Such, then, was the state of affairs when Eddie Denton arrived, and the trouble began.
I was escorting Betty home one evening after a tea-party at which we had been fellow-guests, when, walking down the road, we happened to espy Mortimer. He broke into a run when he saw us, and galloped up, waving a piece of paper in his hand. He was plainly excited, a thing which was unusual in this well-balanced man. His broad, good-humoured face was working violently.
“Good news!” he cried. “Good news! Dear old Eddie’s back!”
“Oh, how nice for you, dear!” said Betty. “Eddie Denton is Mortimer’s best friend,” she explained to me. “He has told me so much about him. I have been looking forward to his coming home. Mortie thinks the world of him.”
“So will you, when you know him,” cried Mortimer. “Dear old Eddie! He’s a wonder! The best fellow on earth! We were at school and the ’Varsity together. There’s nobody like Eddie! He landed yesterday. Just home from Central Africa. He’s an explorer, you know,” he said to me. “Spends all his time in places where it’s death for a white man to go.”
“An explorer!” I heard Betty breathe, as if to herself. I was not so impressed, I fear, as she was. Explorers, as a matter of fact, leave me a trifle cold. It has always seemed to me that the difficulties of their life are greatly exaggerated—generally by themselves. In a large country like Africa, for instance, I should imagine that it was almost impossible for a man not to get somewhere if he goes on long enough. Give me the fellow who can plunge into the bowels of the earth at Piccadilly Circus and find the right Tube train with nothing but a lot of misleading signs to guide him. However, we are not all constituted alike in this world, and it was apparent from the flush on her cheek and the light in her eyes that Betty admired explorers.
“I wired to him at once,” went on Mortimer, “and insisted on his coming down here. It’s two years since I saw him. You don’t know how I have looked forward, dear, to you and Eddie meeting. He is just your sort. I know how romantic you are and keen on adventure and all that. Well, you should hear Eddie tell the story of how he brought down the bull bongo with his last cartridge after all the pongos, or native bearers, had fled into the dongo, or undergrowth.”
“I should love to!” whispered Betty, her eyes glowing. I suppose to an impressionable girl these things really are of absorbing interest. For myself, bongos intrigue me even less than pongos, while dongos frankly bore me. “When do you expect him?”
“He will get my wire tonight. I’m hoping we shall see the dear old fellow tomorrow afternoon some time. How surprised old Eddie will be to hear that I’m engaged. He’s such a confirmed bachelor himself. He told me once that he considered the wisest thing ever said by human tongue was the Swahili proverb—‘Whoso taketh a woman into his kraal depositeth himself straightway in the wongo.’ Wongo, he tells me, is a sort of broth composed of herbs and meat-bones, corresponding to our soup. You must get Eddie to give it you in the original Swahili. It sounds even better.”
I saw the girl’s eyes flash, and there came into her face that peculiar set expression which married men know. It passed in an instant, but not before it had given me material for thought which lasted me all the way to my house and into the silent watches of the night. I was fond of Mortimer Sturgis, and I could see trouble ahead for him as plainly as though I had been a palmist reading his hand at two guineas a visit. There are other proverbs fully as wise as the one which Mortimer had translated from the Swahili, and one of the wisest is that quaint old East London saying, handed down from one generation of costermongers to another, and whispered at midnight in the wigwams of the whelk-seller! “Never introduce your donah to a pal.” In those seven words is contained the wisdom of the ages. I could read the future so plainly. What but one thing could happen after Mortimer had influenced Betty’s imagination with his stories of his friend’s romantic career, and added the finishing touch by advertising him as a woman-hater? He might just as well have asked for his ring back at once. My heart bled for Mortimer.
I happened to call at his house on the second evening of the explorer’s visit, and already the mischief had been done.
Denton was one of those lean, hard-bitten men with smouldering eyes and a brick-red complexion. He looked what he was, the man of action and enterprise. He had the wiry frame and strong jaw without which no explorer is complete, and Mortimer, beside him, seemed but a poor, soft product of our hothouse civilization. Mortimer, I forgot to say, wore glasses; and, if there is
