were just the least bit sorry you hadn’t taken my advice and stayed in England?”
“Why should I be?” she asked, almost defiantly.
“I was afraid you were beginning to find things a bit changed.”
“I’d made up my mind to all that before I left England. It would be rather foolish to start worrying now, wouldn’t it?”
“Are you always so brave and loyal?” he asked.
“There’s nothing very brave in giving up a hard life for an easy one.”
“So you think your life with Mrs. Cooper will be easy?”
“Well, I shan’t have to turn out every morning, whether I’m in the mood for it or not. And in past days Molly was awfully good to me.”
He made no reply. Leaning against the rail, with stifled, unwilling tenderness he watched her small, brave face.
“May I do my poor best to entertain you, Miss Graham?” he said at length. “The other day you were boasting of your prowess as a chess-player. May I challenge you to mortal combat?”
“It won’t be combat at all, but simple slaughter. I shall be wiped out of existence in the first round.”
“Shall we fight over there?” he asked, indicating a lamp in a remote and secluded corner. “Just the two of us alone, mortal enemies, to the death. Then, when I’ve killed you I can drop you overboard and no one will be any the wiser.”
“How vicious you sound! Hankering after bloodshed.”
“You forget I’m half a savage.”
In a gentle, understanding manner Leslie smiled at him.
“I don’t forget because I never thought you were.”
Rather abruptly Lebrassa turned away to fetch the chess-board and the pieces. Leslie went across to the lighted corner and stood there watching the figures flitting on the upper deck.
Up there were women who turned their backs on her, and men who did the same or, worse still, whispered and laughed and tried to talk to her.
As the music struck up afresh she turned her back on the scene, and picking up a book from one of the chairs looked at it with eyes too blurred with tears to distinguish the letters.
Presently, approaching footsteps made her glance round, thinking it was Lebrassa. But when her gaze fell on the figure coming along the deck, she looked away again very quickly.
The newcomer was a stout, red-faced man—one of those who laughed and whispered and tried to talk to her.
Halting at her side, he leant over her in a most familiar manner.
“What about this dance, Miss Graham?” he asked.
“I don’t dance,” she said curtly.
“Well, now I come to think of it, I don’t seem to have seen you hopping round with that nigger.”
Leslie plunged again into her book, ignoring him completely.
“You’re not a very sociable sort,” he said, “and I’ve seen you talking nineteen to the dozen to that Lebrassa.”
It was evident he meant to stay. Deliberately Leslie closed her book and was in the act of moving away when he seized one of her bare arms and, despite her struggles, kept her where she was.
“You’re not in such a dashed hurry to run away when that nigger comes and talks to you,” he said, “so you needn’t put on any airs with me.”
The unexpected contact of his coarse, hot hand on her bare flesh made her give a little gasping scream. The sound reached Fletcher just as he was leaving the smoke-room. It brought him to a halt and made him look sharply along the deserted deck.
On seeing the couple under the lamp, he turned swiftly in that direction.
A voice, hoarse with suppressed anger, made the man loose Leslie’s arm.
“You damned skunk!” it said. “How dare you come and annoy this lady. If I catch you at it again I’ll thrash the life out of you.”
Gripping the man’s shoulder, Fletcher sent him swinging across the deck.
In Leslie’s mind was the memory of her last interview with Fletcher. Under his gaze all speech fled. Then, just as she was pulling herself together, his voice scattered her thoughts again.
“At the risk of annoying you again, I must say it’s not wise of you to stand about alone on deck at night. Considering the circumstances, you lay yourself open to that sort of thing. And while I’m talking, let me say I think you’re very foolish to ignore everybody but Lebrassa. I know half a dozen men on board you could be friendly with and who wouldn’t take advantage of your peculiar position.”
“I… I don’t want to know any one.”
Into the voice of the pariah crept the least suspicion of tears.
“I can quite understand that,” Fletcher replied. “But you’re putting Lebrassa in a very unfair position. You can’t realize what you’re doing or you wouldn’t act in such a foolish manner. What thoughts would come into any man’s head if you were with him as much as you are with this Lebrassa? In the words of the Americans, he’d think you’d ‘fallen for him.’ I’ve seen enough of Lebrassa to know he can behave himself when he wants, and in you he knows he’s dealing with some one very different from the women who usually seek out a man of his sort. But if he should forget himself, you’ve only yourself to blame. I’m sorry to have to speak so plainly. And if you should consider my advice worth taking I’m always ready to help you.”
Quickly Fletcher turned away, fearing the storm that might break on his offending head.
His words left Leslie stunned and petrified.
The idea that she might be leading Lebrassa to think she loved him, filled her with horror.
The mulatto’s voice roused her from her stunned bewilderment.
“I must apologize for being so long, Miss Graham, but I had some difficulty in collecting the weapons together.”
His bored, cultured voice that, in all her experience of him, had never varied one whit, comforted her a little. Sitting down, she watched him arrange the pieces, answering his remarks in a preoccupied manner.
The game started. But Leslie was too full of what Fletcher had said to give her whole attention to it.
Closely Lebrassa watched her. At once he noticed she was perturbed and unusually silent.
During his absence something had happened—something that had startled this little white fawn of his.
He recollected having met Fletcher coming along the deck as though from her direction, and he determined to find out if his enemy had been with her.
“If Captain Fletcher wanted you to dance, I hope you didn’t consider our game,” he remarked.
Leslie looked up from her silent contemplation of the board.
“He didn’t ask me to dance,” she replied, her face flushing.
So Fletcher had been talking to her! Lebrassa wondered what had been said, and he was sufficiently acquainted with his man to know it would be nothing to his, Lebrassa’s, credit.
The thought appeared to amuse him, for a smile, half-tender, half-cruel, came and played about his mouth as he watched his companion. Her hand hovering uncertainly about a piece made his smile deepen.
“If you make that move, I win,” he remarked presently.
Leslie surveyed the position more closely.
“So you do,” she said.
Another move was tried, but further consideration proved it to be no better than the first.
Lebrassa watched her as she sat, with puckered brow, considering her position on the chess board. Just then he was filled with great relief to know that Cooper had not connected Molly’s friend with Lionel de Tourville. In fact the negro had been too elated over his own marriage to inquire further into the matter.
“Why, whatever I do, you win,” Leslie said presently.
Lebrassa swept the pieces together.
“Exactly. Whatever you do I win,” he replied in a voice that had in it a queer undercurrent of savage satisfaction. “Shall we play again? This time I’ll give you unto half of my kingdom, then we shall be more evenly matched.”
“There are one or two letters I must write, so perhaps you’ll excuse me,” Leslie said, very conscious of Fletcher’s advice.
“If I can give you a hand in any way, getting the right sort of stamps or anything, don’t be afraid to ask,” he volunteered.
“… I’ve already been taking up too much of your time.”
Her nervous reply, with an unmistakable note of reserve, so different from her usual friendly, straightforward manner, made a surge of anger go coursing through Lebrassa.
What Fletcher had said to the girl had made her lose faith in him.
“How can you take up too much of my time, when Mrs. Cooper put you in my charge?” he asked.
“But—I keep you away from your own friends.”
“My own friends! Who are they? If you mean the black passengers, I’m sufficiently akin to them to despise them utterly. My friends! I never had any. Those I want, despise me. Those who want me, I despise. I’m nothing, neither black nor white, above the one, below the other. An outcast and a pariah.”
Leslie was aghast at the storm her words had roused. And his dreary, bitter voice cut her to the quick.
For a second time she had a glimpse of the galling black yoke—how it chafed and tortured the man who wore it.
She glanced at him as he sat, all else forgotten but the black curse on his life, with massive shoulders bowed, and a hopeless weariness in his eyes.
The sight made her heart ache. He was so big and strong, so capable of feeling, so full of suffering, so absolutely alone with a burden not of his own making, and which none could help him with.
A sudden flood of sympathy and understanding swept through her. Getting to her feet, she leant over him, a hand lightly on his shoulder.
“It isn’t any fault of yours,” she whispered.
Her voice and light, caressing touch made him start up, shivering as from ague.
Startled by the abruptness of his movement, she drew back quickly. He had loomed over her so suddenly, big and all-powerful, blocking out everything but the fact of himself. There was some emotion on his face that her frightened expression and shrinking attitude stifled.
In a bitter, hopeless way, he laughed.
“Don’t waste any sympathy on me, Miss Graham. I’m not worth it.”
Abruptly he turned away.
As Leslie watched him go, the wail of a violin came sweeping along on the night wind and died away in a long-drawn sigh. Just then the world seemed all pain—pain that no human hands could lighten.
Hardly aware of where she was going, Leslie went along the deck. Her only desire was to reach the light, to get away from the blackness that shadowed and spoilt everything.
On the upper deck, among the gay flags and the colored lanterns, the music that had seemed like weeping was only a waltz tune!
She leant against the rail, thankful for the light, watching the dancers, glad there were still some happy people in the world, people whom the black did not touch.
She looked round the deck for Fletcher. She knew she must accept his offer of friendship, and not risk making things even worse by letting Mr. Lebrassa think they ever could be more than friends.
A little way off, she saw her quarry watching the crowd moodily.
Leslie hesitated. His air of aloofness did not argue well for the coming interview. And the fact that Fletcher had never on any occasion approved of her behavior made her courage shrivel to vanishing point. Then the thought of the consequences that might arise if she persisted in her present line of action made her take her wavering determination firmly in both hands.
A voice with a desperate “do or die” note in it broke in on his moody reverie.
“I hadn’t time to thank you, Captain Fletcher. And I’m very grateful for what you said and did.”
Hardly able to believe his ears, he turned. The cause of his gloomy musings was with him, for the first time condescending to take any notice of him or his advice.
“I’m only too pleased to be of any use to you, Miss Graham,” he said eagerly.
There was a brief pause as Leslie wondered how to put her project into words. She was anxious to justify Molly and to give Lebrassa his due by letting Fletcher know the mulatto had done his best to keep her from going to Africa.
Groping round in his head for some commonplace remark Fletcher watched her, but her presence seemed to have deprived him of speech.
“You were quite right in what you said when that man came and annoyed me,” Leslie said in a nervous manner. “But I’d never looked at it in that light before. So I’d like you for my friend, and… and I’d like to explain everything to you.”
“Don’t bother to explain. I shall be only too delighted if you will count me as your friend without that.”
“But I’d much rather tell you all about it,” she insisted.
“Very well then, if you wish, but let me get you a chair first.”
In a more light-hearted frame of mind than had been his since leaving Liverpool, he skirmished round the deck to find two chairs.
As they sat side by side, into Fletcher’s ears was poured the story of the letter, how it never reached its destination, and the fatal result. She told him of the one that had come to her from Molly in Africa. How Lebrassa had tried to persuade her not to go to her friend, but she had insisted.
“You see,” she finished, “Mrs. Cooper married that dreadful man to save me, not because he’s rich, as people say. And I couldn’t leave her in the lurch.”
Fletcher could read between the lines, and he knew Leslie had struggled on, trying to keep her friend, handicapped beyond her strength.
“I always suspected it was something of the sort, both in your case and Mrs. Cooper’s,” he said in a kindly tone.
“It’s very good of you to have given the case so lenient a view. It was all a mistake, so ghastly that at times I can’t believe it. Poor little Molly tied for life to that—man, all because my letter went astray.”
Fletcher recollected what he had heard in the hotel concerning Lebrassa’s desire for his partner to marry Molly Seaton. With the recollection came a feeling that the mulatto may have wanted the marriage as a means of getting Leslie to Africa.
The idea made him probe deeper into the affair.
“Have any of your people anything to do with West Africa, Miss Graham?”
“No. My father disliked everything African and he had an absolute hatred of negroes. I once had a piece of jewelry that I found among his things. A friend told me it was of West African origin, but it couldn’t have been because my father had never been there, and he had been to the place the name of which was engraved on the armlet, because when he was… ill, he used to talk about it.”
“What was the name of the place?” Fletcher asked.
“Kallu.”
“I’ve never heard of it,” he said thoughtfully. “I’m much interested in things West African, and I know more about them than most people. If you’d let me have a look at that armlet I could tell whether it had come from those parts.”
“I haven’t got it now. I had to sell it last year when Molly was so ill.”
Scenting a mystery, Fletcher pondered on what she had said. He wanted to ask Leslie more about her father. Finally he decided to leave the subject until a more advanced stage of friendship permitted of questions bordering on the inquisitive.
Her voice roused him.
“I like Mr. Lebrassa, and I consider the world is hard on him for a reason that is no fault of his. For all that I shouldn’t like him to think—to think he could be anything more than my friend.”
Leslie got to her feet.
“I’ve not been at all nice to you,” she continued, “and I appreciate your kindness in… in coming to my rescue. Good-night and many thanks.”
Fletcher took the hand she held out to him, wondering why Fate had left such an honorable, high-minded child to find her way through the maze of life alone.
When she had gone, a desire for solitude drove him to the lower deck, to walk up and down there, thinking of all she had said.
Lebrassa was there also, pacing up and down with the quiet, stealthy tread of a jungle beast.
The sight of his dark, powerful face with its cruel mouth and indifferent expression eventually drove Fletcher to his cabin, more than ever convinced there was something behind it all that only the mulatto knew.
“I am so foolish and you are so wise.”
The Calabar River crept along sluggishly, bringing with it all the drainings of a dark continent. A dense forest lined one bank right down to its boulder-strewn edge; the other was a dreary, monotonous stretch of mangrove and pandanus swamp.
No sound broke the quiet of the evening, except the sickly lapping of water round the slimy, weed-grown piles of a wooden wharf. There was no sign of human life save one woman standing ankle-deep in the river, gazing intently across the stretch of steaming swamp.
She was tall and superbly made, a bronze statue in the swiftly fading light, with features more Arab than negro. A cream-colored cloth draped her from shoulder to knee. On her arms were a couple of ivory bracelets; these and a necklace composed of many rows of gold chains set with small nuggets, coral and charms, completed her attire.
Just as the brief African twilight was gathering into night, a canoe crept out from the shadows of the opposite bank, and made straight for the woman.
The boat had one occupant, a young man of about twenty.
When he reached her, the woman greeted him in a dialect not known in that part of Southern Nigeria.
“He’s not back yet, Nanza. He has a great love for England now. He’s been there twice within the last six months.”
For some minutes the two stood talking together. Then they turned inland, to a trading factory standing just behind the wharf.
A light dribbled through one of the reed blinds screening a door leading on to the balcony surrounding the upper part of the building. Inside, busy writing, Cooper sat.
The unceremonious pulling aside of the reed blind made him look up sharply. When his gaze fell on the entering couple, surprise and anger came to his face.
“What are you doing here?” he demanded hotly, looking at the man. “You were told not to come within four hundred miles of this place.”
Contemptuously, Nanza looked at him.
“Since when have I taken orders from you?” he asked.
“The order was not mine, but the Sultan’s.”
“You’ve a great liking for things English lately, both you and he.”
There was a threat in Nanza’s voice. Cooper was quick to hear it. His next remark was in a cooler and more conciliatory tone.
“On each occasion lately, it was business that took our Sultan to England,” he explained.
“And I suppose it was business that made you marry one of an accursed race,” Nanza sneered.
“My marriage was the Sultan’s command,” Cooper said after a moment’s pause.
The answer appeared to leave Nanza nonplussed.
Yoni’s voice broke the silence.
“Is it the Sultan’s command too, that you sit of an evening toying with that woman’s hair, and whispering love words into her ears?” she demanded.
In an access of fury Cooper started up.
“By hell! I won’t discuss my wife with such as you.”
“Hark at him!” Yoni cried mockingly. “We hold his heart in our hand. Squeeze it, Nanza, my brother. Ask all you wish. And if he won’t tell you, threaten to expose everything. And he will tell you then, for love has made a coward of him.”
In a menacing manner Nanza advanced towards Cooper.
“See here,” he cried angrily, “why am I kept in darkness? Twice have I sent down asking why the Sultan doesn’t come. And twice I’ve been put off by you. I will know the truth. What is the Sultan doing in England?”
“I’ve told you,” Cooper replied in a dogged voice. “It’s business that concerns him alone. I’ve been forbidden to say more.”
“What is the Sultan’s concern is my concern. Am I not his cousin and his heir?”
At his words Yoni laughed scornfully, a laugh that had in it an undercurrent of savage jealousy.
“But not his heir for much longer, Nanza,” she said. “For our Sultan is afflicted with a love-sickness, of a fierceness that comes to men but once. And he forgets, as men forget, that the dog which has licked his hand for many years can bite.”
In scorn her brother turned on her.
“A pest on you for a jealous woman. Is it for a fool’s tale such as this that you have dragged me down from Kallu?”
“It is no fool’s tale,” Yoni declared passionately. “Have I been his slave and servant all these years for nothing? When our cousin returned from his last visit to England he would have nothing to do with me. Instead, he would pace at nights from sunset to sunrise, and would bid me begone did I venture near him. What is it comes between a man and his sleep? Soft sleep in arms such as these,” and a pair of beautiful limbs were thrown out with a gesture of despair. “What but the face of another woman!”
“You’re a mad, raving fool,” her brother said contemptuously. “Our cousin has no need of women—as wives.”
“Cooper said the same of himself,” she cried, turning to the negro. “Yet he has returned with a woman fairer than the morning, whose hair is like gold. And she is his wife! I did not know these white women could be so beautiful. All those I had seen before were as sticks, dried and shriveled, and I, Yoni, in all my blackness, was fairer and more to be desired. I said, ‘The whites breed fine men, but their women—bah!’ In my ignorance I spat at them. They are ashamed of such wives, I thought, that is why the white men always come alone. I was wrong. They keep their fairest women safe at home and send here such as are old and of no further use. It is love that has taken our cousin again so soon to England. And he will return with a woman fairer than the whitest star—his wife! It will be a short shrift for you then, Nanza, for the Sultan will brook no heir save of his own breeding.”
This time his sister’s remarks left Nanza very quiet. The truth of her last observation struck home with considerable force.
Apprehensively Cooper glanced at him.
“Yoni is crazy,” he said presently. “Between a man and his sleep come other things than love. Vengeance, for instance.”
Nanza’s eyes came towards him.
“Vengeance,” he echoed.
“Vengeance that is all but completed,” Cooper said. “Now, as always, our Sultan works alone and says no word until all is completed. Two weeks from now he will be here with his victim, trapped in a way that only he could have thought out.”
In the manner of a savage beast about to spring, Nanza took a step forward.
“Not Lionel de Tourville’s son!”
“The Gods have granted even greater vengeance. His daughter!”
“His daughter! There was but a son!”
“The son our Sultan searched for has been dead many years. In his place came a daughter of whose existence we knew nothing. She is young. Hardly more than a child. To seize her forcibly might have meant her death before she reached Kallu. The trapping has been long and most skilful. My marriage was part of it—she is as a sister to my wife. Under the guise of friendship our Sultan is bringing her out here, on a visit to my wife. She is in his care, trusting him! Who but the Sultan could have conceived a plan so deep?”
Nanza laughed, the great roar of some wild beast.
Then another aspect of the situation struck him.
“Why has this been told to you who are but a servant?” he asked haughtily. “And not to me, his cousin and his heir?”
“It wasn’t told to me. I learnt it for myself. When we were in England together he heard a rumor, but he did not mention the matter again, and I thought, as often before, the scent had proved false. When I got out here he was constantly urging me to get my wife a companion of her own color. I was puzzled, for our Sultan has no love for the English, man or woman. I plied my wife with judicious questions, and soon guessed his reason.”
“Are you sure of all this?” Nanza asked.
“Quite sure. And remember, the Sultan has no liking for others to discover his secrets. I should not have said anything about it had not that woman’s foolishness put madness into you. It was no love business that took the Sultan again to England. He was working for Kallu. For the vengeance he promised twenty years ago. Vengeance for a murdered queen. Vengeance for Irena. It was this that made him pace at night, not love as this woman would have you think. And he has remained unmarried because he would see his cousin Nanza heir. For your mother claimed him kin when all his father’s race had turned against him.”
Yoni’s voice broke in sullenly.
“How like a man! Our Sultan has remained unwed because he has no real love to give to women of my color. He would have a white wife, of the class of his father’s people.”
“If the Sultan wished he could have a white wife, even as I have,” Cooper retorted.
“Bah!” she said with intense scorn. “I’ve seen your wife. She is a child of the people. I am Yoni, Keeper of the Stars, priestess of Doomana, noble in my own land, and I know. There is a difference with the whites as with the blacks. Our Sultan would not have a wife such as yours. He would have a wife from the stock of his father, who was a noble of England.”
Angrily, Nanza turned on his sister.
“A curse on you and your mad talk, Yoni,” he cried. “That I should be afflicted with a fool for a sister! Go, this is man’s business and no place for you.”
With blazing eyes Yoni faced her brother.
“I am Yoni, Keeper of the Stars. Night gives me many eyes, and I see deep into the souls of men. Yet I am a fool as you please to say.”
With a haughty gesture she lifted the reed blind and went from the room.
Going to the water’s edge, she stood there watching the night. Blackness surrounded her. And high above, the white stars mocked and twinkled.
“They seem’d long hours.”
In the west, ominous clouds were banked, lurid and luminous, splashed and barred by the deep flaming crimson of the setting sun that lay, a pool of fiery red, in the midst of them. Sullen heaving waves ran right up to the land, if such it could be called; stretch upon stretch of haunting, mysterious mangrove swamp, broken only by the mouth of a river, the thick, muddy waters of which drained greasily down to the sea.
It was the scenery of the Bight of Biafra—mangroves, foul lagoons and pestilential mud. A fetid waste that was neither land nor water, all matted and grown together with rank, tangled creepers, so dense that it seemed nature’s one desire was to keep any ray of light from filtering through into the dark depths.
The scene was neither beautiful nor cheering, but it had a grim fascination as it lay there, sullen and secretive, lighted just on the edge with somber liana-slung passages leading away into darkness.
On the upper deck of the Batava, Lebrassa stood with his eyes on the scene. He might have been studying the wild waste of swamp, or listening to voices that were wafted across the awning-covered deck.
A fortnight had passed since Leslie had made friends with Fletcher. Since that night her acquaintances had increased, at one time numbering fully half a dozen. When the Batava reached African waters they had decreased as the vessel put in at the various ports. Now, as it lay anchored off the mouth of the Calabar River, her friends on board were reduced to two, not counting Lebrassa.
One was Captain Fletcher, the other a Major Harding. The latter was a man of about forty-eight, moreover a father, as Leslie discovered before she had known him half an hour, with a daughter in England about her own age.
In spite of her new friends the girl did not altogether avoid the mulatto. He was a pariah. She had been one for a while; her own experience of the position had given her a keen sympathy for him, and a certain amount of time she still spent in his company.
Lebrassa did not appear to notice any change in her manner. He was the same as ever, except that he was anxious she should make the most of her new friends. So much so, that the fears Fletcher’s lecture had roused were speedily lulled.
A voice speaking at Lebrassa’s elbow made him turn round in his usual bored, indifferent manner.
“I can quite believe your tale about the Bight of Benin,” it said.
“Which tale, Miss Graham?” he asked.
“About the forty who didn’t come out,” she answered.
Then she glanced again at the forbidding scene.
“I wonder what goes on inside that dark landscape,” she added.
“It’s an abode of wickedness. The essence of all the evil that oozes out from the black heart of Africa.”
“It’s your country, and you oughtn’t to say horrid things about it.”
“So you consider it my country,” he remarked, smiling slightly. “In your opinion I’m more in my element here than I was, say—the night I had the pleasure of meeting you?”
Leslie was sorry she had spoken. She tried to avoid all topics that would make his black burden any heavier. But in his ways and speech he was so like a white man that sometimes she forgot the mixed blood in him.
“I didn’t mean that,” she said quickly, a look of distress on her face. “But from something you once said, I imagined you’d lived out here nearly all your life.”
“I’ve spent more than half my life out here,” he replied. “I came when I was about as old as you are now, quite twenty years ago. By now, I suppose you’re right in calling it ‘my country’,” he added, the bitterness she now knew in his voice.
With curiosity she glanced at him. He interested her deeply, this big strange man whom nobody liked, for no reason at all so far as she could see, except an accident of birth.
Often she had wanted to ask him about himself, who he really was and where he came from. And this seemed an opportunity.
“Were you born in England?” she asked, rather nervously.
Leslie knew she ought not to display so much interest in him, but somehow she could not help it. At times too, she had the queer feeling of there being a link between them, but she put this down to the fact of their both being pariahs.
“No,” he said. “I was born in Africa. In a country deep in the wilds—my mother’s country. When I was a baby, my father took me to England. At eighteen I came back to Africa. But, during the interval I’d become too civilized. I couldn’t settle down in my mother’s country—couldn’t quite break away from the white side. So I came down to Calabar, just to stay on the edge of it.”
“But didn’t you like England?”
“It wasn’t that so much as that England didn’t like me,” he said rather grimly.
He changed the conversation.
“You’ve been asking me questions, Miss Graham, so I’m going to retaliate, and ask you one.”
“What is it?”
“I often wonder what your mother was like, and why you weren’t called after her, instead of after—your father.”
“My mother died when I was a baby. But my father always said I was just like her, and not a bit like him. And I am named after her, too—Leslie Sylvia.”
“Why did you discard Sylvia in favor of the masculine Leslie?” he asked. “I much prefer Sylvia.”
On Lebrassa’s face was the quiet, well-bred smile that occasionally came now when they were together.
“I thought Leslie sounded more capable of looking after itself. Sylvia has such a frail sound, as if it ought to be kept at home in cotton-wool with some mere male to look after it. After I left school and went to live with my father, he always treated me as if I were a boy. He said I had my own way to make and I must get used to knocks. It was a bit strenuous at first, but I got used to it.”
“Poor little Sylvia! Does she always do just what this strong-minded Leslie tells her?”
“Now you’re laughing at me.”
“Indeed I’m not,” he said gravely, his mouth twitching with amusement. “In all seriousness I ask you—at a critical moment would ‘Sylvia’ or ‘Leslie’ come uppermost?”
“I won’t answer such a silly question. I’ll go and do my packing and leave you to laugh alone.”
When she left, Lebrassa’s gaze went again to the gloomy landscape, and stayed there in a fixed, brooding manner.
It was nearly midnight when the vessel anchored off Duke Town—haunting, tropical midnight, pitch-dark, close, and breathless. A thick fog hung over the river, deadening every sound, shutting out every light of the settlement on the near bank.
On the boat all was bustle and confusion, but when the noise died down a little, weird sounds came drifting in from the surrounding darkness. Voices out on the river were shouting and singing in a guttural language. In a soft, sickly manner the thick, muddy water lapped on the vessel’s side. Through the darkness came the snort and whistle of a wandering steam launch trying to locate the steamer.
In even quieter lulls, strange sounds from the distant bank were heard. The splashes and heaving sighs of uncouth monsters gamboling; hoarse bellows and soft slithering noises as of heavy bodies sliding over mud; uncanny moans and grunts and screams, mingled and mixed together in a mysterious, whispering whole by the all-enveloping fog.
Everything loomed big and haunting, wild and ghostly, distorted out of all proportion by the dense mist.
Near the gangway Leslie stood with Lebrassa, looking about her with rather nervous eyes. This uncanny land of fog and darkness was not the scented, moonlit, tropic Africa Molly’s letter had led her to expect. This fact, combined with the strangeness of everything, the eerie night and the unknown awaiting her there, made the girl a trifle hysterical.
With a triumphant snort, the wandering steam launch reached its destination. Leslie leant over the rail, straining through the murky atmosphere to get a glimpse of the occupants, hoping to see her friend. Only one person came up the gangway; an Englishman, parched and sun-dried, with the bloodless look of a grasshopper. With some surprise he glanced at her and Lebrassa, then he went along the deck to a spot some yards away where Fletcher and Major Harding were standing.
Presently, out of the shrouded gloom, came the muffled splash of oars. The sound made Leslie move nearer the gangway, thinking that, at last, Molly was coming.
A big boat loomed up, manned by half a dozen savages, naked but for a wisp of cloth round their loins. Black figures with faces like grotesque masks, skins that steamed in the faint yellow lamplight, blood-shot eyes that rolled and glistened, and mouths, big, loose and red, that jabbered in a horrible manner.
Fascinated, Leslie watched them.
For whom were they coming? To whom were they calling, with awful beast-like voices?
They were calling to—Mr. Lebrassa! And he was answering in the same way! It was Molly’s hell. Molly’s hell that she was going to!
A sweet, wild laugh just beside him took Lebrassa’s attention quickly from the boatmen.
“What’s the matter?” he asked sharply.
“Shall I… shall I get like them if I stay out here?”
“What on earth are you talking about?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know,” Leslie said in an hysterical manner. “Where’s Molly? Why doesn’t she come?”
“My men have just brought a message saying she’s not well enough to come and meet you.”
Tightly Leslie’s hands clutched the rail, all hysteria knocked out of her at the thought of Molly being ill.
“Where’s Mr. Cooper?” she asked, scanning the boatload of savages.
“He couldn’t leave her.”
“I must go to Molly at once,” Leslie said, everything forgotten but her friend.
“We’ll start now, if you wish,” Lebrassa replied. “I’ll send my men back for your luggage.”
“I must just say good-by to Captain Fletcher and Major Harding,” Leslie answered, turning in their direction.
It was very evident the group had been watching her, for her first movement in their direction brought Fletcher towards her.
“Where’s Mrs. Cooper?” he demanded.
“She’s too ill to come.”
“Then you mustn’t think of landing to-night.”
“But I must go to her,” Leslie replied.
“You can’t leave the vessel at this time of night, all alone.”
“I shan’t be alone. Mr. Lebrassa is going with me.”
“Good heavens, child, you’re not in England now, or dealing with an Englishman. If you must go, let me take you up in Atherley’s launch. I know where the place is.”
Leslie’s mouth set in the obstinate way it did on those rare occasions when Fletcher’s temper got the better of his judgment and he said anything in the least degree disparaging about Lebrassa.
“I won’t insult Mr. Lebrassa by refusing to go with him.”
Leslie left him wrathful and gloomy and went along to Harding.
“I’m going, now,” she said, “so this will be good-by.”
“Hardly ‘good-by’ as yet, Miss Graham. Dr. Atherley has kindly placed his launch at our disposal, so you’ll let us have the pleasure of seeing you to the end of your journey.”
“It’s very thoughtful of you, but Mr. Lebrassa’s boat has just come.”
Harding glanced at Fletcher. He had noted the other’s interview with the girl, and he had made a final effort to keep her in safe custody.
“Good-by,” Leslie said, holding out a hand to Harding.
With fatherly tenderness he took it.
“You mustn’t desert me altogether, Miss Graham. I miss my own little girl dreadfully, so will you promise to bring Mrs. Cooper to my bungalow sometimes and pour tea for me?”
“I don’t think Molly would care to go anywhere.”
“Well, if you can’t persuade her to come with you, come alone.”
Gratefully Leslie smiled at him.
“It’s awfully decent of you to try to make things easier for me, but I knew just what I was coming to. Molly didn’t try to deceive me. And I shall be very pleased to come and see you sometimes.”
With a pleasant smile at the Major and a cold nod to Fletcher, Leslie joined Lebrassa.
Fletcher watched the two as they disappeared down the gangway. Then he went to the rail in time to see the big boat, with its crew of savages, swallowed up in darkness.
To Leslie, as she left the Batava’s side, there came a sensation of all known things gliding away—an uncanny feeling that made her shiver. She cast a quick glance back at the steamer, and stifled a desire to ask Lebrassa to stop and take her back to the world she knew. With an effort she suppressed the wish and tried to interest herself in her surroundings.
When one of the negroes struck a match, the sharp scratch made her heart give a choking jump. A moment later a lantern flared up in the bow. The combination of flickering light and curling miasma caused wild, distorted shapes to dance in the shrouded gloom, and cast weird shadows over the savage crew.
With hands clasped tightly together, Leslie watched the negroes.
Occasional grunts broke from them as they pulled and sweated at the oars to the accompaniment of a low, whining chant. To any one fresh from civilization, they were very unlike human beings. This Leslie realized as she watched them, horror-stricken at the thought of Molly being married to one of their race.
A movement at the tiller brought her mind back from the naked crew to Lebrassa.
The fitful light rendered his swarthy face darker than usual, and the negro in him showed more as he sat gazing intently ahead, picking out a difficult passage by sounds and signs that only senses attuned to the slightest noise and shadow could have noticed.
Leslie watched him. Never had she seen him look quite so dark, quite so much like a negro before.
“I’d like to give him a coat of black paint and a covering no bigger than a handkerchief, and see what I thought of him then.”
Fletcher’s words, accidentally overheard that night in the hotel, came back to her mind.
What would she think of him then?
A thrill of horror went through her.
All Fletcher had said concerning Lebrassa’s sort and color returned with an appalling rush. With it came a sudden realization of the loneliness of her present position, and the terrifying knowledge that she really knew nothing at all about Lebrassa.
With fearsome speculation she watched him, noting, as she had never done before, every line and flaw on his face, the latent savagery in his eyes, the cruel set of his mouth, the whole stamped with the unmistakable seal of reckless dissipation.
What if she had been wrong all the time? What if he were the Hyena?
Leslie tried to crush this thought back. But it would come uppermost. During the voyage out she had heard many terrible tales about this mysterious rebel chieftain, the mere recollection of which made her shiver.
Lebrassa must have noticed the shudder that ran through her, for he glanced sharply at her.
“What’s the matter?” he asked quickly.
Trying to stifle her terror, she looked at him.
“Have—we much further to go?”
He must have noticed the break of fear in her voice, for he smiled at her gently.
“There’s nothing you need be afraid of,” he said softly. “Fifteen minutes from now you’ll be with your friend.”
His cultivated voice comforted her. It made her remember he was very different from the creatures rowing the boat.
Almost as he spoke, a faint luminous light appeared in the darkness ahead, and grew bigger and redder and more lurid as they approached it.
“What’s that?” she asked.
“The light of my wharf. The end of your river journey.”
The oars were shipped, and black, weed-grown piles loomed up. Some of the crew leant over and pawed along the slimy wood until steps were reached.
As Leslie mounted them, she experienced the uncomfortable feeling of some one’s gliding away at her approach, of unseen eyes watching her from out of the darkness. She was glad of Lebrassa’s company, and stayed close beside him while the negroes went to the trading factory to fetch a hammock in which she was to be carried up to the villa on the hill.
As they stood together, out from the night came the sudden throb of a native drum, a roll of wild music with little intermittent taps.
Another answered it, a faint echo in the distance.
The sound startled the girl. Major Harding had told her how the African tribes signalled to each other in this fashion, sending messages from place to place with amazing rapidity. She wondered what the drums were saying, and why, the moment she landed, they should roll their wild music through the night.
The sound left Lebrassa tense and listening.
In the faint light of a dying lamp overhead Leslie glanced at him. The look on his face was one she had never seen before: an expression of tigerish ferocity.
“What are they making that noise about?” she asked nervously.
“It’s in honor of your landing.”
He laughed, in a manner both savage and tender. For the message of the drums was—that he had returned, and with him was his enemy’s daughter!
His look and laugh made the girl shrink from him. The lamp overhead flared up wildly. In the sudden glare she saw a pair of eyes watching her intently. Then all light died away as the last roll of a drum came echoing down like a faint sigh from the unknown.
Leslie remained in the darkness, conscious some one was creeping stealthily up to her. She could see nothing, but she could feel an unknown and hostile presence.
A voice came out of the night, a wild jabber, loud and coarse, with a note of the beast in it, and the sound sapped Leslie’s last remaining scrap of courage.
“Are you there, Mr. Lebrassa?” she asked nervously.
At her question he laughed.
He was there. So was she. And Kallu knew it!
The depths of savagery in his tone made her shudder. All the fears that had assailed her on the river returned four-fold. Fearsomely she touched the arm of the man who loomed, solid, in the surrounding darkness.
“You’re not the Hyena, are you?” she asked in a hysterical manner.
“If I said ‘yes,’ would you believe me?”
“Please, please don’t make a joke of it when I’m here all—alone.”
The terrified, imploring note in her voice made him draw her arm through his, where he held it carefully. And Leslie was glad of the feeling of safety that came with him.
“So in a critical moment it would be Sylvia,” he said teasingly.
“Would be Sylvia!” she echoed.
Then in a shaky manner she laughed.
“What made you think I might be the Hyena?” he went on. “Am I so very savage when we’re together? Or are you afraid that now I’ve got you far away from your own sort that I shall fall on you and gobble you up, as the wolf did little Red Riding Hood?”
“It was all this strange haunted night,” she confessed. “I… I think I had a sudden attack of nerves. It was stupid of me to say such a thing. You’re not angry, are you?” she finished anxiously.
