“What do you mean?” asked Oscard. They both thought that he had gone mad. Sleep had nothing more to do with Durnovo’s eyes—protruding, staring, terrible to look at.
“Don’t let me go to sleep,” he repeated. “Don’t! Don’t!”
“All right,” said Oscard soothingly; “all right. We’ll look after you.”
He fell back on the bed. In the flickering light his eyeballs gleamed.
Then quite suddenly he rose to a sitting position again with a wild effort.
“I’ve got it! I’ve got it!” he cried.
“Got what?”
“The sleeping sickness!”
The two listeners knew of this strange disease. Oscard had seen a whole village devastated by it, the habitants lying about their own doors, stricken down by a deadly sleep from which they never woke. It is known on the West Coast of Africa, and the cure for it is unknown.
“Hold me!” cried Durnovo. “Don’t let me sleep!”
His head fell forward even as he spoke, and the staring wide-open eyes that could not sleep made a horror of him.
Oscard took him by the arms, and held him in a sitting position. Durnovo’s fingers were clutching at his sleeve.
“Shake me! God! shake me!”
Then Oscard took him in his strong arms, and set him on his feet. He shook him gently at first, but as the dread somnolence crept on he shook harder, until the mutilated inhuman head rolled upon the shoulders.
“It’s a sin to let that man live,” exclaimed Joseph, turning away in horror.
“It’s a sin to let any man die,” replied Oscard, and with his great strength he shook Durnovo like a garment.
And so Victor Durnovo died. His stained soul left his body in Guy Oscard’s hands, and the big Englishman shook the corpse, trying to awake it from that sleep which knows no earthly waking.
So, after all, Heaven stepped in and laid its softening hand on the judgment of men. But there was a strange irony in the mode of death. It was strange that this man, who never could have closed his eyes again, should have been stricken down by the sleeping sickness.
They laid the body on the floor, and covered the face, which was less gruesome in death, for the pity of the eyes had given place to peace.
The morning light, bursting suddenly through the trees as it does in Equatorial Africa, showed the room set in order and Guy Oscard sleeping in his camp-chair. Behind him, on the floor, lay the form of Victor Durnovo. Joseph, less iron-nerved than the great big-game hunter, was awake and astir with the dawn. He, too, was calmer now. He had seen death face to face too often to be appalled by it in broad daylight.
So they buried Victor Durnovo between the two giant palms at Msala, with his feet turned towards the river which he had made his, as if ready to arise when the call comes and undertake one of those marvellous journeys of his which are yet a household word on the West Coast.
The cloth fluttered as they lowered him into his narrow resting-place, and the face they covered had a strange mystic grin, as if he saw something that they could not perceive. Perhaps he did. Perhaps he saw the Simiacine Plateau, and knew that, after all, he had won the last throw; for up there, far above the tablelands of Central Africa, there lay beneath high Heaven a charnel-house. Hounded down the slope by his tormentors, he had left a memento behind him surer than their torturing knives, keener than their sharpest steel—he had left the sleeping sickness behind him.
His last journey had been worthy of his reputation. In twenty days he had covered the distance between the Plateau and Msala, stumbling on alone, blinded, wounded, sore-stricken, through a thousand daily valleys of death. With wonderful endurance he had paddled night and day down the sleek river without rest, with the dread microbe of the sleeping sickness slowly creeping through his veins.
He had lived in dread of this disease, as men do of a sickness which clutches them at last; but when it came he did not recognise it. He was so racked by pain that he never recognised the symptoms; he was so panic-stricken, so paralysed by the nameless fear that lay behind him, that he could only think of pressing forward. In the night hours he would suddenly rise from his precarious bed under the shadow of a fallen tree and stagger on, haunted by a picture of his ruthless foes pressing through the jungle in pursuit. Thus he accomplished his wonderful journey alone through trackless forests; thus he fended off the sickness which gripped him the moment that he laid him down to rest.
He had left it—a grim legacy—to his torturers, and before he reached the river all was still on the Simiacine Plateau.
And so we leave Victor Durnovo. His sins are buried with him, and beneath the giant palms at Msala lies Maurice Gordon’s secret.
And so we leave Msala, the accursed camp. Far up the Ogowe river, on the left bank, the giant palms still stand sentry, and beneath their shade the crumbling walls of a cursed house are slowly disappearing beneath luxuriant growths of grass and brushwood.
XXXIX
The Extenuating Circumstance
Yet I think at God’s Tribunal
Some large answer you shall hear.
In a dimly-lighted room in the bungalow at Loango two women had been astir all night. Now, as dawn approached, one of them, worn out with watching, wearied with that blessed fatigue of anxiety which dulls the senses, had laid her down on the curtain-covered bed to sleep.
While Marie slept Jocelyn Gordon walked softly backwards and forwards with Nestorius in her arms. Nestorius was probably dying. He lay in the Englishwoman’s gentle arms—a little brown bundle of flexible limbs and cotton nightshirt. It was terribly hot. All day the rain had been pending; all night it had held off until the whole earth seemed to pulsate with the desire for relief. Jocelyn kept
