To this Jocelyn answered nothing. Victor Durnovo was one of her brother’s closest friends—a friend of his own choosing.
“Miss Gordon,” said Jack Meredith suddenly, with a gravity that was rare, “will you do me a favour?”
“I think I should like to.”
“You admit that you are afraid of Durnovo now; if at any time you have reason to be more afraid, will you make use of me? Will you write or come to me and ask my help?”
“Thank you,” she said hesitatingly.
“You see,” he went on, in a lighter tone, “I am not afraid of Durnovo. I have met Durnovos before. You may have observed that my locks no longer resemble the raven’s wing. There is a little grey—just here—above the temple. I am getting on in life, and I know how to deal with Durnovos.”
“Thank you,” said the girl, with a little sigh of relief. “The feeling that I have someone to turn to will be a great relief. You see how I am placed here. The missionaries are very kind and well-meaning, but there are some things which they do not quite understand. They may be gentlemen—some of them are; but they are not men of the world. I have no definite thought or fear, and very good persons, one finds, are occasionally a little dense. Unless things are very definite, they do not understand.”
“On the other hand,” pursued Jack, in the same reflective tone, as if taking up her thought, “persons who are not good have a perception of the indefinite. I did not think of it in that light before.”
Jocelyn Gordon laughed softly, without attempting to meet his lighter vein.
“Do you know,” she said, after a little silence, “that I was actually thinking of warning you against Mr. Durnovo? Now I stand aghast at my own presumption.”
“It was kind of you to give the matter any thought whatever.”
He rose and threw away the end of his cigar. Joseph was already before the door, leading the horse which Maurice Gordon had placed at his visitor’s disposal.
“I will lay the warning to heart,” he said, standing in front of Jocelyn and looking down at her as she lay back in the deep basket-chair. She was simply dressed in white—as was her wont, for it must be remembered that they were beneath the Equator—a fair English maiden, whose thoughts were hidden behind a certain gracious, impenetrable reserve. “I will lay it to heart, although you have not uttered it. But I have always known with what sort of man I was dealing. We serve each other’s purpose, that is all; and he knows that as well as I do.”
“I am glad Mr. Oscard is going with you,” she answered guardedly.
He waited a moment. It seemed as if she had not done speaking—as if there was another thought near the surface. But she did not give voice to it, and he turned away. The sound of the horse’s feet on the gravel did not arouse her from the reverie into which she had fallen; and long after it had died away, leaving only the hum of insect life and the distant ceaseless song of the surf, Jocelyn Gordon sat apparently watching the dancing shadows on the floor as the creepers waved in the breeze.
XII
A Meeting
No one can be more wise than destiny.
The short equatorial twilight was drawing to an end, and all Nature stood in silence, while Night crept up to claim the land where her reign is more autocratic than elsewhere on earth. There is a black night above the trees, and a blacker beneath. In an hour it would be dark, and, in the meantime, the lowering clouds were tinged with a pink glow that filtered through from above. There was rain coming, and probably thunder. Moreover, the trees seemed to know it, for there was a limpness in their attitude as if they were tucking their heads into their shoulders in anticipation of the worst. The insects were certainly possessed of a premonition. They had crept away.
It was distinctly an unlikely evening for the sportsman. The stillness was so complete that the faintest rustle could be heard at a great distance. Moreover, it was the sort of evening when Nature herself seems to be glancing over her shoulder with timorous restlessness.
Nevertheless, a sportsman was abroad. He was creeping up the right-hand bank of a stream, his only chance lying in the noise of the waters, which might serve to deaden the sound of broken twig or rustling leaf.
This sportsman was Jack Meredith, and it was evident that he was bringing to bear upon the matter in hand that intelligence and keenness of perception which had made him a person of some prominence in other scenes where Nature has a less assured place.
It would appear that he was not so much at home in the tangle of an African forest as in the crooked paths of London society; for his clothes were torn in more than one place; a mosquito, done to sudden death, adhered sanguinarily to the side of his aristocratic nose, while heat and mental distress had drawn damp stripes down his countenance. His hands were scratched and inclined to bleed, and one leg had apparently been in a morass. Added to these physical drawbacks there was no visible sign of success, which was probably the worst part of Jack Meredith’s plight.
Since sunset he had been crawling, scrambling, stumbling up the bank of this stream in relentless pursuit of some large animal which persistently kept hidden in the tangle across the bed of the river. The strange part of it was that when he stopped to peep through the branches the animal stopped too, and he found no way of discovering its whereabouts. More than once they remained thus for nearly five minutes, peering at each other through the heavy leafage. It was distinctly
