ALAN FALLS ILL.
After the departure of the messengers a deep melancholy fell upon Alan,
who was sure that he had now no further hope of communicating with the
outside world. Bitterly did he reproach himself for his folly in having
ever journeyed to this hateful place in order to secure—what? About
£100,000 worth of gold which of course he never could secure, as it
would certainly vanish or be stolen on its way to the coast. For this
gold he had become involved in a dreadful complication which must cost
him much misery, and sooner or later life itself, since he could not
marry that beautiful savage Asika, and if he refused her she would
certainly kill him in her outraged pride and fury.
Day by day she sent for him, and when he came, assumed a new character,
that of a woman humbled by a sense of her own ignorance, which she was
anxious to amend. So he must play the role of tutor to her, telling her
of civilized peoples, their laws, customs and religions, and
instructing her how to write and read. She listened and learned
submissively enough, but all the while Alan felt as one might who is
called upon to teach tricks to a drugged panther. The drug in this case
was her passion for him, which appeared to be very genuine. But when it
passed off, or when he was obliged to refuse her, what, he wondered,
would happen then?
Anxiety and confinement told on him far more than all the hardships of
his journey. His health ran down, he began to fall ill. Then as bad
luck would have it, walking in that damp, unwholesome cedar garden, out
of which he might not stray, he contracted the germ of some kind of
fever which in autumn was very common in this poisonous climate. Three
days later he became delirious, and for a week after that hung between
life and death. Well was it for him that his medicine-chest still
remained intact, and that recognizing his own symptoms before his head
gave way, he was able to instruct Jeekie what drugs to give him at the
different stages of the disease.
For the rest his memories of that dreadful illness always remained very
vague. He had visions of Jeekie and of a robed woman whom he knew to be
the Asika, bending over him continually. Also it seemed to him that
from time to time he was talking with Barbara, which even then he knew
must be absurd, for how could they talk across thousands of miles of
land and sea.
At length his mind cleared suddenly, and he awoke as from a nightmare to
find himself lying in the hall or room where he had always been,
feeling quite cool and without pain, but so weak that it was an effort
to him to lift his hand. He stared about him and was astonished to see
the white head of Jeekie rolling uneasily to and fro upon the cushions
of another bed near by.
“Jeekie,” he said, “are you ill too, Jeekie?”
At the sound of that voice his retainer started up violently.
“What, Major, you awake?” he said. “Thanks be to all gods,
white and black, yes, and yellow too, for I thought your goose cooked.
No, no, Major, I not ill, only Asika say so. You go to bed, so she make
me go to bed. You get worse, she treat me cruel; you seem better, she
stuff me with food till I burst. All because you tell her that you and
I die same day. Oh, Lord! poor Jeekie think his end very near just now,
for he know quite well that she not let him breathe ten minutes after
you peg out. Jeekie never pray so hard for anyone before as he pray
this week for you, and by Jingo! I think he do the trick, he and that
medicine stuff which make him feel very bad in stomach,” and he groaned
under the weight of his many miseries.
Weak as he was Alan began to laugh, and that laugh seemed to do him more
good than anything that he could remember, for after it he was sure
that he would recover.
Just then an agonized whisper reached him from Jeekie.
“Look out!” it said, “here come Asika. Go sleep and seem
better, Major, please, or I catch it hot.”
So Alan almost shut his eyes and lay still. In another moment she was
standing over him and he noticed that her hair was dishevelled and her
eyes were red as though with weeping. She scanned him intently for a
little while, then passed round to where Jeekie lay, and appeared to
pinch his ear so hard that he wriggled and uttered a stifled groan.
“How is your lord, dog?” she whispered.
“Better, O Asika, I think that last medicine do us good, though it make
me very sick inside. Just now he spoke to me and said that he hoped that
your heart was not sad because of him and that all this time in his
dreams he had seen and thought of nobody but you, O Asika.”
“Did he?” asked that lady, becoming intensely interested.
“Then tell me, dog, why is he ever calling upon one Bar-bar-a? Surely
that is a woman’s name?”
“Yes, O Asika, that is the name of his mother, also of one of his
sisters, whom, after you, he loves best of anyone in the whole world.
