“I am afraid he is very ill,” he said.
At this moment the kettle boiled over, and Marie had to turn away to attend to her duties.
When she came back Oscard was looking, not at Nestorius, but at her.
“We spent four days at Msala,” he said, in a tone that meant that he had more to tell her.
“Yes?”
“The place is in ruins, as you know.”
She nodded with a peculiar little twist of the lips as if he were hurting her.
“And I am afraid I have some bad news for you. Victor Durnovo, your master—”
“Yes—tell quickly!”
“He is dead. We buried him at Msala. He died in my arms.”
At this moment Joseph gave a little gasp and turned away to the window, where he stood with his broad back turned towards them. Maurice Gordon, as white as death, was leaning against the table. He quite forgot himself. His lips were apart, his jaw had dropped; he was hanging breathlessly on Guy Oscard’s next word.
“He died of the sleeping sickness,” said Oscard. “We had come down to Msala before him—Joseph and I. I broke up the partnership, and we left him in possession of the Simiacine Plateau. But his men turned against him. For some reason his authority over them failed. He was obliged to make a dash for Msala, and he reached it, but the sickness was upon him.”
Maurice Gordon drew a sharp sigh of relief which was almost a sob. Marie was standing with her two hands on the pillow where Nestorius lay. Her deep eyes were fixed on the Englishman’s sunburnt, strongly gentle face.
“Did he send a message for me—yes?” she said softly.
“No,” answered Oscard. “He—there was no time.”
Joseph at the window had turned half round.
“He was my husband,” said Marie in her clear, deep tones; “the father of this little one, which you call Nestorius.”
Oscard bowed his head without surprise. Jocelyn was standing still as a statue, with her hand on the dying infant’s cheek. No one dared to look at her.
“It is all right,” said Marie bluntly. “We were married at Sierra Leone by the English chaplain. My father, who is dead, kept a hotel at Sierra Leone, and he knew the ways of the—half-castes. He said that the Protestant Church at Sierra Leone was good enough for him, and we were married there. And then Victor brought me away from my people to this place and to Msala. Then he got tired of me—he cared no more. He said I was ugly.”
She pronounced it “ogly,” and seemed to think that the story finished there. At all events, she added nothing to it. But Joseph thought fit to contribute a post scriptum.
“You’d better tell ’em, mistress,” he said, “that he tried to starve yer and them kids—that he wanted to leave yer at Msala to be massacred by the tribes, only Mr. Oscard sent yer down ’ere. You’d better tell ’em that.”
“No,” she replied, with a faint smile. “No, because he was my husband.”
Guy Oscard was looking very hard at Joseph, and, catching his eye, made a little gesture commanding silence. He did not want him to say too much.
Joseph turned away again to the window, and stood thus, apart, till the end.
“I have no doubt,” said Oscard to Marie, “that he would have sent some message to you had he been able; but he was very ill—he was dying—when he reached Msala. It was wonderful that he got there at all. We did what we could for him, but it was hopeless.”
Marie raised her shoulders with her pathetic gesture of resignation.
“The sleeping sickness,” she said, “what will you? There is no remedy. He always said he would die of that. He feared it.”
In the greater sorrow she seemed to have forgotten her child, who was staring open-eyed at the ceiling. The two others—the boy and girl—were playing on the doorstep with some unconsidered trifles from the dust-heap—after the manner of children all the world over.
“He was not a good man,” said Marie, turning to Jocelyn, as if she alone of all present would understand. “He was not a good husband, but—” she shrugged her shoulders with one of her patient, shadowy smiles—“it makes so little difference—yes?”
Jocelyn said nothing. None of them had aught to say to her. For each in that room could lay a separate sin at Victor Durnovo’s door. He was gone beyond the reach of human justice to the Higher Court where the Extenuating Circumstance is fully understood. The generosity of that silence was infectious, and they told her nothing. Had they spoken she would perforce have believed them; but then, as she herself said, it would have made “so little difference.” So Victor Durnovo leaves these pages, and all we can do is to remember the writing on the ground. Who amongst us dares to withhold the Extenuating Circumstance? Who is ready to leave this world without that crutch to lean upon? Given a mixed blood—evil black with evil white and what can the result be but evil? Given the climate of Western Africa and the mental irritation thereof, added to a lack of education and the natural vice inherent in man, and you have—Victor Durnovo.
Nestorius—the shameless—stretched out his little bare limbs and turned half over on his side. He looked from one face to the other with the grave wonder that was his. He had never been taken much notice of. His short walks in life had been very near the ground, where trifles look very large, and from whence those larger stumbling-blocks which occupy our attention are quite invisible. He had been the third—the solitary third child who usually makes his own interest in life, and is
