Blue Aloes Part 9

The big man made a strange sound and put his hand to his throat. He swayed a little, and then sank upon a long cane lounge. Christine noticed that his eyes rolled with the same curious evolution as the eyes of Mrs. van Cannan had performed that afternoon. It was as though they turned in his head for a moment, showing nothing but the white eyeball. She wondered why the other men rushed to the sideboard and opened a brandy-bottle, and while she stayed, wondering, Saxby spoke softly, looking at her with his beautiful, melancholy brown eyes.

"I shall be dead in half an hour. Fetch Isabel. Let me see her face before I die."

She knew him for a bad man, false friend, one who could be cruel to a little child; yet it seemed he could love well. That was something.

She found herself running through the darkness as she had never run in her life, to do the last behest of Richard Saxby.

When she and Isabel van Cannan returned, they found him almost gone.

Saltire and McNeil had worked over him until the sweat dripped from their faces, but he who has been kissed by the black mamba, deadliest of snakes, is lost beyond all human effort. The light was fast fading from his face, but, for a moment, a spurt of life leaped in his eyes.

He held out his aims to the woman, and she fell weeping into them.

Christine turned away and stared out at the darkness. Saltire had been writing; a sheet of paper upon which the ink was still wet lay upon the table, and in his hand he held a packet of letters.

"I have told everything, Issa," muttered the dying man. "I had to clean my soul of it."

She recoiled fiercely from him.

"'Told everything?'" she repeated, and her face blanched with fury and despair. It seemed as if she would have struck him across the lips, but McNeil intervened.

"Have reverence for a pa.s.sing soul, woman," said he sternly. "Black as his crimes are, yours are blacker, I'm thinking. He was only the tool of the woman he loved--his lawful wife."

"You said that?" she raved. But Saxby was beyond recriminations. That dark soul had pa.s.sed to its own place. She turned again to the others, foaming like a creature trapped.

"It is all lies, lies!"--then fell silent, her eyes sealed to the newly written paper on the table under Saltire's hand. At last, she said quietly: "I must, however, insist upon knowing what he has said about me. What is written on that paper, Mr. Saltire?"

"If you insist, I will read it," he answered. "Though it is scarcely in my province to do so."

"It is only fair that I should hear," she said, with great calmness.

And Saltire read out the terse phrases that bore upon them the stamp of Death's hurrying hand.

"I am a native of the island Z---- in the West Indies. Isabel Saxby, known as van Cannan, is my wife. While travelling to the Cape Colony on some business of mine, she met van Cannan and his wife and stayed with them at East London. When she did not return to Z----, I came to look for her and found that, Mrs. van Cannan having died, she had bigamously married the widower and come to live at Blue Aloes. I loved her, and could not bear to be parted from her, so, through her instrumentality, I came here as manager. The eldest boy was drowned before my arrival. The youngest died six months later of a bite from one of my specimen tarantulas. The third boy is, I expect, drowned tonight. I take the blame of all these deaths and of Bernard van Cannan's, if he does not return. It was only when all male van Cannans were dead that Blue Aloes could be sold for a large sum enabling us to return to Z----. We would have taken the little girls with us.

"With my dying breath, I take full blame for all on my shoulders. No one is guilty but I.

"[Signed.] RICHARD SAXBY."

"Poor fellow!" said the listening woman gently. "Poor fellow to have died with such terrible delusions torturing him!" She pa.s.sed her hands over her eyes, wiping away her tears and with them every last trace of violence and anger. Subtly her face had changed back to the babylike, laughing, sleepy face they all knew so well--the face that had held the dead man in thrall and made Bernard van Cannan forget the mother of his children.

"You will please give me that paper, Mr. Saltire," she pleaded, "and you will please all of you forget the ravings of poor d.i.c.k Saxby. It is true that I knew him in the past, and that he followed me here, but the rest, as you must realize, are simply hallucinations of a poisoned brain."