When you are here he talks of them, but when you are not here he talks
of no one but you. Although he is so sick he remembers white man’s
custom, which tells him that it is very wrong to say sweet things to
lady’s face till he is quite married to her. After _that_ they say them
always.”
She looked at him suspiciously and muttering, “Here it is otherwise. For
your own sake, man, I trust that you do not lie,” left him, and drawing
a stool up beside Alan’s bed, sat herself down and examined him
carefully, touching his face and hands with her long thin fingers. Then
noting how white and wasted he was, of a sudden she began to weep,
saying between her sobs:
“Oh! if you should die, Vernoon, I will die also and be born again not
as Asika, as I have been for so many generations, but as a white woman
that I may be with you. Only first,” she added, setting her teeth, “I
will sacrifice every wizard in this land, for they have brought the
sickness on you by their magic, and I will burn Bonsa Town and cast its
gods to melt in the flames, and the Mungana with them. And then amid
their ashes I will let out my life,” and again she began to weep very
piteously and to call him by endearing names and pray him that he would
not die.
Now Alan thought it time to wake up. He opened his eyes, stared at her
vacantly, and asked if it were raining, which indeed it might have been,
for her big tears were falling on his face. She uttered a gasp of joy.
“No, no,” she answered, “the weather is very fine. It is
I—I who have rained because I thought you die.” She wiped his
forehead with the soft linen of her robe, then went on, “But you will
not die; say that you will live, say that you will live for me,
Vernoon.”
He looked at her, and feeble though he was, the awfulness of the
situation sank into his soul.
“I hope that I shall live,” he answered. “I am hungry, please
give me some food.”
Next instant there was a tumult near by, and when Alan looked up again
it was to see Jeekie, very lightly clad, risen from his bed of
sympathetic sickness and flying through the door.
“It will be here presently,” she said. “Oh! if you knew what
I have suffered, if you only knew. Now you will recover whom I thought
dead, for this fever passes quickly, and there shall be such a
sacrifice—no, I forgot, you hate sacrifices—there shall be no
sacrifice, there shall be a thanksgiving, and every woman in the land
shall break her bonds to husband or to lover and take him whom she
desires without reproach or loss. I will do as I would be done by, that
is the law you taught me, is it not?”
This novel interpretation of a sacred doctrine, worthy of Jeekie
himself, so paralyzed Alan’s enfeebled brain that he could make no
answer, nor do anything except wonder what would happen in Asiki-land
when the decree of its priestess took effect. Then Jeekie arrived with
something to drink which he swallowed with the eagerness of the
convalescent and almost immediately went to sleep in good earnest.
Alan’s recovery was rapid, since as the Asika had told him, if a patient
lives through it, the kind of fever that he had taken did not last long
enough to exhaust his vital forces. When she asked him if he needed
anything to make him well, he answered:
“Yes, air and exercise.”
She replied that he should have both, and next morning his hated mask
was put upon his face and he was supported by priests to a door where a
litter, or rather litters were waiting, one for himself and another for
Jeekie who, although in robust health, was still supposed to be
officially ill and not allowed to walk upon his own legs. They entered
these litters and were borne off till presently they met a third litter
of particularly gorgeous design carried by masked bearers, wherein was
the Asika herself, wearing her coronet and a splendid robe.
Into this litter, which was fitted with a second seat, Alan was
transferred, the Mungana, for whom it was designed, being placed in
that vacated by Alan, which either by accident or otherwise, was no
more seen that day. They went up the mountain side and to the edge of
the great fall and watched the waters thunder down, though the crest of
them they could not reach. Next they wandered off into the huge forests
that clothed the slopes of the hills and there halted and ate. Then as
the sun sank they returned to the gloomy Bonsa Town beneath them.
For Alan, notwithstanding his weakness and anxieties, it was a heavenly
day. The Asika was passive, some new mood being on her, and scarcely
troubled him at all except to call his attention to a tree, a flower,
or a prospect of the scenery. Here on the mountain side, too, the air
was sweet, and for the rest—well, he who had been so near to death, was
escaped for an hour from that gloomy home of bloodshed and
superstition, and saw God’s sky again.
