Cinderella in the South Part 19

'And you bolted,' said No. 1 with a sneer. He took no further notice of him, but called the Black Watch corporal and gave him his orders. 'Take three men,' he said. 'Get to the drift. Run for your lives. Leave the path and go through the bush if there's really a lion.' The four Black Watch were off almost as soon as he had spoken.

Trooper No. 2 began to explain matters at length to his senior.

But the latter did not suffer him at all gladly. Then it was that I started down the drift road, asking No. 2's boy if he would show me the place where they had seen the lion. I asked him if he thought it was wounded. He answered me disdainfully. He showed me how Trooper No. 2 shot the panic way the way to heaven.

Then we came in sight of the lion standing, haloed by the disc of the moon. As I have told you, I tried to give No. 2 a chance to wipe out his stain. I went back to fetch him; he was taking things hardly, doubtless, and I ought to try and do him a good turn. He came, but the lion did not stand still to await him. Why was I so glad he escaped? I don't think it was only because I was afraid. Yet glad I was. So we gave him up, and tramped back to the kraal.

Soon after we were back one of the pursuers returned. He had seen Carrot splash through the drift. He took his time and went at it leisurely, I gathered, with his piccanin astride upon his shoulders. On the other side a crowd of natives had received him in triumph. They jeered at the police and shook their spears and k.n.o.bkerries. Carrot was safely across the border and among his friends.

'It's a lost trip,' said No. 1, and looked No. 2 up and down, as we sat by the camp fire. No. 2 looked injured and ashamed at one and the same time. He was not a hero on principle, I should think, and he had not risen to this occasion. Some people seem to hold that Britishers are heroes on principle all along our frontiers, and rise to all occasions. I can testify that this is not the truth, for I know my own deficiencies. As to No. 2, there is some sort of mitigating explanation of his conduct to be yet recounted. But no, even when I have allowed for this, I am not disposed to write him down heroically efficient or journalistically British not on that night at least. Just as a Colenso now and then slips into our big campaigns, so the monotony of our frontier triumphs gets diversified, I fear, and not so very seldom. No. 2. is by no means the only man of the diversifying type I seem to have met. I refuse to admire No. 2 as he was that night, though I would excuse him.

For the hero of that night, let us look away from him. What a splendid night it was in the late autumn in the very end of May!

Stars seemed to fall in profusion. But the steady ranks that were left showed no thinning to my dazzled eyes. I had much time to watch them, I remember.

Ours was a gloomy camp among the ruins under the stars. One trooper was convalescent and irritable as well as disappointed.

The other was shaken and sulky with little to say. There were great pauses in the talk. I thought how I congratulated Carrot, the cheerful and irresponsible, on his escape. a.s.suredly his would-be captors would have seemed to him dull dogs. Of course he would have thoroughly deserved ordinary boredom. But theirs was like a London fog. So it fell about that I had much time to give heed to the Black Watch as they chattered over their fire hard by. One was telling tales of lions, tales where the terror was glamorous and ghostly. A hint of a surmise floated to me. It recalled a type of mediaeval tale that had once entranced me. But I said nothing to those young white men beside me whose frowning faces were a study, and a pitiful one. I was intensely sorry for them both. I just smoked my pipe, and made ready to go to bed betimes. I was soon asleep, to dream of holy water and silver bullets and to wake and rise as the c.o.c.k was crowing (for the second c.o.c.k-crow I suppose) away down the hillside; I said an added prayer of eager devotion, feeling myself to be a postulant in great need of its answer. I made for the rock of vantage. I found the lion's spoor in the growing light, and followed it slowly and timorously into the bush and beyond. There had been a shower yesterday about noon, and it was easy enough to follow it.

It led down and then up again. I guessed it might be leading me to Carrot's huts and the troopers once more. But, no, it dipped far down to that other group of huts wedged amongst the rocks, where Carrot's boon comrades lived, where I had bandaged the hurt head, where I had heard but just now the c.o.c.k crowing. Two huts I could see to be empty. It did not lead to either of these. It led straight to the other wherein the embers of a fire shone red.

There was no lion within. I looked for the spoor of the lion's exit. There was none.

