John Ames, Native Commissioner Part 37

The sun's rays grew longer and longer, throwing shadows over the ill-omened abode of dark dealings, and the motionless body that lay there. Then the body was motionless no longer. The limbs moved; next the head was raised, but feebly. Shiminya sat up.

"Ah, ah! The Umtwana 'Mlimo is not so easy to kill, Nanzicele; and thou--for this thou shalt die a thousand deaths," he murmured.

He reached over for the _tywala_ bowl, but it had been upset in the scuffle and was empty. Parched with a feverish and burning thirst, the sorcerer dragged himself on hands and knees to the hut wherein he knew there was more of the liquor. He reached it at length, trailing broad splashes of blood behind him. Creeping within, he found the great calabash. It was empty. Nanzicele had drained it.

In a tremble of exhaustion Shiminya sank to the ground. The cold dews of death were upon his face. The awful coldness throughout his frame, the result of a prodigious loss of blood, became an agony. Air! A great craving for air was upon him. His brain reeled, and his lungs gasped. He felt as though he could no longer move.

Then the door was darkened, and something brushed in. With a superhuman effort he collected his energies.

"Hamba, Lupiswana!" he gurgled. "Hamba-ke!"

But the brute took no notice of the voice before which it was wont to cower and tremble. It crouched, snarling. Then it put its head down and licked the blood-gouts which had fallen upon the ground from the veins of its evil master.

The latter began to experience some of the agonies he had delighted to witness in his victims. The savage beast had tasted blood--his blood.

And he himself was too weak to have resisted the onslaught of a rat.

Again he called, trying to infuse strength into his voice. But the crafty beast knew his state exactly, it had learnt to gauge helplessness in the case of too many other victims, perhaps. It only crawled a little nearer, still growling.

For a while they lay thus, man and beast, mutually eyeing each other.

The eyes of the former were becoming glazed with the agony of utter weakness but active apprehension. Those of the latter glared yellow and baleful in the semi-gloom of the hut. It was a horrid sight.

"Hamba, Lupiswana!" repeated the sorcerer, instinctively groping for a weapon. But with a shrill snarl the brute was at his throat, tearing and worrying, and, although a small animal, so furious was its frenzy over this new and copious feast of blood, that it shook the light form of the wizard, almost as it would have done that of a newly dropped fawn. And then in the semi-gloom was the horrible spectacle of a man with his throat half torn out, feebly battling with the enraged furious beast covered with blood and uttering its guttural snarls, as it tore and clawed at his already lacerated vitals. But the struggle did not last. The grim "familiar spirit" had triumphed over its evil master.

Shiminya the sorcerer lay dead in his _muti_ kraal, and the horrible brute lay growling and snarling as it gorged itself to repletion upon his mangled body.

And Nanzicele? Exultant, yet somewhat fearing, he decamped with his booty; but he did not get far. A dizziness and griping pain was upon him, and he sank down in the river-bed, by a water-hole. What was it?

His wound was slight. Ha! The knife! Yes. A greenish froth was on the surface of his wound. The knife was poisoned.

His agonies now were hardly less than those of his slayer, and his thirst became intense. Crawling to a water-hole, he staggered over it to drink, then drew back appalled. He could not drink there, at any rate. It was the very hole into which he had helped throw the unfortunate girl Nompiza. Her decomposing lineaments seemed to glower at him from the surface of the water as he bent over to drink. With a raucous yell he flung himself back, and then, in a paroxysm of agonised convulsions, the rebel and treacherous murderer yielded up the ghost.

He too, you see, had thought to hold the trump card over his confederate, but it was the latter who held the odd trick. Yet better for both, swifter and more merciful, would have been the noosed rope of the white man's justice than the end which had overtaken them.

CHAPTER THIRTY.

CONCLUSION.

Golden August--a sky of cloudless blue softening into the autumn haze which dims the horizon; golden August, with the whirr of the reaping-machine, as the yellow wheat falls to the harvest, blending with the cooing of wood-pigeons among the leafy shades of the park; golden August, with its still, rich atmosphere, and roll of green champaign and velvety coppice, and honeysuckle-twined hedgerow, and dappled kine standing knee-deep in shaded pond; in short, golden August in one of the fairest scenes of fair England.

Here and there red roofs cl.u.s.tering around a grey church tower, whose sparkling vane flashes in the sun; here and there a solitary thatch. In front a lovely sward stretching down to a sunken fence, and a gap, revealing the charming vista of landscape beyond--such is the outlook from the library window of the beautiful and sumptuous home into which we will take a brief and only peep, for it has been for some years past Nidia's home, and is the property of her father. _Has_ been? we said.