This journey was the first of many. Every day the litters were waiting
and they visited some new place, although into the town itself they
never went. Moreover, if they passed through outlying villages, though
Alan was forced to wear his mask, their inhabitants had been warned to
absent themselves, so that they saw no one. The crops were left
untended and the cattle and sheep lowed hungrily in their kraals. On
certain days, at Alan’s request, they were taken to the spots where the
gold was found in the gravel bed of an almost dry stream that during
the rains was a torrent.
He descended from the litter and with the help of the Asika and Jeekie,
dug a little in this gravel, not without reward, for in it they found
several nuggets. Above, too, where they went afterwards, was a huge
quartz reef denuded by water, which evidently had been worked in past
ages and was still so rich that in it they saw plenty of visible gold.
Looking at it Alan bethought him of his City days and of the hundreds
of thousands of pounds capital with which this unique proposition might
have been floated. Afterwards they were carried to the places where the
gems were found, stuck about in the clay, like plums in a pudding,
though none ever sought them now. But all these things interested the
Asika not at all.
“What is the good of gold,” she asked of Alan, “except to
make things of, or the bright stones except to play with? What is the
good of anything except food to eat and power and wisdom that can open
the secret doors of knowledge, of things seen and things unseen, and
love that brings the lover joy and forgetfulness of self and takes away
the awful loneliness of the soul, if only for a little while?”
Not wishing to drift into discussion on the matter of love, Alan asked
the priestess to define her “soul,” whence it came and whither she
believed it to be going.
“My soul is I, Vernoon,” she answered, “and already very,
very old. Thus it has ruled amongst this people for thousands of years.”
“How is that?” he asked, “seeing that the Asika dies?”
“Oh! no, Vernoon, she does not die; she only changes. The old body dies,
the spirit enters into another body which is waiting. Thus until I was
fourteen I was but a common girl, the daughter of a headman of that
village yonder, at least so they tell me, for of this time I have no
memory. Then the Asika died and as I had the secret marks and the
beauty that is hers the priests burnt her body before Big Bonsa and
suffocated me, the child, in the smoke of the burning. But I awoke
again and when I awoke the past was gone and the soul of the Asika
filled me, bringing with it its awful memories, its gathered wisdom,
its passion of love and hate, and its power to look backward and
before.”
“Do you ever do these things?” asked Alan.
“Backward, yes, before very little; since you came, not at all, because
my heart is a coward and I fear what I might see. Oh! Vernoon, Vernoon,
I know you and your thoughts. You think me a beautiful beast who loves
like a beast, who loves you because you are white and different from
our men. Well, what there is of the beast in me the gods of my people
gave, for they are devils and I am their servant. But there is more
than that, there is good also which I have won for myself. I knew you
would come even before I had seen your face, I knew you would come,”
she went on passionately, “and that is why I was yours already. But
what would befall after you came, that I neither knew, nor know,
because I will not seek, who could learn it all.”
He looked at her and she saw the doubt in his eyes.
“You do not believe me, Vernoon. Very well, this night you shall see,
you and that black dog of yours, that you may know I do not trick you,
and he shall tell me what you see, for he being but a low-born pig will
speak the truth, not minding if it hurts me, whereas you are gentle and
might spare, and myself I have sworn not to search the future by an
oath that I may not break.”
“What of the past?” asked Alan.
“We will not waste time on it, for I know it all. Vernoon, have you no
memories of Asiki-land? Do you think you never visited it before?”
“Never,” said Alan; “it was my uncle who came and ran away
with Little Bonsa on his head.”
“That is news indeed,” she replied mockingly. “Did you then
think that I believed it to be you, though it is true that she who went
before, or my spirit that was in her, fell into error for an hour, and
thought that fool-uncle of yours was _the Man_. When she found her
mistake she let him go, and bade the god go with him that it might
bring back the appointed Man, as it has done; yes, that Little Bonsa,
who knew him of old, might search him out from among all the millions
of men, born or unborn, and bring him back to me. Therefore also she
chose a young black dog who would live for many years, and bade the god
to take him with her, and told him of the wealth of our people that it
might be a bait upon the hook. Do you see, Vernoon, that yellow dirt
was the bait, that I—I am the hook? Well, you have felt it before, so it
should not gall you overmuch.”