“Do I sound as if I were?”
“You sound as if you were laughing at me, but then you’re very good at hiding what you really feel.”
Lebrassa made no reply. He remained silent, her arm tucked through his until the arrival of the hammock and lanterns broke the darkness again.
The party was soon stirring. Leslie lay in her litter trying to see something of her surroundings. Only indistinct trunks of trees were visible. In her ears was the sound of dripping moisture, an occasional rustle in the undergrowth, far-away, moaning howls, the stealthy pad of unshod feet, and the comforting sound of a firm, louder tread that denoted a civilized presence.
“Here’s your destination,” Lebrassa said, at length.
His words made her sit up. She saw nothing but mist and trees and a vicious thorny hedge lost either way in the darkness. There was the sound of a gate opening. More mist and trees, and, finally, a halt at the bottom of broad, wooden steps leading up to a wide, creeper-grown balcony.
The noise of their arrival brought some one along the veranda. A negro loomed up, a man of about forty, of medium height and black as any one of her bearers. Only his European dress and the look of intelligence on his face marked him out as in any way differing from them.
Before Lebrassa’s brief introduction, Leslie guessed he was Molly’s husband.
A desire to scream aloud seized her. With an effort she pulled herself together. She must shake hands with him. For Molly’s sake she must behave just as if he were a white man.
“I’m sorry I could not come to meet you, Miss Graham,” Cooper said. “But my wife is dangerously ill.”
His words stunned Leslie.
Lebrassa’s voice reached her.
“Let me take you to the dining-room. You must have something to eat after your tiring journey.”
Impatiently she turned from him.
“I must go to Molly at once. Will you take me?” she asked, looking at Cooper.
She had a vague idea of walking up the steps and along the balcony with some one who, in stilted, foreign English was imploring her to save Molly.
Then she was taken into a lighted room.
In the faint illumination of a shaded lamp she saw a trio of black faces leaning over a bed where a girl lay moaning—two men and one woman.
Leslie had eyes only for the girl on the bed. Molly was there. Molly who had done this dreadful thing for her sake! Molly with her pretty golden hair and sweet, gentle face, staring wildly at the figures clustered around her.
As Leslie crossed the room, she felt a sudden hatred for everybody with a dark skin. Leaning over the bed, she tried to block out from Molly’s poor wild eyes those terrifying black faces.
“What are these people doing here?” she demanded, looking at Cooper.
“They are two doctors and a nurse, Miss Graham.”
“Send them away. I can manage quite well alone. I’ve nursed and doctored Molly through several illnesses.”
Leslie’s only idea was to clear the room of black people.
There was some demur on the part of the negro physicians. In an insolent, aggressive, patronizing manner they questioned Leslie’s right to dismiss them.
Pale and haughty, she faced them.
“You will do as I tell you. Mr. Cooper has put his wife in my care.”
She was of the dominant race and the room cleared.
When the doctors and nurse had gone, Leslie turned to Cooper.
“Will you see if Mr. Lebrassa is still here? And if he is, will you say I’d like to speak to him for a moment?”
He left immediately.
Turning from the bed, Leslie took off her hat with trembling hands. She was bending over Molly again, crooning little words of sympathy and understanding, when a light tap disturbed her.
Crossing the room, she drew aside the reed blind screening the doorway.
Outside Lebrassa stood. In his hands was a tray with coffee and sandwiches.
With an air of proud humility, as if he were more accustomed to be waited on than waiting on others, he put the tray on a table just inside the door.
“You sent for me, so I took the liberty of bringing you some supper at the same time,” he remarked as he put the tray down.
“That was thoughtful of you,” she said, looking at him with eyes full of gratitude. “I really wanted you to tell Mr. Cooper not to come in here again to-night. I didn’t like to tell him myself. But… but Molly will be much better just alone with me. I sent the doctors away too, and I’m afraid I offended them, but they were only frightening her.”
“I’ll see that Cooper and the rest of them keep out of here,” he assured her.
He half-turned to go, but Leslie’s hand on his sleeve kept him where he was.
“You’ll think me very silly,” she said quickly, in a nervous, apologetic tone, “but I wonder if you’d mind waiting here for a bit. I… I’d like to think you were here, that I’m not quite alone with—all these strange people.”
“I’ll gladly stay all night if it’s going to save you one moment’s worry.”
“I would like you to stay until it’s light again. Everything seems so fearfully dark, everybody so… so different from what I’ve been used to. It will be comforting to think I have a friend within hailing distance.”
In a peculiar manner Lebrassa laughed.
“Friend, you call me?”
All Leslie saw in his laughter and his remark was the fact that he had once told her he had no friends.
“Why not?” she asked. “You’ve always been a good friend to me.”
“And you to me, Miss Graham,” he answered with a touch of feeling in his usually indifferent voice.
He changed the conversation.
“But you mustn’t make yourself ill, looking after Mrs. Cooper. Let me send the nurse back.”
“Molly will be much better just with me, and I can manage quite all right, especially now I know you’ll be here. Good-night, and thank you so much.”
From sheer gratitude Leslie held out her hand.
Until now she had avoided shaking hands with him. In fact she had avoided all personal contact, except on the occasions when her sympathy had been aroused, or when sudden fear of the strange life she had been plunged into had made her turn to him.
Very cordially she gave her hand, for in her mind was the knowledge of the suspicions that had assailed her during the boat journey from the steamer.
Lebrassa took it carefully.
“This seals our compact,” he said, smiling at her, the quiet, well-bred smile Leslie now knew and liked. “We are no longer enemies, but friends.”
“What nonsense you do talk at times. We’ve never been enemies.”
“What about those bloodthirsty battles over the chess-board?”
Leslie laughed.
“Oh, those!” she exclaimed.
For a moment Lebrassa held her hand.
“Good-night, little friend,” he said, watching her closely.
Freeing her hand he turned away rather sharply and went from the room.
Once outside, for some minutes he stood, thoughtful and motionless, by the reed blind, as if on sentry there. Then, with a sudden, fierce movement, he went along to the dining-room, where Cooper was.
“Who sent that message up to Kallu?” he asked in a peremptory manner.
The question set Cooper fidgeting uneasily.
“I sent no message,” he answered.
“Who did then?” Lebrassa asked savagely.
“Yoni must have.”
“What made that woman interfere?”
“She had some mad notion that you’d gone to England to get married, and she sent word up to Nanza to that effect. He came down here threatening to expose everything unless he knew exactly what was happening. To keep him quiet I had to tell him it was Lionel de Tourville’s daughter you had gone to fetch.”
The reply left Lebrassa thoughtful.
“What made you connect Miss Graham with Lionel de Tourville?” he asked at length.
“From what you told me that night in Harrogate, and from what I learnt from my wife about her friend. I congratulate you on the clever way you got the girl out here.”
In a strangely unpleasant manner, Lebrassa laughed—a laugh that might have been caused by his minions running foul of his orders, or his own delight at having captured his enemy so neatly.
“But hate and friendship both find their end.”
Outside the Lebrassa & Cooper factory, all was quiet and peaceful in the early morning sun. Inside, the business of the day had started, and Cooper was issuing orders to the colored assistants before ascending to his office on the floor above.
When he left the store to go up the steps leading to the balcony, Yoni came out from behind the building. She followed him to the office and leant against the door, watching him sullenly.
Presently, as she showed no inclination either to speak or go away, he looked up from his books.
“Well?” he asked sharply.
“I have seen her. She has a face like a star set in the black cloud of her hair. Hands so small, fit for nothing save to hold the heart of a man. And a voice that ripples sweet as flowing water.”
“What of it?” Cooper asked impatiently.
“Then you talk of vengeance!”
“Why not?”
Contemptuously she laughed.
“Why not indeed! I’ve seen the Sultan with her. He’s her slave and servant. He! The Lord of Doomana!”
“He treats her as the white men treat their women,” Cooper explained.
“She was afraid last night. I know, for I was close by and saw them. He saw it too, and comforted her with soft words. I don’t know what was said, for they spoke in her language. And he drew her arm through his, and it might have been the earth’s greatest treasure for the care he used.”
Uneasily Cooper glanced at her, wishing his partner would come and deal with this incubus of a woman.
“As soon as my wife is able to travel we’re going up-country,” he said in a soothing manner. “She, as my wife’s friend, goes with us. One day she will stray from the camp and not return. Down here my wife’s story will pacify the white men—that her friend was lost in the forest and devoured by some wild beast. But you and I and the Sultan, Yoni, will know what really happened.”
“That she is to be taken to Kallu, to be sacrificed on the altar her father fouled?”
“Exactly.”
“But if our Sultan is going to kill her, why does he act as if he were her lover?”
“He wishes her to believe him her friend, so that she’ll have no idea what his motive really is.”
“It’s a pastime he finds pleasure in, and would have more of. I followed them last night. My night was spent in the garden watching—the garden I’ve been free to wander in these many years, but am now forbidden to enter. Why?”
As Cooper ignored the question, Yoni answered it herself.
“Because a Star has risen in the Heart of Darkness. I know. Have I not spent my life at his feet? Are there no hands good enough to serve that girl but he must wait upon her himself? Last night it was a tray set with dainty morsels. This morning when she came from that room, who went to meet her with the haste of a supplicant lover, to take her to a lounge set in the sweetest corner of the balcony, to place cushions at her head, to tempt her again with dainties, running to and fro, a woman’s slave? Who? The Sultan!”
Cooper’s temper was rising, but he was anxious to keep the peace.
“The hunt needs great skill,” he answered in a dogged manner. “The game is shy and frightened—a nervous girl feeling insecure in her new surroundings. Our Sultan is lulling her into a sense of safety before he makes the next move.”
“It is a task men love—to soothe the fears of such as she. With little hands so small and white, and eyes like twin flowers of blue set in a roseleaf, other thoughts than vengeance enter the heart of man.”
Cooper’s supply of patience suddenly ran out.
“Confound you!” he cried. “The truest word your brother spoke was when he called you a fool.”
After that, silence reigned in the office.
Presently, the sound of some one coming up the steps made him heave a sigh of relief.
With eyes that had a glint of fear in their somber depths, Yoni turned and looked at the man coming along the balcony. But she might not have been there for all the notice Lebrassa took of her.
“What’s this woman doing here?” he asked sharply, in the vernacular. “I won’t have the natives loafing round my premises.”
With a quick movement, full of grace and abandon, Yoni bowed deeply before him.
“I came to give my lord greeting,” she said.
Without taking the least notice of her Lebrassa moved away.
“Has my lord no greeting for his slave?” she asked with a note of abject pleading.
Lebrassa turned his back on her, and, picking up a budget of letters, began to open and read them.
Cooper glanced quickly from one to the other.
“I don’t think you should be so offhand with her,” he said presently in English, and with an air of diffidence.
“Since when has it been my habit to propitiate?”
“She knows too much. What’s more, she’s madly jealous of that girl.”
A look of savage arrogance came to Lebrassa’s face.
“I presume you mean your wife’s friend,” he said. “In future you will refer to her as Miss Graham, and in no other manner.”
With that Lebrassa left the office.
He went to his private apartments, Yoni following him.
“My lord is angry,” she said with a cringing air.
“I have no use for those who disobey me.”
In an anxious manner, she touched his arm.
“I hoped—” she began.
With a savage gesture, he shook her hand off.
“Don’t touch me, woman,” he cried angrily.
Alarmed and anxious, Yoni watched him.
“Is it for nothing I’ve been your faithful servant these long years?” she ventured. “I, Yoni, Keeper of the Stars, priestess of Doomana, who gave all for the sake of love.”
“Don’t talk to me of love.”
“Essel, my cousin, who spoke first of love? My lord was a good pleader in the dead days.”
In loathing he looked at her, as if the mention of the blood tie between them was more than he could bear.
Watching him in a threatening manner, Yoni drew away.
“And if I go to the white men and say, ‘Come, I will show you the Hyena, the Sultan of Kallu—the man you have looked for these many years’—what then?”
“Do as you please, only keep out of my sight.”
“My lord has no fear?”
“Fear! Of what?”
“It is he who won my heart, only to crush it. Essel, my cousin, see, I am at your feet.”
With a lithe movement Yoni was prostrate before him.
With hatred and aversion, he turned his back on her.
“Go back to the darkness that bred you. I’ve done with such as you,” he cried savagely.
There was a moan, like that of an animal in deadly pain. Yoni crept out on to the balcony and crouched there shivering in the sunshine.
“Yes, the times are changed, for better or worse.”
Roses nodded sleepily over the veranda rail of Cooper’s bungalow, saturating the air with their sweetness. Their scent mingled with that of a hundred subtle foreign perfumes until the place had the languorous atmosphere of an Eastern harem. Around the dwelling lay a wilderness of a garden—a tangle of beautiful tropical trees and shrubs, fenced with a high thorny hedge which protected from inquisitive eyes its wealth of gorgeous flowers and cool greenery.
One corner of the balcony was grown over by roses whose blossoms shut out the blazing glare and turned the spot into a cool, scented bower.
There two girls sat, one on a long cane lounge, the other on a quaintly carved native stool, a tea-table beside them.
Nearly three weeks had passed since Leslie’s arrival in Duke Town, and during the time she had nursed Molly to convalescence.
As Leslie was pouring tea, footsteps along the veranda made her glance in that direction, a rather strained look in her eyes. Since only colored people came to the bungalow, and as Cooper never returned before dusk, she feared it was one of the native doctors of whom she had seen more than enough during the last few weeks.
Coming round the corner was a big, dark man in spotless white. On seeing him an expression of relief came to her face.
“What are you doing here, Mr. Lebrassa?” she asked with mock severity. “My patient isn’t allowed any visitors as yet.”
“I heard Mrs. Cooper was able to get up to-day, and I wanted to be the first outsider to congratulate her on her recovery,” he explained, as he paused beside Molly’s chair.
“You must congratulate my nurse, not me. But for Leslie I should never have pulled through.”
“I didn’t do much,” the younger girl replied. “I just sat round and gave you bites and sups.”
Affectionately, Molly’s thin arms went round the neck of the girl sitting on the low stool beside her.
“Modesty is Leslie’s great failing, as you may have noticed, Mr. Lebrassa. Won’t you sit down?” she finished, glancing at a chair beside them.
As Molly poured out tea for the visitor, Leslie studied him.
She had seen nothing of Lebrassa since the morning following her arrival at the bungalow. He came as a welcome change after society limited to Cooper, whom she avoided as much as possible, and the two negro physicians who were rapidly becoming a nightmare.
She could quite understand Molly’s thinking Mr. Lebrassa almost an Englishman; he was so different from those others.
His voice broke in on her thoughts.
“I hear you’ve not been out since you came here, Miss Graham,” he said. “May I show you some of the local sights to-morrow afternoon?”
“I’ve promised to have dinner with Major Harding to-morrow, and I shouldn’t care to leave Molly both afternoon and evening.”
Since leaving the steamer, Leslie had seen nothing of her two English friends, but she had heard from one or the other daily. And with Molly’s convalescence had come an invitation to dine with Harding the following evening.
Her reply brought a baulked look to Lebrassa’s eyes.
His one desire was to keep Leslie away from all her own color, so that she would not be able to make comparisons that would be to his disadvantage.
However, nothing of what was in his mind showed on his face as he looked at the girl.
“I was told you couldn’t be induced to leave Mrs. Cooper, even for necessary exercise. Now I find you’re willing to desert her for a whole evening.”
“I’m the one to blame,” Molly put in quickly. “Leslie wouldn’t have gone but I made her. She ought not to desert those nice men she met on the boat. She’ll have few enough friends out here, goodness knows.”
“You were wise in persuading her to go,” he said suavely.
Then he looked again at Leslie.
“When does my turn come? When may I take you sight-seeing?”
“Any day that isn’t to-morrow,” she replied.
“What about the day after? And what would you like to see?”
“Something typically African.”
“What’s your idea of ‘something typically African’?”
“A place far away from missionaries and traders, that has never come under white influence,” Leslie answered.
“Away in the wilds, where the African can be seen in all his primitive savagery, unrefined by the least touch of civilization, where human sacrifice goes on daily in the local temple, and where human flesh is displayed for edible purposes in the market square,” Lebrassa said, continuing the theme.
But although he spoke in his usual bored manner, a twitch of amusement and teasing took the hard, set look from his mouth.
Reproachfully Leslie looked at him.
“You’re making fun of me again,” she said.
“There’s a bush village a few miles away. What about that?” Molly suggested, as she poured out a second cup of tea for the visitor.
“Do you think that will be sufficient to satisfy Miss Graham’s craving for undiluted savagery?” he asked.
“You know I don’t like savage things,” Leslie exclaimed.
Her remark silenced Lebrassa.
Presently, he rose to go.
After farewells were made, he lingered for a moment at Leslie’s side.
“Can I persuade you to accompany me as far as the gate, Miss Graham?” he asked.
Because of all his kindness to Molly, Leslie was full of gratitude. This brought her to her feet at once, anxious to comply.
“I shall be glad of a walk,” she said. “And you can tell me the names of some of these wonderful tropical flowers.”
It was pleasant in the garden. The doves were cooing sleepily in the waning afternoon sun. Butterflies, orange, scarlet, brown, opalescent green, mauve, yellow and velvety-black flitted among the drowsy blossoms. From bubbling fountains water dripped, and trees sighed languidly in a light breeze that brought a rainbow shower of petals falling slowly to the ground.
Lebrassa seemed in no hurry to reach the gate. He went along leisurely, pausing frequently, watching with veiled eyes the girl at his side, answering her question about the flowers in a manner that suggested he had a good knowledge of botany.
Eventually when the gate was reached, he came to a halt.
“Miss Graham,” he said earnestly, “will you believe me when I say that had I known six months ago what I know now I’d have done my best to stop your friend’s marriage?”
“But what could you have done?” she asked with some surprise.
“I ought to have known that a man of Cooper’s power would be able to persuade a girl of your friend’s caliber into almost anything he wished, if there was no counter-influence at work. I saw what was happening, and I did nothing to prevent it. It pleased me to see her going headlong to destruction, for I’ve a grudge against the universe, a desire that the rest of mankind should suffer a modicum of what I’ve been through in my time. But had I known she was the friend of my little friend that was to be, I’d have put a stop to it.”
There was a dreary note in his voice that Leslie now knew.
“You’re blaming yourself for something that is not your fault at all,” she said in a sympathetic manner. “And you mustn’t have a grudge against the universe because of—your color. You imagine everybody despises you because of it, and being proud, you get your oar in first, and look at everybody with the deepest contempt. The world won’t stand that sort of thing, and pays you back in your own coin. You should look more amiably at the world. It’s not such a bad place really if… if it weren’t for the mistakes that sometimes happen.”
There was a strained look on Lebrassa’s face as he watched the girl who gazed up at him earnestly and kindly.
“I’m one of the mistakes,” he said. “But so long as you don’t despise me, I’ll endeavor to mend my ways, and be more amiable to the world.”
“Why should I despise you? You’ve never given me any cause to. Now you’re standing in the sun without your hat,” she added.
As if to draw him into the shade, Leslie laid a small, anxious hand on his sleeve.
Almost boyishly, he laughed.
“The sun won’t hurt my head. That’s one of the few advantages attached to being a nigger.”
“You mustn’t call yourself that.”
“Why not? It’s what the world has called me from my earliest days. I don’t mind now, since you don’t despise me because of it. But there was a time when the word made me absolutely rabid, when it left me hovering between murder and suicide. It stirred depths in me your mind could never conceive. I’d high ideals as a youngster. That word stood between me and all of them. It was maddening to have ambitions and yet be a ‘nigger,’ with sufficient white blood in me to make me appreciate the fact in all its fullness. I——”
As if afraid of where confessions might carry him, Lebrassa broke off suddenly.
“But I mustn’t worry my little friend with the career of a ‘mistake,’ ” he continued more calmly. “For in the end I succeeded, but not in the way I’d once hoped.”
“You don’t worry me. I like to hear you talk about yourself. It doesn’t do to keep things of that sort bottled up. They’re apt to ferment and cause a terrific explosion.”
“It was so with me, little friend. I fermented, and there was a big explosion.”
In his remarks Leslie saw nothing more than a reference to the huge business he had built up in Calabar, and the fact that rumor said his private life did not bear inspection. But the more she saw of the man, the more excuses she could find for him.
She returned to the house, pitying him from the depths of her heart, guessing a little of what he had suffered.
Lebrassa was well to the fore in her mind the next evening as she dressed for Harding’s party.
In from the balcony drifted the sound of the strange negro voices. To celebrate his wife’s recovery Cooper had invited a dozen or so guests to dinner.
Leslie knew she would have to make an appearance in the drawing-room before she left. She also knew that with Molly’s recovery there would be more and more of the negro element to contend with.
Presently, erect and fearless-looking, Leslie entered the drawing-room.
A coal-black negro, male or female, in evening dress, is not a pretty sight. This the girl realized as she gazed at the assembly. Her thoughts went to Lebrassa as she had seen him the afternoon before, olive-skinned, with well-cut features, immaculate in white drill, bare-headed in the sun that marked out the silver threads in his crisp, wavy black hair, and the deep-cut lines of dissipation on his face. He had been laughing in a way she had never seen him laugh before, laughing as if his black burden had suddenly dropped from him, laughing in a way that took all the cruel look from his mouth—laughing and calling himself a “nigger”!
And she had come out to Africa thinking all educated negroes would be like Mr. Lebrassa!
As Leslie entered the room one of the black doctors crossed to her, taking in every detail of her frock, letting his eyes dwell on her slim, bare arms and slender white shoulders in a manner particularly offensive.
The girl detested him, and Molly’s convalescence had come as a blessed relief from his almost constant presence in the bungalow.
“I was wondering where you were, Miss Graham,” he said. “I have been looking forward to meeting you unofficially, and without the reserve professional etiquette demands between doctor and nurse. It is quite ten years since I had the pleasure of dining with an English lady, except, of course, my hostess. It will remind me of my college days, when, if I may say so, I numbered many charming English ladies among my friends.”
“I’m dining with Major Harding to-night.”
It gave Leslie untold pleasure to be able to say this. Those other “charming English ladies” this specimen of educated African referred to would hardly have been invited to grace Harding’s table.
“Is that not somewhat unusual?”
“Unusual! What do you mean?”
“I fancied from what I saw of English society—I may, of course, have been mistaken—that it was not customary for young ladies, unchaperoned, to go to the residences of their gentlemen friends.”
A small face, very white and cold, looked back unflinchingly at the leering, insinuating black one.
“I’m not a member of English society now, so I needn’t consider its customs.”
With that Leslie turned her back on him. She crossed to where Molly was sitting. There she stayed for a few minutes, watching the crowd of black faces that seemed suddenly to bear down upon her, bowing coldly as Cooper introduced his various friends.
With a sense of unspeakable relief she heard her hammock announced.
As Leslie was jogged along to Harding’s bungalow, she found it in her heart to wish she had taken Lebrassa’s advice and remained in England. Although Molly had warned her what to expect from the white side, she had not said what Leslie might have to put up with from the black.
She was very quiet and subdued during her dinner with the Major, so much so that he was sorely tempted to ask what the matter was.
However, during the course of dessert, she told him of her own accord.
“Major Harding, it was kind of you to ask me here to-night. Molly has a dinner party on, so I hesitated about coming here because of that. But she insisted on my coming.”
“I’m sorry if my invitation clashed with Mrs. Cooper’s arrangements.”
“It doesn’t matter in the least. I… I’d much rather be here.”
Wondering what had happened, in a very fatherly manner he looked across at her.
“Whenever you feel ‘you’d much rather be here,’ come without waiting for any invitation. I want you to look upon my bungalow as your second home, a place you can run in and out of just as you wish. Whenever Cooper has friends, you come to me. For I don’t think you’ll care much for colored society.”
Leslie’s big, beautiful eyes suddenly grew moist.
“No, I don’t think I shall,” she said huskily.
By now Harding knew what the matter was. He turned the conversation into other channels. And as they talked together, he wondered how long it would be before this foolish, quixotic little girl came and told him she had decided to return to England.
“What is the tale you are telling?”
It was midnight when Leslie arrived back at the garden gate of Cooper’s residence. Dismissing the hammock and its bearers, she went up the silent, leafy path alone. Everything around her lay still and unmoved, as if carved out in black and white marble. And the streaming flood of moonlight had swept away all life and sound.
However, as she neared the bungalow a sudden burst of laughter brought her to a halt. It announced that Cooper’s guests were still there. The fact sent her down a side path, with the idea of staying in the garden until she was quite sure they had departed.
For some distance she went along, until a wide stone seat was reached, set in a secluded corner under a trio of palms. Close by, a fountain bubbled from a moss-grown gargoyle into a deep, clear pool set round with a wealth of ferns. The soft, warm air was heavy with the intoxicating odors of a thousand tropical flowers. Occasionally the trees sighed softly as a faint, scented breeze stirred them.
It was a garden to dream in, a place of almost unearthly beauty, yet over it hung a dreadful black shadow, so dense that at times it blotted out all its charm.
All at once a slight movement just behind her made Leslie turn quickly. Coming round the side of the seat was something quite small and not in the least terrifying.
Leslie had always imagined fairies to be white, but this one was brown. Moreover the average fairy has on some sort of drapery. But this wore only a string of blue beads round its neck, and a gold bangle on one fat wrist.
Hesitatingly it advanced, very naked and very unashamed, one finger in its mouth, and staring at her with great, solemn, dark eyes.
Reassuringly she smiled. It was quite the funniest wee thing she had ever seen. Some one’s small girl-baby who had strayed into the garden.
Then to the civilized mind came the feeling it needed some sort of drapery. Leslie took a silk shawl from her shoulders, wrapped it around the tiny golden-brown statue, and lifted it to her knee.
There it stayed, still sucking a finger and staring at her gravely.
On the seat was a box of chocolates Harding had given her.
Leslie put one in the baby’s mouth. It was eaten with evident relish. Then a fat finger rubbed her shoulder in a way most openly interested and curious.
It was so absurd, having that soft little finger rubbing her as if to remove the coating of white that Leslie laughed. And her laughter made a tiny brown face screw up in a companion smile.
All at once the tinkle of barbaric ornaments made Leslie glance round again.
A woman was coming towards her, quite a savage, with nothing more than a cloth draping her, and a profusion of gold and ivory ornaments.
With a friendly smile Leslie looked at the newcomer. Doubtless she was the brown baby’s mother in search of her truant offspring.
“Is this your little girl?” she asked.
There was no reply. As Leslie had spoken in English, she had not really expected one. But the mournful expression in the woman’s great, dark eyes made her quick sympathy rise; there was so much pleading in them, such unutterable sadness.
“What’s the matter?” she asked gently.
Although Yoni did not understand what Leslie said, she heard the kindness in the white girl’s voice. And this fact brought her to her knees, pouring out a flood of wild, heart-broken, imploring words.
Leslie placed a hand on the brown woman’s shoulder.
“I don’t know what you’re saying,” she whispered in a gentle, distressed manner. “I wish I did, and then perhaps I could help you.”
It was just as well that Leslie did not understand what Yoni was saying.
The latter belonged to a race used to sharing a man’s heart with half a dozen other women. She was imploring Leslie to be merciful, to spare her one scrap of their lord’s affection, referring to her child to prove she had some claim on him, offering to be this new Star’s slave and servant if only one corner of their mutual master’s heart were given back into her keeping.
Carefully, Leslie held the solemn brown baby, wondering what the trouble was, feeling the outbreak was caused by something more than the temporary loss of the child.
As she sat there, puzzled and distressed, she heard some one coming along the path. A moment later there was a quick, fierce movement followed by a savage, guttural exclamation, startling in its unbridled ferocity.
The sound made the white woman jump up quickly and the black one crouch down, shrinking against the skirt of her supposed rival.
Leslie had always feared that somewhere in Lebrassa, in spite of education and the tone good breeding brings, the latent savage might linger. Now it seemed to her that she had never seen so much concentrated fury on any face before.
“What is the matter, Mr. Lebrassa? What has made you so angry?” she asked quickly.
Her voice seemed to penetrate his fury. He stopped abruptly. There was a tense strained feeling in the air, as if he were wrestling with a very demon of wild rage. In the passion of the moment he forgot that lack of a common tongue barred out all conversation between the two women.
“I fear I startled you, Miss Graham,” he said hoarsely, “but I thought this woman had molested and frightened you.”
Rather nervously Leslie laughed.
“She hasn’t frightened me. But you did though, coming stampeding down that path like a rogue elephant.”
Her reply said she had learnt nothing of who and what Yoni really was.
“I’m truly sorry,” he said, “but you frightened me first. I heard you come in, but as you did not appear in the bungalow I began to wonder what had happened. So I searched the garden and came upon you in this secluded corner, annoyed, as I thought, by this woman.”
Yoni still knelt by Leslie’s side, holding her frock in a desperate clutch, with wild eyes watching Lebrassa.
“She wants to tell me something,” Leslie replied. “But I can’t understand a word she says, so now you can translate for me.”
“It’s rather late to start sifting native grievances. Besides you mustn’t stay out in this treacherous night air. Let me take you indoors.”
Although he spoke in his customary bored, indifferent manner, there was an air of forced calm about him that spoke of a tornado raging within.
Sensing trouble, Leslie stuck to her guns.
“I’d like to help her if I could. She’s so upset. Do ask her what the matter is?”
Lebrassa suddenly realized that if he refused, Leslie might take Yoni up to the bungalow and get one of the servants to act as interpreter.
Yoni’s threat to expose him he had taken for what he knew it was worth, but it had never entered his mind that she would dare to accost Leslie. The fact maddened him, both by its unexpectedness and the thought of what the consequences would have been if one of the servants had found the two together. It would have swept away all he was working for—the desperate hope that Leslie might overlook his color and marry him.
Yoni’s latest escapade, combined with previous acts of disobedience that needed all his powerful brain to cope with, made him merciless where she was concerned.
He spoke to the kneeling woman, asking her how she dared disobey his orders, and what she meant by accosting this English lady.
In deadly fear Yoni whimpered out her reason. The explanation, if possible, increased his rage. His infuriated reply, with the death note in it that she had heard before for others, made her shrink closer into the sanctuary of Leslie’s skirt, quick to know that there her one hope of safety lay.
The girl noticed Yoni’s terror and her convulsive shivers.
“What have you said to make her so frightened?” she asked, laying a protecting hand on the woman’s dark shoulder.
“I was telling her to go away and not worry you. It’s some domestic grievance. Nothing you can rectify,” he replied with an air of forced calm.
“She hasn’t worried me. But you’ve made the poor thing think she’s done something terrible. Now say something nice to her.”
Lebrassa’s only idea was to separate the two. But this was not so easily done.
Leslie’s kind heart, quick to sympathize with him, was equally quick to respond to Yoni. She knew the matter was more serious than Lebrassa would have her believe. And she was determined not to let her visitor go until all fear was soothed.
“I won’t let her go while she’s so terrified,” the girl continued, “because she didn’t look like that before you came. And there’s not the least need for you to be angry with her.”
It dawned on Lebrassa that before he could part the two Yoni would have to be forgiven.
Turning to her, with forced gentleness he said a few words. They brought her prostrate before him.
The sight of a woman at a man’s feet left Leslie aghast.
“She mustn’t do that!” she cried in astonishment.
Then she was half-kneeling before Lebrassa also, trying vainly, with her one disengaged arm, to raise Yoni.
“Leave her alone, child,” he commanded in a strangled, wrathful voice.
“Help her up. Don’t stand there looking as if you expected it,” she replied with indignation.
For no reason at all that Leslie could see, Lebrassa laughed. It cleared the air. Bending down, he raised the prostrate woman to her feet.
“Now, what else am I to do?” he asked, turning to Leslie.
There was about him the air of a subdued wild beast, pleased and purring under the caressing touch of a favorite keeper.
“Tell her to take the baby home.”
Turning to Yoni, he delivered the message, together with one of his own. His words brought her kneeling at Leslie’s feet, pouring out a torrent of words.
“What’s she saying now?” the girl asked.
“That she’s your slave for ever.”
“I don’t want any slaves. Tell her to go home and put the baby to bed.”
A further word from Lebrassa brought Yoni to her feet and sent her down an adjacent path.
Leslie watched her go.
“I’m so glad you were nice to her,” she remarked. “I hate to see people miserable.”
Apparently Lebrassa had forgotten about the “treacherous night air.” Instead of taking Leslie back to the house, he started talking.
“What made you wander about the garden at this hour?” he asked.
Leslie gave only part of her reason.
“Because it’s all so beautiful. I like Africa by moonlight.”
“In my old age I find myself going back to the tastes of my youth,” he replied. “I’m heartily tired of Africa and craving for civilization. I’ve just one scheme to put through, and if I can manage that in the way I hope, I shall retire and settle down in Europe—Italy or Spain preferably, where I wouldn’t be too conspicuous, where not one in twenty would put me down for what I really am—a nigger.”
With a gentle smile Leslie looked up at him.
“Why don’t you try to forget about that?”
“I’m afraid I can’t, though I’ve sought oblivion in various ways.”
At that moment her only desire was to get his thoughts away from a subject she knew was painful.
“What scheme are you working on now?” she asked.
With veiled tenderness he looked at her.
“When it’s through I’ll tell you,” he replied. “And if it comes off in the way I want, I may forget, or rather, perhaps cease to worry over the fact that God, or more possibly the devil, made me half a nigger.”
Leslie glanced at him.
For some reason the same vague frightened feeling was upon her that had assailed her in Liverpool when Lebrassa had spoken of his rose garden that was “some distance from Calabar.”
“If we met, he and I—we alone—we two—
Would I give him one moment’s grace to pray?”
On the plateau behind Duke Town, where several official bungalows were situated, only one showed any sign of habitation. From there a blaze of light flared out, cutting like a gigantic knife into the darkness.
In this one lighted room silence reigned, a silence broken by the ping of the ever-present mosquito and the occasional clink of ice on glass. The latter sound came from a table where three men sat playing cards to an accompaniment of whiskey and soda.
Through the open door leading to the balcony came the lash of driving rain and the steady pour of the torrent rushing down from the corrugated iron roof.
Between the deals Harding looked across at his guests.
“You two will have to spend the night here,” he remarked.
With the readiness of bachelor freedom, Fletcher and Atherley agreed.
For the next half-hour the game went on without a break. One o’clock chimed as Fletcher rose to fetch a further supply of soda-water from the sideboard.
As he stood there a slight noise out on the balcony made him glance towards the door.
“Good Heavens! What is that?” he cried, darting in that direction.
His voice made the other men look round, and what they saw brought them to their feet.
A girl stood in the doorway, a little thing of mud and blood and long loose wet hair where golden stars flashed.
She stood for a moment gazing at them. Then she laughed, a wild, sweet sound, and ran toward Fletcher, collapsing just as he reached her.
“What is it, child? What has happened?” he asked hoarsely, as he caught her.
Only meaningless laughter answered him.
Over Leslie’s dripping head, he looked at Harding and Atherley.
“My God, if he has injured her! My God, if he has injured her!” he said in cold, merciless reiteration.
By now the Major’s arm was about Leslie.
“It’s all right, little girl,” he said soothingly. “You’re quite safe now. You’re in my bungalow. Don’t you remember? You had dinner here last night.”
But the wild sobbing laughter went on, the result of a brain that had given way under some dreadful strain.
Over Leslie’s sobbing mirth Atherley’s voice came.
“Let me have a look at her. Bring her in here, Fletcher,” he said, leading the way to one of the bedrooms.
He turned toward Harding.
“Go round and rouse the cook and tell him to send one of his women here at once.”
In a dazed way Harding obeyed the doctor’s orders.
Fletcher went back to the sitting-room and stood there until Harding returned. When the Major came in, he crossed to a sideboard and, opening one of the drawers, took out a couple of revolvers. One he handed to Fletcher.
“We can’t do any good here,” he said tensely. “So we’ll get along to Cooper’s place and hear what he has to say about Miss Graham’s plight.”
Presently, with storm-proof lanterns, the two officers started across the black, rain-washed plain.
Cooper’s bungalow lay about a mile away. As they neared the place, Harding stumbled over an unnoticed heap lying huddled on the ground.
At once Fletcher switched his lantern on to it.
“Something ghastly has been happening here,” he said. “Look at this.”
Harding gave an exclamation of horror.
What he had stumbled over was the corpse of a negro servant, hacked and mutilated out of all human semblance.
“What fiend’s work is this?” he asked hoarsely.
As if the sight were no new one, Fletcher gazed at the corpse.
“Let’s get on to the house,” he said in a brooding manner, “and see how much more of this there is.”