Andrew McNeil's dour face had grown bewildered, but softened.

Christine--if she had not seen a little too much, if she had not known that lovely golden hair hanging in rich plaits about the woman's shoulders covered the crisped head of a white negress, if she had not overheard impa.s.sioned words at midnight, if she had not loved Roddy so well--might have been beguiled. But there was one person upon whom the artist's wiles were wasted.

"I'm afraid it can't be done, Mrs. Saxby," said Saltire gravely. "The testimony of a dying man is sacred--and Saxby's mind was perfectly clear."

"How could it have been? And do not call me 'Mrs. Saxby,' please."

She still spoke patiently, but a smouldering fire began to kindle in her eyes.

"You see," he continued, exhibiting the packet of letters to which he now added the testimony, "I have here the certificate of your marriage to Saxby six years ago in the West Indies--and also proof of the possession by you of a large amount of antimony. You may, of course, be able to explain away these things, as well as Saxby's testimony, but you will understand that I cannot oblige you by handing them over." A silence fell, in which only her rapid breathing could be heard. "There is one thing, however, you can do, that will perhaps help a little.

Tell us where Roddy is--if you know."

The smouldering fires leaped to flame. She glared at him like a tigress.

"Oh, you, and your Roddys!" she cried savagely. "If I knew where he was, I would kill him! I would kill any one I could who stood in my way--do you understand? That is how we are made in my land. Oh, that I ever left it, to come to this vile and barren desert!"

She gave one swift, terrible look at the dead man and swept from the house. That was the last time any one of them ever saw her.

When, a little later, Saltire, McNeil, and Christine came out of the dead man's house and left him to his long silence, the black wings of night were lifted, the storm was past, and a rose-red dawn veiled in silver bedecked the sky. The hills were tender with pearl and azure.

The earth smelled sweet and freshly washed. A flock of wild duck rose from the dam and went streaking across the horizon like in a j.a.panese etching. All the land was full of dew and dreams. It was almost impossible to despair in such an hour. Christine felt the wings of hope beating in her breast, and an unaccountable trust in the goodness of G.o.d filled her.

"Joy cometh in the morning," she said, half to herself, half to the men who walked, sombre and silent, beside her, and the shadow of a smile hovered on her lips. They looked at her wonderingly. The night of terror had taken toll of her, and she was pale as the last star before dawn. Yet her white beauty framed in hanging hair shone like some rare thing that had pa.s.sed through fire and come out unscathed and purified in the pa.s.sing. "_Il faut souffrir pour etre belle_" is a frivolous French saying, but, like many frivolous phrases, has its basic roots in the truth. It was true enough of Christine Chaine in that hour. She had suffered and was beautiful. Dour old Andrew McNeil gave a sigh for the years of life that lay behind him, and a glance at the face of the other man; then, like a wise being, he said,

"Well, I'll be going on down."

So Christine and d.i.c.k Saltire walked alone.

"Let us hurry," she said suddenly, quickening her pace. "I feel as though something may have happened."

But all was silent at the farm. It was still too early even for the servants to be astir, and the big front door stood open as she and the other woman had left it an hour or so agone.

She left Saltire in the stoep and went within. The little girls slept peacefully, ignorant of the absence of their brother.

All seemed unchanged, yet Christine's searching eye found one thing that was unusual--a twist of paper stuck through the slats of the shutter. In a moment, she had it untwisted and was reading the words printed in ungainly letters upon it.

"Do not worry. Roddy quite safe. Will come back when his father returns."

"I knew," she whispered to herself, "I knew that joy cometh." She looked in the mirror and was ashamed of the disarray she saw there, yet thought that, even so, a man who loved her might perhaps find her fair.

As a last thought, she took Roddy's two yellow roses and stuck them in the bosom of her gown. Then she went back to the stoep and, showing Saltire the paper, told him the story of the whispering thing that had sighed so often for Roddy's safety outside her window.