Now Alan was more frightened than he had been since he set foot in
Asiki-land, for of a sudden this woman became terrible to him. He felt
that she knew things which were hidden from him. For the first time he
believed in her, believed, that she was more than a mere passionate
savage set by chance to rule over a bloodthirsty tribe; that she was
one who had a part in his destiny.
“Felt the hook?” he muttered. “I do not understand.”
“You are very forgetful,” she answered. “Vernoon, we have
lived and loved before, who were twin souls from the first. That man
now, whom I told you lived once on the great river called the Nile,
have you no memory of him? Well, well, let it be, I will tell you
afterwards. Here we are at the Gold House again, to-night when I am
ready I will send for you, and this I promise, you shall leave me wiser
than you were.”
When they were alone in their room Alan told Jeekie of the expected
entertainment of crystal gazing, or whatever it might be, and the part
that he was to play in it.
“You say that again, Major,” said Jeekie.
Alan repeated the information, giving every detail that he could
remember.
“Oh!” said Jeekie, “I see Asika show us things, ’cause
she afraid to look at them herself, or take oath, or can’t, or
something. She no ask you tell her what she see, because you too kind
hurt her feeling, if happen to be something beastly. But Jeekie just
tell her because he so truthful and not care curse about her feeling.
Well, that all right, Jeekie tell her sure enough. Only, Major, don’t
you interrupt. Quite possible these magic things, I see one show, you
see another. So don’t you go say, ‘Jeekie, that a lie,’ and give me
away to Asika just because you think you see different, ‘cause if so
you put me into dirty hole, and of course I catch it afterwards. You
promise, Major?”
“Oh! yes, I promise. But, Jeekie, do you really think we are going to
see anything?”
“Can’t say, Major,” and he shook his head gloomily.
“P’raps all put up job. But lots of rum things in world, Major,
specially among beastly African savage who very curious and always ready
pay blood to bad Spirit. Hope Asika not get this into her head, because
no one know what happen. P’raps we see too much and scared all our
lives; but p’raps all tommy rot.”
“That’s it—tommy rot,” answered Alan, who was not
superstitious. “Well, I suppose that we must go through with it. But oh!
Jeekie, I wish you would tell me how to get out of this.”
“Don’t know, Major, p’raps never get out; p’raps learn
how to-night. Have to do something soon if want to go. Mungana’s time
nearly up, and then—oh my eye!”
It was night, about ten o’clock indeed, the hour at which Alan generally
went to bed. No message had come and he began to hope that the Asika had
forgotten, or changed her mind, and was just going to say so to Jeekie
when a light coming from behind him attracted his attention and he
turned to see her standing in a corner of the great room, holding a
lamp in her hand and looking towards him. Her gold breastplate and
crown were gone, with every other ornament, and she was clad, or rather
muffled in robes of pure white fitted with a kind of nun’s hood which
lay back upon her shoulders. Also on her arm she carried a shawl or
veil. Standing thus, all undecked, with her long hair fastened in a
simple knot, she still looked very beautiful, more so than she had ever
been, thought Alan, for the cruelty of her face had faded and was
replaced by a mystery very strange to see. She did not seem quite like a
natural woman, and that was the reason, perhaps, that Alan for the
first time felt attracted by her. Hitherto she had always repelled him,
but this night it was otherwise.
“How did you come here?” he asked in a more gentle voice than he
generally used towards her.
Noting the change in his tone, she smiled shyly and even coloured a
little, then answered:
“This house has many secrets, Vernoon. When you are lord of it you shall
learn them all, till then I may not tell them to you. But, come, there
are other secrets which I hope you shall see to-night, and, Jeekie,
come you also, for you shall be the mouth of your lord, so that you may
tell me what perhaps he would hide.”
“I will tell you everything, everything, O Asika,” answered Jeekie,
stretching out his hands and bowing almost to the ground.