They went up the dripping, leafy alley, passing two similar heaps within the next hundred yards.
“It looks as though there had been a general massacre here,” Harding commented as the third heap was passed, “and that these poor wretches had been flying for their lives.”
Fletcher said nothing, but each corpse they came to made his face more tense and thoughtful.
The house was reached at last.
Strangely large and haunted it loomed up out of the pouring rain. A sense of dire tragedy had gripped the two Englishmen. This increased as they mounted the balcony steps and went toward the one lighted room, which lay eerie and lifeless, in spite of the gay flare of rose-colored lamps. There was no vestige of the human sounds that should have accompanied those gay lights; nothing but the ceaseless drip of rain, the mournful sough of the wind through wet trees, the echo of their own footsteps, and the soft tapping of sodden roses on the balcony rail.
On reaching the open door, abruptly they halted, aghast at the scene of desolation and destruction that lay before them.
The pink carpet was muddy and blood-stained, and covered with the marks of great, naked feet. The mirrors were smashed to atoms. The furniture broken into splinters. The whole place looked as though an army of maniacs had held riot there. There were four corpses in the room, but one lay white and peaceful among the pale pink cushions of a lounge, her white lace dress blood-stained, her shoes in a thick red pool that oozed from a dismembered, mangled corpse at her feet.
In awed silence Harding and Fletcher crossed to the lounge. They gazed down at the dead girl, noting a little wet red patch in her golden hair. Then Fletcher stooped and turned over one of the two naked bodies lying face downwards on the carpet beside the mangled remains that had once been Cooper.
As he turned the corpse over, a savage, bestial face crudely scarred and marked met his view.
“I thought so,” he said grimly.
“What?” Harding asked quickly.
“This is some of the Hyena’s work. I’ve been on his trail too often not to recognize the signs. I suspected it when we saw that first mutilated corpse outside. Now I’m sure. I should know these dog-toothed devils of his anywhere,” he said, glancing again at the savage figure at his feet.
“This rather explodes your theory about Lebrassa,” Harding commented.
“Explodes it!” Fletcher echoed. “Not unless I find his corpse hacked up in a similar manner,” he finished grimly.
Then his gaze went to Molly, lying quiet and still among the pillows so peaceful-looking that she might have been asleep. And from her his eyes wandered down to a revolver still clenched in one of the hands of the mangled heap at her feet.
“Cooper shot her, poor little woman, rather than let her fall into the clutches of these fiends. And thank heaven he did!”
Going from the drawing-room, the two officers went around to the back premises where the servants’ quarters were situated. The whole place was like a slaughter-house, not a soul left alive. Every room was trampled, mud-splashed and red-stained, as though a horde of wild beasts had burst in searching for what they could kill.
But nowhere did Fletcher find what he was looking for—some trace of Lebrassa.
“I wonder how that little girl escaped,” he remarked, taking a long shred of muslin, that matched the tattered remains of Leslie’s frock, from among the splinters of a wooden table, “for she was here, right enough.”
“I should say Lebrassa got her away and was killed in doing so,” Harding replied.
In a harsh, mirthless manner Fletcher laughed.
“Let’s go on to his factory and see if he’s there,” was all he said.
They left the bungalow and pressed on through the deserted night. No sound reached them as they went along, except the steady pour of the rain, the constant drip of the trees and the sobbing moan of the wind.
On reaching the factory all was silence and darkness. No light showed in the upper rooms, nor was there a sign of life anywhere about.
With the idea of making an examination of the lower storey, they started walking round the place.
By the open door of one of the back storerooms, Fletcher came to a sharp halt.
“Some one has been here,” he remarked. “The same little crew who were up above.”
Holding up his lantern, he showed his companion great, red marks on the white paint, where bloody paws pushed the door along on its rollers.
“And look at this,” he added on entering.
A whole litter of stores lay about, covered with ominous red marks and mud, as if a crowd had searched around hastily for certain articles, casting aside everything except just what they desired.
Fletcher surveyed the débris—scattered hammocks, waterproof rugs, silk shawls, and cases of edibles.
“It looks to me as if some one had arranged a very hurried departure up-country. And he had not intended to go alone, either. A man of Lebrassa’s type doesn’t take this sort of junk on a forced journey.”
Fletcher’s foot touched a wooden case marked “Chicken in aspic,” which had been crudely pried open and a dozen or so tins snatched out.
“If Lebrassa isn’t upstairs, then he’s at the bottom of this, and he is the Hyena.”
Harding made no comment. In silence they left the storeroom and went toward the balcony. Noiselessly Fletcher went up the stairs with his lantern well down against the wooden steps. They showed clean and white, with none of the muddy marks that had been on Cooper’s veranda, but it was quite possible the pouring rain might have washed off all traces of the marauders.
But when the covered part of the balcony was reached, he suddenly grasped Harding’s arm.
“Not so quick,” he whispered. “There’s a little matter here we’d better investigate before going any further. What do you think of this?”
He pointed to a track of muddy feet, shod ones, a solitary pair, that went along the spotless boards to the accompaniment of a trail of water, telling plainly that some drenched person had passed that way not so very long before.
“It looks like Lebrassa’s trail,” Harding whispered. “I’m anxious to hear what he has to say about to-night’s business.”
“Not as anxious as I am,” Fletcher responded grimly. “But I doubt if we shall be given an opportunity.”
With screened lanterns, stealthily the two continued their journey. Presently they turned the corner of the side where Lebrassa’s living-rooms were situated. On reaching the first of the dark windows they paused, listening for any sound that might come from the rooms beyond.
All was silent. Out from the black night came the mournful swish of sodden palm trees and the constant roar of the downpour.
“It doesn’t look as if any one’s at home,” Harding whispered.
“Exactly. But for all that we’ll be wise to announce ourselves with caution.”
Drawing their revolvers, they took a few stealthy steps forward and then halted.
In front of them the living-room door stood wide open. Into it the trail of muddy feet went. But there was no sign of their returning.
Looking and listening they peered into the darkness, but they saw and heard nothing.
“Are you there, Lebrassa?” Harding called sharply.
All was silent.
They waited for a few moments, then entered, flashing their lanterns quickly around the room. It was deserted, but all was straight and orderly.
The trail of the shod, muddy feet and stream of dripping water went across the white matting into a room beyond.
The two visitors followed the trail into a plainly furnished bedroom. There was no sign of life there either. But in one corner lay a heap of dripping, muddy clothes.
“What does that mean?” Harding asked, gazing at the pile.
“Possibly that we must look for Lebrassa in a very different guise from any Calabar knows.”
They turned to make a survey of a third chamber.
This proved to be a study, sparsely but suitably furnished. There were choice engravings on the walls and cases of classical books; and on the writing desk, a solitary white rose in a crystal vase.
English, French, German and Italian reviews and papers were scattered on the tables and couches; there was every sign of education and culture.
All this Fletcher noticed. But most of all he noticed the half-blown white rose that reminded him of Leslie, as it stood there fresh and sweet and pure, and so lonely.
As if he hated to see the blossom in the mulatto’s possession, he crossed to the desk, and taking it from the vase, held it tenderly.
“I wonder who and what Lebrassa really is,” he said. “He can be the devil incarnate, yet this room shows quite another side of him.”
In some surprise Harding was gazing about the study.
“I know nothing at all about him,” he confessed. “During my time in Calabar, he has gone his own way, ignoring both black and white, holding occasional mad orgies in that slaughter-house on the hill, which has given him an unsavory reputation throughout the Bight. I’d never noticed him much until this voyage out. And I must say his good manners and correct behavior surprised me, considering the reputation he held.”
Fletcher made no immediate reply. Thoughtfully he looked at the white rosebud he was caressing.
“I always have thought, and shall think,” he volunteered presently, “that he knows more of Miss Graham’s history and who and what her father was than the girl herself does. And I’m certain he was at the bottom of her coming out here. To-night the climax arrived. Whether Cooper endeavoring to spoke his wheel brought about the tragedy up there I don’t know. But one thing I do know—whether he wants Miss Graham for motives known only to himself, or because he’s infatuated with her, he’ll stop at nothing to get her back again.”
“That’s rather apart from your Hyena theory,” Harding remarked.
“The whole business is beyond me,” Fletcher confessed.
“Well, we’d better push on, and see what his employees have to say.”
Retracing their steps, they went along a narrow forest track which led to a cluster of native huts lying some quarter of a mile away. There, everything was in order, and no clue to the night’s happenings could be culled from the sleepy inhabitants.
Leaving the tiny hamlet, they went along the river bank, choosing a different route for the homeward journey. Presently they turned into a little, tree-lined path leading up to the plateau. For some minutes they pushed on through the driving rain, the wind full in their faces.
All at once a sound reached them of some one coming swiftly down the narrow way. Quickly the two officers came to a halt and veiled their lanterns.
By now the rain had ceased, and a fitful moon gave a silver tinge to the night.
As the two officers waited, peering intently ahead through the vague gray of mist and moonlight, out of a side track a few yards ahead a figure loomed, rendered very big and shadowy by the fog.
Coming toward them was what appeared to be a coal-black negro, naked but for a loin cloth. Over his shoulder what seemed to be a thick, folded rug was slung.
On seeing the two Englishmen, he turned abruptly into the thick growth lining the track, and went swiftly through the screening forest.
As he turned Fletcher caught a glimpse of his face. In an instant his revolver rang out, but a hand jogged his elbow, spoiling his aim.
“What are you thinking about, man?” Harding cried angrily. “You can’t go about shooting at every nigger you see.”
Fletcher, however, rushed after the negro, firing as he ran. One shot reached home, for the man’s right arm fell limp.
Facing round savagely, the negro dropped to his knees, slid his shrouded burden to the ground, and crouched over it as if to screen the contents from the pepper of bullets.
His hand went to his loin cloth. He drew out a revolver, and started firing at Fletcher. Although the shots were left-handed two whizzed uncomfortably close to the latter’s head, and a third found a home in the big muscle of his right arm.
Without waiting to load his own weapon, Fletcher dashed on, to be felled by a thunderous blow that changed his reckless fury to blackness and dancing stars. But although he was half-stunned, he clutched and held on to the bundle the negro was protecting.
“By hell! You shall pay for this,” a mad voice bellowed in English.
Through the stars and blackness Fletcher heard it, and it made him cling desperately to the blanket the dark hands tried to snatch from him.
Relief came from behind.
Before the negro could wrest his shrouded burden from Fletcher’s stunned grip, Harding’s revolver rang out.
The shot would have been fatal but for the deceptive fog. As it was, it brought the blood streaming down the negro’s face from a scalp wound. Dashing the blood from his eyes, the massive black figure broke away, leaving the bundle in Fletcher’s hold.
Harding flew after the negro. But the sounds of his progress drifted farther and farther off, until they were lost in the night.
Pausing, he listened, but no echo came from the surrounding darkness. Then, quickly, he retraced his steps to where Fletcher was kneeling, the blood streaming from his arm, beside the bundle the negro had dropped and fought over.
As if petrified Harding stopped, surprised beyond speech at the sight the lantern showed.
In the blanket Leslie lay, dead asleep—in the deep unconsciousness of drugged slumber.
His presence roused Fletcher.
“You infernal idiot! That was the Hyena. Lebrassa. The devil incarnate! And but for your damned interference I should have killed him.”
Harding said nothing. By now he had realized that what Fletcher said was true. Getting out his handkerchief he bound up his companion’s wounded arm. Then he picked up the sleeping girl.
The two continued their journey in silence. Nothing more could be done until headquarters were reached.
On arriving at the major’s bungalow all was chaos. Half a dozen sleepy servants wandered about aimlessly, unable to tell them anything except that Atherley had gone to rouse the other officers.
Presently, all wet and dishevelled, the doctor came in. His story was very simple—so much so, that when he saw Leslie still asleep among the pillows from which she had been snatched barely half an hour before, he felt like doubting the truth of his own statements.
After Leslie’s sleeping draught had taken effect, he had left her in charge of the cook’s wife while he went back to the dining-room to put away his drugs. A few minutes later he had returned to the bedroom to find the negress bound and gagged and her charge gone.
As Atherley probed about in the fleshy part of Fletcher’s arm on the track of Lebrassa’s bullet, the events of the night were told to him.
“It’s a queer affair altogether,” he said. “And the whole of this night’s work we shan’t know until Miss Graham recovers. But this final act shows how much Lebrassa will risk. He came here knowing this would be the sanctuary she would make for, and hung about outside awaiting his opportunity, relying on his disguise. What Miss Graham has said about her father proves he was a hunted man. And, in the face of the little we know, this goes to prove that Lebrassa was his enemy.”
Turning towards a side table, Atherley picked up a heavy gold armlet. Its plain surface was embossed with stars, the clasp a hyena’s head, the whole slightly twisted, as if the soft metal had been bent into some desired shape.
“You have told me that Miss Graham said when her father was ill he used to rave about a place called Kallu, which he said was not in Africa. This proves the contrary, and shows Lebrassa as something more than the Hyena.”
Atherley held the armlet towards the two officers.
“This thing,” he continued, “was round Miss Graham’s head, evidently put there by its owner. Read what’s inside.”
Fletcher took the jewel and glanced at an Arabic inscription engraved on the inner surface.
This ran:
“Essel, Sultan of Kallu, Lord of Doomana, Ruler of the Night, Heir of all Darkness.”
The captain read the words aloud.
“There’s an all-powerful sound about it,” Harding remarked. “Yet I don’t know of any such place as Kallu.”
“Nor I,” Atherley chimed in, “until Fletcher told me about it in connection with Miss Graham. Now it occurs to me to wonder if her father found the place and that was why he was hunted and I should say, finally, trapped, considering his mysterious disappearance. Now the mantle of vengeance has descended against the daughter.”
“But if Lebrassa wanted to kill her he’s had every opportunity,” Harding pointed out.
“But he may have wanted to do it in some special place and at the appointed season, after the manner of negro rites,” Atherley replied.
So far Fletcher had said nothing. He just held the armlet looking at it thoughtfully.
Now he chimed in.
“Blood feud and vengeance may have been at the bottom of it all originally,” he said, “but in my opinion Lebrassa reckoned without himself, without the white side which we know can be very dominant. A man may be as big a brute as the Hyena yet to the end there’s generally one thing that will bring any good that may be in him to the fore. And that is love.”
Pausing, Fletcher laid the armlet down on the table.
“I’ve studied Lebrassa and I know Miss Graham,” he continued. “She’s so frank and innocent and high-minded, without a thought or idea of evil in her head that she would attract him apart from the added charm of her spirituelle appearance. On the voyage it was obvious that his only idea when with her was to make a good impression. He may have started with the idea of working off some blood feud, but it ended in his own complete infatuation.”
“I’m inclined to agree with you,” Harding put in.
“I’m sure of it,” Fletcher said emphatically. “Such a love as his, the wild passion of a blood-stained, half-caste African sultan, would only fill a well-bred English girl with horror. Miss Graham had no idea what she was dealing with. The mere fact of her being civil to him would fan the spark into flame. I tried to warn her, but he was always too clever for me. Any doubts I raised he speedily lulled. To-night’s work may be the outcome of his rejected suit.”
Picking up the armlet again, Fletcher eyed it in a contemplative manner.
“It’s impossible to say how far Lebrassa’s influence extends, for this thing seems to point to his being not only sultan, but priest. In these capacities I know nothing of him. But I know him as that mysterious raider, the Hyena. What he’ll do from sheer daring and deviltry will be nothing compared to the lengths passion and infatuation will carry him. It would be better for Miss Graham had he kept to his original intention and killed her. Knowing the man as I know him, I fear he’ll get her into his possession again, in spite of all we may do.”
“What’s your suggestion then?” Harding asked. “Lebrassa’s not going to have her if I can help it.”
“We must get her out of the country the moment she’s able to travel. And in such a way that nobody except ourselves knows where she is.”
“If Lebrassa is as all-powerful as this leads us to believe, that will be difficult. He’ll have spies all around the place, watching our every movement,” Atherley commented.
Fletcher made no reply. He was looking at the armlet speculatively, as if measuring his strength against that of Lebrassa.
“Yet, I warn’d you—ah! but my words came true—
‘Perhaps some day you will find him out.’ ”
The story now goes back to the afternoon preceding the events in the previous chapter.
Along a narrow forest track leading to a native village, Leslie and Lebrassa were walking. They had come up the river by boat, landing within easy distance of the place.
The path was the merest jungle trail, twisting through aisles of strange trees grown over with bright, flowering creepers.
In course of time the village was reached. Their arrival was heralded by the barking of dogs—a continuous chorus that brought the inhabitants out from their huts.
The hamlet was prettily situated among lime, palm and pawpaw trees. And over the quaint brown huts, plantains, bananas and bamboo fluttered. Outside each doorway, over fires made between four big stones, the evening stew was being prepared. The smell was so pronounced that Leslie made inquiries about the ingredients. She heard its basis was well-hung fish, or dog, or monkey, seasoned with red peppers, with palm oil added as a flavoring.
In spite of wanting to see something really African, she was startled by the villagers’ ways. For they lived and acted in a manner alarmingly primitive.
“Well, have you had enough of the undiluted savage?” Lebrassa asked presently, as the girl’s face grew whiter and her eyes ever bigger.
“I’d no idea they’d be quite so… so primitive,” she said in a rather breathless manner.
But for his foresight the village would have been even more primitive. Lebrassa had sent instructions that the inhabitants must be on their best behavior and decently clad. As it was, there were no adults going about in a state of nature or acting in the manner of cattle.
“Suppose we go and have a look at something civilized in the shape of tea,” he suggested.
“I am awfully thirsty,” Leslie said, glad of an excuse to escape from what seemed to her a crowd of absolute savages.
Lebrassa took her to a large hut on the outskirts of the village. There was something about the place that suggested it had been furnished for the occasion. The crude contents were supplemented by a couple of comfortable wicker chairs and a folding table where a tea-basket reposed. Leaving the girl in the hut, he went in search of water fit for drinking purposes. During his absence, Leslie explored the dwelling. There were two rooms, and in the inner one was everything essential for a welcomed “wash and brush up” after a hot, stifling walk in the tropics.
Tea was set, cakes and biscuits laid out when she came through the curtain screening the inner room.
By the table Lebrassa stood, watching the kettle he had set to boil on a spirit stove.
Her entrance made him look up.
“Well, in your survey of the African at home, what impressed you the most?” he asked.
Leslie could have said the scanty clothing, but she mentioned only a secondary impression.
“That the women were doing most of the work and the men loafing about.”
Her reply brought to his face the slightly teasing look that came occasionally when he talked to her.
“But think, Miss Graham, if a man has half a dozen wives he can’t afford to keep them all in idleness.”
“Have they half a dozen wives?” she gasped.
“More—some of them. And if you care to argue the point I can prove that out here in Africa, among a race of savages, women are more highly prized and thought more of than in England.”
“I don’t quite see how you’re going to do that.”
The slightly pugnacious note in her voice made his teasing look deepen.
“In England when a woman marries, her father ‘gives her away’—not only gives her away, but very often a considerable sum of money is added to a dowry. But out here in Africa, does a dusky parent give his daughter away, much less pay to get rid of her?”
“What nonsense you talk at times.”
“It’s not nonsense. I’m arguing my case. Out here if a man wants to marry a woman he has to give some substantial proof of his affection. ‘Does this young fellow love my daughter sufficiently to give me three goats, two lengths of Manchester cloth, a case of gin and a cuckoo clock?’ the dusky parent argues. ‘If not, I won’t give my girl in marriage with a man whose affection is so limited that he won’t deny himself a few little bachelor luxuries in order to get the evidence I need.’ Now I ask you in cold, calm logic, which lover is more worthy of the name, which father esteems his daughter higher?”
“How absurd you are! Logic has nothing to do with it.”
Her indignant reply made him laugh.
“You’re trying to draw a red herring across the trail,” he said. “Logically you know I’m right. Sentimentally, of course, I’m very much off the line. A wife who comes to her husband in the recognized English way, for the great and simple reason of love, is immeasurably above one obtained in either of the two recognized African methods—buying and stealing.”
“Stealing!”
Leslie’s voice was full of horror.
“It’s not much done in these more civilized parts,” he explained. “But up-country it frequently happens.”
The kettle boiling turned Lebrassa’s thoughts to tea-making.
When the meal was over, one or two inquisitive little black faces peering with fearsome interest in at the doorway took Leslie’s attention.
“Do you mind if I give them these cakes and biscuits now we’ve finished?” she asked.
“Of course you may,” he answered quickly. “Why trouble to ask?”
With all the remnants on a tray Leslie left the hut, distributing the scraps among the children collected outside.
“There wasn’t one there as nice as my brown baby,” she remarked on returning.
“Which do you call your brown baby?” he asked.
“The one I found in the garden last night.”
“Oh, that,” Lebrassa said in a forced, offhand manner.
“None of the women here were anything like as good-looking as its mother,” the girl continued. “What beautiful ivory armlets she wore, did you notice them?”
“I don’t know that I did, specially,” he replied, with the same air of simulated indifference.
“They had stars carved on them,” Leslie persisted, continuing a subject that obviously interested her. “I once had an armlet like hers, but mine was made of gold. And inside was an Arabic inscription. A friend translated it to me and he said it meant, ‘Irena, Queen of Kallu, Daughter of the Stars, Bride of the Night, Beloved of Darkness.’ I often wonder who she was and where my father got it from. I never even knew he had it until after he was… lost.”
As Leslie talked, a strained look came and deepened on Lebrassa’s dark face. When she finished he made no remark. Instead, he sat in gloomy silence.
A faint sigh roused him. It came, not from his companion, but from the forest outside. A low, moaning rush followed. This made him start up quickly and go to the door. There was a sudden mad shriek, as if all the winds of the world were loosed. Leslie came to his side.
“What’s the matter?” she asked, with alarm.
There was no need to answer the question. The horizon was a mass of blood-red and indigo—the lurid tints of an approaching tornado.
Before he could answer her question the first great, blinding streak of lightning shot across the sky.
“We shall have to wait here until this storm passes off,” he remarked casually.
Leslie sat down again, listening to the storm that came ever closer, until the murky, thunder-ridden clouds cast the gloom of twilight over the scene.
Presently a flash of lightning and a deafening peal directly overhead made her glance at Lebrassa who was leaning carelessly against the lintel watching the storm, and apparently in no way disturbed by its violence.
“You don’t seem to mind,” she said.
“I’ve seen many of the sort. The other day you were asking for something typically African. Now you’ve got it—a typically African tornado.”
Then seeing the girl was nervous, he came and seated himself in the chair next hers.
“There’s nothing to be alarmed about,” he said in a soothing tone. “The lightning goes for the high trees, and not these little huts.”
The next few minutes there was one constant flash and roar that filled the atmosphere with the smell of sulphur and scorched wood, and left Leslie sitting wide-eyed and trembling, obviously gripping her courage with both hands.
“Leslie has Sylvia very well under control,” he remarked presently, a tender, caressing note in his voice.
The comment made her smile at him in a tremulous manner.
“You seem to remember every silly thing I say. And I have the feeling that you’re always vastly amused at my expense.”
Lebrassa said nothing, but his mouth softened until all its cruel lines vanished. He sat as if lost in his own thoughts, watching the rain coming down with a violence that blotted out the adjacent forest in a driving cloud of gray.
“I’m afraid we shall have to stay here for some hours,” he remarked presently. “There’s no chance of this clearing up just yet.”
“Hours!” Leslie echoed, and her voice was full of dismay.
“As soon as the rain lessens, I’ll send one of the villagers down to the river for your hammock. You can’t possibly walk back with the ground in the state it will be in after this downpour.”
“I’m putting you to a great deal of trouble,” she said apologetically.
He smiled, in the quiet, well-bred way Leslie liked.
“You’re my only friend,” he replied. “The first I’ve ever had. If Fate had been kind enough to provide me with an English mother I should have had a circle almost bigger than I could manage. Where my one friend is concerned, nothing is too much trouble. I’m only too pleased to do any little thing for you.”
For the next hour the rain poured down continuously, bringing darkness earlier than usual and making even more gloomy the short African twilight.
Inside the hut the shadows quickly gathered. Leslie sat watching the torrent and listening to Lebrassa’s cultured voice as he talked of a hundred and one things calculated to take her mind away from the present predicament.
The darkness thickened until only two white blurs showed up in the hut.
Presently Lebrassa rose.
“I’ll get a light,” he volunteered.
“Wait till the rain stops a bit. You’ll be wet through before you’ve gone a dozen yards,” she said quickly.
“If I wait for the rain to stop we shall have to sit in darkness until midnight.”
“You mean we shall have to stay here until then?”
“There’s not much chance of getting away before,” he said.
With that he left the hut.
Brooding on his verdict, Leslie stayed alone in the darkness, listening to the hiss of the rain, the moan of the wind through the forest, the strange creaks and sighs and distant howls that came with it, the rustle of lizards in the roof, and the scratching, tapping sounds as the long leaves of a plantain scraped against the side of the tiny dwelling.
The mingled sounds made an eerie whole. There was such an unaccustomed feeling about everything, such a creepy sensation, too, at the idea of being in this savage village miles away from the nearest white person.
The combination sapped Leslie’s nerve.
A big, indistinct blot suddenly looming up in the doorway made her heart jump in a sickly fashion.
“Is that you, Mr. Lebrassa?” she asked, a touch of fear in her voice.
“Now who else would it be?”
“You… you were gone so long. I—was beginning to get quite alarmed.”
“There’s nothing to be alarmed about,” he said in a soothing manner.
“But you were a long time. And… and all this is a bit new to me.”
“Poor little Sylvia! If I’d thought of her, I’d have given you a hint that I was seeing about dinner, and also searching round for some ‘typically African’ means of illumination.”
Now that he was with her, Leslie’s fears subsided.
“And I expect you got wet through in doing it.”
The expression of her voice was essentially feminine, chiding and concerned at the same time.
“I believe I did,” he said indifferently.
As he leaned over the table to arrange the lighting apparatus, Leslie’s hand touched his sleeve, with one of those little downward strokes by which one investigates as to the dampness of a person.
“Why, you’re absolutely soaked!” she cried, her voice full of distress.
“It won’t harm me,” he answered, in a tone that said her concern on his account pleased him. “I’m used to it. I could be out all night in this rain, sleeping on the ground in it, and feel no ill effects. Another advantage attached to being ‘a nigger’.”
“No one who really knew you would ever call you one,” she assured him.
“So you don’t think of me as one, now you’ve got to know me?”
Leslie thought of some of the specimens she had met at Cooper’s bungalow.
“Never,” she said emphatically.
On the table, as lamps, Lebrassa was arranging two half-cocoanut shells filled with palm oil with a scrap of rag floating in each as a wick. After several attempts, he made them burn—dancing, uncertain lights, each with a thick column of pungent smoke.
“How’s that?” he asked.
“It looks very local.”
Seating himself, he went on talking until the dinner arrived. A trio of native women appeared with a variety of calabashes. There were small ones to do duty as plates, and polished half-cocoanuts for glasses.
In one huge calabash a savory stew steamed. In another were pancakes made from pounded plantains fried in palm oil which gave them a curious red tinge. A third was piled high with nuts and fruit. And in a bottle that had once held trade gin was native palm wine.
“Shall we gather round?” he asked as the women left.
“How strange and nice it all looks,” Leslie remarked, as she seated herself at the table.
Over the flickering, smoking lamps a powerful brown face looked at a delicate white one.
“Now, Miss Graham, what about some chicken stew? I guarantee it’s fit for civilized consumption because I saw the ingredients put in, and dared the cook, under pain of death, to add any trifles of her own choice.”
As the meal proceeded, in a veiled way Lebrassa’s negro-tainted eyes watched the girl who chatted to him in a frank, friendly manner, often smiling at him in the way she had done when her photograph first met his gaze.
By the time dessert was reached, Leslie was thoroughly enjoying her “typically African” evening.
“We might be miles and miles away from civilization,” she said in the course of conversation. “Right in the heart of savage Africa. But I’m glad we’re not.”
“What’s your objection to the heart of savage Africa?”
“I should live in constant fear of the Hyena swooping down on me, and grilling me over a fire, or leaving me abandoned on an ant-hill.”
Her reply was the last Lebrassa had expected. An uneasy look crossed his face.
“What made you think about that man just now?” he asked hoarsely.
“All these strange, barbaric surroundings, this far-away-from-all-civilization feeling. Captain Fletcher says he tortures people for days on end. I can’t imagine any one human being acting in that manner toward another, can you?”
The strained look on Lebrassa’s face deepened.
“Everybody out here has some theory about him,” he answered. “Mine is, that he’s some unfortunate wretch suffering from a loathsome disease that is a constant torture to him, which he knows neither time, patience, repentance, nor any earthly remedy can cure, and only death relieve. In the agonies of others he may find some little relief from his own—forgetfulness of his own spectre.”
“Captain Fletcher says he does it from sheer hatred of white people,” Leslie put in.
“Perhaps. But we’ve only to refer to history to find that some of the greatest barbarians of the past, men whose names are bywords of cruelty to this day, have been afflicted themselves. Any horrible affliction, combined with inherited savage instincts and the cruelty that lurks in all things negro, would produce something on a par with the devil. Sympathy is always with the Hyena’s victims. Personally I find myself extending a little to the man himself, if the cause is what I say.”
For some time there was silence.
In a sympathetic manner Leslie watched Lebrassa, knowing his thoughts were on his own affliction—the black blood in him.
“Why don’t you smoke?” she asked presently, with the idea of getting his mind away from himself.
Her voice brought him out from his black study.
“May I?”
“Of course. Why didn’t you light up sooner?”
“I thought tobacco, combined with the smell of these lamps, might be rather too much for you,” he explained.
“I like it. It keeps off the mosquitoes,” she replied, glad she had got his thoughts away from his constant trouble.
He drew out a wet-looking cigar-case. A search for matches followed. But he could find none, the last having been used to get the lamps burning.
“I’m afraid you’ll have to endure the mosquitoes,” he said.
Leslie pointed to the soaked rag that lay, half submerged in the oil-filled shell, flickering and smoldering under the heavy pall of thick, greasy smoke.
“What’s wrong with getting a light from there?” she asked.
“There’d be too much palm-oil flavor attached to my cigar if I did!”
“I never knew anything quite so helpless as a man if a thing can’t be done in the regulation way. Why not make a paper spill?”
As he searched round in his pockets for material for making one, Lebrassa’s eyes, soft and smiling, rested on the girl.
“I shall call you ‘Little Friend of all the Universe,’ Miss Graham,” he remarked. “You seem able to ease every one’s troubles, and find a way out of his difficulties for him.”
He drew out his pocket-book, and opened it carelessly to tear out a dry leaf from the middle.
As he did so, something fluttered to the table and lay there, face upwards, staring at Leslie.
In blank astonishment she stared back at it.
Her intent gaze drew Lebrassa’s attention to the spot.
On the table a little pictured face lay; a face he had come to know very well since he had torn it out from the group, wondering who the girl was and if she would smile at him in such a friendly manner if she knew she was smiling at a “nigger.”
Starting violently, he looked across at the original.
The pleasure of having Leslie so entirely to himself, miles away from all her own color, trusting him as implicitly as if he were one of her own people, to know she was concerned about his welfare and his wants, that she understood and sympathized with him, had made him forget what secret lay hidden within his notebook.
He made a movement to pick the photograph up, but her hand was there first.
“Why! It’s like the one I sent to Molly!” she exclaimed. “In that letter! You know. The one that was lost.”
As if unable to credit her eyes, she turned it over.
On the back her own handwriting greeted her.
“It is the very one!” she went on in a disbelieving gasp.
In a dazed, puzzled manner, she looked across at him.
“How did you get hold of it?” she asked.
Lebrassa’s eyes were strained and anxious, but her blank surprise had given him time to gather an explanation together.
“I found it among some of Cooper’s possessions, that he asked me to forward after he left Harrogate.”
“But it’s out of the letter I sent to Molly! The one she never had. My letter must have got there. And he… he must have taken it!”
Lebrassa made no reply.
Intently he watched the girl, wondering if his excuse would stand, by now sufficiently acquainted with her character to know she would not question the negro on a matter nothing could rectify, or tell Molly that the man who was her husband had attained the position by stealing a letter.
All at once Leslie looked across at him.
“Mr. Lebrassa, will you do me a favor? Don’t say anything to Mr. Cooper about this. It’s too late to mend matters now. And I don’t want Molly to know either. If she did, it would sweep away the shred of tolerance that makes her life with her husband possible. Do help me to keep this secret,” she finished earnestly.
“I won’t say a word if you don’t wish me to,” he said hoarsely.
“Will you shake hands on it?”
Across the table a small white hand was extended. He drew back as if stung, watching her with an expression that was tortured.
“Can’t you trust me without that?” he asked roughly.
Leslie imagined her action had been misconstrued; that he thought his mixed blood had made her fancy he was not to be relied on.
“Of course I can,” she said, all penitence. “It’s only a silly school-boy formula.”
After that she sat back in her chair, brooding over the mystery that had been solved at last.
It was some time before it struck her to wonder why the picture should have been in Lebrassa’s possession. The shock of coming across it so unexpectedly had taken all but the fact of Cooper’s treachery from her mind.
Now other thoughts came trooping in, the principal being—why had Mr. Lebrassa picked out and kept her photograph?
On further inspection, the fact that he had done so left her with an uncomfortable feeling; a desire to get back to other people, not to be quite so alone with him.
Fletcher’s final lecture on the Batava was well to the fore in her mind. What if Captain Fletcher were right, and she wrong? What if Mr. Lebrassa were in love with her?
She tried to comfort herself with the knowledge that there had never been anything lover-like in his behavior. He treated her in a friendly, fatherly way, much as Major Harding did.
But the fact that he carried her photograph about refused to be ignored, and there came the perturbing thought that friendship might not satisfy him. He might wish for something more.
Like an appalling flood there swept through Leslie the recollection that Lebrassa was only half English, only half civilized. And in matters of emotion the savage might come to the top.
Anxiously he watched her as she sat silent and thoughtful. Every shadow and expression that crossed her face he noted, all the time wondering if his excuse would pass muster, knowing there were incidents in their first meeting that might go to disprove his explanation.
Suddenly Leslie got up and went to the door. As she did so he caught one glance—fleeting, fearsome and suspicious.
“I—don’t think it’s raining quite so much. Hadn’t we better start back now?”
There was unmistakable reserve in her voice, and a break of fear that he immediately noticed.
Crossing the hut, he took up his stand just behind her—as he very often did—looking over her head at the driving rain.
“We can’t possibly start in this,” he said.
Leslie moved to the other side of the door. With her mind full of suspicions she did not care to have him so close to her. The action made him glance at her in a sharp, anxious, almost hungry manner, suspecting that some idea of his deceit had dawned on her.
She caught his look, and it did not add to her peace of mind.
“But I’d like to go now,” she said, trying to speak naturally.
She did her best to hide her uneasiness. She feared that her having seen the photograph might make him tell his reason for carrying her picture about. Being what he was, he might not take his congé in the manner an Englishman would.
“Molly will be wondering what has happened to me,” she added as an excuse.
“Mrs. Cooper will guess why you’re late. There’s no need for you to distress yourself on her account.”
Lebrassa’s voice was very hoarse, as if he were laboring under great but suppressed emotion. Leslie, with ears now quick to mark every tone in his voice, heard it.
She shivered, so violently that it was noticeable. His hand was on her shoulder with quick, caressing anxiety.
“You’re not damp or cold, are you, little friend?”
She drew away from him and went into the room, putting the length of the table between them. There she stood watching him with frightened, suspicious eyes. Half an hour ago she would have put his touch and anxiety on her account down to friendship, but the finding of her photograph in his possession now gave all his doings another meaning.
Lebrassa followed her.
Guilt made him quick to put but one construction on her actions. A further survey of the situation had shown her flaws in his explanation—flaws through which the truth was leaking. Her avoidance and desire to escape from him made him think she had guessed he had taken the letter.
“Before God, Leslie, I wouldn’t have taken that letter had I known everything,” he said hoarsely.
Blankly she looked at him.
“What are you talking about?” she asked with undisguised surprise.
In an instant Lebrassa’s mistake flashed on him. He knew now why she shrank from him. She had guessed his reason for keeping the photograph. Now his own confession had betrayed him, had swept away the one thing he was working for—to possess her legally. On her trust, sympathy and liking, there had been a chance he might build something stronger than the friendship she had granted him. A slender chance, that his own words had swept away.
Leslie stood wondering what he meant.
His hoarse, broken words were very different from the proposal she had expected and dreaded.
“I wouldn’t have taken that letter had I known everything.”
Over and over again the sentence repeated itself in her mind.