"I feel sure, somehow, that, after all, he is safe, and with that friend who knew more than we did, who knew all the tragedy of the mother and the other two little sons, and feared for Roddy from the first."

Saltire made no answer, for he was looking at the roses and then into her eyes; and when she tried to return the look, the weight of the little stones was on her lids again, and her lips a-quiver. But he held her against his heart close, close--crushing the yellow roses, kissing the little stones from her lids and the quiver from her lips.

Then he left her swiftly; for it is a sweet and terrible thing to kiss the lips and crush the roses and go, and a better thing to hasten the hour when one may kiss the lips and crush the roses--and stay.

So she did not see him again for three days. But from the faithful McNeil she heard that the flooded river had been forded and a telegram sent recalling Bernard van Cannan, that a search had been inst.i.tuted for the mistress of Blue Aloes, who was missing, that a party of farmers had been collected to "sit" upon the body of Richard Saxby, and had p.r.o.nounced him most regrettably dead from the bite of a black mamba. Whereafter he was buried in a quiet spot near the hedge of blue aloes, from which he had collected so many rare specimens of poisonous reptiles and insects.

On the third day, one of the kloofs on the farm gave up a wig of golden hair, all muddy and weed-entangled. The natives hung it on a bush to dry, and there was much gossip among them that day, hastily hushed when any European person came by.

At nine o'clock the same evening, Roddy was found peacefully sleeping in the bed with Meekie carefully adjusting the mosquito-curtains over him as though he had never been missing. In the morning, he told Christine he had had an awfully funny dream.

"I dreamed I was with my old 'nannie' again--you know--Sophy. She was all covered up, and I could only see her eyes looking through holes in a white thing. She was living all by herself in a hut. I didn't stay with her, but with another old woman, but she used to come and see me every day, and sometimes Meekie used to come, too, and Klaas and Jacoop and all the farm-boys to talk to me. The old woman kept giving me some tea made of herbs that made me feel very quiet and happy, and Sophy told me I should come back soon to the farm when daddy was home again.

She was always covered up with white clothes, and I could only see her eyes, and I love Sophy very much, Miss Chaine, but I can't say she smelled very nice in my dream. It was a very funny dream, though, and lasted an awful long time."

It had indeed lasted three days, but Roddy would never know that, during those three days, he had been incarcerated in the Kafir kraal on the hillside, outside the aloe hedge. It was only when the golden wig was washed up from the river that the mysterious kraal people, silent and impa.s.sive, seemingly ignorant of all but their duties, yet knowing every single thing that pa.s.sed at the farm, even down to the use of the false hair (though Bernard van Cannan himself had never suspected this), gave him back to those who awaited.

If d.i.c.k Saltire had not so thoroughly understood the native mind and inspired the confidence of his boys, the truth might never have been known. As it was, it lay in his power to relate to those whom it concerned that a certain woman named Sophy Bronjon, formerly nurse to the van Cannans, and sent away by them to be conveyed to Robin Island because she had developed leprosy, had never left the precincts of the farm, but stayed there, brooding over the little ones she loved. The kraal people to whom (though a mission-educated woman) she belonged had hidden and sheltered her. Through Meekie's instrumentality, she undoubtedly knew all that pa.s.sed on the farm, and as surely as she had noted the fate of the van Cannan heirs, she recognized Christine as an ally and friend, and had warned her as best she could of the dangers that beset Roddy. It was she who had sighed and whispered through the closed shutters, frightening Christine at first, but in the end engendering trust, and it was she who, on hearing of the narrow escape of Roddy from the tarantula, had made up her mind to spirit him, with the aid of Meekie and the storm, from the farm and its dangers until the return of his father.

With the disappearance of Mrs. van Cannan and the death of Saxby, the menace was removed and the child brought back as silently as he had been taken away. Even he knew no more than that he had dreamed a strange dream.