With Edged Tools Part 59

"I am afraid he is very ill," he said.

At this moment the kettle boiled over, and Marie had to turn away to attend to her duties.

When she came back Oscard was looking, not at Nestorius, but at her.

"We spent four days at Msala," he said, in a tone that meant that he had more to tell her.

"Yes?"

"The place is in ruins, as you know."

She nodded with a peculiar little twist of the lips as if he were hurting her.

"And I am afraid I have some bad news for you. Victor Durnovo, your master--"

"Yes--tell quickly!"

"He is dead. We buried him at Msala. He died in my arms."

At this moment Joseph gave a little gasp and turned away to the window, where he stood with his broad back turned towards them. Maurice Gordon, as white as death, was leaning against the table. He quite forgot himself. His lips were apart, his jaw had dropped; he was hanging breathlessly on Guy Oscard's next word.

"He died of the sleeping sickness," said Oscard. "We had come down to Msala before him--Joseph and I. I broke up the partners.h.i.+p, and we left him in possession of the Simiacine Plateau. But his men turned against him. For some reason his authority over them failed. He was obliged to make a dash for Msala, and he reached it, but the sickness was upon him."

Maurice Gordon drew a sharp sigh of relief which was almost a sob. Marie was standing with her two hands on the pillow where Nestorius lay. Her deep eyes were fixed on the Englishman's sunburnt, strongly gentle face.

"Did he send a message for me--yes?" she said softly.

"No," answered Oscard. "He--there was no time."

Joseph at the window had turned half round.

"He was my husband," said Marie in her clear, deep tones; "the father of this little one, which you call Nestorius."

Oscard bowed his head without surprise. Jocelyn was standing still as a statue, with her hand on the dying infant's cheek. No one dared to look at her.

"It is all right," said Marie bluntly. "We were married at Sierra Leone by the English chaplain. My father, who is dead, kept a hotel at Sierra Leone, and he knew the ways of the--half-castes. He said that the Protestant Church at Sierra Leone was good enough for him, and we were married there. And then Victor brought me away from my people to this place and to Msala. Then he got tired of me--he cared no more. He said I was ugly."

She p.r.o.nounced it "ogly," and seemed to think that the story finished there. At all events, she added nothing to it. But Joseph thought fit to contribute a post scriptum.

"You'd better tell 'em, mistress," he said, "that he tried to starve yer and them kids--that he wanted to leave yer at Msala to be ma.s.sacred by the tribes, only Mr. Oscard sent yer down 'ere. You'd better tell 'em that."

"No," she replied, with a faint smile. "No, because he was my husband."

Guy Oscard was looking very hard at Joseph, and, catching his eye, made a little gesture commanding silence. He did not want him to say too much.

Joseph turned away again to the window, and stood thus, apart, till the end.

"I have no doubt," said Oscard to Marie, "that he would have sent some message to you had he been able; but he was very ill--he was dying--when he reached Msala. It was wonderful that he got there at all. We did what we could for him, but it was hopeless."

Marie raised her shoulders with her pathetic gesture of resignation.

"The sleeping sickness," she said, "what will you? There is no remedy.

He always said he would die of that. He feared it."

In the greater sorrow she seemed to have forgotten her child, who was staring open-eyed at the ceiling. The two others--the boy and girl--were playing on the doorstep with some unconsidered trifles from the dust-heap--after the manner of children all the world over.

"He was not a good man," said Marie, turning to Jocelyn, as if she alone of all present would understand. "He was not a good husband, but--"

she shrugged her shoulders with one of her patient, shadowy smiles--"it makes so little difference--yes?"

Jocelyn said nothing. None of them had aught to say to her. For each in that room could lay a separate sin at Victor Durnovo's door. He was gone beyond the reach of human justice to the Higher Court where the Extenuating Circ.u.mstance is fully understood. The generosity of that silence was infectious, and they told her nothing. Had they spoken she would perforce have believed them; but then, as she herself said, it would have made "so little difference." So Victor Durnovo leaves these pages, and all we can do is to remember the writing on the ground. Who amongst us dares to withhold the Extenuating Circ.u.mstance? Who is ready to leave this world without that crutch to lean upon? Given a mixed blood--evil black with evil white and what can the result be but evil?

Given the climate of Western Africa and the mental irritation thereof, added to a lack of education and the natural vice inherent in man, and you have--Victor Durnovo.

Nestorius--the shameless--stretched out his little bare limbs and turned half over on his side. He looked from one face to the other with the grave wonder that was his. He had never been taken much notice of. His short walks in life had been very near the ground, where trifles look very large, and from whence those larger stumbling-blocks which occupy our attention are quite invisible. He had been the third--the solitary third child who usually makes his own interest in life, and is left by or leaves the rest of his family.