“You mean you took that letter?” she asked at length.
There was no reply. Something gripped Lebrassa’s throat and strangled all utterance as her astounded eyes gazed at him with the truth dawning in their clear depths.
Over the flickering, curling lights he watched her in a strange, wild, hungry way.
Leslie noticed nothing of this. Other things were in her mind. Back to her had flashed some of the incidents of their first meeting, all of which went to corroborate the gradually dawning truth.
She remembered how she had been sent to his room. His start and surprise on hearing her name. How he had said he was expecting some one. His knowledge that she had come from Paris.
The full meaning of it all dawned on her at last.
He was responsible for Molly’s ghastly marriage. This man she had been sorry for, whom she had called “friend,” treated as such, and held to, in spite of advice and warning.
Why Lebrassa should have taken the letter had no place in her mind. Everything was forgotten in the flood of cold, unbounded rage that swept over her at the knowledge of his treachery and how she had been deceived.
With unveiled aversion, she turned from him, and picking up her hat pulled it on her head with hands that shook with the intensity of her anger.
There was no mistaking her action. She had done with him entirely.
She turned to leave the hut. Before she reached the door, Lebrassa was there, barring the way.
There was no need for further deception. The knowledge that he was now despicable in her sight had cracked the veneer of civilization. The savage, whom her trust, innocence and liking could keep in abeyance, showed through. A flood of wild emotion had swept away almost every English trait on his face, leaving it reckless, cruel, arrogant, full of savage love and hungry passion.
Leslie faced him, looking at him with contempt and loathing, too enraged to notice the wild storm her scorn had raised.
“Let me pass at once,” she said.
It was a haughty command, with no hint of fear or entreaty.
“And if I refuse, little white rose, what then?”
Unflinchingly she scanned the big figure barring her way.
“You will recollect what you are and obey me instantly.”
He laughed, a low, fierce laugh, with a great note of the tiger in it.
“What am I, heart’s delight? Tell me what I am. For what if I say I am the Hyena?”
At his words all color died from Leslie’s face.
Wide-eyed and in dread fascination, she gazed at him.
“A savage African Sultan with a price on his head.” “The most bloodthirsty villain in West Africa.”
With sickening force his words came thundering back to her mind. Contempt and anger were lost in the flood of deadly terror that swept over her.
She was not dealing with a civilized being, but with a savage chief, a blood-stained monster, a creature quite beyond her comprehension.
She glanced round wildly, seeking refuge from the tainted eyes watching her. As if to get away from the truth confronting her, she made a backward step. Lebrassa followed, not touching her, just driving her backwards step by step, laughing all the time, driving her backwards until she could get no further. There was a wall behind her, and this great savage thing in front watching her and laughing.
It was impossible to scream. No sound would come.
A sound came, but from outside. From the forest not a hundred yards away. A snarling, ravening sound, a howl of fiendish mirth, a shriek of mad, bestial laughter. Like a pack of hell hounds on the trail, the sound rose and fell with the swish of the rain; now, a low, blood-curdling chuckle, now a wild, hellish yell, a horrible cry, like a hundred hyenas howling. The wild sounds stopped as abruptly as they had arisen. And through the heavy roar of the downpour came the echo of running feet.
That ghastly howling sobered Lebrassa.
The wild surge of red-hot negro passion the sudden chattering of his hopes had roused died down as quickly as it had arisen. Another flood of emotion swayed him. How to save the girl now looking at him as if he were earth’s greatest horror. There was the low moan of a child in deadly fear as his arm went round her, crouched against the wall, staring at him with eyes black with terror.
Leslie was aware he lifted her lightly, holding her in a grip that took all her strength away. Then everything faded in total blackness as she lay, limp, in a dead faint within his arms.
The running feet reached the hut. Yoni loomed up and threw herself on her knees before Lebrassa, as he stood holding Leslie close against him in fierce protection.
“What treachery is this, woman?” he demanded in a savage, desperate voice.
“It’s Nanza,” she gasped. “He did not go back to Kallu. He waited here to spy. Then he sent a message up to the high-priest, Mhaki, who has come down with fifty of his followers demanding blood and vengeance. Nanza has seen you with the Star, and he knows you love her. He has told them, and they are filled with madness. They come now for the blood of the Star and the death of a Sultan who has betrayed them. Essel, my cousin, give them vengeance. What does it matter if that girl dies? But not my lord who is the Sultan and my life.”
As the gasping, breathless voice finished, another burst of fiendish laughter roused the echoes, the mad hyena’s cry that had preceded Yoni’s coming. A crowd of howling black figures dashed into the hut, wet and dripping, with the steam rising from their ebony hides; with scarred faces and thick, livid lips that snarled and showed great yellow fangs filed down to resemble dogs’ teeth.
“Back, dogs!” Lebrassa roared in some heathen dialect. “Since when has it been law to enter thus the presence of your Sultan?”
As his furious voice thundered out, to be heard above the mad babel, the wild roar died down to an ominous growl. The half-dozen savages already in the hut, stopped short, but they were pressed on by the force of those behind them.
“By all darkness! Who comes one step nearer dies,” Lebrassa thundered.
The mob stopped. Under the mulatto’s blazing eyes there was some inclination on the part of the most prominent of the intruders to draw back and give precedence to their fellows.
It was one thing to talk against the Sultan behind his back, another to meet him face to face. There was the sullen, backward cringe of wild beasts under the eye of their trainer, and the growl subsided into silence.
“Don’t heed him,” a voice from behind cried. “He would keep blood from us.”
“So, Nanza, you are here,” Lebrassa answered. “Come! Your Sultan bids you enter.”
Nanza came through the crowd and halted, facing Lebrassa with an arrogance equaling his own.
“Now, what’s all this talk about withholding blood? Since when in Kallu has your voice issued orders except of my giving?” the mulatto asked. “Remember, even the Sultan’s cousin, heir to all Darkness though he be, is not exempt from death if he dare disobey me.”
“Nor is the Sultan exempt from death, if he betrays the priests and the people,” Nanza replied boldly.
A growl of assent went up.
“In what way have I betrayed either priests or people?” Lebrassa demanded.
“Need you ask, with that girl in your arms?” Nanza replied, pointing a black finger at Leslie’s unconscious form. “Have you forgotten your oath sworn on the Altar of the Night?”
Lebrassa gave a savage laugh, arrogant and contemptuous.
“What I hold in my arms is mine. No oath broken, but what has long been the wish of the priests and the people.”
“It is no wish of theirs that you hold that foul murderer’s daughter in a lover’s embrace. Give her to us. Give us blood and vengeance. Give us the woman you hold,” his cousin cried.
With a sullen, angry roar the horde surged up to Lebrassa as if to tear Leslie from his protecting arms. Only one man touched her, and the next moment he fell under a blow that would have stunned an ox.
“That I should live to see this crew of mongrels yapping round me!” Lebrassa roared with mad fury. “Hounded on by the lash of jealousy. By one who desires to sit in your Sultan’s place.”
These were words that could reach through the blood-lust that swayed the crowd: motives they could understand. Vengeance was one, treachery another, now a third had been presented to them. Some of their fury died down, and left them waiting for explanations.
Lebrassa was quick to seize his opportunity.
“But do I hold the child of that murderer?” he asked. “Who has said so? Only Nanza. And why?”
Now the mob was all attention, hanging on to his words, awaiting his excuses.
“Why do you listen to the voice of jealousy?” Lebrassa continued. “It was said in Kallu, ‘The Sultan tarries. Why is he so long away from his people?’ A message was sent up, ‘Wait’, but it did not say for what. There is one who sits in the Sultan’s place when his dogs rest after hunting—one who fain would sit there always. He must plot mischief, he and a jealous woman. A message was sent up to you, ‘The child of the murderer is found.’ Who sent it? Not I. Yet it was a true one. And another had been found also.”
Lebrassa paused for a moment, and his arms took an even firmer hold of the girl who lay limp within them.
“Long has it been asked in Kallu, ‘Why have we no Queen?’ ‘Why does not the Sultan give us an heir of his own breeding?’ Why? Because no Star had risen in the Heart of Darkness. In Kallu there was no woman as beautiful as Irena, Bride of the Night. None fit to take her place, to be wife to her son. Your Sultan was ambitious. He would give even greater beauty than Irena’s to shine on the Throne of Night, to be a mother of kings. There was a hunt, a hunt of vengeance; a fresh rumor had come as to the whereabouts of the child of Irena’s murderer. On the trail of blood your Sultan found a love scent. A Star rose in the Heart of Darkness. It was a dual hunt that kept your Sultan from Kallu—love and vengeance. And in the end, both were successful.”
Lebrassa stopped for a moment, his gaze on the small head pillowed against his chest.
With staring eyes and interest on their fierce faces, the wild crowd waited for him to continue.
“Vengeance proved more easily wooed than love. The first was soon completed, the other far from finished. What is the best guard for a woman who needs safe keeping, whose life is forfeit for her father’s sins? A husband who loves her and is jealous of her beauty. A husband was found for the daughter of that foul murderer. At my order my servant Cooper married her. But he does not know who she really is, the woman who is now his wife. I had to find a keeper for her, for the love hunt was far from finished.”
Smiling fondly Lebrassa laid a big, brown hand on Leslie’s head.
“Is it the way of a Sultan to turn back from love not attained?” he asked proudly. “It was but a small Star I sought, yet it would have none of me. I laughed and waited. It was a sweet game over which men love to linger, when the end is sure. A small Star against the Ruler of the Night! I spread a net for it, into which the little feet of innocence strayed. My Star would have fled, but too late. I had caught it. Nanza can tell you more of my snare, but in it he would have I was trapping vengeance, not love. Shall we say—for reasons of his own?”
As if to let his question sink in, Lebrassa paused again.
“For has it not been whispered that he would remain my heir now and forever? Say, dogs, had you slain me by the words jealousy had whispered, who would be your Sultan now? Nanza has no wish for me to marry. For my son would be the heir, and not himself. It is well then if I am slain. Who is to be believed? The one who desires to sit in the Sultan’s place, or he who has led you to victory these twenty years? He or I? Love is here in my arms. The object of our vengeance is in charge of her guard, Cooper, whom you know better as Bhessu, my servant.”
There was no mistaking who had the heart of the crowd now. Lebrassa knew his audience and played on it, swaying it with the gift of negro eloquence, combined with English reason.
A wild howl went up, very different from the first that had greeted him. Half a score of hands seized Nanza as he stood trying to make himself heard, bore him backwards and would have had his life. Over the babel Lebrassa’s voice came thundering.
“Back, dogs, let him have his say. Do not let my words, like his, sway you unduly. Maybe there is something lacking in my explanation. I would answer all the charges he has to bring against me.”
The dusky horde surged back immediately.
“What he has said is no proof,” Nanza yelled. “When only the Sultan knows the truth, it is easy for him to say one woman is the other.”
Fifty voices answered him.
“Proof! What need have we of proof? The Sultan’s word is enough.”
Then a man who had not yet spoken put in a word. He was a negro of about sixty who appeared to weigh judicially all that had been said. Lebrassa’s desire that Nanza should have his say had had a more favorable effect on the high-priest, Mhaki, than anything that had yet passed.
“Nanza has spoken truly,” he said quietly. “What the Sultan has said is no proof. It is easy to pass off one woman as the other. With love deceit enters into the heart of man. I’m not of the rabble to be swayed by words and references to fights that have gone before. I am a priest of Doomana, a faithful servant of the Night-God, of the murdered Queen Irena, of the Sultan Essel too, if he give but one proof to his statements.”
“Then, Mhaki, no one can give better proof than you. For no one here but you saw my mother’s murderer in his prime. Now, what was he like, that man you saw nearly twenty-three years ago?”
As Lebrassa put the question he was busy drawing the pins from the coils of hair about Leslie’s ears.
“He resembled Irena’s consort,” Mhaki replied. “So much so that he might have been his brother. He was a tall man, with hair of gold, and eyes gray as a night cloud.”
“He was as you say, Mhaki, a man who might have been my father’s brother,” Lebrassa said, a bitter note in his voice. “Now, who has seen Cooper’s wife? Come, Nanza, you’ve played the spy. Speak up, and tell us what she is like?”
There was no reply.
Lebrassa laughed.
“Is there any one here who has seen her?” he asked.
Yoni rose up from Lebrassa’s feet.
“I give testimony to my lord. I, Yoni, Keeper of the Stars, priestess of Doomana, who caused all this, and put jealousy into my brother. I have seen her. She has hair of gold, and eyes that are as the twilight.”
“There’s the proof you desire, Mhaki,” Lebrassa cried. “Now, see this!”
With a quick movement, he tore off Leslie’s screening hat. A shake brought her cloud of black hair sweeping over his sleeve. Then he held the girl at arms’ length, where she lay gazing around with big, dazed, purple-blue eyes.
There was a moment of astonished silence.
“She is, indeed, a Star,” Mhaki said in an awed voice. “Never have I seen a girl so beautiful.”
He made as if to finger Leslie’s silky hair, but Lebrassa drew her quickly back to his heart, pressing her against him with fierce tenderness and savage jealousy, away from the black paws that would have touched her.
“A Star for me alone, and not for you and your color to touch, Mhaki,” he answered. “If love were not in my heart, your lives would pay for this night’s work. Now, I will crown her, Queen of Kallu, a gift from the Sultan to his people.”
The project met with a roar of assent. Lebrassa stood in the midst of a crowd that fawned round him in the manner of dogs welcoming a long-absent master.
The excitement of victory, coming after the tearing strain of the last few minutes, when only he stood between Leslie and fifty fiends thirsting for blood and vengeance, made Lebrassa, for the moment, forgetful of everything except that she was safe.
As he stood surrounded by the fawning crowd Nanza slipped out of the hut. For he knew that death would be his portion once the Sultan remembered his treachery.
The savages were too busy to notice Nanza’s stealthy exit. All eyes were on the two in the middle of the hut, eager to miss no detail of the impromptu crowning of their Queen.
One of the mulatto’s arms was bared to beyond the elbow. On his massive brown limb was a circle of gold, embossed with stars. This Mhaki was unclasping. When the armlet was off he gave it into Lebrassa’s keeping. The latter took it and placed it on Leslie’s head, drawing strands of her hair through it to keep it in position. And there it gleamed—a band of golden stars set in a cloud of black.
The curling, smoking lights played on the wild figures who watched him as he stood holding a white-faced girl close against him, gazing with savage arrogance over her star-crowned head.
“Is there no greeting for my Queen?”
Fifty voices answered him.
“We are star-worshipers, we spawn of the night. In Kallu there is always welcome for such as she.”
There followed the wild, tribal war-cry—a long-drawn howl of hyena laughter, so weird and blood-curdling that it reached Leslie through her stunned terror.
Involuntarily, she clutched Lebrassa’s wrist.
“Enough, you are frightening her,” he cried. “She’s not used to the music of my hunting dogs, this little Queen of mine.”
Then all at once, Nanza’s absence dawned on him.
“By all darkness! That traitor has slipped away!” he thundered.
It needed but a minute to convince everybody of the truth of this statement, and growls of anger arose from the savages.
“He will do no harm as yet,” Lebrassa said in a quick, compelling voice. “Saving his own life concerns him more now than betraying us. But we must act quickly.”
A few sharp orders were issued.
The hut cleared.
Presently there remained only Yoni and the two who, not an hour before, were seated amicably together at dinner.
The negress was ordered out and told to wait within earshot until called. When she left, Lebrassa drew up a chair and put Leslie into it. For the girl drooped against him, so weak and limp that he knew she would have fallen but for his arm.
Once she was seated he stood watching her, as if hoping for some word. There was a tired, strained look about him; a lot had been lost and gained within the last hour.
Presently, as the silence remained unbroken, he leaned over her and took one of her cold, trembling hands into his.
“Say something to me, little white rose?” he asked with pleading. “Say I’ve deceived you. That you hate me. Anything. Don’t sit in silence as if no words could express your contempt and my baseness. I deceived you. But is it quite unforgivable? A small, white hand reached down to me, through the blackness and the blood, to the depths of a hell I’ve been in these last twenty years. If I try to keep it, am I wrong?”
Watching her anxiously he paused, but if he expected an answer he was disappointed.
“I’m hungry after white innocence and purity, nobility and gentleness, things that have been denied me. I would have them for my own, to hold them close against me. You are my treasure, my precious angel, as far above me as the stars. I would have won you honorably if I could, Leslie, but fate was against me. You know me now for what I am—a creature black and blood-stained, who has been the sport of the gods since birth. A constant black horror was born with me, one that can drag me down to the level of the beasts, with which I must move, eat and sleep to the end—a horror that I see reflected on every white face, that neither time, patience, money nor penitence can take from me. That horror has risen in all its ghastly blackness between me and every hope, ideal and ambition I may have cherished, and it has hounded me to hell in search of oblivion. And I found oblivion—at last. At last I found the Waters of Lethe. Where do you think, Leslie?”
For a moment he paused as if hoping for some word from her. But only the sigh and the sob of the rain answered him.
“I found oblivion. Not in the depths I’d groveled in so long. But high above me, in the stars. For you, Leslie, smiled on me and were my friend, treating me just as if I were as other men. You forgot what I was. And I forgot also, because you did. Forgot, and when you had gone, remembered a thousand times more. Yet I would hide the blood and blackness from you. Would deceive you. I was thirsty for whiteness after my life in hell.”
He raised her cold, shaking hand to his lips, kissing it tenderly.
“It is such a little hand, this of yours,” he said, holding it carefully in his big brown one. “Yet it eased the yoke that held me. It brought me back to what I might have been. This little hand, trembling in my own. May I keep it, Leslie?”
There was no reply. Only her hand trembled more than ever.
“Have you nothing to say to me, little friend?” he asked with abject pleading. “Not one word. I dare not ask for love, but just a little toleration and pity, a little of the old sweet sympathy. I could give so much in return—love, worship and adoration. Don’t make an even greater savage of me, Leslie. Be something more than a Sultan’s captive bride. Be my little angel of pity.”
For some moments he watched her hungrily.
A white-faced girl looked back at him, speechless and in dread fascination.
“Haven’t you one word for me, darling?” he begged.
Still there was no reply.
For a moment longer he waited. Then he went from the hut, leaving Yoni on guard at the door.
“My soul seem’d numbed by the blow,
A faintness followed, a sickly swoon.”
When Leslie returned to consciousness she seemed to be in quite a different world—a world of darkness, damp and chill, full of wild howls and animal snarlings, and over it all a savage voice was thundering.
Fearsomely she glanced round, the terrors of a ghastly nightmare upon her, not yet awake to the events of the evening. Above her head a voice was speaking, full of triumph, arrogance, and barbaric pride.
It roused her to a further review of her surroundings.
She became aware of a big brown hand holding hers, pressed close in fierce possession. In a dazed way, she studied it. No reassuring ring of white flesh appeared beneath the wet, blistered cuff. This caught her attention. Many men had brown hands, quite as dark as this one. Captain Fletcher had, in fact. Yet on his arm the brown stopped all at once, just beyond the cuff, and the white began. But on this arm the brown did not stop. It went on and on, until it was lost in the depths of the sleeve.
Leslie’s eyes went to the swarthy, powerful face above her head, and stayed there in a puzzled fashion.
It was like a once well-known scene that had been devastated by some wild flood, vaguely haunting in outline, yet changed almost beyond recognition: all the old familiar landmarks had been swept away and unknown signs had taken their places.
A sickly shudder ran through her. Through the numbness that had followed her brief swoon, came a sudden dawning of the terror which had been with her before a merciful unconsciousness had seized her—when the knowledge of who and what Lebrassa really was had thundered down on her.
She stayed frozen with the horror of recollection, gazing at the wild figures around her, hoping they would not go and leave her quite alone with him.
Her strained eyes watched them as they slipped away one by one, to be swallowed up in the night.
When Lebrassa put her into the chair, Leslie was limp with terror. As from a long way off she heard his voice talking in a manner that filled her with even greater fear.
Then presently, mercifully, he was gone too.
When he left the hut she got up. With uncertain steps she crossed to the door, looking up at Yoni in a wild way.
“Let me pass. I want to go at once,” she said.
Yoni looked back at her, but she made no sign of moving from the narrow doorway.
Leslie tried to push past her, but it was no use.
For the first time the full sense of her captivity dawned on her, and with it some of the cunning which is the heritage of all trapped weakness.
Going back to the chair, she sat there trying to think of some means of getting her jailor away before Lebrassa returned.
Presently she got up, and taking one of the lamps went into the inner room.
She returned, sponge in one hand and empty water jug in the other. By pantomime she pointed out to her jailor that she wanted to wash but there was no water.
Yoni shook her head and refused to move. Leslie smiled at her—a smile that got no further than her lips—and pointed to a stream of water pouring off the roof not more than a couple of yards away, which Yoni could reach by just moving from the door.
As the negress took the jug and leaned across to hold it under the stream, Leslie darted past her.
Yoni dropped the jug and made a grab at her, seizing whatever she could grasp. A brief struggle ensued. Then a wave of fear went over the negress, for the girl suddenly collapsed in her grip.
Lifting her charge, she carried her back into the room, and laid her in the chair. Then she stood watching Leslie’s white, unconscious face, chafing her cold hands, in an access of mortal fear as to what her fate would be if the Sultan returned and found this cherished being injured.
The chafing had no effect. Yoni tried forcing palm wine between the girl’s slightly parted lips. But she could bring no flicker of life back to the heavy, black-fringed lids, no glimmer of returning consciousness to the small white face pillowed on the cushions.
The case was beyond her. She must send and let the Sultan know. Perhaps his voice and arms would coax this strange Star back to life.
For a moment Yoni hesitated, then she went quickly from the hut.
She was not gone two minutes, yet, when she returned, the hut was empty!
The discovery left her petrified. To her came the knowledge of what her fate would be when the Sultan returned and found out what had happened. The thought made her run from the hut towards the sheltering forest.
Then there were two women lost in the night, flying through rain and storm, away from the fate that would be theirs if they fell again into the hands of the Hyena.
“The wide gulf that parts us may yet be no wider.”
Molly stood by the drawing-room door of her bungalow, gazing across the veranda into the pitch-dark night, listening to the heavy thunder of the rain.
Presently her anxious eyes came back from the shrouded garden to the man sitting by the lounge she had just vacated.
“I do hope Leslie will be all right,” she said.
Getting up, Cooper came to her side, gazing at her with a curious mingling of dumb pleading and conscious possession.
“She will be all right, my dove. Lebrassa will see to that.”
“But I wish she was back. It’s after eleven.”
So saying, Molly turned away from him, and went to a table at the far end of the room. There she stood, turning over the many magazines listlessly.
Presently she picked out one and went back to the lounge. As she seated herself she tried not to see the blackness of the hands that arranged the cushions for her with clumsy tenderness. Then she stayed, not reading, but watching the man beside her.
All at once there came a sound like the rush of many naked feet along the balcony.
As Cooper started up, a crowd of wild figures loomed in the open doorway, wet and steaming, with the rain dripping from their wool, their scarred, naked bodies gleaming and writhing.
They burst into the room, trampling with great, muddy feet on the dainty carpet, knocking over half a dozen chairs by the impetuosity of their entrance.
In a rush of fear, Molly clutched her husband’s arm. One of his hands went to his hip pocket and stayed there.
The intruders stopped short, awed, not by the negro’s action, but by the strangeness of their surroundings. To savages, accustomed only to the crude appointments of a mud hut, that drawing-room with its rose-painted piano, its gilded, satin-covered furniture, soft silken draperies, flowers and cushions, was a revelation.
“Who are they? What do they want?” Molly gasped.
Cooper pushed her back on the lounge, standing between her and the savages.
From the wild rabble Mhaki came forward.
“What are you doing here?” Cooper demanded in anger and astonishment, thinking the high-priest had come, as he did occasionally, but unattended, to see Lebrassa.
“What are we doing here?”
A mocking chorus answered him in the dialect he had used.
“We have come for the woman who is your wife,” the chanters continued. “She is to be wedded to another whose name is Death. Full long has Kallu called for vengeance. And we are thirsty after long years of waiting.”
The answer infuriated Cooper.
“Get out of this, you mad, gin-drinking fools,” he bellowed. “It’s just as well for you I’m here and not the Sultan, or your lives would be the price of this piece of drunken folly.”
A roar of brutal laughter greeted him.
Its unbridled ferocity made Molly clutch his arm again. Her face was pressed against his side. In fear his blackness was forgotten; she remembered only the fact that he was her husband and her natural protector.
“Why, Bhessu, the Sultan sent us,” came with jeering laughter.
“The Sultan sent you!” Cooper repeated. “What madness are you talking?”
Over the jeers and laughter Mhaki’s voice came.
“There’s no need to mock at him. Our Sultan said he did not know. And he has been a good keeper. Come, Bhessu, let us have that woman, your wife, the daughter of He-who-slew-Irena. The Sultan has sent us for her.”
“It is false,” Cooper roared. “The woman you want is with him.”
“Hark to him! Another traitor,” the mob yelled.
By now Cooper’s anger had died down. In its place had come a strained, thoughtful look.
“I am no traitor,” he said quietly, “but a faithful servant of the Sultan. What fool’s talk is this, Mhaki, about my wife being the daughter of He-who-slew-Irena? What did the Sultan say?”
Very briefly the high-priest gave the gist of Lebrassa’s statements.
“Come now,” he finished. “Let us have the woman. The Sultan desires both of you, and there is no time to waste.”
Calm and ominous, Cooper’s answer came.
“There is still time to talk. It is false, all this the Sultan has said. I swear by all Kallu holds sacred. He has lied to you through love of the woman he held, and has put the burden of vengeance on another. Ask Yoni, to whom in my faithfulness I would not listen. Ask her, and she will tell you.”
“He speaks against the Sultan. His life for it,” the crowd howled.
Cooper’s hand came from his pocket to rest on the golden head pressed against his side. He stayed, waiting for the mob to rush.
Over the wild yells Mhaki’s voice came, calling for silence.
“Love has made you crazy, Bhessu,” he said. “Yoni gave evidence in favor of all the Sultan said. And I can see for myself this woman is the one. For she has the hair and the eyes of her accursed father.”
In a strained, dogged voice, Cooper answered.
“Let me have my say. Then if you still think this woman is the one, you may take her. Hair and eyes, what proof are they? May not a child favor one parent and not the other? Perhaps the mother of your Sultan’s bride had hair like the night and eyes of the deepest blue, and it is the mother and not the father she favors. What Nanza told you is true. And I can prove it. How many years is it since the Queen Irena was found murdered on the Altar of Night? Twenty-three. And it was proved that he who did the deed was not then married. If your Sultan speaks the truth concerning these two women, how is it that my wife is nearly twenty-eight?”
Scoffing laughter greeted this statement.
At twenty-eight a negro woman is old. To Mhaki and his following the girl Cooper was defending looked still in her teens.
With wild mockery and jeers the crowd surged up to him, to tear Molly’s hands from their clinging, terrified hold.
There was a gasping scream as her face was hidden against her husband’s coat to shut out the swarm of naked, mud-splashed, bestial figures.
His hand that had lain loosely closed on her soft hair, moved slightly. A glint of steel showed pressed on to gleaming gold. And with it came a revolver shot.
“The Sultan lies,” Cooper bellowed. “I will not give my wife to such as you.”
Molly sank back on the silken cushions, an ominous little red patch oozing through the strands of her shining hair.
Over the baulked howls of the savages came the sound of five more revolver shots fired in quick succession. Then all was silent except for a horrible, soft, hacking sound.
On the lounge Molly lay quiet and peaceful, her brocade shoes in the blood of the mangled heap at her feet, that had once been her husband.
He had given her the gift she most desired—death. A gift that had cost him his life.
The savage horde went from the room, thirsting for further slaughter, maddened by the vengeance that had been taken from them.
Yet in Mhaki’s mind a doubt lingered.
“Ah me! we believe in evil,
Where once we believed in good.”
The first puff of cool afternoon wind came sighing up from the distant sea, stirring the creepers on Harding’s veranda. As the cool breeze moved the heated air there was a slight stir in a hammock slung across its shadiest corner. At the movement, a washed-out English nurse, sitting close at hand, glanced at her patient—a girl so thin and wasted that she appeared to leave no impression on the pillows supporting her.
Nearly a month had passed since Leslie had come, soaked and blood-splashed, to Harding’s bungalow.
The happenings of that night stood out like a ghastly nightmare—a chaos of blackness, wild wind, driving rain, mad laughter and blood. She had stumbled on, lost in the blinding darkness, battling against the raging storm in a maze of trees and thorns and mud, with the feeling of some Terror close behind her; so close that the fact froze out all thought of the elements she was battling against with the mad haste of a hunted thing.
Out of the black night and driving rain a voice had called her by name.
“Leslie, my darling, where are you? Oh God!” it had cried again and again.
The sound had made her rush into a deep stagnant pool, and stay there, crouched up to the neck in foul water, heedless of the swarm of great leeches that had fixed on her, screening her face with the blackness of her hair, lest its whiteness should betray her: in shivering, deadly terror lest the frantic thumping of her heart and her own sobbing, panting breath should be heard above the howl of the storm.
How long she crouched there listening as Lebrassa searched round she did not know. Then he had gone, still calling frantically, until his voice was lost in the night.
Creeping out from her refuge, she had gone on and on and on, her only desire to reach whiteness and light again.
She had found Molly’s house at last.
Light was reached. Then—!
Something must have snapped in her head, for she woke up in a strange bedroom with a shriveled, dried, grasshopper-looking little man sitting beside her.
In his patient, as well as shock and strain, Atherley had had to fight against malaria fever. Yet, with skilful nursing and in the care of a doctor who knew every turn of the treacherous tropical disease, Leslie was slowly creeping back to life.
Fletcher and his brother officers had scoured the country. However, they had found no trace of Lebrassa, and learned nothing of him except that the morning after the massacre in Cooper’s bungalow, a couple of Mohammedan traders had called at a medical mission about twenty-five miles away. The younger of the two, a giant of a man, had a broken right arm, the result, so he had said, of his companion’s revolver going off accidentally.
Beyond a doubt the man was the Hyena.
When Leslie returned to reason she had told all she knew of that night’s happenings, and there the matter ended.
On the river bank the Lebrassa & Cooper factory lay closed and silent. On the outskirts of the settlement the bungalow stood empty and lifeless, overgrown and entangled, its tragedy sleeping quietly in the embrace of black earth. And on the balcony of Harding’s house lay the girl who had escaped from that night of rapine and slaughter.
Presently the sound of men’s voices drifted along with the sighing wind. A couple of soldierly figures came up the balcony steps. Harding went on, round the corner to the shady spot where Leslie’s hammock was slung, but his companion remained at the head of the stairs, in a state of obvious fidgets.
When the Major appeared round the corner, a feeble smile greeted him.
By Leslie’s side, he came to a halt, patting her worn face tenderly.
“Well, how’s my little girl?” he asked. “Feeling equal to a visitor?”
Leslie guessed who the visitor was, and a faint tinge of color came to her white cheeks.
“If it’s Captain Fletcher, I’d like to see him,” she said faintly.
So far she had seen no one except the nurse, doctor, and her host.
Perhaps Fletcher had never felt so clumsy and nervous, or so speechless, as when, a few moments later, he sat by Leslie’s hammock bereft of the support of his friend and the nurse, who had withdrawn, leaving him alone with the patient.
He was not used to feminine society. Most of his adult life had been spent on the edge of one of the wildest parts of the Empire, where from year’s end to year’s end he never saw a white woman. Now, as he watched the girl among the pillows, he felt keenly the loss of the gift of free and easy conversation.
However, Leslie broke the silence before it grew strained.
“Captain Fletcher, I can never thank you enough for all you did—that night. I know you were wounded in saving me. I’m awfully sorry you’ve been hurt, because it… it was all my fault.”
Fletcher could answer remarks, even if he could not broach subjects of his own.
“Some one must have been exaggerating about my injuries,” he said. “I was out and running about the same day. So you see I couldn’t have been seriously damaged. And how do you make it out to be all your fault?”
“If I hadn’t told that—that dreadful man what I overheard you saying that night in the Harrogate hotel, all this would never have happened.”
No one knew better than Fletcher what had been lost by that piece of thoughtlessness, but he had always kept to himself the fact that Leslie had inadvertently told Lebrassa he was under suspicion. Now, his one idea was to soothe the girl, never to let her know the extent of her folly.
“You foolish child,” he said gently. “Lebrassa would have suspected the moment he saw me. What you said made no difference at all.”
Leslie cast a quick glance at the sun-bitten face beside her.
“It’s very kind of you to say so,” she said humbly.
“I mean it,” he replied emphatically. “He knows I’ve been on his trail for the last ten years. If you must know, that’s really my job. Sort of secret police business. Sleuthhounding round for any clue that may lead up to the catching of that villain.”
His words comforted Leslie a little.
“He took my letter,” she volunteered. “The one Molly never got, that made her marry Mr. Cooper. I can’t think why he did it.”
Fletcher agreed it was a mystery.
“He told me all about the Hyena,” she went on. “I’d no idea there really were people of that sort. So different from what they seemed… so absolutely dreadful.”
“Lebrassa has deceived most people, many of them men twice your age and used to dealing with all manner of villains. So it’s not very surprising if he succeeded in your case.”
“I thought you were not just, not fair,” Leslie confessed, “and all the time you were right. I shall never forgive myself for not listening to you from the first.”
The arrival of Atherley with “Time’s up, young man,” resulted in the routing of Fletcher.
However, he did not go very far away. Only round the corner to a spot where Harding was sitting.
Presently Atherley joined the two. Then over whiskey and soda, they listened to Fletcher’s plan for getting Leslie out of the country in such a way that Lebrassa would have no inkling of where she was.
The doctor, whose leave was about due, was to take her, and Fletcher insisted the financing of the affair was his concern alone.
The plan of campaign was as follows.
From Calabar River it was possible to get to another river, Rio del Rey, about forty miles away. At the trading stations there, steamers called at stated times. By one of these Atherley and his charge would proceed to the island of Fernando Po. An express German steamer was due there within the next fortnight. By it the two would proceed to Hamburg, and on by rail to some place on the Riviera until Leslie was fit to take up life again.
“And then?” Harding asked, as Fletcher finished.
“Then I expect she’ll go her own way,” the captain answered in a gloomy manner. “Because none of us has any legal claim or hold on her.”
“You great overgrown ass, why don’t you ask her to marry you?” Atherley put in.
For a moment it looked as though Fletcher would resent the question.
“I’ve no reason to believe she even likes me,” he replied stiffly. “To ask her now when she’s under an obligation to me would be taking a mean advantage. The child is absolutely penniless. She might feel bound to take my offer—no matter what her own feelings were—as the only possible way of paying off her debt.”
Harding’s voice eased the situation.
“I’ve a brother-in-law in the Portuguese wine trade. If I wrote to my sister and asked her to take Miss Graham as her companion, I know she would. Then at least we should know where the child was.”
“I say, that’s awfully decent of you,” Fletcher said, relieved.
During the next week the three men devoted a good deal of time to the mechanism and working of the doctor’s launch. Dispensing with the negro crew, the little craft took short runs in the cool of the afternoon with these three budding engineers and Leslie as passenger.
On the river bank the usual crowd of loafing negroes watched their exit and return.
One day the three Englishmen and their solitary passenger set off as usual. However, they failed to return at the customary hour. This fact appeared to interest a couple of the negroes, for they waited until darkness came.
Night fell, but there was no sign of the truant launch.
Presently, out of the dark forest, came the wild roll of a native drum with curious little intermittent taps. Another answered it. And still another, from farther and ever farther away, repeating the rhythm until it was lost in distance.
However, before the news of Leslie’s departure reached Lebrassa, she was lying under the awning of a steamer in Rio del Rey, waiting for the evening tide to bear her down the river and away from Africa.
By her side Fletcher was sitting.
Now that the actual parting had come he was more tongue-tied than ever. On Leslie, too, had fallen a cloak of silence.
Strained and anxious, she was watching the man at her side.
“Captain Fletcher,” she said presently in a nervous voice, “I can never thank you for all your kindness to me.”
“That’s nothing,” he said hastily. “If you’ll drop me a line occasionally I shall be more than repaid.”
“Of course I shall write to you.”
There was another pause, broken this time by the “All ashore” bell.
“Well, I must push off,” Fletcher said, getting to his feet.
Leslie got up also.
“You will keep out of the way of that dreadful Hyena, won’t you?” she asked anxiously.
He took the hand she was offering, holding it carefully.
“Don’t you worry about that,” he said cheerfully. “Lebrassa will make it his business to avoid me. Now, good-by, and take care of yourself. And… and may I come and see you during my next leave,” he stammered.
