“I wonder,” she said half-aloud, taking up the crescent again, “why he sent it to me?”
Lady Cantourne, who was writing letters at a terrible rate, glanced sharply up. She was beginning to be aware of Millicent’s unspoken fear of Sir John. Moreover, she was clever enough to connect it with her niece’s daily increasing love for the man who was soon to be her husband.
“Well,” she answered, “I should be rather surprised if he gave you nothing.”
There was a little pause, only broken by the scratching of Lady Cantourne’s quill pen.
“Auntie!” exclaimed the girl suddenly, “why does he hate me? You have known him all your life—you must know why he hates me so.”
Lady Cantourne shrugged her shoulders.
“I suppose,” went on Millicent with singular heat, “that someone has been telling him things about me—horrid things—false things—that I am a flirt, or something like that; I am sure I’m not.”
Lady Cantourne was addressing an envelope, and did not make any reply.
“Has he said anything to you, Aunt Caroline?” asked Millicent in an aggrieved voice.
Lady Cantourne laid aside her letter.
“No,” she answered slowly, “but I suppose there are things which he does not understand.”
“Things?”
Her ladyship looked up steadily.
“Guy Oscard, for instance,” she said; “I don’t quite understand Guy Oscard, Millicent.”
The girl turned away impatiently. She was keenly alive to the advantage of turning her face away. For in her pocket she had at that moment a letter from Guy Oscard—the last relic of the old excitement which was so dear to her, and which she was already beginning to miss. Joseph had posted this letter in Msala nearly two months before. It had travelled down from the Simiacine Plateau with others, in a parcel beneath the mattress of Jack Meredith’s litter. It was a letter written in good faith by an honest, devoted man to the woman whom he looked upon already as almost his wife—a letter which no man need have been ashamed of writing, but which a woman ought not to have read unless she intended to be the writer’s wife.
Millicent had read this letter more than once. She liked it because it was evidently sincere. The man’s heart could be heard beating in every line of it. Moreover, she had made inquiries that very morning at the Post Office about the African mail. She wanted the excitement of another letter like that.
“Oh, Guy Oscard!” she replied innocently to Lady Cantourne; “that was nothing.”
Lady Cantourne kept silence, and presently she returned to her letters.
XXXVIII
The Accursed Camp
Here—judge if hell, with all its power to damn, Can add one curse to the foul thing I am—
There are some places in the world where a curse seems to brood in the atmosphere. Msala was one of these. Perhaps these places are accursed by the deeds that have been done there. Who can tell?
Could the trees—the two gigantic palms that stood by the river’s edge—could these have spoken, they might perhaps have told the tale of this little inland station in that country where, as the founder of the hamlet was in the habit of saying, no one knows what is going on.
All went well with the retreating column until they were almost in sight of Msala, when the flotilla was attacked by no less than three hippopotamuses. One canoe was sunk, and four others were so badly damaged that they could not be kept afloat with their proper complement of men. There was nothing for it but to establish a camp at Msala, and wait there until the builders had repaired the damaged canoes.
The walls of Durnovo’s house were still standing, and here Guy Oscard established himself with as much comfort as circumstances allowed. He caused a temporary roof of palm-leaves to be laid on the charred beams, and within the principal room—the very room where the three organisers of the great Simiacine scheme had first laid their plans—he set up his simple camp furniture.
Oscard was too great a traveller, too experienced a wanderer, to be put out of temper by this enforced rest. The men had worked very well hitherto. It had, in its way, been a great feat of generalship, this leading through a wild country of men unprepared for travel, scantily provisioned, disorganised by recent events. No accident had happened, no serious delay had been incurred, although the rate of progress had necessarily been very slow. Nearly six weeks had elapsed since Oscard with his little following had turned their backs forever on the Simiacine Plateau. But now the period of acute danger had passed away. They had almost reached civilisation. Oscard was content.
When Oscard was content he smoked a slower pipe than usual—watching each cloud of smoke vanish into thin air. He was smoking very slowly this, the third evening of their encampment at Msala. There had been heavy rain during the day, and the whole lifeless forest was dripping with a continuous, ceaseless clatter of heavy drops on tropic foliage; with a united sound like a widespread whisper.
Oscard was sitting in the windowless room without a light, for a light only attracted a myriad of heavy-winged moths. He was seated before the long French window, which, since the sash had gone, had been used as a door. Before him, in the glimmering light of the mystic Southern Cross, the great river crept unctuously, silently to the sea. It seemed to be stealing away surreptitiously while the forest whispered of it. On its surface the reflection of the great stars of the southern hemisphere ran into little streaks of silver, shimmering away into darkness.
All sound of human life was still. The natives were asleep. In the next room, Joseph in his hammock was just on the barrier between the waking and the sleeping life—as soldiers learn to be. Oscard would not have needed to raise his voice to call him to his side.
The leader of this hurried retreat had been sitting there for two hours.
