With Edged Tools Part 68

"They tell me, sir, that Missis Marie--that is, Missis Durnovo--has gone back to her people at Sierra Leone."

Thus spoke Joseph to his master one afternoon in March, not so many years ago. They were on board the steamer Bogamayo, which good vessel was pounding down the West Coast of Africa at her best speed. The captain reckoned that he would be anch.o.r.ed at Loango by half-past seven or eight o'clock that evening. There were only seven pa.s.sengers on board, and dinner had been ordered an hour earlier for the convenience of all concerned. Joseph was packing his master's clothes in the s.p.a.cious cabin allotted to him. The owners of the steamer had thought it worth their while to make the finder of the Simiacine as comfortable as circ.u.mstances allowed. The noise of that great drug had directed towards the West Coast of Africa that floating sc.u.m of ne'er-do-welldom which is ever on the alert for some new land of promise.

"Who told you that?" asked Jack, drying his hands on a towel.

"One of the stewards, sir--a man that was laid up at Sierra Leone in the hospital."

Jack Meredith paused for a moment before going on deck. He looked out through the open porthole towards the blue shadow on the horizon which was Africa--a country that he had never seen three years before, and which had all along been destined to influence his whole life.

"It was the best thing she could do," he said. "It is to be hoped that she will be happy."

"Yes, sir, it is. She deserves it, if that goes for anything in the heavenly reckonin'. She's a fine woman--a good woman that, sir."

"Yes."

Joseph was folding a shirt very carefully.

"A bit dusky," he said, smoothing out the linen folds reflectively, "but I shouldn't have minded that if I had been a marryin' man, but--but I'm not."

He laid the shirt in the portmanteau and looked up. Jack Meredith had gone on deck.

While Maurice and Jocelyn Gordon were still at dinner that same evening, a messenger came announcing the arrival of the Bogamayo in the roads.

This news had the effect of curtailing the meal. Maurice Gordon was liable to be called away at any moment thus by the arrival of a steamer.

It was not long before he rose from the table and lighted a cigar preparatory to going down to his office, where the captain of the steamer was by this time probably awaiting him. It was a full moon, and the glorious golden light of the equatorial night shone through the high trees like a new dawn. Hardly a star was visible; even those of the southern hemisphere pale beside the southern moon.

Maurice Gordon crossed the open s.p.a.ce of cultivated garden and plunged into the black shadow of the forest. His footsteps were inaudible.

Suddenly he ran almost into the arms of a man.

"Who the devil is that?" he cried.

"Meredith," answered a voice.

"Meredith--Jack Meredith, is that you?"

"Yes."

"Well, I'm blowed!" exclaimed Maurice Gordon, shaking hands--"likewise glad. What brought you out here again?"

"Oh, pleasure!" replied Jack, with his face in the shade.

"Pleasure! you've come to the wrong place for that. However, I'll let you find out that for yourself. Go on to the bungalow; I'll be back in less than an hour. You'll find Jocelyn in the verandah."

When Maurice left her, Jocelyn went out into the verandah. It was the beginning of the hot season. At midday the sun on his journey northward no longer cast a shadow. Jocelyn could not go out in the daytime at this period of the year. For fresh air she had to rely upon a long, dreamy evening in the verandah.

She sat down in her usual chair, while the moonlight, red and glowing, made a pattern on the floor and on her white dress with the shadows of the creepers. The sea was very loud that night, rising and falling like the breath of some huge sleeping creature.

Jocelyn Gordon fell into a reverie. Life was very dull at Loango. There was too much time for thought and too little to think about. This girl only had the past, and her past was all comprised in a few months--the few months still known at Loango as the Simiacine year. She had lapsed into a bad habit of thinking that her life was over, that the daylight of it had waned, and that there was nothing left now but the grey remainder of the evening. She was wondering now why it had all come--why there had been any daylight at all. Above these thoughts she wondered why the feeling was still in her heart that Jack Meredith had not gone out of her life for ever. There was no reason why she should ever meet him again. He was, so far as she knew, married to Millicent Chyne more than a year ago, although she had never seen the announcement of the wedding. He had drifted into Loango and into her life by the merest accident, and now that the Simiacine Plateau had been finally abandoned there was no reason why any of the original finders should come to Loango again.

And the creepers were pushed aside by one who knew the method of their growth. A silver glory of moonlight fell on the verandah floor, and the man of whom she was thinking stood before her.

"You!" she exclaimed.