“If you think such a foolish person is… is worth keeping in touch with,” she said shyly.
“Worth keeping in touch with!” he echoed.
Then feeling himself on the edge of a proposal, hastily he shook the girl’s hand and turned quickly away.
Presently he was gazing longingly after a steamer that was disappearing round a bend of the river.
On its deck Leslie lay, wondering drearily if her folly had quite alienated Captain Fletcher. During the past week, although they had been quite a lot together, he had never shown the least sign of straying beyond the friendship stage. In her eyes, now, he was a hero, not the interfering busybody he had once seemed.
As she pondered on the problem she watched the sunset.
Great, black clouds, flecked with lurid red, loomed up over the land she was leaving, looking almost as if they were chasing her.
As she gazed at them a violent shiver ran through her. She would much rather have had one of the brilliant, rainbow-hued sunsets that had fallen to her lot many times during her brief tragic stay in Africa. Not this ominous banking of black and red. For it seemed to suggest that the blood and blackness could not be left behind so easily.
“Love of my life! we had lights in season—
Hard to part from, harder to keep.
We had strength to labor and souls to reason,
And seed to scatter and fruits to reap.
Though time estranges and fate disperses,
We have had our loves and our loving mercies:
Though the gifts of the light in the end are curses
Yet bides the gift of the darkness—sleep!”
“ ‘Our burdens are heavy, our natures weak,
Some pastime devoid of harm
May we look for? Puritan elder, speak!’
‘Yea, friend, peradventure thou mayest seek
Recreation singing a psalm.’ ”
The Kubu Mission had a new convert. His industry was a marvel; his progress a matter that afforded a never-ending topic of conversation to the teachers of the Mission.
He had come to them some eight months before, clad only in a loin-cloth, speaking an uncouth African dialect, and with a habit of squatting on his heels. Now, he was sitting out on the veranda of the schoolhouse, in a civilized manner, on a chair, attired in a full-blown suit of white drill, with his large feet encased in a pair of canvas shoes.
He was reading the “Pilgrim’s Progress” in English; and in a stiff, stilted, negro manner, he could now speak this language very well.
For hours this young convert would sit at the feet of his pastors while they told him of the wonders and glories of England. And he would listen in round-eyed astonishment, asking them endless questions—most of them on purely secular subjects.
When they were tired of talking he would thank them humbly and then go and perform lowly tasks about the place. But as he worked he smiled to himself with a depth of ferocity that would have startled the gentle missionaries had they seen it.
For motives known only to himself Nanza was doing what is vulgarly called “learning the ropes.”
This particular afternoon as he sat in the shade of the schoolhouse reading, he put down his “Pilgrim’s Progress” and drew from his pocket a string of nondescript objects, and stayed studying it intently.
It looked like a kite’s tail. There were half-a-dozen cowrie shells of varying sizes, beads of different hues, several nuts and dried berries, punctuated with feathers and strips of rag of divers colors, all threaded and tied together on a single piece of string.
To Nanza it represented a letter. A letter, moreover, from the high-priest Mhaki.
The barbaric message worried him extremely. First by the fact that the high-priest knew his whereabouts, secondly by its contents.
It left him undecided whether to answer in person, or whether to fly from this seat of learning. He knew the cunning of his cousin the Sultan, and this might be a trap.
When Nanza had fled from Calabar his one object had been self-preservation. As soon as this was accomplished, his mind turned to other subjects, chief among them being vengeance.
Sometimes he wondered whether he would reveal the whereabouts of Kallu to the authorities. But to do this meant the downfall of the power to which he was still direct heir, and that would sweep away all chance of supreme sultanship even more surely than his cousin’s marriage.
For a long time he sat on the veranda considering whether or not he would respond to Mhaki’s overtures. Finally he decided it was worth risking. He knew his ground and could back out at the first sign of a trap.
About a fortnight later Nanza was approaching an up-country village some two hundred miles removed from the Kubu Mission. However, he showed no immediate desire to enter. Instead, he hid himself away in the undergrowth and awaited nightfall. When darkness gathered he entered the little town.
There was an air of stealth about him as he crept through the muddle of mud huts, palm trees, drinking pools and heaps of débris; an obvious desire to avoid meeting any of the inhabitants.
The place lay in darkness, the silence broken only by the snores that issued from some of the huts and the squeaks and rustles of uneasy domestic animals.
Nanza went along in a manner that suggested his surroundings were not entirely new, his objective the guest-house in the middle of the village. Out of the purple darkness, lying like a pall over the market-square, a light flickered and disappeared and flickered again at regular intervals in the open door of the little hut in the center.
For some time Nanza watched the light. So far as he could see the hut was empty save for one old figure, nor did there appear to be any one lurking in the vicinity.
Presently, with the stealthy tread of a leopard, he went forward.
Just inside the door of the guest hut was a negro of about sixty, who, squatting on his heels on the mud floor, was busy pulling to and fro the shutter of a battered dark lantern.
Nanza’s approach made him look up. On seeing his visitor, he gave a grunt of satisfaction.
“So you recognized my signal?” he said by way of greeting.
Nanza nodded. He entered the hut, and, drawing the palm-leaf shutter screening the doorway into position, seated himself opposite the high-priest.
“How are things in Kallu, Mhaki?” he asked. “Is there any sign as yet of a new heir? And how is it that you are plotting against the Sultan? Have my words proved true? Or is the Sultan so enamored with the Star he has caught that he forgets the rites of the temple?”
Mhaki cast a glance at his blustering visitor. Then he rolled a portion of tobacco he was chewing across his tongue, and expectorated with great deliberation before replying.
“There is no bride in Kallu,” he said.
The remark left Nanza amazed. He knew nothing of the final happenings of that tragic night, nothing of Leslie’s escape or Molly’s death.
“What do you mean?” he asked excitedly.
Mhaki told how the Star had fled back to the night and had not returned.
Nanza laughed, a great roar of savage mirth.
“So my cousin is not so successful in love as in war. And what did the Ruler of the Night do when the Star he loved fooled him?”
“It’s because of what he did and what he did not do that I searched for you,” Mhaki answered. “I am his servant, but, before him, I have sworn to serve the gods. It may be the Sultan spoke falsely, for the girl he held was fair enough to melt even the heart of hatred.”
The old man paused.
“We of Kallu have almost forgotten that the Sultan’s father was not one of us, but of a race who make no war on women,” he continued a moment later. “In past days I learnt much of the ways of white men from Irena’s consort. Who knows what goes on in the heart of man when eyes such as the Star’s have looked into it? Now, hearken, Nanza, Heir of all Darkness. I will tell you my story, and when suspicion first entered my heart, and all that has happened since.”
Mhaki moved a little closer to his companion. The feeble light of the lantern played on him fitfully, making him look like a gigantic black toad shuffling along in the semi-darkness.
Into Nanza’s ears was poured an account of what had taken place in Cooper’s bungalow, when the first seed of doubt concerning Lebrassa’s statements had been sown in Mhaki’s mind.
“Yet,” he finished, “when I told the Sultan how Bhessu had killed the woman who was his wife rather than give her to us, it was as nothing. There was nothing in the Sultan’s mind but the lost Star; no thought or regret for the vengeance that had been swept from him. Now, what do you think of that?” Mhaki asked.
“A Sultan of Kallu does not take so lightly the passing of vengeance, unless all thought of vengeance has long since passed from his mind,” Nanza answered.
Mhaki nodded to himself.
“That was exactly what I thought,” he said. “And another thing. Had not the love of Bhessu for the Sultan always been a byword in Kallu, even where all worship him? Had not Bhessu as great a hatred for the Queen Irena’s murderer as had the Sultan? Yet this faithful servant of the Royal House did not turn from his wife when the truth was told him. He swore the Sultan had lied! He, Bhessu, to whom the Sultan was a god! He tried to save his wife, swearing she was not the daughter of Irena’s murderer. Yet I saw the woman had the eyes and hair of that foul traitor. Bhessu tried to prove to us by her age that she could not have been a child of that thief. And I did not believe him, for in my ears the Sultan’s words were still ringing.”
Pausing, Mhaki laid a black, wrinkled hand on Nanza’s shoulder.
“Yet there was a flaw somewhere,” he continued. “With the next sunrise I went with the Sultan, who had been injured in his efforts to get the Star from the white men, to a Mission where his wound was dressed. I saw a white woman there, a teacher. Of a servant I inquired her age. To me she looked a girl. And I was told she was over thirty! Three years older than the woman who was Bhessu’s wife. There is no reason why that servant at the Mission should have lied to me. And then I began to wonder who had lied, Bhessu or the Sultan?”
Silence reigned in the hut as Mhaki finished speaking. The wind moaned around the deserted market square, bringing with it distant forest howls and the gentle sigh of the palms.
Nanza heard nothing of these noises. He was thinking over all the high-priest had told him, glowing with inward satisfaction at the thought of the white man’s learning which was now his, and which would help him to prove the suspicions lingering in his companion’s mind.
“What do you want of me?” he asked, finally.
“I am an old man,” Mhaki answered. “A faithful servant of Doomana. And I would know the truth, yea, even if it means my death. For in Kallu we have no use for traitors.”
“Even so,” Nanza agreed. “Tell me what I can do, and I will do it.”
“If you knew the ways and speech of the English, the plan I have thought of would be robbed of half its difficulties. There is always gold and to spare at Kallu. For that white men will tell you all you care to ask.”
Evilly Nanza smiled.
Then he told Mhaki how he had been occupied since his hurried flight from Calabar.
In a calculating manner the high-priest looked at him.
“It’s no child’s game we’re playing. And I am still the servant of the reigning Sultan. It is the truth alone I seek. If it be proved the Sultan Essel has spoken truly then it will be well for you, O Nanza, to keep from this country. There will be ten thousand watching lest you betray Kallu. Yet, if it be proved that the Sultan Essel loves where he should hate, then he dies, and I am the faithful servant of the Sultan Nanza.”
“The stakes are high, but I am willing to venture all,” the younger man answered.
“Think well. I am setting you no light task. Nor am I easily deceived,” Mhaki said pointedly. “I, too, can read and write after the manner of the white men. In the dead days Irena’s consort taught me these things. All knowledge is good, and I have not forgotten my white lore. The proof you bring must be no proof of mouth alone, but white man’s proof with seals and documents and signatures. And I must have time to ponder, to write and ask for myself the truth of what you may bring.”
With some eagerness Mhaki awaited Nanza’s reply, sufficiently acquainted with his man to know that the fact of his return would prove the truth of the papers he brought with him.
“I am no child now, but Heir of Doomana,” Nanza answered proudly. “That night when I accused my cousin, Essel, of treachery, I was saying what Bhessu had told me more than a month before, when I arrived in Calabar, sent by you to inquire into the reason of the Sultan’s long absence. What my sister said made me stay. When she first spoke, I considered her words only a jealous woman’s madness. Then I saw for myself that the Sultan was infatuated with the girl he had brought with him. And I pondered on the matter, wondering if what Yoni said were true. For it struck me that a woman sees deeper into the heart of a man than does a man.”
“That’s so,” Mhaki agreed.
“I watched the Sultan with the maid he had sworn to kill. Love made him deaf, for often I stood close by, spying. And there is a saying in Kallu, did a fly but crawl the Sultan heard it! Yet none would believe what I said. And now you, Mhaki, have doubts, even as I had.”
Mhaki nodded.
“Now, Nanza, listen,” he said, “and I’ll put my plan before you.”
In the dim light the two drew closer together.
“If the Sultan has lied, it would be vain for us to trace the lost Star. He will have destroyed all evidence against her. If he is a traitor, we have need of her, so that he may see her die first. The Ruler of the Night has searched for her in vain these nine months. We will let him search. If he can’t find her, the task is beyond us. But we will go to work in another manner. We will find out more about the other woman, the one Bhessu held as wife. Go first to Calabar. Learn all you can about her from his friends there. Afterwards proceed to England and probe further. If you can prove she was not the daughter of that foul murderer, then ten thousand will call you Sultan of Kallu.”
Pausing, the high-priest drew a small leather bag from his loin-cloth and dropped it in front of his visitor.
“This bag of pebbles means great wealth in England. Take it, and remember there is short shrift for traitors, you or the Sultan Essel.”
With that Nanza rose and passed out into the night.
“As we’ve sown so we must reap.”
Mail day was the great event of the month at Tuata, Northern Nigeria, one of the most isolated of British outposts. The district was a vast tract of dense forest with no means of communication beyond the trails leading from one village to another.
It was so peaceable that Mellors, the commissioner, occasionally found it in his heart to wish for a little more excitement. In fact, it was so law-abiding, in a part where uprisings were frequent, that Captain Lindsay Fletcher had come to Tuata to pursue his investigations in the tangled, almost unexplored forest that comprised most of the district; to find out if those hundreds of miles of dense wilderness held any clue to the Hyena’s headquarters.
At that moment under consideration the Government representatives were stretched out on cane lounges on the veranda of Mellors’ bungalow, deep in the contents of the newly arrived mail.
Captain Fletcher was lost in an epistle signed “Leslie Graham.”
Nearly a year had passed since he had last seen the writer, and during the period letters from that source had come to him regularly at the rate of about one a month, all of which he had kept and treasured.
The broiling midday sun poured down on the cleared hill where the tiny town was situated. No sound broke the hot silence except the sleepy drone of insects and the rustle of paper, as Fletcher, Mellors, and a young subaltern went through the monthly mail.
All at once, a sudden order to halt, issued by the Hausa sentry on duty at the top of the balcony steps, made the three Englishmen look up.
A tattered, blood-stained figure was ascending the stairs—a negro assistant at a trading factory, to judge from his garments. His left arm was tied up in an unskilful manner in a caked and gory cloth, and there was a wild, hunted look in his eyes as he stood, swaying with fatigue, at the top of the steps.
This apparition brought the Englishmen to their feet.
“Hello, my friend, what has happened?” Mellors asked, going quickly towards the wounded negro.
“They all dead, all dead,” the man gasped. “Massa Barton, Massa Joe, Congo Sam, Brass Boys. All dead. All but me. I see um die. Killed all dead. And dem wild mans laugh! Laugh, all time. Laugh like de debil.”
Barton’s was one of the few trading stations scattered throughout the district; it was a store situated near a big village about twenty miles away, and run by two brothers of that name.
“Good Lord!” Mellors ejaculated. “It means the whole factory has been wiped out.”
“I expect it has,” Fletcher replied. “From what this fellow says it sounds like some of the Hyena’s work.”
“Then we’re in for a lively time if he’s taken it into his head to prowl round my district,” Mellors said.
Fletcher turned to the negro.
“Tell me all you know,” he said quietly.
Between breathless gasps the story came out—a short one—and the tactics Fletcher knew very well.
Just before midnight of the preceding day the store had been set on suddenly by a score of fiends who had risen, so it seemed, from the earth with howls of mad laughter. He, the speaker, had been cut down as he fired the alarm, trampled on, and left for dead as the marauders swept on towards his masters’ sleeping quarters.
Before they returned he had managed to crawl away and hide himself in the forest. The two Englishmen and their assistants had fought till the greater force had overpowered them. Then the raiders had set fire to the factory.
“My aunt! To think that was all going on within twenty miles of us. And I was playing patience last night because I’d nothing better to do,” the subaltern said, sorrowfully.
“Well, my son, you’ll have something else to do this evening,” Mellors rejoined grimly. “You can go along with Fletcher and help him to clean up the mess at Barton’s place.”
In less than an hour Fletcher and the youngster, with a detachment of Hausas, were en route for Barton’s factory.
It was early afternoon when the expedition left Tuata. For the first twelve miles they went along a narrow path in the silent forest, which twisted, like an endless snake, between immense towering trees all festooned and matted together by a mass of parasitic growths. There were patches of swamp on the route, rudely bridged by half-submerged trunks of trees, covered again with small boughs and rushes to make a safe passage across the quaking bog that lay, black and green-patched, stretching away beneath a low arch of twining vegetation.
Twilight gathered early in the green shade of this dense forest, bringing with it the usual thick miasma. The last glimmer of daylight vanished by the time the journey was rather more than half completed. Fletcher called a halt for rest and refreshments, before pushing on into the thick blackness.
The journey was started again, the party proceeding in single file, the captain leading. It was a dark night, with a saturating mist; no glimmer of starlight could penetrate the matted growth; and there would be no moon before the small hours of the morning; even then, no matter how brilliant the flood of light, only the merest ray would pierce through into the tangled depths. All around lay the sleeping forest, its silence broken by the rustle of their movements, the distant howls of a prowling leopard or the booming of some night-bird.
For nearly half-an-hour they went along, until the most intricate part of the trail was reached; a tangle so thick and overgrown that even in single file they had great difficulty in pushing through.
Then, suddenly, without the least warning, a blaze of fire was opened on them, lighting up the mist and night with its flare. It was followed by a screech of hideous mirth, a roar of devil’s laughter, the snarl of a hundred maddened beasts.
Fletcher knew that sound only too well.
A brief, grim, death-struggle began. Shadows fought with shadows in a shadowy mist. Shrieks and yells, groans and hoarse commands, dull yellow flashes and the clang of steel, came from every side. It was a nightmare of blackness and blood, fog, fire and ghastly yells.
Fletcher’s little force fought with the madness of cornered creatures; but they were surrounded, split up, outnumbered easily three to one.
All at once a red-hot something seemed to sear Fletcher’s brain, and in its train came an all-prevailing silence.
There followed a vista of pain and heat and thirst. When consciousness returned he was being jogged along in a litter; all was darkness, yet the twitter of birds and other daylight sounds reached him. He tried to move his right arm, but it appeared to be fixed to his side. Any attempt to raise the left resulted in excruciating agony.
Slowly events came back to him, bringing in their wake a suppressed shudder; for he realized he had fallen into the hands of the Hyena!
He lay wondering how long it was since the ambush, and why, instead of killing him, his captor had nursed him back to life. A sudden chill swept away the feverish heat enveloping him as the fate of other white officers who had fallen alive into the hands of the Hyena rushed back to his mind.
A halt roused him. The cloth screening his eyes was removed, his uninjured arm loosened. Weakly he raised himself and inspected his surroundings. The interior of a native hut met his gaze, the door guarded by a trio of savages. By his side lay the subaltern, moaning and gazing round with fevered blue eyes.
A glance told Fletcher the boy was past saying anything. Swaying with weakness, he struggled to his feet and, aided by the walls, tottered to the door, his first instinct to get an idea of his surroundings. The three on guard there quickly gave him to understand he was not to go outside. He sat down again, too weak and dazed to argue the matter.
As he sat, limp and sagging on a packing case, brooding on the situation, a movement of the guard roused him. His gaze went to a figure just entering. And remained there.
The man was one he had grown to know very well during the voyage out on the Batava, as spotless and immaculate now, in well-cut white drill and broad, sombrero hat, as he had been when he strolled up and down the deck, alone and aloof; or stood talking in a half-bored, half-amused manner, to the girl whose voice could stop his stealthy, caged-lion march, whose presence banished the habitual expression of contempt his face wore when she was not about.
Lebrassa crossed the hut, and, ignoring Fletcher completely, knelt by the side of the moaning boy. He dressed the lad’s wounds and readjusted the bandages with a care and gentleness that left Fletcher marveling.
The mulatto seemed to feel his prisoner’s fixed gaze. Presently he looked round, the cruel lines about his mouth deepening.
“You notice I’ve a liking for blue eyes, Captain Fletcher,” he said. “If your ravings are to be believed, it’s a weakness we share in common.”
The Englishman knew quite well what Lebrassa was hinting at, and he ignored the remarks.
Presently Lebrassa got up and came to his side.
“With your permission I’ll dress your shoulder too,” he said suavely. “Dr. Hillman, my surgeon, has just started for Europe on a very important mission, so his duties fall to my lot. I’m afraid my men mauled you about pretty severely and I’ve a reason for wanting you whole. However, as it happened, it made no difference, except that you’ve missed three days’ appreciation of my scheme of exchange and barter.”
Fletcher still ignored his captor.
“I’ve been impatiently awaiting your return to reason,” Lebrassa continued, “so that I can tell you, among other things, that Barton’s factory was not raided by me. I merely wanted you to go that way because the path offered the best ambush in the district of Tuata. My messenger played his part well, and you very kindly walked into my trap. I’ve been most anxious to meet you. I thought you might be able to give me Miss Graham’s address. I don’t suppose you’ll tell me freely. But you’re sufficiently versed in my methods to know I can use ways of extracting information perhaps not recognized by the British Army.”
Much as Lebrassa tried, he could not keep a note of savage hate from leaking into the suave, friendly tone he had adopted.
“You black devil!” Fletcher cried. “You may torture me till Doomsday, but I won’t tell you where she is.”
The mulatto laughed, low and fierce, and with intense satisfaction.
“I admire your sentiments,” he said. “However, the circumstances are now beyond you. Mental tortures, I know from personal experience, exceed any amount of physical pain. This, I think, will explain what I mean.”
From his pocket Lebrassa drew a packet of bloodstained letters and dropped them on Fletcher’s knee. They had on them Portuguese stamps, and the writing was Leslie’s.
Blankly Fletcher stared at the package.
“I came across these when I searched your unconscious body,” Lebrassa continued. “They told me all I wanted to know. I may add that as soon as I learnt Miss Graham’s address I sent Dr. Hillman as special envoy to her, offering your life in exchange for herself.”
Fletcher was beyond speech. One hand went across his brow as he gazed at the letters on his knee. Letters he had treasured and always carried about with him. Letters that would put Leslie again into the Hyena’s hands!
As the meaning of it all penetrated his dazed brain, a sudden desire to do murder seized him. Everything passed from him—the knowledge of his own wounds and weakness, the giant strength of his captor. A red cloud surrounded him, and out of it a dark face looked with savage hatred and mocking triumph.
He staggered to his feet and made a dash at the other’s brown, muscular throat, heedless of the excruciating agony of his shoulder. For his effort tore the wound open and brought the blood pouring down his arm.
A push from Lebrassa sent him reeling backwards. Sick with pain and the sense of his own helplessness, he sank back weakly onto the packing case, and with a stifled groan buried his face in his hands.
“Let me gather a little strength to think,
As one who reels on the outermost brink,
To the innermost gulf descending.”
In a summer-house of one of the several châlets perched up among the Cintra mountains sat Leslie. Far below was a vista of hill and dale, forests of cork and chestnut, groves of orange, lemon and olive trees, white villages and red, ploughed fields and, in the distance, the silver sea and Lisbon.
Behind towered rock-strewn heights, standing black and sinister against the sunlit sky, their craggy sides patched with somber pines and firs. Suspended like a jewel in the heavens, was the Palacio da Pena (the Palace of Sorrow), with its three golden domes flashing in the clear blue sky.
Nearly a fortnight ago Leslie’s employers had sent her up to their mountain resort. For suddenly she had become pale and thin, had lost interest in her duties and in the round of gaieties which fell to her lot as companion to one of the most popular women in Lisbon. In fact, she was again the sad-eyed, listless girl who had come to Lisbon nearly a year before on Major Harding’s recommendation.
Yet this sudden lack of energy was not due to overmuch dancing in the Portuguese capital as her employers suspected. It resulted from an item seen in the month-old paper now lying on her knee—a curt notice of an occurrence that frequently happens in the running of an Empire.
“News comes from Tuata, Northern Nigeria, of the death of two British officers, Captain Lindsay Fletcher and Lieutenant Paul Vincent. They, and a small company of Hausas, were ambushed and massacred by a party of natives. The whole of the British force was annihilated. The bodies of the Hausas were recovered, but no trace of the murdered officers’ bodies has been found.”
Inside the folded newspaper were ten letters from West Africa, all written by Fletcher—letters with a curious air of restraint about them.
Over a year had passed since Leslie had said good-by to Dr. Atherley. Her new life in a strange land, with its round of pleasures and slight duties, together with the kindness and consideration of her new friends, had eased the blow of Molly’s tragic end. Lebrassa she still thought of with a shudder. But as time passed he faded somewhat from her mind and was no longer the constant, haunting specter he had been during the early months following her departure from West Africa.
She sat, white and tearless, thinking of the man she loved, murdered out in darkest Africa, wondering, in a numb, heartbroken way, why the world went on just as usual.
As she sat there brooding, the approach of a servant, with a letter on a salver, roused her.
Picking it up, she glanced at the envelope. The postmark was Lisbon, re-addressed to her from her employers’ house there. The writing was vaguely familiar, yet she could not put it down to any one of her acquaintances in that city.
Thinking it must be some invitation she opened it. She drew out no card, but thin sheets of foreign correspondence paper. The opening phrase brought a gasp of alarm to her lips. Quickly she turned it over and looked at the signature.
It was one she had seen before, on a letter that had come to her eighteen months ago in London—a brief note telling her the name of the boat that was to take her to West Africa, the time of sailing and the best train to Liverpool.
“Essel Lebrassa.”
Big and all-powerful the name looked back at her, blinding her to everything but the fact of its presence.
With wide, dilated eyes she scanned the letter her shaking hands held.
Little White Rose,
There is so much I want to tell you, that I want you to believe, that I would have told you, but you fled away from me. Why did you, Leslie? I thought I had been through most of the phases of mental agony this existence can offer, but the knowledge that you were out in that driving gale, battling with wind and rain through miles of forest, and that fear of me had sent you there, caused me the deepest suffering I have yet known. You will not believe me when I say that the greatest joy of my life was when I heard you had recovered from the effects of that night. Yet I am such a savage. I am writing to you now to make you come back to me.
Little friend, you once had so much sympathy. Why did you take it from me? Just when I needed it most. When you knew me for who I was, the depths of vile blackness in me, the red flood wherein I had sought oblivion. And some of the white, too, that you could always bring to the top.
I was a brute that night. I think I touched the bottom of a seemingly bottomless hell. I would have injured the little girl who trusted me. But your scorn and contempt maddened me, roused every atom of the vile black blood in me.
There was a time—so long ago that I had almost forgotten it until I met you—when I tried to conquer every evil passion the negro blood brought with it. And I succeeded. Yet it proved no use. All I had been working for was swept from me by an act of treachery, by a man who should have been my best friend. I left England for Africa, went back to a heritage I knew was mine, where I was welcomed and worshipped as a god and Sultan, not an object of contempt, as I was in your country, to be sneered at and called a “nigger,” and treated as though I were immeasurably beneath the poorest white trash civilization produces.
I was not twenty when I left the white world, to take up every rite and custom of my mother’s people, and very bitter against my father’s race because they had dealt out to me nothing but sneers and insults and injustice.
I had once hoped to make a name for myself, not in the way I have since done, but honorably. My birth and one man’s crime barred me out from that, so I tried another way, and succeeded. I think I am born for success, provided there is no honor attached to it. I tried to win you honorably, Leslie, though you will not believe me. And all the time I knew how poor my chance was. You were mine, more mine even than you know, the white side of me that had come back embodied in an angel who had deigned to be my friend.
I want to tell you, little rose, of the worship and adoration in my heart. Yet I know you have no wish to hear it. No pleading or love I could offer would bring you to me willingly, as I had once hoped, foolishly, wildly. Your white hands had touched me gently once or twice with such sympathy and understanding, that I dared to think you might give yourself into my keeping.
I was always a dreamer, Leslie, and always rudely awakened. I had forgotten what I was—a creature black and bloodstained. Such a flood of blood and blackness that it swept away the one friend life had given me; one I would have chosen had fate made me as other men.
I must have the one pure thing that has come into this nightmare life of mine. I am so thirsty down here at the bottom of my black hell, thirstier than ever before for goodness and purity. My little angel knows the truth about me; no small white hands will touch me willingly again; no rose will flood me with its sweetness.
Because of the vile depths of blackness in me, I must make a bargain with the whiteness that has spurned me.
Little Rose, I hold a life in my hand. I will give it to you in exchange for yourself. A man’s life for one sweet white flower from an English garden. One whom you now call “friend,” as you once called me. It is Captain Fletcher.
What a threat to use! One that will make you loathe and despise me more utterly than ever. I am a brute even to my most cherished treasure, whom I would have know only the best in me, but to whom Fate has determined to show the worst.
Captain Fletcher is my prisoner, not dead, as will be reported, but captured by me with but one motive—to learn your whereabouts. If you will come to me his life is yours—his and that of his brother officer whom I took at the same time. The day you arrive at Kallu they will be sent back to the nearest British station. If you refuse to come they both die. It is for you to choose. Even if you refuse to come, you cannot escape me. I know where you are now. My servants will be watching your every movement, awaiting an opportunity to trap you and bring you out here. The first is the quicker method, that is why I have adopted it. I am so hungry for you; so hungry to have my little English rose set in the sweetest garden earth holds. And I must make a further compact with my rose, lest she betray me.
I have sent a guardian to Lisbon for you, Dr. Hillman, who, for the next week will wait all day in the Rocio. If you are willing to give yourself in exchange for Captain Fletcher, you have only to stand by the statue in the middle, with a white rosebud in your hand. He will give you another letter. You must do what it says, and say nothing to any one of where you are going. You will come out to Africa as his daughter. There will be eyes watching you always. Any attempt on your part to betray either me or my servant will result in Captain Fletcher’s death.
How can I expect you to do anything but hate and loathe me? I am the Sultan of Kallu, with ten thousand souls to treat as I please, yet I am the son of an English nobleman, an upright and honorable man who would have had me the same, but he reckoned without my mother and the race of savage rulers she sprang from. You can keep me the son of my father, even after twenty years of savagery, if you will. Be my sweet angel of pity, as you once were. Don’t drive me quite back to barbarism, Leslie. Try to have toleration and pity on your side. Love I could not hope for, but just a little something, dearest, that would hold us together outside the power of my arms.
Essel Lebrassa.
With trembling hands Leslie put the letter down. The first feeling that came out of the chill, sick daze enveloping her was one of relief to know Fletcher was alive. The full meaning of what the price of his life meant she was too stunned to realize. She only knew he was not dead and that she could save him.
None of the pathos and the pleading in the letter came to her.
“Mask more subtle, and disguise
Far less shallow, thou dost need, O
Traitor, to deceive my eyes.”
Mammy Illa and her little brown piccaninny were well known on the steamers that plied up and down the West Coast of Africa. It was nearly eighteen months since she had first appeared among the batch of native women who boarded the vessels at Sierra Leone for the purpose of disposing of various articles of local manufacture to the European passengers.
She stood now in a corner by the gangway of an outward-bound British steamer, picturesquely clad in a full, short-sleeved bodice and skirt of gaily printed blue and yellow cotton cloth. Around her were arranged carved calabashes, baskets and mats of all shapes made from crudely dyed rushes, plaited and twisted leather-work, a few pieces of carved ivory, and roughly made trinkets of gold.
In the midst of all these wares sat a solemn-eyed mite of a girl.
All the world, black and white, who passed up and down to West Africa could be seen in that first port of call on the coast. And this Yoni knew when, under an alias, she made her way there.
The town lay behind her now, a delightful little place situated at the foot, and half-way up, a mountain. It was criss-crossed with red streets where grew brightly flowering shrubs, tall grass and cocoanut palms. On the hill at the back, airy bungalows nestled among lime, lemon and orange trees, with now and again a cluster of fluttering bananas, a vivid red acacia looking like a splash of fire, or an odd patch of quaint, stiff cacti with brilliant scarlet and yellow flowers, all backed by the eternal, glowing green of West Africa, and set under a sky of blazing blue.
Yoni had no eyes for the treacherous beauty of her native land. Her gaze was on the passengers. One especially—an overdressed negro in gray flannels, scarlet tie, and panama hat with a ribbon to match, who had just emerged from the saloon.
Five months before she had seen him pass out from Africa. On that occasion she had claimed no acquaintance, knowing there were reasons that would account for his departure from his native land. But she could not reconcile herself to his return. Moreover, there was an air of triumph about him that gave her a feeling of uneasiness.
As Nanza stood by the saloon doorway, a voice speaking in a dialect probably no other person on board understood, made him turn sharply.
“What are you doing here, my brother?” it was asking.
For a moment he stared at his sister in speechless astonishment. Then a cunning look crossed his face.
“And you, Yoni?” he asked. “Why do you stand at the gate of Africa, watching?”
“I have watched these eighteen months,” she replied. “I saw you pass out, but I did not speak, knowing there would be bitterness in your heart against me, for my jealousy nearly caused your death. Now I see you return. Is it safe for you to do so?”
Nanza smiled tigerishly.
“I would stand well in the sight of our cousin, the Lord of Doomana,” he replied. “So I made a journey to England searching for the lost Star, by her recovery hoping to attain again his favor. It is not well to have a Sultan of Kallu as an enemy, and I am hungry for my own land.”
“It was you then, who found her,” Yoni said with well-feigned surprise. “She was here but a week ago, and with her was the white doctor. It was a small Star, white and frozen, who has no love for the Ruler of the Night. Nor have you, or I, Nanza. I want revenge on the Sultan, yea, and on the Star too, who stole his heart from me.”
Yoni had spoken to one of Leslie’s unofficial bodyguards. She knew Nana was in no way responsible for the girl’s return. Now she wanted to find out why her brother had returned to Africa, and what he was doing.
Yoni’s act of many months before, which had resulted in Nanza’s first appearance in any spot approaching civilization, was the proceeding of a woman scorned. Nanza’s counter-action of staying in Calabar and playing the spy had made her realize that he was likely to develop into something more than a jealous woman’s tool, a means of extracting information she had been unable to obtain from Cooper. In fact, her brother had seemed likely to develop into a menace to the Sultan. Nanza’s departure from Africa left her with a feeling of relief. But his return filled her with fears concerning the safety of her god and Sultan. All the more because she knew Nanza had lied to her concerning the reason of his visit to England.
“Was it vengeance that took you to England?” she asked. “If so, I would like to help you.”
It was news to Nanza that Leslie had been found. But he did not tell his sister so.
“If you want vengeance, why did you give evidence in favor of what our cousin said that night in Calabar?” he asked.
“I’m only a woman. I feared he might slay me if I spoke against the Star. And for the sake of vengeance I desired to live. The Lord of Doomana was deceived by my action, thinking me then, as always, his slave. So deceived that he left the Star in my keeping. Then my moment came and I let her escape. For your sake, Nanza, so that you might still be the heir. Now you have brought the Star back to the Ruler of the Night! Who knows what will please a man? And I am in ill-favor all round. For it is not good to withhold from a Sultan of Kallu the woman he desires.”
“Nor is it good to withhold from the people of Kallu the blood that is their due,” Nanza answered, in a tone of savage hate.
Yoni’s face assumed an air of abject terror.
“My brother will not betray me. What I did was from love of you. And for that piece of treachery to the Lord of Doomana my life is forfeit.”
As Nanza watched his sister his suspicions died away.
“It was a bad day for you, Yoni, when our cousin went to England on the trail of vengeance, for he found the trail of love too. They were so mixed, those two, that we of Kallu could not tell one from the other until the Sultan gave us his word. And then, of course, we doubted no longer. But now the Star has returned, and all will be well.”
Two great tears trickled down Yoni’s face.
“It is well for you who have found her. Now you can return home in honor. I, too, am hungry for my own people, and am shut out from them forever,” she replied mournfully.
Nanza laughed.
“Who knows?” he said. “Even a sultan may die.”
With that he sauntered off.
Yoni watched him go, convinced that he knew something that might harm her god. And the knowledge made her determined to warn the Sultan.
“Good night!—and—Good-by!”
The first red beam shot out of the east, sending the rich fiery glow of dawning day over a vista of densely wooded country, breaking up the thick veil of mist that night had drawn over the landscape. The growing light showed an endless stretch of matted forest with only one break as far as the eye could reach. There the marble ruins of a once great city glinted; but time had broken it almost beyond recognition, and vegetation was swallowing the little that remained.
White carved columns stood side by side with those of Nature’s rearing; great arches and the scattered stones of city walls stretched away under deep, gloomy vaults of towering trees; graceful, fluttering palms grew among the ruins of marble palaces. It was the remains of one of those mystic, haunting cities occasionally met with by those who probe the all-devouring forest wastes that comprise so much of West Africa.
There was still life in one corner of this shattered city; one patch the all-shrouding vegetation had not yet covered up.
Within a huge walled garden a tiny palace showed, Moorish in design and of a recent era. It had graceful horse-shoe arches, columned balconies and beautiful carved arabesque windows opening on to a center courtyard smothered with roses. There fountains played, and orange trees, white with blossom, shaded carved stone seats.