That it should continue to be so, forms, as it happens, the subject-matter of the very conversation going on at that moment between them.

Nidia herself seems in no wise to have altered; indeed, why should she, unless to grow more charming, more alluring than before, that being the only alteration happiness is potent to effect? For on the third finger of her left hand a plain gold ring of suspicious newness proclaims that she is Nidia Commerell no longer. The other party to the conversation is her father.

"It is really good of you, child," the latter is saying, "to come back so soon to your old father, left all alone. Not many would have done it--at any rate, at such a time as this. But I don't want to be selfish. You had been away from me so long, and had been so near--well, being away altogether it would have been, I suppose, but for that fine fellow, John Ames--that--well, I did want to see my little girl again for a few days before she started on her travels, not in an infernal savage-ridden country this time, thank G.o.d!"

"Of course I wanted to see you again, dear--and just as much as you did me," returned Nidia, meaning it, too. "But even the 'infernal savage-ridden country' has its bright side."

"Meaning John Ames," said the old gentleman, with a laugh.

In aspect Mr Commerell was of about medium height, scrupulously neat in his attire. He wore a short white beard, and had very refined features; and looking into his eyes, it was easy to see whence Nidia had got hers.

In manner he was very straight to the point and downright, but it was not the downrightness which in nineteen cases out of twenty degenerates into mere brusquerie. He and John Ames had taken to each other wonderfully, and the old gentleman had already begun to look upon his son-in-law as his own son.

"What I have got to say, child, is this," he went on; "and mind you, I don't much like saying it. However, here it is. When you have done your round on the Continent, why not come back here and make this your home? I know the old argument against relations-in-law in the same house and all that, but here it's different. You should both be as free as air as far as I am concerned. You know I am not of the interfering sort--indeed, you could have your own set of apartments, for the matter of that. But when I bought this property to retire to in my old age, it was with an eye to some such contingency, and--um--well, it could not have befallen better. Well, what I was coming to is that it is a large property and wants some looking after, and John will find plenty to do in looking after it. He will have to look after it for himself and you when my time is up, so may as well begin now."

But Nidia took the old man's face between her hands as he sat, and stopped his utterance with a very loving kiss.

"Father, darling, don't say any more about relations-in-law and interfering, and all that--bosh. Yes, bosh. _You_ interfering, indeed!

And for the matter of that, I know that John is awfully fond of you; you get on splendidly together. Of course we will come back and take care of you, and we'll all be as happy together as the day is long."

"G.o.d bless you, Nidia, child! Hallo! here he comes."

"Who?" asked Nidia, with a ripple of mirth over the inconsequence of the remark--which certainly was funny.

"John, of course. He is a fine fellow, Nidia. Didn't know they grow men like that in those parts"--with a very approving gaze at the advancing figure of his son-in-law, who, strolling along the terrace, was drinking in the lovely panorama of fair English landscape, contrasting it, perchance, with certain weird regions of granite boulder and tumbled rock and impenetrable thorn thicket. And here it may be noted that, her present happiness notwithstanding, Nidia had by no means forgotten her sad and terrible experiences, and there were times when she would start up in her sleep wild-eyed and with a scream of horror, as she saw once more the mutilated corpses of the murdered settler's family, or found herself alone in the s.h.a.ggy wilds of the Matopos. But the awakening more than made up for the reminiscence. She was young, and of sound and buoyant Const.i.tution, and the grim and ghastly recollection of appalling sights and peril pa.s.sed through would eventually fade.

"Am I interrupting you?" said John Ames, as at his entrance the two looked up. "Nidia was going to stroll down to the bridge with me, Mr Commerell; but if you want her, why, I shall have to keep myself company."

"Considerate, as few of them are or would be under the circ.u.mstances,"

thought the old gentleman to himself. But aloud he said, "No--no. It's all right. We've done our talk, John. You'd better take her with you, and she can tell you what it has all been about. Besides, I have some business to attend to."

He watched them strolling along the terrace together, and a strange joyful peace was around the old man's heart.

"G.o.d bless them!" he murmured to himself--his spectacles, perhaps, a trifle dim. "They are a well matched pair, and surely this is a Heaven-made union if such a thing exists. G.o.d bless them, and send them every happiness!"

And here we take leave to join in the above aspiration; for although ourselves no believers in the old-fashioned "lived-happy-ever-after"

theory, holding that about nineteen such cases out of twenty, putting it at a modest proportion, are, in actual fact, but spa.r.s.ely hedged around with the a "happy" qualification, yet here we think it possible that the twentieth case may be found, if only that all the circ.u.mstances attendant upon it go to make for that desirable end.

The End.