It was not quite clear to him why he was the centre of so much attention. His mind did not run to the comprehension of the fact that he was the wearer of borrowed plumes--the sable plumes of King Death.

He had always wanted to get on to the kitchen table--there was much there that interested him, and supplied him with food for thought. He had risked his life on more than one occasion in attempts to scale that height with the a.s.sistance of a saucepan that turned over and poured culinary delicacies on his toes, or perhaps a sleeping cat that got up and walked away much annoyed. And now that he was at last at this dizzy height he was sorry to find that he was too tired to crawl about and explore the vast possibilities of it. He was rather too tired to convey his forefinger to his mouth, and was forced to work out mental problems without that aid to thought.

Presently his eyes fell on Guy Oscard's face, and again his own small features expanded into a smile.

"Bad case!" he said, and, turning over, he nestled down into the pillow, and he had the answer to the many questions that puzzled his small brain.

CHAPTER XL. SIR JOHN'S LAST CARD

'Tis better playing with a lion's whelp Than with an old one dying.

As through an opera runs the rhythm of one dominant air, so through men's lives there rings a dominant note, soft in youth, strong in manhood, and soft again in old age. But it is always there, and whether soft in the gentler periods, or strong amidst the noise and clang of the perihelion, it dominates always and gives its tone to the whole life.

The dominant tone of Sir John Meredith's existence had been the high clear note of battle. He had always found something or some one to fight from the very beginning, and now, in his old age, he was fighting still.

His had never been the din and crash of warfare by sword and cannon, but the subtler, deeper combat of the pen. In his active days he had got through a vast amount of work--that unchronicled work of the Foreign Office which never comes, through the cheap newspapers, to the voracious maw of a chattering public. His name was better known on the banks of the Neva, the Seine, the Bosphorus, or the swift-rolling Iser than by the Thames; and grim Sir John was content to have it so.

His face had never been public property, the comic papers had never used his personality as a peg upon which to hang their ever-changing political principles. But he had always been "there," as he himself vaguely put it. That is to say, he had always been at the back--one of those invisible powers of the stage by whose command the scene is s.h.i.+fted, the lights are lowered for the tragedy, or the gay music plays on the buffoon. Sir John had no sympathy with a generation of men and women who would rather be laughed at and despised than unnoticed. He belonged to an age wherein it was held better to be a gentleman than the object of a cheap and evanescent notoriety--and he was at once the despair and the dread of newspaper interviewers, enterprising publishers, and tuft-hunters.

He was so little known out of his own select circle that the porters in Euston Station asked each other in vain who the old swell waiting for the four o'clock "up" from Liverpool could be. The four o'clock was, moreover, not the first express which Sir John had met that day. His stately carriage-and-pair had pushed its way into the crowd of smaller and humbler vehicular fry earlier in the afternoon, and on that occasion also the old gentleman had indulged in a grave promenade upon the platform.

He was walking up and down there now, with his hand in the small of his back, where of late he had been aware of a constant aching pain. He was very upright, however, and supremely unconscious of the curiosity aroused by his presence in the mind of the station canaille. His lips were rather more troublesome than usual, and his keen eyes twinkled with a suppressed excitement.

In former days there had been no one equal to him in certain diplomatic crises where it was a question of brow-beating suavely the uppish representative of some foreign State. No man could then rival him in the insolently aristocratic school of diplomacy which England has made her own. But in his most dangerous crisis he had never been restless, apprehensive, pessimistic, as he was at this moment. And after all it was a very simple matter that had brought him there. It was merely the question of meeting a man as if by accident, and then afterwards making that man do certain things required of him. Moreover, the man was only Guy Oscard--learned if you will in forest craft, but a mere child in the hand of so old a diplomatist as Sir John Meredith.

That which made Sir John so uneasy was the abiding knowledge that Jack's wedding-day would dawn in twelve hours. The margin was much too small, through, however, no fault of Sir John's. The West African steamer had been delayed--unaccountably--two days. A third day lost in the Atlantic would have overthrown Sir John Meredith's plan. He had often cut things fine before, but somehow now--not that he was getting old, oh no!--but somehow the suspense was too much for his nerves. He soon became irritated and distrustful. Besides the pain in his back wearied him and interfered with the clear sequence of his thoughts.

The owners of the West African steamer had telegraphed that the pa.s.sengers had left for London in two separate trains. Guy Oscard was not in the first--there was no positive reason why he should be in the second. More depended upon his being in this second express than Sir John cared to contemplate.

The course of his peregrinations brought him into the vicinity of an inspector whose att.i.tude betokened respect while his presence raised hope.