This miniature palace was set in a great shady garden full of winding walks, unexpected fountains and deep, still pools where gold and silver fish flashed among the roots of pink, white and blue water-lilies. Roses, from the deepest red to pure white, vied in sweetness with the sensual perfume of a thousand tropical flowers. Palms, mangoes and bread-fruit trees cast a welcome shade over patches of violets. Wistarias showered down a flood of petals on whispering bamboo, and trailing jessamine found support around the trunks of grotesque, spiky-leaved dragon trees.
The whole of this little paradise was walled by twenty feet of marble, with only one entrance—a gilded gate that flashed in the rising sun.
Outside the screening walls were scores of rude huts. From these came a busy hum. Wild, black figures flitted to and fro, and were lost among the ruins; others sat on the ground polishing knives and spears and shields, until they vied with the sunshine.
There was an air of savage gaiety over everything—no suggestion of the warfare the industrious polishing of weapons might have led one to expect. The Hyena’s following, when they went out to battle, were armed with something very different from the crude spears, shields and knives they cleaned amidst loud laughter and many jokes; but they all agreed these made a better show than white man’s weapons, and who had ever heard of a Sultan’s bride entering Kallu save under an arch of spears held by the picked men of her lord’s army.
So broad-bladed spears were cleaned, and heavy, elephant-hide shields, with flashing brass knobs, polished with a right good-will.
Had not the Ruler of the Night at last found the Star that was his heart’s delight? Gossip, grunts, comments, much laughter and friendly bantering went on, whilst the old-fashioned weapons grew ever brighter, and the stacks of wood for bonfires ever higher.
Twenty miles away, in the deep green gloom of the forest, unconscious of the celebrations which were to be held in her honor, Leslie was sitting in the tent that had been her home for over six weeks.
To her the months since receiving Lebrassa’s letter had been a kind of mental paralysis. Now an incident had occurred which made her realize how close the dread future was.
On the table beside her lay a letter, and a bunch of roses held together by a thick, heavy bracelet of red-gold with diamonds sparkling like stars on its surface—the first gift of the Sultan to his bride.
The flowers, bracelet and letter were lying there, untouched, half an hour later when Hillman entered to tell the girl the last stage of her journey was about to start.
Wearily Leslie rose, to be assisted into the hammock that had borne her daily for more than six weeks.
With the approaching end of her journey had come the haunting fear that Lebrassa might not keep his side of the bargain. Even now the man she had come to save might have been killed. It was hardly likely the Hyena would let such a determined enemy as Captain Fletcher live and go free.
These facts passed through Leslie’s mind as she was jogged along in the hammock. Assuming her lover were still alive, she was trying to think out some way of saving him from the result of her own folly and his enemy’s vengeance.
There was one way of making sure of Captain Fletcher’s safety. But it meant such a long vista of horror for her—not the quick way of death she had decided on.
As the afternoon wore on, the forest grew less dense, and more sunshine dribbled through the matted branches. A desire to meet her fate standing seized Leslie. She raised herself on her elbow and looked round for her guardian.
The movement brought Hillman to her side.
“What is it, Miss Graham?” he asked.
“I’d like to walk the rest of the way.”
The doctor looked at her in the manner he frequently had used since their first meeting in Lisbon—as if wondering why his patron should run such risks in order to get this white-faced wraith of a girl into his possession.
“You can hardly do that,” he answered. “We’ve still two miles to go.”
“I want to walk. I can’t stay here any longer.”
A voice that would be very powerful in Kallu had stated its desire. The doctor helped Leslie from her litter. Then the procession started again, following in the wake of the two.
The girl had no idea how long she walked.
She seemed hardly to have left the hammock when the path widened and scattered blocks of masonry showed up. The trees grew farther and farther apart and, between them, ruins loomed. She went on, wondering why the sun was shining, why it was not all as black as her own future.
Presently the world became a brilliant flood of golden light, that flashed on a long avenue of spears.
She was aware the doctor left her just as the first two silent, black warriors were reached. There seemed an endless double row of them, all watching her, all black, all with rolling, blood-shot eyes.
As she entered the arch of spears, the wild war-cry greeted her.
With set, white face she went on, thinking the savage roar would follow her into eternity, and emerged into a wide, open square. Marble walls and a glittering gate formed one side, the other three were living walls—an excited, eager crowd, all watching her, all shouting.
The dazzling glare of tropical sunshine did not blind her to a man coming toward her, bareheaded, the only person there in European dress.
Lebrassa halted beside her, gazing intently at her white, scornful face.
“May I say ‘Welcome to Kallu,’ little rose?” he asked with a touch of pleading.
There was no reply.
A light breeze sighed through the forest, bringing with it the excited whisper of thousands watching the meeting of their Sultan and his bride.
“Have you no word for me, little friend?”
“I want to see—Captain Fletcher,” Leslie said in a breathless way.
Evidently Lebrassa expected this. Putting a hand lightly on her shoulder, he guided her across the square toward a point where mud and palm leaf dwellings showed. Like a receding wave, the crowd swept back as they approached. Beyond was a group of palm trees; beneath them a two-roomed hut, around the door of which half a dozen savages mounted guard.
The sight of the sentries broke up some of the haze in which Leslie was submerged. Their presence indicated that Captain Fletcher was not dead as she had feared. She pulled her benumbed faculties together for the great effort of saving him.
She quickened her pace, heedless of the black figures closing up to block the entrance, stopping only when she realized she could not pass them and that they had no intention of moving.
So far Lebrassa had given no signal for the guard to admit her. He stood waiting for the request to come from her. This Leslie quickly grasped, for she looked at him haughtily. Just then other matters than the horror of himself were in her mind.
“Tell them to move,” she said coldly.
He made a gesture, nothing more than a slight movement of his hand, and the way was cleared. For the first time the girl realized how all-powerful he was. Also it gave her the feeling that a word of hers could move him as easily as he had moved the barrier. The full extent of the influence she had over him dawned on her, and she determined to use all means within her power to save her countrymen.
The sound of her sweet cool voice made the two men sitting within the hut start up. Fletcher’s face, worn and haggard, was turned towards the door, as he stood, bound and helpless, watching the entering couple.
To Leslie, as she crossed the hut, there was only one thing left in the world—the man she loved. A man with a tired, hopeless face and weary eyes. She went up to him, to stand holding his bound arms tightly.
“Why did you come, little one?” Fletcher asked hoarsely. “I’d hoped, prayed, you wouldn’t.”
There was no reply, but the clutch of the small hands on his arms tightened.
Vincent’s husky voice roused her to the fact of his existence.
“You shouldn’t have come, Miss Graham, whatever that black brute threatened.”
Wistfully she smiled at him. He was a nice-looking youngster, so fresh and fair and Anglo Saxon; no boy of his type would ever come into her life again. She was glad he was there. Just then it was easier to talk to a stranger than to Captain Fletcher.
“If I hadn’t come, it would have made no difference. I should have been here sooner or later, once he knew where I was.”
Her brave strained voice brought a stifled groan to the youngster’s lips, and the look of deadly pain in Fletcher’s eyes deepened.
From outside came the excited hum of the crowd, an occasional jabber from the sentries, with now and again the crude blast of a horn or the beating of tom-toms, and, above all, the sleepy sigh of trees stirred by the breeze of sunset.
A black bar fell across the flood of golden light streaming in at the doorway. Leslie shivered, as if with sudden cold. Her eyes left Fletcher’s worn face and went to the mulatto. And there they stayed with desperate, scornful gaze.
“Mr. Lebrassa,” she said in a stiff, cold voice, “you promised me these two lives if I came here, but I know you won’t keep your word. Death is a quick way out of my troubles. Yet—if I know that Captain Fletcher and Lieutenant Vincent really reach safety I… I’ll promise not to kill myself in order to get away from you.”
“Don’t bargain with him, darling,” Fletcher broke out hoarsely. “Don’t bind yourself down to hell because of us.”
At her words the least flicker of feeling crossed Lebrassa’s face.
“I suppose you won’t believe me when I say I’ve no intention of breaking our bargain,” he said. “What proof would satisfy you these two officers really reach safety?”
“If Captain Fletcher sends a letter back with a message I give him now, privately, signed by himself and Lieutenant Vincent and the officers of the outpost they reach.”
Leslie spoke in a hard, forced way, as if the plan were one desperation had forced on her.
“Very well. I’ll give you three minutes alone,” Lebrassa answered.
He turned to the youngster.
“Come outside with me, Vincent,” he commanded.
When the two left the hut, Leslie stood looking up at Fletcher with eyes full of love. There was no need for disguise now, when the whole world ended with his departure.
The knowledge of her position and his own helplessness was beyond the man’s strength. He dropped on to a bench, his haggard, distorted face pressed against the rough mud wall, to hide from her the tears that agony had brought to his eyes.
Putting her arms about his neck, she drew his head on her shoulder, trying to kiss away his pain.
A movement outside made her arms tighten.
“Kiss me just once, to show you don’t despise me,” she whispered. “Then say, ‘Good night, dear, and—good-by.’ Will you put that in your letter, ‘Good night and Good-by’?”
A few minutes later a little procession—two Englishmen, with an escort of negroes—set out into the forest. In the center of the square Leslie stood, heedless of the man beside her, watching Fletcher until he was lost in the shadows.
“My story is told as, long ago,
My story was told to me.”
To Leslie, as the little procession disappeared, came the feeling that had assailed her when she had first landed in Calabar—that of all known things gliding away from her.
Presently, out of the world of unreality surrounding her, a voice came.
“Come, little rose, let me take you where you can rest and have tea.”
In a dazed manner she looked up at Lebrassa.
“You can’t stand here any longer,” he said gently. “You must come with me now.”
There was nothing else to do but obey.
Like one numbed, she walked with him up to the gilded gates, and on through a maze of flowers and trees until a building was reached. She passed through an arch into a room—a room all white and green, with marble floor and walls, and little fountains dripping into carved shells filled with ferns. There were alcoves draped with glistening gauze and heavy silver lamps hung from the ceiling. The place had no windows, but all one side was columned arches around which roses twined.
Leslie noticed nothing of her surroundings. Lebrassa took her across to one of the curtained alcoves, and held the silver gauze aside so that she might pass through. She looked at his brown hand, so dark against the curtain, wondering why it left no red stain on the whiteness.
Beyond was a door. This he opened.
“You’ll find all you want in there, Leslie. Then you must come back to me and have tea.”
The place proved to be an ordinary bedroom which, but for the mosquito net drawn round the bed, the marble floor and walls, and the fretted arches screened with reed blinds, might have been any girl’s room in far-away England.
Taking off her hat, she sank down on one of the chairs and stayed there, with hands clasped tightly on her knee.
A knock roused her. A woman entered—a negress in a loose, blue cotton smock, with big, gold hoops in her ears.
Guessing the woman to be an emissary from her captor, Leslie rose, and went through the shimmering draperies into the room beyond.
Her entrance made Lebrassa, who was bending over a tea-table, look around.
“Sit down,” he said gently.
She sank down on the nearest lounge. And there she stayed, watching him hostilely. The thought of Captain Fletcher’s safety had lessened her own burden of horror.
Presently he came to her side, a cup of tea in one hand, in the other a cake-stand with various dishes of assorted dainties.
“Tea, Leslie,” he said.
She took the cup he was offering. And then sat holding it, forgetting it was there.
How silent the room was! No sound but dripping water and this man’s soft movements. She could quite understand Molly’s hell now!
His voice broke into her thoughts.
“Now, what would you like?”
She looked, not at the array of dainties he was offering, but at the swarthy face above them.
“Nothing, thank you.”
Her voice must have lashed him with its depths of scorn and aversion. But no flicker of feeling came to his face.
“Drink your tea then,” he said quietly. “Afterwards we’ll talk.”
Turning away, he went to one of the arches leading out into a center courtyard. There he lounged, his gaze fixed in an unseeing manner on the beauty outside.
He looked so thoroughly English as he stood there, his face half turned away, his hands deep in his pockets, so that she could not see their darkness, that again Leslie had the feeling of moving in some ghastly nightmare. She could still hardly realize he was the Hyena. Mr. Lebrassa! A man she had once liked and been drawn to!
The sound of her cup being put on a table, roused him. With a quick, feverish movement he crossed to where she sat. There was a moment of quivering silence as he stood with one hand on the back of her chair, watching her hungrily.
“I suppose your mind is made up to hate and despise me,” he said tensely.
“Do you expect me to do anything else?” she asked, in a cold, scornful manner.
“I expect a lot from you, Leslie. And, since you’ve driven me to it, I’ll tell you why.”
Then from Lebrassa’s lips came a flood of words, low, fierce and passionate.
“I’ve had the world’s scorn and contempt, Leslie, but I won’t have yours. God knows I would not smirch the whiteness of my rose. I don’t like to tell you what I’m about to tell you now. It’s no story for a girl’s ears. But I want so much from you, and you will give me nothing willingly. Not a grain of pity. Not a shred of toleration. Not a shadow of the sympathy that was so sweet. Nothing but scorn, contempt and aversion—what all your color have dealt out to me.”
As if gathering his words together he stopped for a moment.
“Do you think I should have become the brute I am without a reason?” he asked. “Don’t you know me well enough to have asked yourself that question? Have you never wondered why I took that letter?”
There was no answer.
“Your signature on the envelope made me take it, Leslie. I’d been looking for someone of that name for years. And I’ll tell you why. It started forty-five years ago, with a man’s desire for travel and romance. There were two brothers, orphans, sons of an English nobleman, the last of an old family. The elder was twenty-five when his father died, the other twenty-two. Even at that age the younger one’s life had been so vicious that his father had disinherited him. Yet his brother stood by him, paid off his debts and gave him a fresh start in life. Then the elder one followed his own bent. He was by nature an artist and a dreamer, a brave man who loved travel and adventure, and the wild romance civilization cannot bring. Fate brought him out to Africa, to the heart of the unknown. There was a queen reigning there, in the corner of a ruined city, a girl barely fifteen. She was the daughter of an African Sultan and his chief wife, a negress with a dash of white blood in her. This young queen was a girl of great beauty, resembling more her unknown white ancestors than her negro parents. See, Leslie, here she is! Irena, Queen of Kallu, Daughter of the Stars.”
Lebrassa drew aside a curtain screening an alcove near.
A life-size portrait was behind, a picture of a girl with a tawny, yellow skin, who looked like a lovely purring tigress. But her great, black eyes smiled out at the world, full of love and tenderness.
The artist had been clever and realistic, for the stars flashing among her wealth of black curls glittered with gold-dust put on before the paint had dried. Golden armlets, strewn with golden stars, glistened against her golden skin. A robe of purple gauze, like the darkest night, draped her from shoulder to ankle, scarcely hiding the golden sheen of herself. Stars held the sleeveless garment on her tawny shoulders, and were strewn about its hem. On her softly rounded bosom was a golden ornament, the shape of a hyena’s head, with lips curled back on a vicious snarl over tiny white fangs, and green eyes that leered diabolically.
She stood, a daughter of Sultans, proudly smiling, a slim girl, like a golden reed, draped in the garment of the night, with the crest of her race on her bosom.
The curtain dropped, and Lebrassa’s low, tense voice started again.
“Her European ancestry was shown in more than her light skin and unusual beauty. It was shown in her aversion to marry with any of the negro chieftains from neighboring districts. And this Englishman was brought to her, a prisoner found trespassing on her lands—the first white man she had seen. She was a queen. The priests desired her marriage. If her choice fell on this stranger, a man fair-skinned, with hair that gleamed like her golden jewels, was it very surprising? The surprise was not there, but on the other side. This Englishman, her prisoner, grew to love her as few women are loved—this wild, golden girl who had picked him for her consort, this daughter of savage negro Sultans, Irena, Queen of Kallu. He was a man who honored and respected women. He took her away, far beyond the bounds of the corner where she ruled, and married her at a Protestant mission. She was his legal wife as surely as if she had been an Englishwoman.”
There was a brief pause.
Dark shadows were creeping into the arched recesses of the room. Lebrassa struck a tiny gong. Its mellow voice brought a soft-footed servant who lighted the lamps and vanished as noiselessly as he had appeared. Their glow gave a golden sheen to the purple of advancing night, a purple that was rapidly growing deeper.
“They came back to Kallu,” Lebrassa went on when the servant had disappeared. “This little palace he had built from the ruins of a once great city. And he lived here with his wife, teaching her, dreaming, and painting. A time came when he was awakened. For something occurred to the possibility of which I doubt if he had ever given a thought. A third came into the little paradise he had made for himself and one other. A problem confronted the dreamer: a problem he had created and was responsible for. A son was born, heir alike to all that was his father’s and his mother’s, to light and darkness, to civilization and barbarism, to English culture and African savagery. But he was a just man, and he determined his son should have every chance.”
Lebrassa stopped for a moment, then he went on again, but in a quiet, dreary way.
“A little, a very little of my history I once told you, Leslie, so pleased that you should wish to hear. I was a year old when my father took me to England. He did not take me as his son, but under another name, the one you know me by. Afterwards I kept it, because I couldn’t prove my claim to a better. I was put into an English clergyman’s family as a mulatto boy in whom he was interested, to be brought up in the ways of civilization. I was five years old when I first remember seeing the man I afterwards knew to be my father. Just when I was beginning to realize I was not as the other children at the vicarage, but a nigger. It was some time before I knew all that the word meant, but I felt it was one of contempt.”
He paused, as if hoping for some word from Leslie. Her gaze was on the picture. The name “Irena” was familiar. It had been on the golden armlet she had found among her father’s possessions. It had been on his lips occasionally, when attacks of raving, which subsequent knowledge of the world had told her were delirium tremens, had him in their grip. Although she had no idea what Lebrassa’s confession was leading up to, a feeling of dire disaster, outside of anything to do with her being in his power, gradually was creeping over her.
“I remember quite well how I felt when I reached the stage of reading for myself and crept into the library to find out the meaning of the word they threw at me in anger,” his voice continued. “The next time it came from English lips, from a boy two years my senior, I fought him and made him take his word back. I believe I would have killed him, for I was a Sultan of Kallu even in those days, but the nurse separated us. She called me ‘a little black devil’ and locked me in my room for the rest of the day. A few weeks after this I first saw my father—my guardian I thought he was. That episode was told him, together with other instances of uncontrollable temper and childish arrogance. The short time he stayed in England we spent together. He explained to me the mixed blood in me. He said he wanted me to grow up to be an Englishman. He said I must not let my savage instincts conquer me. That I must learn to control myself, to prove myself worthy to be called a white man. I knew he liked me, and I loved him. After that God alone knows how I fought with myself to try to become the man he wished. As I grew up I fought the white race, but in a different manner, with my brains. And I always won. I was first in my studies and in my games. But I still remained ‘that nigger.’ Jealousy applied the term to me then. I made no friends at school. The boys I would have liked to be friendly with avoided me. Those who would have had me for their friend, I avoided. From Africa letters came frequently, encouraging, helpful letters from the man I loved and was striving to please.”
Lebrassa’s voice trailed off into silence, to become one with the sigh of the night wind drifting through the arches.
“I only saw my father three times,” he continued, “the last when I was about sixteen. I remember how elated I was on that occasion. I’d just won a scholarship that would take me on to college. I was delighted to tell my benefactor this, to know I should be no further expense to the man who had done so much for me. I remember wondering why he laughed when I told him, and how he told me he would give me a good allowance in spite of my scholarship. And I knew he was pleased with me, my success, my control over myself. For he told me I was a ‘white man,’ and how glad he was that he had given me my chance. Then he gave me a sealed letter, saying he could rely on my word of honor not to open it until I was eighteen. I sometimes wonder why he did so. But afterwards I learnt he had a weak heart, and he may have felt his doom was upon him.”
As if brooding on the long-dead past, Lebrassa paused again.
“I went on to college,” he began. “But at the end of the second term my allowance stopped. The firm of solicitors who forwarded the money could tell me nothing except that my patron, Mr. Godfrey—the name I knew him by—had not sent his usual remittance to them. My scholarship kept me going. At the bottom of my box was a sealed letter, my most cherished possession, to be opened when I was eighteen. I was very honorable in those days, Leslie, too honorable to open that letter after I had given my word. And you will hear now all that honor did for me. Had I been less honorable there would have been no Hyena. I should have been able to outwit my enemy.”
Lebrassa stopped again, as if hoping for some comment from the girl. But she said nothing.
“I can’t make you understand what that letter was to me, Leslie. It was a legacy from my lost friend who I felt must be dead. It kept me silent and uncomplaining under the burden of gibes and insults your color heaped upon me. Some of the fault may have been mine. At times I forgot I was a ‘nigger’ and stated my ideas and opinions in a manner my colleagues would not brook from a person they considered so much their inferior.”
There was another pause.
From beyond the garden the flare of bonfires lit the sky, and sparks flew out in golden showers drenching the soft purple of the night. The wind sighed through the open arches, bringing the scent of roses and the sound of distant merrymaking—of crowds rejoicing over their Sultan’s happiness.
Tense and low the mulatto’s voice came again, whispering and sighing away into the depths of the silent room.
“Then my eighteenth birthday came. And what that letter told me! It was from a father to a son he was proud of, who he had once thought might bring dishonor on an ancient name, but who had proved himself worthy of his heritage. I was not Essel Lebrassa, the bastard son of a negro woman as I had imagined myself to be, a waif, brought to England out of charity by a man who desired to experiment. I was Essel de Tourville, only and legal son of Richard, Earl of Alglenton, heir to one of the oldest names in England. My existence was known only to two English people, my father and his brother. There was a lot about my mother in the letter, and it told me of my African heritage and where it was situated. I did not want that. It was the English one I craved, because it took the stigma from me. Shall I tell you of the dreams I dreamt that night? Not dreams of self-advancement, but of all I could do for the country I loved in spite of the insults it had dealt out to me. I would be one of its peers, would have a voice in its management, could do for it in its African possessions what no other man could do, understanding so well both the black and white sides of all the problems different colors bring, having both black and white in me. They were a boy’s dreams, rudely shattered. The next morning I was up in Town with the solicitor who had sent me notice of the cessation of my allowance nearly two years before. I showed him my letter. He laughed at me. Richard, Earl of Alglenton had died unmarried and had been succeeded by his brother, the Honorable Lionel de Tourville. My letter was a hoax. The invention of a madman. It proved nothing. ‘Would the present peer, knowing the existence of his brother’s son, have deprived him of his heritage?’ ‘Would the late Earl of Alglenton have so far forgotten what was due to him as a peer of England to have legally married a negro woman?’ These and other questions he put to me, all the time laughing at me. I must produce my mother’s marriage certificate, my own birth certificate, before I could expect anyone to listen to a story as mad as mine.”
By now Leslie was looking at Lebrassa in a strained way, her eyes brought to his by the mention of the names “Richard” and “Alglenton.”
“My faith in my letter was unshaken,” he went on. “I left the office laughing at myself. In my excitement I had forgotten such things as certificates were necessary. Then out of the whirl I was moving in, came another thought. Why had my uncle sent me no news of my father’s death? Why had he stepped so calmly into my place? I thought no evil of my father’s brother, and I soon found an answer to my own questions. It was my father’s wish that all facts should be kept from me until my eighteenth birthday. My uncle had taken my place to avoid explanations. I had yet to find out what manner of man I was dealing with. I decided to go and see my uncle. I consulted a directory and found my own town address. I found him in my own house. He was a clever villain. My card was given to him and he had me admitted. I recognized him at once by his likeness to the Mr. Godfrey I’d known. I did not expect him to claim me kin until he had seen my father’s letter. I said why I’d come and brought out my letter. He took it in a strangely quiet way. I know now that he had no idea I had it. It was some evidence. Experts could prove that the handwritings of Mr. Godfrey and Richard, Earl of Alglenton, were identical, the work of the same man. I was not expecting treachery. I judged him by my father. I had to learn they were very different. He left me, crossed to the fire and stood there reading my letter. Then, Leslie, before I knew what was happening, he had burnt it! Burnt my letter!”
As if the agony of that moment were still upon him, Lebrassa paused.
“Then he turned on me in mockery, asking me what I meant by bringing such a lunatic’s tale to him. He denied all knowledge of my existence, of my father’s marriage; of all my letter contained. I was dumbfounded. Too late I realized the villain I was dealing with. I knew it was his intention to defraud me, to keep my heritage from me. Although he had burnt my letter, I knew its contents by heart. In it had been given cursory information as to the whereabouts of my mother’s country. But it was enough for me. I determined to go there, get my certificates and again confront him. During the few days I remained in England I learnt more of my father and uncle. How my father had died suddenly of heart disease two days after I’d last seen him, just as he was about to start out to Africa. No one but my uncle knew what took him there. Society had long since ceased to talk about him, dubbing him an eccentric man who preferred the wilds to England. My uncle spent the year following his brother’s death abroad, before launching himself as the Earl of Alglenton. I was soon to know how his time had been spent.”
There was a brief pause. Leslie’s gaze was still on Lebrassa, in a fixed, anxious manner, as if she dreaded what he might say next.
“God knows, little rose, I wouldn’t tell you this,” he went on in a strained way, “but I want your love and sympathy. It is my right and due as surely as was the Earldom of Alglenton.”
He laid his hand on her shoulder, looking down at her hungrily. She did not shrink from his touch. She did not even know his hand was upon her. She sat just waiting, petrified, at the knowledge of some unknown, ghastly horror that was sweeping toward her.
“Within a few days I left England for Africa,” he continued a moment later. “It was months before I reached Kallu, longing for my unknown mother, to lay my head on her knee and tell her how they had served me. And what do you think I found? A tribe of maddened savages. Ten thousand tongues clamoring for the blood of a white man, the murderer of their queen. No certificates were needed to satisfy them who I was. My word was enough. There were those among my mother’s people who could speak English, taught them by my father. From them I learnt the rest of the story. Two years before, a second white man had found his way to Kallu. He called himself an emissary from England, sent by the queen’s consort to ask her for certain papers she held, that her husband needed to prove the identity of their only child. My mother took him into the temple where she kept these treasures of hers in a golden casket on the altar of her heathen ancestors. What happened in there no one knew. Whether my mother suddenly suspected him of treachery and refused to give them into his keeping, I don’t know. She was a savage in spite of everything. Some of the instinct civilization stifles may have come to her, telling her not to part with the papers that gave her son his English heritage.”
Once more Lebrassa paused, as if he saw that slim, golden girl, his mother, alone in the Temple of the Night, standing by an ancient altar, with her treasured papers pressed against her heart, wondering if she dared give them into the keeping of the man who said he was a messenger from the white husband she adored, and whose lightest word to her was law.
“That stranger left the temple alone,” he continued. “Nothing was thought of it. The Queen Irena often stayed there to muse among the forgotten gods of her ancestors. Hours passed and she still did not appear. Then the priests entered. They found her dead, strangled on the altar, and the casket empty.”
The wind took up Lebrassa’s words, and they seemed to die away like a sob in the far corners of the great room.
“From one of the men my father had taken with him, I learnt the whereabouts of the Mission where my parents had been married. I went there, thinking I might prove something. I was too late again. I might have known that villain would leave me nothing. The man who had married them was long since dead. But there were people about the place who remembered the marriage of an Englishman with a yellow girl of great beauty. They searched all the books for a record of the event. A book was found where the record should have been. But—the page containing the entry was missing! I asked if any stray white man had been there during the last two years. There had been several, and one answered to my uncle’s description. I was the Sultan of Kallu. This heritage brought me riches far surpassing my English one, if not the honor. I went back to England, to my uncle, accusing him of treachery. I swore I would have his life in exchange for my mother’s unless he gave me my due. He laughed at me. In my rage I would have killed him there and then, had not the servants stopped me. The next year I spent in an English prison, and narrowly escaped being shut up for life as a criminal lunatic. Twenty-two years ago England was ringing with the story of a ‘nigger’ who imagined himself to be an English earl. Then I went mad. I forgot civilization altogether. In an English prison was born a man now called the Hyena.”
Lebrassa’s hand left Leslie’s shoulder. He moved a few steps away, to a curtain screening another alcove.
“I went back to Kallu,” he continued. “I took up every rite and ceremony of my negro ancestors. On the altar of my heathen forefathers I swore to have the life of the man who had defrauded me. Not only his, but all who sprang from him. Revenge on the whole white race for the sneers, insults, and the final degradation they had put upon me. Then my uncle learnt that I meant what I said. And he dared not remain in public life. So very soon England was ringing with another story—the mysterious disappearance of the Earl of Alglenton, his countess and infant son. For fourteen years my servants hunted him, and in the end I caught him. But he died of pneumonia a week later. His death left me rabid, for it seemed he had robbed me of everything, even vengeance. Yet, presently, I was glad I had not killed him. Madly I searched for his son, to make him pay the penalty his father had escaped. It was not until many years later I heard his son had died in infancy but there was—a daughter. Who was he, Leslie, this man who stole all from me when I was a boy?”
With a quick, passionate gesture Lebrassa drew the curtain screening the alcove. It showed a portrait of an Englishman of about thirty, in light, tropical garb, tall and fair and with gray eyes.
In a dazed way Leslie looked at the picture. In spite of the difference twenty years would make, only too well she knew of whom it reminded her.
“That is my father, Leslie, Richard, Earl of Alglenton. Your father’s brother.”
It had broken over her at last, that great wave of blood and blackness and treachery that had been rapidly rising. Broken over her and swamped her completely.
There were a dozen things to confirm Lebrassa’s statements. Her lack of knowledge as to who and what she really was. The wandering life her father had led. His mysterious disappearance. His dislike of Africa, where he said he had never been, yet his own ravings proved to the contrary, and the names of Richard, Irena, Alglenton and Kallu had always been on his tongue when drink had him firmly within its grip. The armlet she had found among his possessions, similar to the ones the pictured girl wore.
Leslie had loved her father; he was the only relative life had given her. For all that, as she grew older she had realized he had been a wastrel, that his ways had not been those of an upright and honorable man.
Through the black cloud that seemed to choke her, Lebrassa’s voice came.
“And then your letter came into my hands, with the name of the son of my enemy. And I saw you, heard you speaking in my defense. I had to learn you were my cousin, my one white relative. You came to my room, and I found out the truth. You stayed talking to me, treating me just as if I were a white man. I went back to Africa, intending to keep my oath. I schemed to get you to Kallu. I meant to make you pay for your father’s crimes. Yet, when I saw you again, my only desire was to turn you away from the trap I had laid. I had no chance against you. I couldn’t hate you, much as I tried. I could only love you, Leslie. If I were the man I might once have been I wouldn’t have forced you to come to me now, knowing you had nothing but hatred for me. I’ve been a savage too long. Too long the Sultan of Kallu. But I could be so patient, if patience would win me a little toleration, a little liking perhaps. God knows I’m a brute, steeped in every vice and crime, not fit to touch you. Yet, little rose, is the blame all mine? If I went back to savagery, who drove me?”
Leslie’s hands had gone to her face, as if to shut out the picture of vile treachery he had put before her.
“I didn’t know. I’d no idea,” she moaned.
That heart-broken wail made him touch her gently.
“I know you hadn’t, darling,” he whispered. “It’s just a ghastly mess, no more your fault than mine. The sins of the fathers that we have to pay for.”
There was no response. Instead came the sound of stifled sobbing.
Her tears made him drop on his knees beside her, whispering words of consolation.
“You mustn’t cry, little cousin. It’s no fault of yours. I can forgive everything if only you’ll try to love me, touch me willingly again. He’s not my enemy now. He’s the father of my rose. The sweetness he created can do more than ease my pain. I was a brute to tell you. But I couldn’t stand your hatred. Don’t cry, little cousin, dearest, don’t. I can’t bear it.”
The broken-hearted sobs went on, but a small, shaking, white hand came trembling on to Lebrassa’s head. At its touch, he buried his face on Leslie’s knee, and knelt there with his arms around her.
“In lieu of flowers from your fair land—
Take wild growths of dreamland or starland.”
The early morning breeze came whispering through the shady little courtyard that lay in the midst of the palace. It brought a shower of white petals fluttering down in the golden sunshine, mingling with the silver rain of fountains. Some fell like snowflakes on a shady stone seat where Leslie was sitting.
She had been a week in Kallu, and with each passing day she seemed to grow smaller, whiter and more wraith-like.
The girl had taken the burden of her father’s sins upon herself. A way of compensation had been shown to her, and she had accepted it, although the weight was crushing all life out of her. In another week’s time she was going to marry her cousin according to heathen rites. Then he was taking her over the border, to a secluded Mission, where they would be united in the European manner.
Now Leslie had no desire to return to civilization. Her father’s sins had cut her off from all her own color. The white world was no place for her, the daughter of a man guilty of depths of treachery she once would have deemed impossible. She was branded—as much an outcast and pariah as the big, strange cousin whose crimes her father was morally responsible for.
The sound of some one coming through one of the horseshoe arches roused her. Now she knew that footfall very well. And it made her look round with a smile, pathetic in its wistfulness.
Lebrassa crossed to her side. He noticed her forced air of welcome. And he noticed also that daily the girl grew thinner. She was visibly wasting away, and only too well he knew the reason. Half-kneeling on the seat beside her, he drew a branch of orange blossom down until it touched her head.
Every morning brought Leslie some gift from her cousin, the Sultan. His presents varied considerably, from heavy, barbaric jewels, rich and rare and gaudy, to a tiny specimen of a deer, so small that it had been sent in a foot-square hamper, so tame that it now lay at her feet.
His dark, tainted eyes were quick to see this morsel of life found more favor in her sight than all the costly jewels he heaped upon her.
That morning, with her early breakfast, had come a tiny cage, not more than four inches square, made of fine gold wire and studded with gems. In it was a mite of a bird, little bigger than a bumble bee, bright-eyed and very much alive.
On seeing it, for the first time since reaching Kallu, Leslie had laughed. It was such an absurd morsel, such a complete cage with feeding troughs, perches and a swing, everything a bird needed. And the servant who had brought the present had glided silently away to tell his royal master how much the gift had pleased.
As Leslie had sipped her coffee, talking to her new pet, pinhead, beady eyes had watched her, as if trying to explain that, in spite of its minuteness, it was a bird, and there was one thing the golden, jeweled cage lacked. It had chirped so loudly about its missing privilege that, the moment breakfast was over, she had taken the cage out into the courtyard. Now it stood empty on the seat beside her.
This Lebrassa noticed the moment his gaze came from his cousin’s face.
“Why, you’ve let it go!” he exclaimed. “And I was told you liked it.”
She laid a thin, apologetic hand on his sleeve.
“I’m sorry, Essel, but it didn’t like being shut up, so I had to let it out.”
His given name on her lips always brought a look of pleasure to his face. But on this occasion the look had died away by the time her sentence was finished.
Moving the tiny cage, he seated himself beside her, and stayed there in thoughtful silence.
“You’re making me very much the son of my father, Leslie,” he volunteered presently. “When you’re about I seem to have no connection with the savages on my mother’s side.”
She glanced at him, wondering what he was leading up to.
His gaze, however, was on the empty, golden cage.
“If I said you needn’t marry me and sent you back to England, do you think you’d get quite well and happy again?”
“I’d much rather stay here—now.”
He realized that the fact of her father’s crimes made her wish to avoid all people of her own color.
“I was a brute to tell you,” he said in a voice choked with feeling. “I was a fool not to have known it would crush the life out of you.”
Leslie said nothing.
A light wind breathed through the garden, bringing the scent of roses, the cooing of doves, and the ceaseless drip of fountains.
“Then it isn’t just the thought of me and all I wish that makes you look so tired and worn?” he asked anxiously.
“I’m only too glad to be able to make some return.”
He got to his feet, watching her tenderly. Then he took one of her listless hands into his, holding it carefully.
“You’re just a rose, Leslie, and crushing brings out all your sweetness. Do try and think of me only as my father’s son. Try not to dwell on my mother’s side,” he begged.
“I never think of you now except as my cousin,” she answered. “I know you would have been very different but for—my father,” she finished, in a voice that trembled.
He raised her hand to his lips.
“Why did I ever tell you?” he cried, his voice full of pain.
Kissing her hand he turned quickly away, and disappeared through one of the arches.
Leslie spent a long, listless morning, then lunch-time came—a solitary meal set in the coolest corner of the marble room. It was followed by a silent afternoon, hot and breathless, when everything, even the insects, seemed to sleep.
Sometimes Leslie wondered where her cousin was. She never saw him except for a few minutes in the morning and again in the evening when, with the cool of approaching sunset, he came to take her for a walk.
When the rising night wind woke up the sleeping trees, Lebrassa’s step roused Leslie as she sat reading on the terrace of the marble room.
“Are you ready?” he asked.
With a weary air, she picked up and pulled on a large hat lying on a chair near. As she walked by his side she saw nothing unless it was pointed out to her. A cloud of black and red had risen between her and earth’s beauties, shutting out the world, leaving her alone with a man who was her cousin, yet half a negro.