"Yes."

She rose, and they shook hands. They stood looking at each other for a few moments, and a thousand things that had never been said seemed to be understood between them.

"Why have you come?" she asked abruptly.

"To tell you a story."

She looked up with a sort of half smile, as if she suspected some pleasantry of which she had not yet detected the drift.

"A long story," he explained, "which has not even the merit of being amusing. Please sit down again."

She obeyed him.

The curtain of hanging leaves and flowers had fallen into place again; the shadowed tracery was on her dress and on the floor once more.

He stood in front of her and told her his story, as Sir John had suggested. He threw no romance into it--attempted no extenuation--but related the plain, simple facts of the last few years with the semi-cynical suggestion of humour that was sometimes his. And the cloak of pride that had fallen upon his shoulders made him hide much that was good, while he dragged forward his own shortcomings. She listened in silence. At times there hovered round her lips a smile. It usually came when he represented himself in a bad light, and there was a suggestion of superior wisdom in it, as if she knew something of which he was ignorant.

He was never humble. It was not a confession. It was not even an explanation, but only a story--a very lame story indeed--which gained nothing by the telling. And he was not the hero of it.

And all came about as wise old Sir John Meredith had predicted. It is not our business to record what Jocelyn said. Women--the best of them--have some things in their hearts which can only be said once to one person. Men cannot write them down; printers cannot print them.

The lame story was told to the end, and at the end it was accepted. When Sir John's name was mentioned--when the interview in the library of the great London house was briefly touched upon--Jack saw the flutter of a small lace pocket-handkerchief, and at no other time. The slate was wiped clean, and it almost seemed that Jocelyn preferred it thus with the scratches upon it where the writing had been.

Maurice Gordon did not come back in an hour. It was nearly ten o'clock before they heard his footstep on the gravel. By that time Jocelyn had heard the whole story. She had asked one or two questions which somehow cast a different light upon the narrative, and she had listened to the answers with a grave, judicial little smile--the smile of a judge whose verdict was pre-ordained, whose knowledge had nothing to gain from evidence.

Because she loved him she took his story and twisted it and turned it to a shape of her own liking. Those items which he had considered important she pa.s.sed over as trifles; the trifles she magnified into the corner-stones upon which the edifice was built. She set the lame story upon its legs and it stood upright. She believed what he had never told; and much that he related she chose to discredit--because she loved him. She perceived motives where he a.s.sured her there were none; she recognised the force of circ.u.mstances where he took the blame to himself--because she loved him. She maintained that the past was good, that he could not have acted differently, that she would not have had it otherwise--because she loved him.

And who shall say that she was wrong?

Jack went out to meet Maurice Gordon when they heard his footsteps, and as they walked back to the house he told him. Gordon was quite honest about it.

"I hoped," he said, "when I ran against you in the wood, that that was why you had come back. Nothing could have given me greater happiness.

Hang it, I AM glad, old chap!"

They sat far into the night arranging their lives. Jack was nervously anxious to get back to England. He could not rid his mind of the picture he had seen as he left his father's presence to go and take his pa.s.sage to Africa--the picture of an old man sitting in a stiff-backed chair before a dying fire. Moreover, he was afraid of Africa; the Irritability of Africa had laid its hand upon him almost as soon as he had set his foot upon its sh.o.r.e. He was afraid of the climate for Jocelyn; he was afraid of it for himself. The happiness that comes late must be firmly held to; nothing must be forgotten to secure it, or else it may slip between the fingers at the last moment.

Those who have s.n.a.t.c.hed happiness late in life can tell of a thousand details carefully attended to--a whole existence laid out in preparation for it, of health fostered, small pleasures relinquished, days carefully spent.

Jack Meredith was nervously apprehensive that his happiness might even now slip through his fingers. Truly, climatic influence is a strange and wonderful thing. It was Africa that had done this, and he was conscious of it. He remembered Victor Durnovo's strange outburst on their first meeting a few miles below Msala on the Ogowe river, and the remembrance only made him the more anxious that Jocelyn and he should turn their backs upon the accursed West Coast for ever.

Before they went to bed that night it was all arranged. Jack Meredith had carried his point. Maurice and Jocelyn were to sail with him to England by the first boat. Jocelyn and he compiled a telegram to be sent off first thing by a native boat to St. Paul de Loanda. It was addressed to Sir John Meredith, London, and signed "Meredith, Loango." The text of it was:

"I bring Jocelyn home by first boat."