The retainer who had had his head broken by Carrot lay curled in his blanket by the fire. He was sleeping an exhausted man's sleep. It was hard work waking him. At last he sat up, a squat patriarch with grizzled bushy beard and shrewd watchful eyes. He was huddled in a queer parti-colored blanket purple and brown and orange and grey. I tried to testify to him with zeal against blackness of witchcraft. I told him with zest of the Light. He looked blank enough. Afterwards I spoke of Carrot's escape. His eyes underwent a change as I watched. The Light which lighteth every man that cometh into the world, showed in them, as it seemed to me. He was genuinely glad that his baas was out of the wood. So clear an affection for the man whose mark he was wearing touched me. I half emptied my tobacco bag into his hand ere I said Good-bye in the roaring south-easter, under the saffron streamered dawn.

I surmised that Carrot owed his escape largely to a real hero ready to face fire at need, whom we white men had not recognized.

A new feeling of pity for Trooper No. 2 took me. Haply he had miscalculated things as he pursued his unsanctified way. Haply he a modern, had been handicapped from his lack of equipment, lack of such discarded kit as I had dreamed about. Quite conceivably he had wrestled last night, not only against flesh and blood, but against princ.i.p.alities and powers unknown.

AS TREES WALKING

It was in the spring of last year that I started for a holiday journey towards some ruins about a hundred miles away. I had suffered much in the cold weather from fever and broken rest, so I longed to renew my strength before the heats of summer should be fully come.

I started on a bright and calm September morning by the main southward track, hoping to reach a friend's Mission Station on the eve of the third day.

I reached it then, but I had provoked my enemies by walking in the chilly hours, and walking to weariness. I was feverish and spent ere I reached Greenwood's Mission House.

It stood under a towering granite kopje some ten miles only from the ruins. I had never entered it before. When I last visited Greenwood, quite two years ago, he had been working on a town station. He was a dark, lean, rather ascetic-looking person, not very talkative. I remembered the days when I had fought shy of him; we had seemed to disagree on so many subjects, and he had seemed to resent disagreement so intensely. But he had written me two or three most friendly letters of late, and that nigh?, when I came to his door so sick and sorry, he seemed to be kindness itself. I soon revived by his fireside, ate my supper, and smoked and talked with him to my great content. We were speaking about roughing it, and told many camp-fire and roadside tales. As I told and listened, I seemed to be my old self of a year ago once more, tough and dogged, and rather sinfully contemptuous of mosquitoes and malaria. Yet I had but a poor night after all, and the yawning and shuddering chills came on with vigor at Church in the early morning. I went back to my blankets after an aguish breakfast, and Greenwood dosed me and told me to go to sleep. He spoke with authority, and I obeyed. I did not wake up till the early afternoon. I seemed to have lost much weight in those last steaming hours, and also, to my joy, the fever.

'I hope I'll sleep well to-night and get an early start to-morrow after all,' I said to Greenwood. He looked at me rather intently with his resolute grey eyes.

'The fever is gone for the time,' he said, 'but I don't like the look of your eyes at all. If I were you, I'd change your room to-night and sleep in the Hospital.'

'Where's that?' I asked.

'Oh, not very far; half a mile at most. It's Saint Lucy's little hospice on the hill there across the valley.'

Afterwards, when I went out and sat on the sunny stoep with him, he showed me the place. I could see a grove of trees standing up on a near ridge and two or three thatched buildings in among them; yes, and a white cross surmounting one of these.

'It looks lonely over there,' I pleaded.

'Oh, I'll come with you,' he said. 'I want to tell you the story of the place before we blow our candle out; it may help the cure.' So when sundown was near, he and three of his native retainers started with me for the Hospice of Saint Lucy, carrying goodly packs every one. I was rather dubious about that expedition.

'I hope it's warm there,' grumbled I to myself. 'If Greenwood's as strong as a horse, I am not so just now. I wish he'd camp at home in peace.'

However, I tried to look interested as they made ready for us to go and delighted, as we started away.

Just as we went across the narrow valley the sun went down behind St. Lucy's hill, and bells or gongs answered one another from either side.