She watched him as he leant over a bed of violets gathering a bunch for her. Blacker than her father’s crimes loomed her own future. She felt crushed between the two, with no escape from either.
“Let me pin them on, darling?” he asked as he straightened himself.
“Why not, if you wish to,” she answered, smiling wistfully at him.
Then she watched his brown fingers that looked so dark against her white frock. So dark that only with an effort could she keep herself from shivering. Just then, when he was so close, the negro in him seemed so terrible, more insurmountable than all the crimes of his own doing.
Leaving the garden they passed through the village, and on into the cool depths of the forest. The night shadows were lengthening, and the relics of the forgotten city stood like white ghosts in the green gloom.
Leslie went on, thinking of Captain Fletcher, knowing her father’s infamy shut her out from all such as he.
Lebrassa’s voice broke the silence that had enveloped them since entering the forest.
“Who knows, Leslie,” he began, his gaze on the ancient ruins, “perhaps the black people were the first on earth. There was darkness before light, and night before day. We know there have been civilizations which time has buried. Perhaps the Sphinx itself is a monument of a past negro civilization, for it has a very negroid cast of features. The negroes may not be what the world thinks, a race just getting light from the whites, but the descendants of an ancient civilization, now forgotten. Perhaps, if one only knew it, it’s not such a disgrace to be a nigger.”
Leslie listened, not minding what subject he talked on now, so long as it was not love.
“Are you the last of your race?” she asked.
“There’s you, little cousin.”
“I meant——”
Abruptly she stopped.
Her remark and pause brought a dreary smile to his lips. It told him just what he was in her estimation.
“You mean my mother’s race? I’ve two cousins, children of my mother’s younger sister. Is that the only side you can see of me? I want to be all white with you, yet you can only see the nigger. You’re very sweet to me now, but I know it’s only to pay a debt. Don’t think I don’t know it. And appreciate it, too. I’m thankful for so little where I’d once dared to hope for so much.”
In silence the walk continued. And away in the forest, a prowling hyena laughed, loud and long and with wild mockery.
“Both by land and sea we have travell’d far.”
Mhaki, the high-priest, squatted among the ruins of a forgotten city watching the night shadows gather. He sat with his back against a marble block, listening to the sounds drifting through the night.
There was one that always left him alert—a single howl of hyena’s laughter.
He watched the shadows gather till the darkness shut out everything, and brought a life all its own—a whispering, rustling, creeping, stealthy life that preyed one on the other. Every noise that drifted through the bush he noted. Presently a sudden cessation of all sounds made his old eyes go sharply to a track just ahead of him.
It was one of those silences that fall upon all smaller forest life when a common enemy is abroad. The high-priest listened, knowing it meant either the presence of man or some big beast of prey, and his hand grasped a spear lying just in front of him.
Then came a sound that made him start up quickly.
About three hundred yards away, along the one lone trail that led to Kallu, came a long-drawn howl, a solitary hyena’s cry. There was a moment’s pause, then two howls came, from Mhaki’s lips this time. Three answered him. The repetition made his gnarled old hands lose their grip of things, and his spear fell to the ground.
It was Nanza’s signal. The truth had come to Kallu at last! And Nanza’s return said his worst fears were verified.
Presently a dark figure loomed up.
With trembling knees the old priest went to meet him.
“Hail, Nanza,” he said, “what message do you bring? Yet your return spells the Sultan Essel’s treachery.”
“I bring proof to all Bhessu said,” Nanza answered. “And, Mhaki, night whispers to me that the Star is in Kallu. It should please my cousin to see the daughter of his mother’s murderer sacrificed on the altar her father defiled.”
“How do you know the Star is here?”
“Night whispered it,” Nanza answered. “But this is no time for gossip. In some safe spot, let me show you the proofs I’ve brought.”
Mhaki drew out a soiled cloth and tied it over his visitor’s eyes. Then he led him towards the wilderness of creepers and shattered masonry.
After they had gone some distance Nanza was told to stoop and crawl. When the bandage was removed, he found himself in what appeared to be an underground cellar.
Mhaki produced a wooden lever from a corner and inserted it into a crevice between the flags forming the floor.
“There are many ways into the Temple of Night, but this is known only to me and the Sultan,” he grunted, as a two-foot square stone heaved up in response to his efforts.
Beneath was a narrow spiral stairway, twisting down a funnel-like hole until it was lost in darkness.
Taking a lamp from a niche near, Mhaki started down. The winding stair led to a heavy wooden door. This the high-priest opened.
The feeble light showed a fair-sized cave with curious signs and symbols on the rugged walls. A spring gurgled up in one corner; close by was a slit in the solid rock, wide enough for a man to walk through, that led on to darkness again.
A lounge, a table and a case of books showed up in one corner.
There Mhaki went, placing his battered lamp on the table.
“This is the Chamber of Musing,” he volunteered. “It lies just behind the Throne of Night.”
He paused and pointed to the slit.
“That leads to the temple, but the secret of its entrance is known only to the reigning sultan and the high-priest. Now, Nanza, the proofs. And if your story is false, you will stay here until death finds you. For no one knows the way that leads to and from this room except the Sultan Essel and myself.”
Nanza smiled.
“I, at least, am no traitor,” he said proudly. “Here are the proofs, white man’s proofs with seals and documents and signatures as you requested.”
From his loin cloth he drew a flat packet and laid it on the table.
With shaking fingers Mhaki opened it.
“How did you come by all these?” he asked, as several photographs and a bulky sealed letter came to light.
“As you advised, I went to Calabar. There I made friends with people who had been friends of Bhessu’s, Cooper, that is, and the white woman who was his wife. He had talked much about her. I learnt where they had met and what her name was from a man to whom he had given a photograph, taken the day they were married. I heard all that was said, and afterwards, when darkness fell, I returned by stealth to the house of this great talker and took that picture. Then on to England. From friends I made during the voyage I learnt the manner of tracing people among the whites. I was told there were those in London who lived by finding out all concerning others. To such I went. Gold did the rest. There, signed and sealed, untouched by me since I left their office, is what they found. It proves the woman who was Cooper’s wife to be no murderer’s child. She was the daughter of a man who served in a store where cloth was sold. The niece of another who to this day bakes bread for the city. And he bears witness to all that is written here. There is a picture, too, that I bought from him.”
From the papers, Nanza drew out a portrait of two girls, with dark and fair heads together.
“That,” he said, pointing to Leslie, “is the child of that foul murderer. Not this one, as the Sultan Essel would have us believe,” Nanza went on, putting a black finger on Molly’s pictured face. “Because none of us in Kallu, but you, had any white man’s learning, he thought we were easy to dupe. Here is what the people of London told me. Write to them if you wish. I’m content to stay here until you have proved my words to be true.”
Mhaki opened the sealed letter.
Messrs. Speyer and Speyer, private detectives of London, would have been very surprised had they known that the mass of information a wealthy colored client had desired them to find concerning a certain Molly Seaton, married about two years before at a Liverpool registry office to a negro named Horten Cooper, whom she had met in a Harrogate hotel, would be opened in the inner chamber of a heathen temple, some five hundred miles up-country in West Africa.
Tracing Molly had proved a simple task. From Harrogate they had followed her history backwards, through the years of her clerkship in London to a childhood spent in Islington where her father had been a cashier in a big drapery store. It described her minutely at every stage of her career. There were copies of her birth certificate, dated twenty-nine years before, and of her marriage certificate. The letter told how Molly Seaton had found a child called Leslie Graham, supposed to have been deserted in London, about eight years before, and how the two had lived together to within a few months of Molly’s marriage. It proved beyond doubt that the Molly Seaton born in Islington twenty-nine years ago was the same Molly Seaton who had married a negro called Horten Cooper in Liverpool twenty-seven years later.
For more than two hours Mhaki pored over it all. He read and re-read the letter and studied the photographs. Yet, in spite of everything, his faithful old heart wanted more proof before condemning the son of his beloved Irena.
“I would have more proof,” he said at length. “The condemning of a Sultan of Kallu is no light matter. There may be some flaw that even these people have not grasped. I must have more proof before I lay these papers before the other priests.”
Evilly Nanza smiled, the smile of one who holds the ace of trumps up his sleeve.
“I’ve proof beyond all this. Proof that will satisfy even you. And I found it for myself. I made friends with that uncle who bakes bread, and I paid him well to tell me all he knew about these two women. He had a box containing goods belonging to his niece and her friend. And I went through it carefully. I found there a picture of two faces both of which Kallu knows.”
From his loin cloth Nanza drew out a thin, oblong packet, wrapped in oil silk. This he opened and handed to the high-priest.
“Who are these two?” he asked.
Speechless Mhaki looked at the picture.
It was a photograph of a man of about fifty-five, with a handsome, dissipated face. Standing by his side was a little girl of perhaps eleven, who smiled out at the world in a frank, friendly way. The first Mhaki knew at a glance. He was the stranger who had come to Kallu and murdered the Queen Irena. On the second his eyes lingered. Big, dark eyes looked back at him with fearless innocence. In spite of the difference between the child of eleven and the grown-up woman, he knew who it was. The girl the Sultan proposed to marry!
There was no room for further doubt. It was proof direct. The Sultan Essel had lied!
The old man got up suddenly, the gleam of the fanatic in his eyes.
“Hail, Nanza! There has been a law these twenty years in Kallu, one of the Sultan Essel’s making: ‘Death to all traitors.’ ”
With savage satisfaction Nanza laughed.
“I thought that would satisfy you,” he said.
“I want no further proof. I see here the murderer with his child. I must have time to convince the priesthood of the truth of all you have brought. The Sultan is Lord of Doomana, and none will believe his treachery readily. I have a plan. Give me time. It’s for your sake I ask. Did those beyond know of your presence here you would be slain before I could save you. We must work stealthily. First I must convince the priests of the Sultan’s treachery. If they are satisfied we will wait. Then, on the night of his marriage, when all the tribe are gathered together to witness it, we will accuse him as he stands with her, on the Throne of Night, desiring to make her Queen of Kallu—this offspring of the accursed one, this daughter of his mother’s murderer! There will be no escape for him or her. First he shall see her die. Then we will deal with him.”
Mhaki swept together all the correspondence. Then, blowing out the light, he seized his companion’s arm and led him on into darkness.
“A horror of outer darkness.”
A vast hall of darkness, so great that it seemed to have no end; a place blacker than the deepest night, with no glint of light or life. Yet life was there, for out of the gloomy depths came the buzz of a multitude, eager and suppressed, now nothing more than a sighing breath, again a loud excited whisper that rose and echoed away until space swallowed it up.
The sighing breath took an upward rush, resounding through the darkness like the thunder of surf, to die away again in whispering, waiting silence.
A speck of light appeared, a pin-prick in the vast gloom. Gradually it came closer, and halted, shining high above everything.
The light showed a girl with a tired, white face, clad in a robe of purple gauze that swathed her with the billowy softness of a cloud. Her bare arms and shoulders were loaded with barbaric jewels—a rainbow mass of glittering color, looking almost too heavy for her to carry.
Her appearance made a wild shout come up from beneath.
“Hail, Star, Bride of the Night. All darkness gives you welcome.”
Leslie had no idea what was said, only a roar of savage sound came from the depths her strained eyes were trying to fathom.
The noise died away, to be followed by a silence so still that it seemed to whisper.
Then from a long way off a voice spoke in cultured English.
“Come, dearest, there’s nothing to fear.”
Leslie came of a race that died fighting. Although the voice left her cold and shivering, it reminded her that a debt had to be paid.
She stepped forward into the gloom. Each step brought frantic, hysterical courage; a determination to wipe off, if possible, her father’s infamy; to give this big, strange cousin all he wanted; never to let him know the depths of her aversion.
She reached the bottom of the long flight of rude stone steps. The lantern she carried showed nothing but empty space, and from beyond came the murmur of thousands.
She went forward. Other steps appeared, leading upwards. When she reached the top of these, out of the gloom some one leant towards her, whispering to her not to be afraid.
As the two met, suddenly a thousand torches flared up at all points of the vast underground hall, and a minute later a hundred bonfires burst into life.
Leslie gazed around. It was darkness no longer, but yellow curling mist and smoke and flames. The flare revealed great arches stretching away on either side, until they looped out into a gigantic circle. In each a bonfire danced, lighting the enclosed ring, but accentuating the gloom beyond. There was an inner circle of men, five deep, with spears and shields, all holding torches—men with scarred black faces and fang-like teeth. In front of these again were shadowy figures draped from head to foot in black, with nothing but their rolling eyes to tell they were alive.
Behind them was a sea of faces, all black, all watching her, stretching away until they became nothing more than gleaming eyes.
Leslie’s gaze came back from the countless wild faces to her immediate surroundings.
She was standing on a square block of black rock. Close behind loomed what appeared to be a great night cloud spreading away until it was lost in the shadows. At the first glance it was nothing more than a cloud, cunningly represented by some sculptor of forgotten ages. As she gazed, out of the billowy mass form came. It held her fascinated. It was not a cloud banked up behind the place where she was standing, but a great shape, neither God, nor beast, nor devil, yet all three so blended that they were lost in one. A fearsome Thing, yet strangely human.
She closed her eyes for a moment, then looked at it once more. It was a cloud again, slowly taking shape as she gazed. Its face was bestial, devilish and divine, with eyes that glowed dully in the firelight. Eyes, which, on first inspection, appeared to be two stars peeping out from the night. Some long-dead artist’s conception of the darkness from which all life sprang.
Her eyes left the cloud and went back to Lebrassa. There they stayed, frightened and fascinated.
He was clad in a long, straight, black gown, his massive bare arms flashing with golden armlets. A worn circlet of gold, with strange signs and symbols, was on his crisp, wavy hair. The sight sent a chill through her. There was so little of the Englishman left. So much of the savage, negro Sultan.
His voice broke in on her thoughts.
“You mustn’t watch that beast, darling, or he’ll gather you into everlasting darkness.”
His voice brought back the knowledge of his English side, and her own determination.
“But it isn’t quite a beast. One way it looks almost god-like.”
“I’ve watched it for days on end, and seen nothing but the beast and devil.”
“Perhaps you haven’t looked at it in the right way.”
“Or with the right eyes, little rose.”
“What is it?” she asked.
“Doomana, the shadow of all things. The darkness from which all earth sprang, according to the legend of my mother’s people. A lowering mass of evil that has brooded over this temple since time past all memory. That gathered me into its clutches more than twenty years ago.”
Gently she touched his arm. At that moment the knowledge of her debt loomed large before her.
The light touch brought him bending over her, anxious and eager.
“Little cousin, if I’d come to you clean-handed, my father’s son, not the Sultan of Kallu, could you have overlooked the black if there had been no red of my own making?”
Bravely she answered, with no hint of the ice that seemed to freeze her heart and stop its beating.
“There would have been no red, Essel dear, but for my father.”
The endearment, the first that had passed her lips, brought a smile that took all the lines of cruelty from his mouth. He drew her arm through his, where it stayed, cold, but unresisting.
Leslie stood, staring straight in front of her, until a burst of wild music brought her mind back to earth again.
A procession was winding its way through the gloom beyond the arches, all wearing straight black gowns. Leslie guessed them to be priests. There were perhaps fifty of them, headed by an old man carrying a tray of carved ebony on which reposed a wreath of golden stars, a crown similar to the one worn by the girl-queen, Irena.
From the shadow a voice chanted some old, weird melody, wild and haunting. Now and again, thousands answered it in a chorus that was deafening.
As Leslie watched the approaching procession of priests, it seemed to her they looked at her in anything but a friendly manner—almost as if they hated her. Quite different from the way the black soldiers used to look at her when she went with her cousin among his people. She glanced up at him, wondering if he had noticed it. But he had eyes for her and nothing else.
“What is it, dearest?” he asked, when their eyes met.
“I shall be glad when it’s all over.”
“It will soon come to an end,” he whispered.
Leslie wondered whether it would be a month, a year, or whether old age would come before the debt was settled and a welcome death claimed her.
At the foot of the steps leading to the rocky throne where she and Lebrassa stood, the procession halted. Silence fell on the multitude. A silence broken only by the crackle of the flames as the assembly stood waiting for the high-priest to begin the ceremony.
Then Mhaki’s voice came.
“Hail, Essel, Sultan of Kallu. Lord of Doomana. Ruler of the Night. Heir of all Darkness. Hail, Star, Bride of the Night, set to shine high on the Throne of Night, a gift from the Sultan to his people.”
Leslie was aware that her cousin drew her in front of him, holding her close against him.
Over her head his voice came thundering.
“Hail, all Kallu. A Star has risen to shine in the Heart of Darkness.”
Next came Mhaki’s voice.
Mounting half-way up the steps, he stood facing the crowd, holding on high the glittering crown.
“See, all Kallu! What is set above the night, as night is set above the earth?”
“The stars. And a star was sent to earth to wed with the one who first ruled in Kallu, in the shadow of the Night, as Lord of Doomana. And to his heirs, forever, a star. Our Sultan has chosen, and we would see him crown her.”
Question and answer came like the repetition of some old formula.
The high-priest’s voice again wailed through the temple.
“The Sultan has chosen, and we would see him crown her.”
There was a touch of menace in Mhaki’s voice that made one or two of the dusky warriors glance at him sharply. But Lebrassa had eyes and ears only for the girl within his arms.
As the high-priest mounted higher, to bow before the Sultan and the Star of his choice, holding the crown on its ebony salver, there was a stir among the shrouded figures of the priests forming the circle immediately in front of the warriors.
When Lebrassa took the crown and placed it on Leslie’s head, a sort of sigh passed through them, like an indrawn, hissing breath. Then it died away, and all eyes were fixed on him as he stood proudly smiling over her small head where golden stars now glittered. Over the murmur of the seething crowd, above the crackle and roar of the bonfires, his voice came, loud, arrogant, and all-commanding.
“Is there no greeting for my Queen?”
Ten thousand voices answered him.
“We are star-worshipers, we spawn of the night. In Kallu there is always welcome for such as she.”
As the volume of sound died away, from one corner came a solitary burst of hyena’s laughter. Ten thousand took up the wild war cry. The great hall trembled as the roar thundered through it. Long after Lebrassa’s hand was raised for silence the sound came echoing up from the darkness, to die away in a feeble, jeering laugh and a final sobbing sigh.
There was silence again, a silence that hissed and whispered.
Then, once more, the high-priest spoke:
“In Kallu there is always welcome for such as she. Red welcome.”
It did not need the added phrase to bring Lebrassa’s eyes from Leslie to the black face watching him in fanatical hatred. The menace of the voice had reached him before the clause of Mhaki’s own adding.
Before he had time to say or do anything, almost before the words had left the high-priest’s lips, a hundred voices bellowed:
“Traitor!”
The word was one that raised all the wild beast in the Kalluians. Who and what the traitor was no one knew, save fifty priests and the same number of probationers attached to the temple. The word had come. It raised the blood-lust of a crowd already excited almost beyond bounds. A savage roar went up, demanding the name of the traitor, and his death for daring to desecrate the Sultan’s nuptials with his presence.
The mass surged up to Lebrassa as he stood with surprise, savage anger and a glint of uneasiness on his face.
They stopped at the foot of the throne, not aware the one they sought was there, demanding that the Sultan should deliver this traitor into their hands. Their sudden onward rush swallowed up the priests, who went through the seething crowd whispering, insinuating, hinting.
No name was said, only one sentence.
“The daughter of the murderer is here.”
In the writhing mist and smoke and darkness no one knew where the words came from. They were whispered from the shadows, murmured out of the blackness, echoed through the vaulted arches. From mouth to mouth the words went.
There were men among the soldiers who remembered an argument between the Sultan and his cousin, Nanza, more than eighteen months before, in a hut near Calabar, five hundred miles away: an argument concerning the identity of two white women. They numbered only twenty-eight of the warriors, but what they said was listened to and repeated again and again, till ten thousand heard it.
In less than a quarter of an hour what had been an orderly crowd was a wild pandemonium. Question and answer were hurled out of the mist and smoke and shadows.
Then an ominous lull fell on the surging mass. The wild shouts died down to thick, hoarse growls. All eyes were turned on Lebrassa. His voice came thundering through the vast hall.
“By all darkness! What madness has seized you?”
He stood a picture of unbridled savagery and arrogance, enraged beyond measure, conscious of Leslie’s heart thumping in wild terror beneath his hand. He realized that some inkling of who she really was had reached Kallu. He never doubted but what he could quell the riot. But he did not know the extent and completeness of the evidence against him.
As yet no one had set foot on the Throne of Night. Lebrassa’s voice and attitude held those immediately beneath in check.
Over the growl of the multitude Mhaki’s voice answered, coming from the crowd just below.
“What madness has seized you, Essel, Sultan of Kallu, that you would set the daughter of your mother’s murderer on the Throne of Night? A gift of the Sultan to his people. A gift you promised full twenty years ago. But a gift of vengeance, of blood, an offering to Doomana. Not a star to shine as Queen of Kallu. There is a law which says, ‘Death to all traitors.’ ”
No savage roar greeted the word now. The growl died away to a whispering hiss. The multitude stood with strained ears, awaiting their Sultan’s defense.
“What madness has seized you in your dotage, Mhaki, that you accuse me, your Sultan, of black treachery? Death to you that you should dare to foul the name of the Star now shining over Kallu. Say, dogs, do you stand quiet and hear your leader called a traitor? By Mhaki who, with his own eyes, saw the daughter of the murderer die. Shot by Cooper, her husband.”
Lebrassa’s appeal to the soldiers had its effect. A roar greeted him. With a wild rush the warriors swept toward the high-priest, who stood surrounded by his supporters. It was just as well Mhaki had retired beyond his master’s reach. After his accusations he had backed down the steps of the throne and a surge of his friends and followers had swallowed him up. Had he remained within the Sultan’s reach the royal hand might have choked him.
Until order was restored, Lebrassa dared not leave the high rock where he was standing. He did not know what the mob might do to Leslie if she were left alone. He did not think about his own danger. As once before all his wits were concentrated on saving the girl he held pressed close against him in fierce protection. He thought he could keep the surging mass immediately beneath in check until the soldiers cleared a way so that he could get her out of the temple and in some place of safety. Then he would return and pacify the mob.
As he watched, the oncoming soldiers wavered, hesitated, came on uncertainly and then stopped altogether.
Lebrassa had reckoned without the women who had been gathered in the shadows beyond the lights. Chaos had brought them out among the men. A fortnight of wild revelry had preceded the Sultan’s marriage. This had given the hearts of the dusky warriors very much into the keeping of their womenfolk. Black hands could cling and hinder and make their power felt just as easily as white ones on men who were husbands, sweethearts and would-be lovers. The women clustering around the soldiers had fathers and brothers among the priests, and they had no wish to see their relatives killed. They clung to the arms of the soldiers, pleading and imploring, whispering that what Mhaki said might be true, that love plays havoc with the hearts of men, and the Sultan was but human, begging them to talk matters out quietly, to have no bloodshed. And all the time the priests were talking, whispering no longer, but declaring plainly that Nanza had returned and had brought proof beyond all doubt of the Sultan Essel’s treachery.
The soldiers’ halt left Lebrassa aghast. Through the babel of sound separate voices reached him. He heard how the news had come to Kallu and who had brought it, and he realized how poor was his chance of quelling the riot.
There was but one way of saving Leslie.
He glanced round calculatingly, knowing he could keep the mob in check for a few moments, sufficiently long to carry out the plan of escape that had come to him.
But first he desired a personal interview with Mhaki—to get within touch of the high-priest and silence that worthy for ever. But before doing this, he wanted to have Leslie where she could not see him act according to the instincts of his savage ancestors.
He was a picture of sultanic fury as he stood thundering for the silence he was gradually obtaining.
Over the mad babel his voice was heard at last.
“Who is the cur that heads this rabble? Let him come forward and prove his statements. If what he says is true, then I have been deceived about this girl I would make my wife.”
At his words a listening silence fell on the horde. To Mhaki’s face there came an expression of relief. But Nanza, disguised as one of the shrouded temple probationers, shrank back into the shadows.
Breathless silence reigned as the Sultan’s defense went on.
“Mhaki saw the murderer’s daughter die. A woman who told me her father was the man who slew Irena. And I thought then that she did not know who I was. But if what Mhaki says is true, then she knew me, what my motive was, and misled me purposely. For the woman whom I thought to be the daughter of that foul murderer was smitten with a disease that made her days numbered. Moreover, she had a friend whom she loved beyond all else—the Star I would have set to shine over Kallu. If the news my cousin Nanza has brought is true, then the woman who is dead deceived me purposely, hoping to save her friend. If it can be proved that Bhessu’s wife was not the child of the murderer, but it is her friend whose blood is wanted, she who is with me now as my bride, say, all Kallu, would there be anything but hatred in my heart, and a desire to deal with her as her father dealt with my mother? I, also, would know the truth. If all Mhaki says is fair and just, proof past all doubting, no plot of his and Nanza’s, then there will be no love in my heart for the Star, but hatred. And I will give her over to you to do with as you please, and say I am a fool, I, the Sultan of Kallu, to be so deceived by a woman.”
The explanation sent the crowd surging over to Lebrassa’s side.
Even the high-priest’s fanatical old heart was eased. The son of his beloved Irena was no traitor after all! But a man deluded by a woman, ensnared by the beauty of another as is ever the lot of man, not knowing who and what she really was.
Lebrassa watched the effect of his words on the crowd surging beneath the rock where he stood alone with the girl he was endeavoring to save. As he watched he made a gradual backward movement toward the brooding shape that loomed behind him, so slowly that in the flickering shadows it was hardly noticeable.
Just as Mhaki reached the foot of the steps the mulatto touched some point in the carved mass behind him, at the same time assuming a stiff unnatural position as though both feet and one elbow were working for some desired effect. There was a heavy stealthy noise as of a great stone moving. Leslie felt herself being lowered with quick haste and a voice whispered:
“Have no fear, little cousin, go straight on and I’ll join you.”
By then the unsuspecting priest had reached the top of the steps. The mulatto sprang forward, seized him in the grip of a madman, swung him on high, then dashed him with all his giant strength down against the black rock.
The roar of ten thousand wild beasts greeted this action. But Mhaki lay quite still, his sharp old brains bespattered about the Throne of Night, the only person, besides Lebrassa, who knew how to open the entrance to the Chamber of Musing, or who knew where, in the forest, was the door of the secret way leading from it.
Lebrassa turned to join Leslie, his idea being to take her on through the passage, and out into the forest, trusting to his own great strength, skill, cunning and savage lore to make his way through the wilderness until he reached what would be a place of safety for her, the first British outpost more than two hundred miles away.
As he turned to open the rock again, which had swung to the moment his hand left it, Nanza drew a revolver from beneath his cloak and fired wildly.
One shot reached home. Just as Lebrassa was about to move the rock again and join Leslie in her temporary refuge, he reeled and fell, lamed by a bullet through his ankle. He was up again almost at once, but just too late. Before he could reach sanctuary fifty hands seized him and dragged him down as he fought with the strength of Samson and the fury of a mad elephant.
In spite of everything there was a small orderly section in the mob. The hands holding Lebrassa were mostly priestly ones; the probationers formed a circle around him, keeping off the herd bellowing for his life.
Over the pandemonium Nanza’s voice came thundering. The fact of his presence sent a further howl echoing through the vast hall—a howl of welcome. A call for silence went round. Gradually the wild babel died down and his voice was heard.
“Hail, all Kallu. The truth has come, and with it the death of a Sultan. My cousin would have us think he knew not that the Star was the daughter of Irena’s murderer. Are we fools to be beguiled by such a tale? If what he said was true, why did he hide the girl, and then kill the high-priest, Mhaki? He lied to you and killed Mhaki in order to save himself and her, for only he and Mhaki knew that beyond lies a secret passage leading to the heart of the forest. And only he and Mhaki knew the secret that moves the stone. Does not all this prove that he knew who and what the girl was, and that it was his intention to defraud you of the blood that is your due?”
This speech resulted in a further dash to reach Lebrassa who now lay, bound and helpless, surrounded by a guard sufficiently strong to keep the rabble at bay.
Over their fury Nanza’s voice came again.
“You would give him an easy death,” he cried. “Not one worthy of Kallu. Let me ask him if he is willing to give the Star back into our keeping, and we will deal with him according to his answer.”
Nanza turned to his prostrate cousin.
“Tell me, Essel, the secret that moves Doomana, that I may enter and bring back the Star to shine over Kallu. A gift from the Sultan to his people.”
There was no reply.
The mulatto’s eyes blazed back at his tormentor as he writhed in a giant effort to burst his bonds and reach the one responsible for his capture. He was in an agony of helplessness at the thought of Leslie alone in the rock chamber, yet he knew that death by slow starvation would be preferable to the one this mob would deal out to her if she fell into their hands.
“See, he will tell me nothing,” Nanza cried. “What shall we do? Shall we persuade him?”
There was order now, the order of a multitude all of one mind.
The throne was cleared of all except Nanza, half a dozen priests and the prisoner. Wild figures rushed round the circle, mending and poking fires the happenings of the last hour had allowed to smolder unattended. There must be light—light to show what was about to happen.
The fires blazed up on a mass of figures, all squatted on their haunches, with the lurid light playing on their black, shining skins and eyes that had an inward red gleam fixed on the square rock, high above, where another fire gleamed.
Through the waiting hall Nanza’s voice came, full of savagery and hate.
“Tell us, my cousin, how to reach the Star set to shine over Kallu? We would have her in our midst, this Light from the Skies.”
There was a long pause, but no reply.
The question came again, but it still met with no answer.
At a gesture from Nanza, one of the priests drew a red hot bar of iron from the fire.
A moment later there was a faint hissing sound, and with it came the smell of live flesh scorching. This was followed by a laugh, loud, arrogant and defiant. Nanza’s voice came again.
“Come, Essel, son of my mother’s sister. Give us the Star. We are anxious to welcome our Queen.”
Again there was no response. And again there came that sickly, scorching smell.
Another laugh followed, but it died away in a stifled groan.
A crowd sat and watched, but there was no laughter now, only the smell of scorching flesh and a sort of suppressed panting.
“My king, to the last put trust in me.”
The Sultan Nanza was holding audience in the market-square. Three days had passed since the deposing of his cousin. Down in the great underground temple Lebrassa lay, recovering from the effects of that night’s work. During the time that had gone by since that evening, parties of soldiers had scoured the forest looking for the entrance to the passage down which Mhaki had taken Nanza, but no trace of it could be found.
In the market-place Nanza stood, his ambition attained at last. For now he was the Sultan of Kallu, no longer his cousin’s understudy and deputy, and he was talking loudly of all that was going to happen now he had the management of affairs.
A sudden stir and shouting on the outskirts of the village, took the attention of his audience. A woman had just emerged from a forest track, a tall, handsome negress of travel-stained appearance—a woman once very well known in the place.
On seeing his sister the new sultan stood in open-mouthed astonishment. Heedless of the questions and greetings showered on her, Yoni came on and threw herself at her brother’s feet.
“Hail, Nanza,” she cried breathlessly. “You see my words of long ago were true. The Sultan Essel had deceived us. That traitor who took me from my country and then cast me off with mockery and scorn. Give me vengeance. Let me see him die. Don’t tell me you have already killed him.”
Savagely Nanza laughed.
“No traitor dies in three days,” he said. In a suspicious manner his eyes remained on his sister. “How is it you’re here only a few days after me?” he added.
“I followed you, purposely, hoping that if you found favor in the sight of our cousin you would plead with him for me. A week ago I reached a village, and there one whispered to me the news you had brought from England, of the Sultan Essel’s treachery, of a Star that was no Star. I ask no greater boon than to see him as he lies in agony, that in his hour of suffering I may mock at him as he once mocked at me. Grant this, O Nanza, my brother and Sultan, to a woman full of hate and suffering.”
As she talked, suspicion died from his eyes, and her final sentence brought a tigerish smile to his lips.
“Our cousin lies in the temple. A free show to all, and a warning to those who would be traitors.”
Yoni rose to her feet.
The crowd’s gaze was upon her. They all noted her blazing, fanatical eyes and air of savage hate. She was another who had no love for the deposed Sultan!
This was the opinion of the priests some ten minutes later when Yoni halted at the head of the passage leading down to the temple, in her brother’s name, demanding admittance.
She passed through and went on to the head of the long flight of steps.
In the darkness below a fire gleamed. The light showed a man lying on a rude native couch. Beside him squatted a score of priests.
Lebrassa’s face was very English now. Pain had drawn his features; they had lost their heavy look, but his eyes still showed the negro taint that nothing could take away.
As the priests half-dozed on the throne by the royal prisoner, a wild voice from the back made them look round sharply. A woman was bearing down on them, with arms uplifted, wild-eyed, and face distorted with hate and passion.
In front of the priestly barrier she paused, glaring at the man they were guarding, shrieking out a volume of abuse. The flood of vituperation brought Lebrassa’s attention to her.
He watched her, surprised that his treachery to Kallu should have roused her hatred, when the breaking off of the life they had once led together had failed to do so.
“And you too, Yoni,” he said presently, with a dreary smile.
Her voice died down to a long-drawn, hissing breath and a splutter after speech, yet through it words reached Lebrassa that made his scorched hands clench. What seemed to the priests nothing more than the frantic gurgle of a woman choked with anger, reached him in the dialect of Calabar: a language unknown to any one there except himself and Yoni.
“My lord knows his slave is faithful,” he heard her say.
Yoni raised her voice again, raving, shouting and vituperating, down to a gurgling, breathless splutter.
“I came to give warning, but too late. To save my lord I would give my life,” reached Lebrassa.
She made a mad rush at the priests standing between her and the couch, as if to get at the deposed sultan and work her will upon him. They held her back, as she fought them wildly, their attention being temporarily removed from the prisoner. But through her struggles Yoni’s ears were strained for any word that might come from Lebrassa.
“More than life lies beyond the Shadow of Doomana, Yoni,” he was saying. “You cannot save me, but save the Star, and my death will be happy in spite of the tortures they deal out to me.”
Again her voice was raised in a storm of wild abuse, to die away in a sob of fury and frantic gasps. Between them came protestations that her desire was to save him, not the girl who had brought him to his end.
There was a further struggle between the priests and the distraught woman endeavoring to reach the prisoner. Sobs of fury came, and through them Yoni spluttered:
“I am but a slave to obey. A trance will come over me. I will fall here and none will dare touch me. Pretend to sleep, then mutter all you wish.”
Suddenly she stopped her wild struggles. She stood, stiff and frothing at the mouth. Then like a log she fell unconscious not two yards from where Lebrassa lay.
The priests gazed at her with awe. In past days she had been one of their kind, a priestess of the temple, but she had been expelled through love of the man she now hated. They sat round, watching her with interest, waiting until she came back to consciousness, wondering what she would say. For they thought her trance an audience with the gods.
On the couch the prisoner dozed uneasily, muttering whilst he slept.
A sudden howl from Yoni startled the priests. She staggered to her feet, swaying weakly, staring unseeingly into darkness. All waited to hear the words the gods had put into her mouth during the hour or so she had been with them.
“I am Yoni, Keeper of the Stars. Night gives me many eyes and I see. There is one coming whose arrival brings the darkness and the dawn.”
Long after she had vanished, swallowed up in the depths of the temple, the priests sat and talked over the meaning of the message.
But Lebrassa lay gazing patiently into darkness. To him the words needed no interpreting.
For Leslie’s sake he had betrayed Kallu. He had told Yoni to go to Tuata, to bring up Captain Fletcher and a relieving force.
“The blackness of darkness.”
As the great mass of rock swung back into position Leslie stood for a few moments conscious of a queer, dizzy feeling, glad of the quietness after the wild uproar she had left, wondering what had caused it. Then she went on in the darkness, groping her way along the rocky wall. An abrupt turn in the passage showed a faint light ahead. She went forward quickly, to find herself in a cave, faintly lighted by a lamp set on a table in one corner of it.
She glanced around. It was a large, high vault with a little spring oozing from a crevice at her feet, and another opening opposite the one by which she had entered, blocked by a heavy wooden door. The cave was empty but for the one corner whence the light came, which was fitted up as a chamber. There lay a suit of white drill. In that secret room behind the throne of rock, barely half an hour before, Lebrassa had put on the barbaric robes for the heathen wedding ceremony.
Crossing to the lounge, Leslie seated herself there, watching the passage by which she had entered, thinking it all part of the wild rites that made her her cousin’s wife, almost sick with dread at the thought of the man who soon would be coming along the passage, in terror not noticing how the time was passing.