Then they started and following many long passages as before, although
whether they were the same or others Alan could not tell, came at last
to a door which he recognized, that of the Treasure House. As they
approached this door it opened and through it, like a hunted thing, ran
the bedizened Mungana, husband of the Asika, terror, or madness,
shining in his eyes. Catching sight of his wife, who bore the lamp, he
threw himself upon his knees and snatching at her robe, addressed some
petition to her, speaking so rapidly that Alan could not follow his
words.
For a moment she listened, then dragged her dress from his hand and
spurned him with her foot. There was something so cruel in the gesture
and the action, so full of deadly hate and loathing, that Alan, who
witnessed it, experienced a new revulsion of feeling towards the Asika.
What kind of a woman must she be, he wondered, who could treat a
discarded lover thus in the presence of his successor?
With a groan or a sob, it was difficult to say which, the poor man rose
and perceived Alan, whose face he now beheld for the first time, since
the Asika had told him not to mask himself as they would meet no one.
The sight of it seemed to fill him with jealous fury; at any rate he
leapt at his rival, intending, apparently, to catch him by the throat.
Alan, who was watching him, stepped aside, so that he came into violent
contact with the wall of the passage and, half-stunned by the shock,
reeled onwards into the darkness.
“The hog!” said the Asika, or rather she hissed it, “the hog,
who dared to touch me and to strike at you. Well, his time is
short—would that I could make it shorter! Did you hear what he sought
of me?”
Alan, who wished for no confidences, replied by asking what the Mungana
was doing in the Treasure House, to which she answered that the spirits
who dwelt there were eating up his soul, and when they had devoured it
all he would go quite mad and kill himself.
“Does this happen to all Munganas?” inquired Alan.
“Yes, Vernoon, if the Asika hates them, but if she loves them it is
otherwise. Come, let us forget the wretch, who would kill you if he
could,” and she led the way into the hall and up it, passing between the
heaps of gold.
On the table where lay the necklaces of gems she set down her lamp,
whereof the light, all there was in that great place, flickered feebly
upon the mask of Little Bonsa, which had been moved here apparently for
some ceremonial purpose, and still more feebly upon the hideous, golden
countenances and winding sheets of the ancient, yellow dead who stood
around in scores placed one above the other, each in his appointed
niche. It was an awesome scene and one that oppressed Jeekie very much,
for he murmured to Alan:
“Oh my! Major, family vault child’s play to this hole, just
like——” here his comparison came to an end, for the Asika cut
it short with a single glance.
“Sit here in front of me,” she said to Alan, “and you,
Jeekie, sit at your lord’s side, and be silent till I bid you
speak.”
Then she crouched down in a heap behind them, threw the cloth or veil
she carried over her head, and in some way that they did not see,
suddenly extinguished the lamp.
Now they were in deep darkness, the darkness of death, and in utter
silence, the silence of the dead. No glimmer of light, and yet to Alan
it seemed as though he could feel the flash of the crystal eyes of
Little Bonsa, and of all the other eyes set in the masks of those
departed men who once had been the husbands of the blood-stained
priestess of the Asiki, till one by one, as she wearied of them, they
were bewitched to madness and to doom. In that utter quiet he thought
even that he could hear them stir within their winding sheets, or it
may have been that the Asika had risen and moved among them on some
errand of her own. Far away something fell to the floor, a very light
object, such as a flake of rock or a scale of gold. Yet the noise of it
struck his nerves loud as a clap of thunder, and those of Jeekie also,
for he felt him start at his side and heard the sudden hammerlike beat
of his heart.
What was the woman doing in this dreadful place, he wondered. Well, it
was easy to guess. Doubtless she had brought them here to scare and
impress them. Presently a voice, that of some hidden priest, would
speak to them, and they would be asked to believe it a message from the
spirit world, or a spirit itself might be arranged—what could be easier
in their mood and these surroundings?
Now the Asika was speaking behind them in a muffled voice. From the tone
of it she appeared to be engaged in argument or supplication in some
strange tongue. At any rate Alan could not understand a word of what
she said. The argument, or prayer, went on for a long while, with
pauses as though for answers. Then suddenly it ceased and once more
they were plunged into that unfathomable silence.