'So you have a bell up there at the Hospital,' I said.

'There's more than you expect to see at the Hospital,' said Greenwood mysteriously.

So there was. It wasn't a Hospital at all in our wonted modern sense, but a rather ornate round Church. Outside, it was plain enough, but within it gave me a sense of studied charm and even costliness. No drug-covered or dispenser's table was admitted within its doors, though both were to be found in one of its neighbor buildings. The main building housed aids to recovery, but they were of another type. Over the Altar was a life-sized picture of Saint Lucy, golden-haired and blue grey-eyed, with great splendor of shapeliness and stature, and real English apple-blossom cheeks. She came along a rocky path through an African forest; she was smiling, and had a far-s.h.i.+ning lantern in her hand. You could single out the trees in the forest, there was the crimson-flowered tree yet leafless, and the wild fig-tree in full leaf and cl.u.s.ter, and the wild orange-tree; the wild acacias and the cactus trees were growing among the stones above. Far off in the distance, at the back of the picture, there were dim cliffs and pale sands and waves breaking in the bright star-light.

The time was meant to be c.o.c.k-crow. At least it seemed so, for a red c.o.c.k was perched on a tree-pole in the foreground of the picture, crowing with a will. In the sky were many stars. The quarter over the sea whence the Saint came was of excelling brightness. There the morning star hung in a haze of glory.

The Altar itself was of granite slabs and ma.s.ses. Before it burnt a purple-gla.s.s lamp, hung by chains of native smithy-work, rather incongruously heavy, I thought. But who was I to cavil at this jewel of a shrine in our wilderness?

'Where are we to sleep?' I asked.

'Here, before the Altar,' said Greenwood solemnly.

Even as he spoke his house-boy came in with hushed feet, and began to spread out our rush mats and many-colored blankets. Then we went into the dispensary hut, and had our supper and many pipes together, while the native boys chatted and chewed roasted monkey-nuts in the hut beside us. I felt very hungry and happy and healthy generally that night, and we sat at our table long, and then smoked far into the hours of darkness. But, though he told me many tales, Greenwood would not tell me the tale of the place, however much I begged him to do so. That was kept for the Shrine itself. That was not as other tales.

We kept up a good fire, for the night was a cold one.

The talk turned on pilgrimages at last; we spoke of many Shrines, of old-time ones and of others in the heyday of their youth still. Greenwood talked well on that subject. Was the aura of his own Saint in the air of that dispensary? He talked with a pa.s.sionate faith about more than one Shrine, that left me almost breathless.

Then we argued about the Pilgrims' Way in Kent, as to where it was that most pilgrims forded the Medway, and about certain homely Kentish legends.

Suddenly he rose and went to the door. He looked out on the mighty vista of sable earth and spangled sky.

'The moon is just going down and you ought to be sleeping,' he said. 'And remember there is my tale still to tell.'

So we went to the Church. We had one candle between us there.

Moreover, the purple lamp was burning, its quaint cup of wire-gauze averted doom from many self-immolant flies. We knelt beneath it, and he said the Prayers of the Shrine, then our own prayers followed then he began to tell:

'I was coming back from England twenty months ago and I chose to come by the East Coast. It is a beautiful way to come. I saw Zanzibar, where there are many hopes and memories. I slept two nights far out of the city there, in a grove of palm trees. Then the boat came back from the mainland and I went aboard again.

'We started for a four days' voyage or so, to Beira. She came aboard at Zanzibar, I think. Some one told me this, when I asked about her afterwards. But I was never really conscious of her presence till the second night of our voyaging. Then we met at a Concert in the Third Cla.s.s, that I had strolled down the deck to patronize. To my shame I was traveling second, while she was in the crowded family of the third. I went and spoke to her.

'A child had had a bad fall from some steps, and she was mothering him. It was a lovely and pleasant thing to see how she did it.

'He should wake up without much pain,' she said, with a smile, at last. She handed the boy to his own admiring mother. Then she turned to me, for I had been asking after him.

'She began to talk about our common work. "I want to climb on a new boat at Chinde, and go the way of the Lakes," she said.

'Are you going to teach?' I asked.