The splutter of the dying lamp roused her. Fear of one darkness made her forget the other. Getting up quickly, she went to the slit, and stood there listening for some sound of her cousin’s coming. She heard nothing except the faint lapping of the spring. In an excess of terror and loneliness she crossed swiftly to the door, very conscious of the wild, moving shapes the lamp cast, thinking he might be coming that way. But, much as she tried, it was beyond her strength to open it.
Fearing the light would die away before she reached it, she ran back to the table and stood watching the flickering lamp. It gave a final upward flare of long flames, smoke and sparks, then died down to a glowing, smoldering wick. Breathlessly she watched the point of red. Then it faded, leaving her alone in utter darkness.
How long she stood with her eyes on the spot where it had been, she did not know. But it was until her legs gave way beneath her. Then she sank down on the lounge, and stayed there trying to hear something besides the gurgle of the spring.
Presently she got to her feet, her only desire now to reach the way by which she had entered.
On finding the slit she went up it blindly, with outstretched arms, until the solid rock stopped her.
“Essel! Essel!” she called wildly. “Don’t leave me here all alone.”
A sense of being buried alive seized her. With desperate hands she beat on the unresisting rock. Dull echoes answered.
She stopped, waiting until the gruesome sounds died away. Then she crept back to the lounge, trying to realize what it all meant and why her cousin had not come as he had said.
Then, presently, out of sheer fatigue, she slept.
She awoke with a stiff, cramped feeling, wondering where she was and why it was so dark. With a sudden flood came the recollection of all that had happened before sleep brought oblivion.
Louder than the gurgle of the spring, came her own heart-beats. A long shudder ran through her as she realized something must have happened or her cousin would not have left her so long in darkness. A wild wish to scream aloud, to make some human sound come out of the blackness, seized her. With an effort she repressed the feeling, conscious only of the chill, sickly fear that had her in its grip.
Then she rose and went groping for the passage, stumbling over rocks, heedless of the pool she splashed into, her only desire to reach the way by which she had entered. Then she threw herself face downwards on the ground in an effort to shut out the all-enveloping darkness.
There followed a vista of constant terrifying night.
Then forgetfulness came again. From this she awoke, dazed and blinding, in unaccustomed light that made her eyes ache.
A black face was bending over her, a woman’s face, vaguely familiar, watching her in an anxious but unfriendly manner.
“Have you come to fetch me?” Leslie asked feebly.
Yoni made no reply. She knew what the girl said. During the months the negress had spent trading on the steamers she had picked up a smattering of English. Turning toward the table, she began unwrapping the voluminous blue cloth that swathed her, bringing to light a number of parcels tied on to her person. They proved to be a quantity of hard biscuits, plantains, oranges and nuts, a bundle of candles and a couple of boxes of matches—supplies such as any native woman in an up-country African village would have bought for household stores.
In a dazed manner Leslie watched the silent woman, wondering if she were dreaming. She hardly dared speak lest this apparition should fade and leave her in total blackness again.
“Where’s Mr. Lebrassa?” she ventured at length.
The name brought Yoni’s eyes to her—black, suffering eyes full of hate and jealousy.
“He say you lib for here tree week,” she answered in broken English.
Her reply left Leslie aghast.
“But I can’t. I can’t stay here any longer. I shall go mad,” Leslie cried hysterically.
“He say you mus’ lib for here till Cap’en Fletcher come.”
Leslie stared back at her, too weak to grasp the meaning of what was said.
“Tell Mr. Lebrassa I can’t stay here. Why doesn’t he come?” she finished wildly.
“He no can come. He say I mus’ no say why.”
With the feeling of some nightmare on her, Leslie watched the silent figure that stolidly continued unpacking the parcels.
All at once Yoni faced the girl, looking at her in a wild, jealous way.
“He say I no mus’ say. But I say. He tink only ob you. You—who hab lose him everyting.”
There came a flood of wild words in broken English. As Leslie deciphered their meaning, it left her frozen.
They told of all Lebrassa was suffering, and for what reason; of the weeks of agony that lay before him; of how Yoni had reached him; of the secret of the whereabouts of the forest entrance to the rocky chamber which he had entrusted into her keeping; of the provisions she was to bring before starting to Tuata, over two hundred miles away to bring up the British force which meant Leslie’s rescue and the downfall of Kallu.
“An’ I hate you, you white gel!” Yoni’s frantic, sobbing voice finished. “An’ I kill you, but dat I no can sabe him, an’ he wan’ see you ’fore he die.”
Petrified Leslie listened. The hopeless tragedy was more than she could bear. Just as surely as her father had stolen her cousin’s English birthright, so she, unwittingly, had deprived him of his African heritage and brought him to this ghastly end. All the aversion and dread she had felt were lost in a flood of pity, so great that it was almost love.
She got up, looking with desperate eyes at Yoni’s dark, distorted face.
“Take me to Mr. Lebrassa at once,” she commanded.
The negress stopped sobbing and gazed at her with curiosity.
“You no lub him, an’ you wan’ go an’ sabe him?”
“I won’t have him tortured because of me.”
Yoni pushed her back on the lounge.
“No good now. Dey kill him all same. An’ you, de one he wan’ sabe. He say you write note to Cap’en Fletcher, so dat white mans see I say true.”
Yoni plunged into a big calico pocket that was tied round her waist and produced a stump of lead pencil. With trembling fingers Leslie took it and looked round for something to write on.
The candle Yoni had fixed on the table by means of a drop of grease showed a strange picture. A big, gloomy cavern full of groping shadows, and, in one corner of it, a worn, white girl sat scribbling a frantic message on a piece of soiled paper that had been round one of the packages. The light flashed on slim, gem-laden fingers that wrote with desperate pleading, begging her distant countryman to come and save a man whose head had had a price on it for the last seventeen years; it played on the rainbow mass of jewels gleaming on her slender bare arms and shoulders, and on the golden stars strewn about the gauzy, billowing robe she wore. The light showed, too, a black woman standing half-naked, silent as a statue, her coarse blue cloth trailing on the ground, with eyes full of jealousy, hatred and suffering fixed on the frail, ethereal beauty beside her.
When the note was finished Leslie rose, determined to make another effort to save Lebrassa from further suffering.
“You must let me out. Perhaps they won’t torture him if they have me.”
Savagely Yoni laughed, in a way strangely reminiscent of her brother.
“If dat sabe him, you no be here now. I tell hem fetch you so soon I know how get here. I take you now, but I know it hurt de Sultan more see you hurt dan all dey hurt him. Dere is only to do what he say. You here. He dere—hoping dat de white mans come ’fore he die, an’ he know you safe. It all you—you—you!”
Dazed and stunned Leslie stood conscious of the truth of all Yoni said, aghast at her own helplessness. There was nothing to do but wait, knowing a man was being tortured to death on her account. The fact left her sick and shivering. And above all was the knowledge that her cousin had tried to keep this last horror from her.
In an ecstasy of pity and helplessness she touched Yoni’s arm.
“Is there nothing I can do?” she asked.
Roughly the negress shook off that small, anxious, white hand.
“You can do what he say. No more.”
Yoni took the candle from the table and made for the wooden door by which she had entered, and started wrestling with the catch.
Leslie followed her. In what the woman had said, the girl had forgotten her own weeks of imprisonment and dire loneliness.
“Why do you do so much for the Sultan?” she asked.
For a moment Yoni ceased her struggles with the door. Turning, she scanned Leslie from head to foot, a glance that showed all the hatred she felt for the one responsible for her god’s suffering and downfall.
“For de reason he do so much for you.”
Then she turned her back on Leslie and re-attacked the door. Presently it gave way under her efforts. Without a word she went out, banging it behind her almost before Leslie had realized what was happening.
She flew to the door, trying to reach Yoni, still hoping that if she gave herself up her cousin’s torments might cease, but as she got there she heard a heavy bar slipped into position. She pulled and banged at the door, but her efforts brought no response from the woman outside.
Presently, worn out with her three days of starvation, she groped her way back to the table and felt round for candle and matches.
There were only a dozen candles and these would have to last her for three weeks at least. But although light was so precious, she could not sit in darkness alone with her thoughts.
“Though the gifts of the light in the end are curses,
Yet bides the gift of the darkness—sleep!”
All day long war drums had been sending their wild tattoo echoing through the forest. Savage figures flitted to and fro among the ruins of ancient Kallu. War-palaver was being held in the market-square, attended by an array of warriors, blood-stained and bandaged, hardly one of them whole.
Kallu was learning that the Sultan Nanza was not the leader the Sultan Essel had been.
Away in the forest, now not more than thirty miles distant, a thin line of khaki and black, led by a trio of Englishmen, was pushing its way onwards, and no effort of the Kalluians could dislodge or turn it from its course.
When the first news of the coming expedition had been brought, Kallu had set out, a thousand strong, to annihilate the hurried advancing towards them. There had been attacks by day and by night, every one a failure. There were ambushes set, but every hiding place on the route appeared to be known to the advancing force, and the Kalluians found themselves attacked by a foe they had hoped to surprise.
A sullen crowd scowled at Nanza as he stood arranging the next move. There was no getting away from the fact that they were beaten, and the fall of Kallu was only a matter of a few hours. The warriors had lost faith in their leader. He was brave, but courage was of little use when machine guns came into play, and his skill in warfare was crude negro cunning; he had none of the finesse and strategy his cousin had inherited from a long line of English ancestors, most of them famous soldiers. In the Sultan Essel’s day they had fought in many parts of West Africa, and their portion of the campaign had been always successful. Now, to be defeated, routed day after day, by a force only a fraction of their original number, took the heart out of them, and left them with no desire to meet the advancing foe face to face.
More than three weeks had passed since Yoni had started down to Tuata.
The news she had brought, and the frantic note from Leslie delivered with it, had resulted in the whole garrison being sent up, for Fletcher knew enough of the Hyena’s following to guess they would prove no easy foe, even when deprived of their half-caste leader.
Always when the expedition halted for its few hours’ nightly rest, Fletcher would bring out Leslie’s imploring letter. In it was no mention of that brief moment of exquisite agony when her small, white face had been so close to his and her soft lips had tried to kiss the pain out of his eyes. Nothing of the confession of love that tragic parting had brought. It was a wild cry, begging him to come and save the man he had been trying to catch for years.
And it left him with the feeling that had assailed him once before, at the Harrogate hotel, on the occasion of his first round with Lebrassa over Leslie, when the mulatto had succeeded in converting his dinner invitation into consideration for her only. Now, in his end, ghastly as it was, the same thought and consideration were there, and the volume of it appeared to have driven from Leslie’s mind the knowledge of all else.
The wild, imploring note was in Fletcher’s hand, as he sat camped only ten miles from Kallu, wondering what the morrow would show him; whether Lebrassa would have withstood the tortures put upon him and kept the secret of Leslie’s hiding place, or whether he would have come too late to do more than stamp out this nest of hornets.
The blackness of night was growing faintly red when the little British force started on the last ten miles of its journey. The sun was up long before the first glimpse of the ruins came into view. The piles of masonry and tangled curtains of creeper offered excellent cover for the enemy. Every moment Fletcher expected an attack, not knowing Kallu had struck its last blow.
The little column marched on, and came out into the blaze of sunshine flooding the market-square. Everything there was quiet and peaceful; thin spirals of faint, gray smoke curled up from fires outside the mud huts clinging to the palace walls. Around them stood a crowd of women and children, sullen and resentful, watching the intruders. But there was no sign of a man of fighting age.
Fletcher knew what had happened—reverses had taken the heart out of Kallu. He had seen these evacuations before, in several expeditions against rebellious tribes, when the tide had gone against them.
However, he was taking no risks.
In spite of his desire to reach Leslie, and Yoni dragging at his arm and imploring him to come at once to the temple, he made a survey of the place to satisfy himself its peaceful attitude was no trap. At the head of the tunnel leading down to the temple he posted half his men. Then, with a supply of torches, he took the remaining half in with him.
The long, dark corridor he and his party traversed sounded strangely silent and deserted; only the booming echo of the steady tramp of feet came out of the darkness confronting them. The array of torches showed rock walls covered with signs and symbols beyond the knowledge of the present age—the work of some night-worshipers who lived when the world was dim.
Fletcher had no eyes for these. At the head of his men he marched along, wondering what the unknown beyond would show him.
Presently a flight of steps was reached, leading down to even darker depths of silence. No glimmer of light came from it, no sound.
For a moment he stood staring into the pit. It seemed as if he had come too late; that this great black void had swallowed up everything.
Yoni’s hand, pulling his sleeve in desperate, anxious haste, roused him.
The party descended into the inky well. The torches showed only further darkness. They marched on until the columns of a great arch loomed up in the feeble light.
A cry from Yoni brought Fletcher’s gaze to something lying at the foot of the wide stone steps leading up to the Throne. Something that had once been a man. Now a mass of festering sores and stumps, forgotten in the fighting that had taken his torturers from Kallu, left alone in darkness to die. Something once so strong that even death had been conquered by it, for the great bare chest, scarred and burnt till the ribs showed through, still moved with a flicker of life.
With a wail of agony Yoni sank beside Lebrassa.
Fletcher knelt beside his old enemy, marveling that a man could endure so much and still be alive. Opening his flask, he coaxed a draught of weak whiskey and water between Lebrassa’s parched lips. Tortured eyes opened, then closed again as if the light were too much for them; opened again, and rested unbelievingly on the Englishman’s face.
“Why, Fletcher!” came out in a faint gasp.
Fletcher had no love for the man he was tending. There had been a time when he had thought the worst death earth could inflict would be too good for him. But now his end had come, the cause that had brought him to it seemed to have wiped away the mass of villainy at his door.
The idea made Fletcher do the most difficult, and perhaps the most noble, deed of his life.
“Miss Graham wrote to me, asking me to come and save you. There was no thought of anything but you in her letter—you and what you were suffering on her account.”
His words made a shadow of the old arrogance cross Lebrassa’s face.
“That woman must have told her. I wanted to keep it from her.” Then he laughed, a laugh pathetic in its feebleness. “Leslie asked you to save me!”
Lebrassa’s eyes closed weakly. Then he spoke again, in a querulous, hopeless, wandering way.
“Take me out of this black hell. I want light and whiteness and roses.”
Fletcher’s next draught brought his wandering mind back to the present. His eyes opened and rested on his captor’s face in an anxious, pleading manner.
“Those devils have left me no sight for a girl’s eyes. I’d like to look something like a man in case she should want to see me.”
Even now, in spite of all he had endured for Leslie’s sake, there was the anxious doubt that the return of her own sort and color might take her thoughts from him and bring back all the old antipathy.
Despite his desire to reach Leslie, the wistful pleading in that faint, tortured voice made Fletcher comply with the request before going further. Turning to a Hausa sergeant, he gave an order for an impromptu stretcher to be made. Whilst Lebrassa was being lifted carefully on it, he scribbled a note to the doctor of the expedition, telling him to do his best for the dying man.
When this was done, in a feeble, gasping voice Lebrassa told him the secret that opened the Shadow.
In a fever of anxiety Fletcher went up the wide stone steps of the throne and crossed to the rock where the brooding Shape loomed. Slowly and carefully he followed out the complicated instructions Lebrassa had given. Presently an oblong hole appeared in the banked cloud. It revealed nothing but darkness, no sign or sound of the one entombed within.
Telling his men to hold the rock back, he lowered himself into the gaping hole. Then he took a torch from one of them and went along the empty passage.
The noise of his heavy military boots went echoing down the long, rough, rock alley, booming into the cave beyond with the sound of distant thunder. It made the girl sitting there in darkness, start up with wildly beating heart, not knowing whether it was relief at last, or whether the man suffering outside had been unable to endure more, and had told her whereabouts.
Fletcher came out of the slit with the growing fear that the horror and loneliness had proved beyond the girl’s strength.
Anxiously he stood gazing round the great cave, for the light of his torch was not sufficient to pierce its far, gloomy corners. Out of the darkness something seemed to float towards him; a wraith of a girl in crumpled purple gauze where golden stars flashed. She was so transparent and ethereal that for a moment he thought she was some conception of his own mind come to haunt his waking hours as her ghost did his dreams.
Then dropping his torch he rushed forward and drew her into his arms.
“My darling!” he cried, falling on his knees before her.
Small hands, so thin and white, were on his shoulders.
“Is he—still alive?”
Leslie’s question sent a chill through her lover. In the end it seemed that Lebrassa was victor, that he had succeeded in stealing her love. The idea left Fletcher tongue-tied and clumsy, and choked back the flood of tender words on his lips.
“He’s still alive,” he said huskily.
“Is… is he much hurt?”
He knew she had no idea of the tortures savages were capable of inflicting. He knew also that Lebrassa’s end was only a matter of a few days, hours even, that his desire to see the girl for whose sake he had suffered so much had helped to keep life in him.
“I’m afraid he won’t recover.”
“Then I shall have killed him!”
“No, darling, his own wild schemings brought him to his end.”
“He’s my cousin,” Leslie said brokenly. “And something my… father did made him do all those dreadful things.”
This was no news to Fletcher. The bare fact had come into Leslie’s wild, imploring note, and it had left him wondering what the true story was.
“So you told me, little one,” he said tenderly.
“I thought you would never come,” she said wildly. “I’ve waited so long, all the time knowing they were torturing him. Perhaps I’m only dreaming now, and I shall wake up in the dark again, thinking he’s still being hurt.”
Tenderly Fletcher drew her fragile little form closer.
“Haven’t you a word of welcome for me, darling?” he asked.
Leslie was too weak and dazed to realize anything except that relief had come at last, and her only desire was to see the man who for her sake had suffered so much.
“I can’t think of anything but my cousin.”
Fletcher’s arms dropped from the slender waist they encircled. It seemed to him they had no place there; that he was usurping a dying man’s privilege.
Instinct must have told Leslie that his heart was stricken.
“Don’t be hurt and angry, dear,” she pleaded. “I must do all I can to make my cousin’s end happy. Don’t you see, he’s not a nigger to me now. He’s my cousin. My brave, dear cousin. The cousin my… father mortally injured.”
Getting to his feet, Fletcher picked up the torch. As he did so, drearily he wondered why the mulatto always succeeded in out-maneuvering him where the girl they both loved was concerned.
To Leslie the journey back to daylight was a blurred vista of sensations. She was aware of a bigger flare of light as Fletcher lifted her out through the hole and onto the rock throne. There was the vast hall to cross, a walk that made her realize how weak she was. Steps were reached, a breathless climb. Then a long corridor, like an endless black tube, with a faint speck of light at the end, that grew bigger and brighter as she stumbled on, until it almost blinded her.
Well within the screening shadow of the tunnel, where the light did not come so strongly, Fletcher came to a halt. He gave an order to a Hausa sergeant to fetch a hammock to carry Leslie to the palace. Then he drew out a handkerchief and folded it thickly so as to bind her eyes when she crossed the sunlit square.
As they stood there waiting, Lieutenant Vincent came and spoke to her, telling her that Lebrassa was a hero and a gentleman, that the doctor was doing his best for him.
He said a great deal more but that was all Leslie grasped. In a dazed way she listened as he went on talking, glad some one was saying a good word for her cousin.
When the hammock came, Fletcher bound her eyes and carried her into it. Then the screening cloth was taken off, she was in the green, shady garden within the palace walls.
The big arch leading into the courtyard was reached at last, then the fretted, columned windows opening into the sitting-room that had once been hers.
The moment the bearers stopped Leslie slipped from the litter. She went on blindly, with eyes only for a man on a low couch set between the portraits of the two who were responsible for his being.
She did not realize the extent of her cousin’s injuries, for his persecutors had left his face untouched, and a coverlet screened the rest from her sight. But there was no mistaking the suffering in the tainted eyes watching so eagerly for her coming.
With a little cry she crossed and knelt beside him, flooding his worn face with her tears. The soft shower eased his look of pain and anguish and took the wistful anxiety from his eyes.
“The tears are not for me, are they, little rose?” he whispered.
“You should have told them where I was. You shouldn’t have let them hurt you,” she sobbed, as she smoothed back his crisp, wavy hair—now more white than black—in an ecstasy of loving pity.
“A life in hell makes one oblivious to pain, little cousin.”
“You should have spoken! You should have spoken! You shouldn’t have let them torture you because of me.”
In a weak, pleased, tender manner Lebrassa laughed.
“There’s no pain now, little rose, only sweetness.”
The depth of love and suffering in his voice was more than Leslie could bear.
Her head sank on the coverlet and stayed there in an agony of suppressed weeping. A mangled limb that had been bandaged back to some semblance of an arm came out from beneath the screening coverlet, and was put around her with a vestige of its old fierce protection.
“You mustn’t cry, dearest,” he whispered. “I’ve got a better end than I deserve.”
“You mustn’t die, Essel. You mustn’t. I want you.”
“I’d go through any hell, Leslie, to come out finding you weeping over me, wanting me!”
Then his faint, tired voice stopped. Happiness seemed to have taken away his last remaining mite of strength. He lay just watching the girl who knelt beside him, smoothing his grizzled hair and touching his haggard face with gentle, caressing fingers, a touch that took all pain from his eyes.
The doctor’s entry roused them. Coming to the couch, he stood looking at Lebrassa, wondering how much he would endure for the sake of the girl with him, knowing what pain the moving of that encircling arm must have caused.
“I shall have to send you away now, Miss Graham,” he said in a kindly manner. “I haven’t quite finished making your cousin comfortable.”
The mere suggestion of her leaving him made Lebrassa’s arm tighten round the girl.
His action brought a tearful smile to Leslie’s lips. All was weakness and suffering where once there had been such strength and power. She did not draw back from that feeble hold, instead even more tenderly she smoothed his worn face.
“Let me go, Essel dear,” she whispered. “I’ll come back the moment the doctor will let me.”
With a touch of savage jealousy he held her tighter, kissing her caressing hands passionately.
“There’s no one but me now, is there, little angel? In spite of the blackness,” he asked anxiously.
“No one,” she whispered.
She bent over him until the cloud of her hair screened from his sight everything but herself. Gently she smoothed his worn face, and he gazed at her in worship and adoration, whispering all the wild love that, up to now, the knowledge of her aversion and dread of him had kept stifled.
When Leslie returned to his bedside she was no sultan’s bride, but a little English girl in a straight, short-sleeved muslin frock with hair done in tight coils round her ears. All afternoon she stayed beside him, fanning him gently, for the breathless, tropical heat had taken all but the faintest spark of life from him, and that was in the tainted eyes that never left her face.
The dim, shaded room was all peace and quiet, the silence broken only by the girl’s slight movements, the occasional gentle murmur of her voice and the tramp of the sentry on duty outside—the only thing that said Lebrassa was a prisoner.
For nearly a week he lingered, patient, quiet and happy, with Leslie his nurse by day and Yoni taking night duty.
There came a time when he was a little exacting with Leslie, anxious she should stay with him all morning instead of going for her usual half hour walk in the garden as he had always insisted, peevish if she left him even for a moment. He was irritable with Yoni, not wanting her near him; angry if any of the Englishmen came into the room, holding Leslie in a weak yet savage, jealous way, if they spoke to her.
All morning he lay watching his cousin, refusing everything but the sips of water she coaxed between his lips. But when lunch-time came he asked her to go and have her meal in some cool spot in the garden, as an excuse saying she had been tied to the room all morning and that now he felt like sleeping a little.
But once she was out of sight, he asked if he might see his captor.
The request surprised Fletcher. Generally Lebrassa ignored him, if he chanced to come in the room, granting him neither look nor word. The message was from a dying man so Fletcher went, wondering why his prisoner should suddenly ask for him.
On approaching the couch, Lebrassa’s gaze met his in a pleading, anxious manner. Then he looked at the doctor who usually sat in the room.
“Could we be quite alone, Captain Fletcher?” he asked faintly.
Fletcher glanced toward his medical officer.
“I’ll take a turn with the patient, if you’d like to get along for lunch now.”
Once the doctor was out of earshot, Lebrassa spoke again.
“You love my cousin, Captain Fletcher?”
From such a source the captain once would have resented this question. Even now it rubbed him on the raw, but remembering the cause for which his rival was dying he answered from his heart.
“I loved Miss Graham from the first moment I saw her.”
“Leslie loves you, too, though she tries to hide it from me,” Lebrassa replied. “But in her generous, unselfish way she has given me one week in heaven, and for that I’m grateful.”
As if getting his words together Lebrassa paused.
“My cousin is penniless,” he continued a moment later. “She can’t prove her claim to anything that was once my father’s. As an indemnity your government will seize all I own out here, so it’s no use for me to make a will in her favor.”
Realizing the truth of these statements, Fletcher said nothing. He had decided what Leslie’s future was to be. That she was penniless did not trouble him at all; he had a comfortable income apart from his pay. But he still wondered what the interview was leading up to.
“I want Leslie to be happy,” that weak, gasping voice continued. “And she can’t be with the weight of her father’s sins upon her. And because of them, she won’t marry you either.”
This fact Fletcher had not grasped. Now it made him listen eagerly to what the dying man was saying.
“I can’t bear to think of her missing happiness because of her father. Because of his sins going through life feeling a leper. I know that feeling only too well. And I won’t have Leslie suffer in the way I have.”
Fletcher saw his own paradise retreating, and the fact stunned him.
“But what can you do?” he asked rather helplessly.
His question brought a slight smile to Lebrassa’s drawn lips.
“In strategy and finesse I’ve always been the better man of the two,” he remarked.
Fletcher knew the Sultan was referring to their many rounds in past days, when he had always proved himself more than a match for the Englishman.
“I’m going to tell my cousin another story,” Lebrassa went on. “And you must uphold my second confession. Now listen carefully.”
Fletcher stooped over the bed to miss no word of that faint, gasping speech. With heads close together they stayed talking, two men, once mortal enemies, now brought together as friends in defense of the girl they both loved.
“But it’s going back on a brave man,” Fletcher protested when Lebrassa had finished.
“Better to go back on a ‘brave man’ as you please to call me, than leave an innocent, honorable girl suffering for the rest of her life. And you’ll be the braver man, Captain Fletcher, for you’ll have to tell lies and stick to them, knowing that by cheating you’ll win the prize.”
To Fletcher it seemed no sacrifice could be greater than the one his old enemy was prepared to make for the sake of the girl they both loved.
“You will back me up,” Lebrassa pleaded.
Fletcher was past speaking; he just nodded.
A bandaged arm made a movement in his direction, as if to shake hands on their bargain. Then Lebrassa seemed to recollect what he was and the mutilated limb was drawn back. Slight as the gesture was, Fletcher saw it and he put his own hand carefully on the stump where his enemy’s hand had once been.
When Leslie returned to her vigil by her cousin’s couch there was no sign of Fletcher. Nor did the doctor who was sitting in the room make any mention of his visit.
The long, hot, trying afternoon dragged on. It left Lebrassa lying with closed eyes, that opened only to smile when she touched him caressingly. But the coolness of evening brought a little life to him.
For a long time he stayed watching her in an anxious, hungry, jealous way. Then a whisper brought her bending over him.
“There’s something I want to tell you, Leslie. Something that will take all your love away from me.”
“What is it, dear?” she asked. “What do you want to tell me now?”
The whole of his nightmare life, black, white and red, had been poured out before her during the past few days.
“It’s about you, dearest,” he whispered, in a hesitating manner, as if afraid of what the result of his confession would be.
“I’m listening, Essel,” she said, patting his hollow face tenderly.
“It’s what I once told you about your father. It wasn’t true. Not a word of it, except that I am your cousin, but not legally. My father married my mother by heathen rites only. Think of it, Leslie, would such a thing as a legal marriage be likely? My father was the reprobate, not yours. He was a just and honorable man, even to me. Accidentally I learned who my dead father was. I forged that letter and went to my uncle, claiming to be the legal son of his elder brother. He listened to me. Read my letter. Said if my story was true, he would give me my title and estates, but I must first produce my mother’s marriage certificate and my own birth certificate. She had been dead long before I went to him, and I swore she had hidden the proofs I wanted and that the secret of their hiding-place had died with her.”
There was a brief pause, then the weak voice went on, gradually gaining force and power and conviction—a dying man’s effort to remove a heritage of sin from a girl’s white conscience.
“He came out to Kallu, to see how much of my wild story was true, and spent a lot of time in trying to find out the truth. Then he discovered it, and accused me of being the imposter I was. I tried to terrorize him into giving me what was his, and acknowledge me as his brother’s legal son. I said I’d have his life and the lives of his wife and child if he did not give me my father’s title and estates. Fear for them drove him from England. It was not true, anything I told you that day you came to Kallu, Leslie. I said it to make you be kind to me, so that you wouldn’t quite hate me, knowing it would be so easy to deceive you, that I might get sympathy that way, if not love.”
Stunned, Leslie listened.
For a moment it seemed as though the burden of her father’s infamy had slipped from her. Then other thoughts came that made her bend over her cousin in an ecstasy of love and pity.
“I don’t believe you, Essel.”
“It is true. You must believe me,” he said with weak determination. “I said it to make you like me. I’ve deceived everybody, so why not you, the one I plotted and schemed and did murder to get? Why not you, the little girl whose love I wanted, who always paid her debts so nobly? Why not forge a debt to make you pay me back in the sympathy and sweetness I couldn’t get otherwise?”
There was conviction in the voice that had gathered strength for this last effort at deception. But in Leslie’s mind were childish recollections of a drunken, dissipated man who had habits and ways and ideas that the light of advancing years had shown her were neither just nor honorable. Above all was the knowledge of her cousin’s wild love and depth of sacrifice for herself.
She leaned over him, anxious these last few hours should be as happy as she could make them.
“Never mind, dear. If you deceived me, it was because you loved me.”
Searchingly, he watched her.
“You believe me, don’t you, little rose? I swear it on my dying oath.”
She took his anxious, watching face between her hands.
“I believe you, Essel, but it doesn’t make any difference now. You’re my cousin just the same. The dear, brave cousin I love.”
This effort to remove the burden of sin from her shoulders to his own, left him almost unconscious.
Daylight died away, and brought shadows creeping into the room.
Lebrassa lay in a fitful, uneasy doze, starting and waking to gaze round anxiously for Leslie. The doctor came in to light the lamp and look at his patient, and out again to fetch Fletcher. The two Englishmen stayed in the screening shadows so that the dying man could not see them, knowing their presence might raise a flood of negro jealousy he was now too feeble to keep under control.
Midnight came. Lebrassa still lay muttering, sometimes in the language of his mother’s people, sometimes in English—back again to his boyhood spent in England.
All at once he started up with the wild war-cry of his negro ancestors. Fletcher and the doctor darted forward to hold down the maimed, distorted thing howling on the couch. Their presence maddened him, and brought back all the hatred of the whites that had once been his.
A savage roar of fury greeted them in the heathen dialect that, in past days, had led many a charge against their color.
There was a quick movement beside him, and a slim, white hand was laid on his shoulder.
“Essel! Essel, dear.”
Leslie’s voice brought his mad, blazing eyes from the two white men. For a moment he looked at her in bewilderment, then a smile came.
“Why, little rose!” he exclaimed, as if brought out of some nightmare.
Falling back weakly, he lay watching her.
“Keep hold of me, little cousin,” he gasped presently. “Hell is so close now. Hell here and hereafter.”
With an arm around his neck, she sat with her face pressed close against his brown one.
His voice came again, peevish and fretful.
“It’s so dark now, I can’t see you, dearest. You won’t go where I can’t find you, will you?”
“No, dear, I’ll stay with you always.”
There was no reply. But a bandaged arm came out from beneath the coverlet and groped round blindly as if feeling for something.
Leslie put it round her waist where it stayed contentedly.
For some time there was silence. The night wind came creeping through the fretted arches, bringing the moaning sigh of the surrounding wilderness, and distant, weird, wild, forest howls.
Then a whisper came, faint and far away, from just on the Verge—the last, tired sigh of a soul slipping into eternity.
“I deceived you, little rose. I swear it on my dying oath. Say you believe—”
“I believe you, dear. Of course I do,” she whispered, stooping.
But the lips Leslie kissed were dead ones.
“I loved her better than my life,
And better than my soul.”
On the veranda of Harding’s bungalow Leslie was sitting. Over two months had passed since, away in the wilds, Essel, Earl of Alglenton, the man known as the Hyena, had died. The previous day, in Fletcher’s charge, the girl had returned to Calabar. Now, as the Major’s guest, she was awaiting the arrival of the steamer that was to take her back to England and civilization.
To Leslie, the time that had elapsed since Molly’s marriage had assumed the aspect of some ghastly nightmare from which she had emerged with the shadow of sin upon her. She could not make up her mind which of her cousin’s two confessions was the true one; there was so much for and against each.
Yet Captain Fletcher, who was generally right about things, always voted in favor of the last.
The mere idea that her father might not be responsible for Lebrassa’s crimes had lifted the cloud of despair that had settled on the girl.
As she sat there brooding, another problem confronted her—the problem of a living. In a listless manner she was going through a pile of papers on a table beside her, too full of other thoughts to realize they were more than a month old.
From this occupation a step roused her, and sent her eyes to the big sunburnt man coming along the veranda.
Now, where Leslie was concerned, Fletcher had no nervousness. She was the woman he loved, who loved him, and who deliberately shut herself away from him behind the barrier of her father’s possible crimes.
Halting at her side, he eyed the newspaper she was scanning, which was open at the “help wanted” page.
“Why are you looking at that?” he asked.
“I must get something to do when I return to England.”
Leslie was not looking forward to taking up life again. For two years she had been more or less out of things, and she knew the future was not going to be any too pleasant or easy.
“There’s only one job open for you now, and that’s marrying me,” he said firmly.
“I’d marry you to-morrow, dear, if—”
She broke off, the blighted look he now knew very well again on her face.
Before Fletcher there arose the picture of a dim room in a far-away marble palace, a mangled form on a low couch, the anxiety in its tainted eyes, and his promise to a dying man.
“My darling, I know your cousin’s second confession was the true one, everything points to it,” he said tenderly.
“But my father wasn’t my idea of an honorable man, Lindsay.”
“Any man would go to pieces if he had to give up everything and fly for his life.”
Earnestly she looked at him.
“Do you really think Essel was speaking the truth when he said my father was not to blame? You know he’d endure anything, tell any lie to save me.”
In his own mind Fletcher had no doubt which was the real culprit. For all that he was adding brick after brick to the wall of deception Lebrassa had endeavored to raise between the girl and the truth, hoping it would soon be high enough to screen from her the deeds that some men will do in their lust for power and position and money.
“Of course he was, my darling,” he said firmly. “Haven’t I said so a thousand times. And have you ever caught me in a lie?” he added bravely.
Leslie took one of his sunburnt hands and pressed it to her cheek.
“You’ve been so good to me, Lindsay,” she whispered. “And sometimes I almost think you’re right about—my father not being to blame.”
“Give me some proof of your faith by marrying me. Don’t spoil both our lives because of a fancy.”
“I wish I could really think it was a fancy.”
“That’s all it is, darling. A fancy that, if you’re not careful, is going to make a mess of both our lives.”
“I do so want you to be happy,” she said, suddenly weakening. “And if you really think—”
Fletcher did not give her time to finish her sentence.
“Think! I know,” he exclaimed, catching her into his arms.
He kissed the small, white, anxious face and the wide, blue eyes that were looking into his as if trying to read the truth in his soul.
“He was a hero, that cousin of yours,” he said hoarsely, a few minutes later. “A far braver man than you know, Leslie. Braver than I could have been under the same conditions.”
Leslie liked to hear him praise her cousin, and she tried to think his words referred to the tortures Lebrassa had undergone for her sake, which Fletcher had accounted for by saying the Kalluians had objected to their Sultan’s marrying a white woman.
But to Fletcher, now, the wall of deception he had built round Leslie was a monument raised to the memory of a brave man whom Fate and circumstances had driven mad.
THE END
Minor spelling inconsistencies (e.g. bloodthirsty/blood-thirsty, market-square/market square, etc.) have been preserved.
Alterations to the text:
Formatting: abandon the use of drop-caps and left-align the chapter epigraphs.
Fix some quotation mark pairings/nestings.
Add ToC.
[Chapter II]
Change “I can see your ear eyes opening when you receive this” to dear.
[Chapter III]
“In the lounge hall of the hotle the visitors were assembling” to hotel.
[Chapter IV]
“but quite another to dine tête-à-tête wtih a” to with.
[Chapter VI]
“He leaves for England the day after tomorrow” to to-morrow.
[Chapter VIII]
“Presently, approaching foosteps made her glance round” to footsteps.
[Chapter XXIV]
“a slim girl, like a golden reed, drapped in the garment of the” draped.
“As if brooding on the long dead past, Lebrassa paused again” to long-dead.
[Chapter XXVII]
“knew that beyond lies a secret pasage leading to the heart” to passage.
[End of text]