Still must the man move sadlier for the dreams
That mocked the boy.
“Where are you going?” asked Meredith, when they were in the street.
“Home.”
They walked on a few paces together.
“May I come with you?” asked Meredith again.
“Certainly; I have a good deal to tell you.”
They called a cab, and singularly enough they drove all the way to
Russell Square without speaking. These two men had worked together for
many months, and men who have a daily task in common usually learn to
perform it without much interchange of observation. When one man gets
to know the mind of another, conversation assumes a place of secondary
importance. These two had been through more incidents together than
usually fall to the lot of man--each knew how the other would act and
think under given circumstances; each knew what the other was thinking
now.
The house in Russell Square, the quiet house in the corner where the
cabs do not pass, was lighted up and astir when they reached it. The old
butler held open the door with a smile of welcome and a faint aroma of
whisky. The luggage had been discreetly removed. Joseph had gone to Mr.
Meredith's chambers. Guy Oscard led the way to the smoking-room at the
back of the house--the room wherein the eccentric Oscard had written his
great history--the room in which Victor Durnovo had first suggested the
Simiacine scheme to the historian's son.
The two survivors of the originating trio passed into this room
together, and closed the door behind them.
“The worst of one's own private tragedies is that they are usually only
comedies in disguise,” said Jack Meredith oracularly.
Guy Oscard grunted. He was looking for his pipe.
“If we heard this of any two fellows except ourselves we should think it
an excellent joke,” went on Meredith.
Oscard nodded. He lighted his pipe, and still he said nothing.
“Hang it!” exclaimed Jack Meredith, suddenly throwing himself back in
his chair, “it is a good joke.”
He laughed softly, and all the while his eyes, watchful, wise, anxious,
were studying Guy Oscard's face.
“He is harder hit than I am,” he was reflecting. “Poor old Oscard!”
The habit of self-suppression was so strong upon him--acquired as a mere
social duty--that it was only natural for him to think less of himself
than of the expediency of the moment. The social discipline is as
powerful an agent as that military discipline that makes a man throw
away his own life for the good of the many.
Oscard laughed, too, in a strangely staccato manner.
“It is rather a sudden change,” observed Meredith; “and all brought
about by your coming into that room at that particular moment--by
accident.”
“Not by accident,” corrected Oscard, speaking at last. “I was brought
there and pushed into the room.”
“By whom?”
“By your father.”
Jack Meredith sat upright. He drew his curved hand slowly down over his
face--keen and delicate as was his mind--his eyes deep with thought.
“The Guv'nor,” he said slowly. “The Guv'nor--by God!”
He reflected for some seconds.
“Tell me how he did it,” he said curtly.
Oscard told him, rather incoherently, between the puffs. He did not
attempt to make a story of it, but merely related the facts as they had
happened to him. It is probable that to him the act was veiled which
Jack saw quite distinctly.
“That is the sort of thing,” was Meredith's comment when the story was
finished, “that takes the conceit out of a fellow. I suppose I have
more than my share. I suppose it is good for me to find that I am not
so clever as I thought I was--that there are plenty of cleverer fellows
about, and that one of them is an old man of seventy-nine. The worst
of it is that he was right all along. He saw clearly where you and I
were--damnably blind.”
He rubbed his slim brown hands together, and looked across at his
companion with a smile wherein the youthful self-confidence was less
discernible than of yore. The smile faded as he looked at Oscard. He was
thinking that he looked older and graver--more of a middle-aged man who
has left something behind him in life--and the sight reminded him of the
few grey hairs that were above his own temples.
“Come,” he said more cheerfully, “tell me your news. Let us change the
subject. Let us throw aside light dalliance and return to questions of
money. More important--much more satisfactory. I suppose you have left
Durnovo in charge? Has Joseph come home with you?”
“Yes, Joseph has come home with me. Durnovo is dead.”
“Dead!”
Guy Oscard took his pipe from his lips.
“He died at Msala of the sleeping sickness. He was a bigger blackguard
than we thought. He was a slave-dealer and a slave-owner. Those forty
men we picked up at Msala were slaves belonging to him.”
“Ach!” It was a strange exclamation, as if he had burnt his fingers.
“Who knows of this?” he asked immediately. The expediency of the moment
had presented itself to his mind again.
“Only ourselves,” returned Oscard. “You, Joseph, and I.”
“That is all right, and the sooner we forget that the better. It would
be a dangerous story to tell.”
“So I concluded,” said Oscard, in his slow, thoughtful way. “Joseph
swears he won't breathe a word of it.”
Jack Meredith nodded. He looked rather pale beneath the light of the
gas.
“Joseph is all right,” he said. “Go on.”
“It was Joseph who found it out,” continued Oscard, “up at the Plateau.
I paraded the whole crowd, told them what I had found out, and chucked
up the whole concern in your name and mine. Next morning I abandoned the
Plateau with such men as cared to come. Nearly half of them stayed
with Durnovo. I thought it was in order that they might share in the
Simiacine--I told them they could have the whole confounded lot of the
stuff. But it was not that; they tricked Durnovo there. They wanted to
get him to themselves. In going down the river we had an accident with
two of the boats, which necessitated staying at Msala. While we were
waiting there, one night after ten o'clock the poor devil came, alone,
in a canoe. They had simply cut him in slices--a most beastly sight. I
wake up sometimes even now dreaming of it, and I am not a fanciful sort
of fellow. Joseph went into his room and was simply sick; I didn't know
that you could be made sick by anything you saw. The sleeping sickness
was on Durnovo then; he had brought it with him from the Plateau. He
died before morning.”
Oscard ceased speaking and returned to his pipe. Jack Meredith, looking
haggard and worn, was leaning back in his chair.
“Poor devil!” he exclaimed. “There was always something tragic about
Durnovo. I did hate that man, Oscard. I hated him and all his works.”
“Well, he's gone to his account now.”
“Yes, but that does not make him any better a man while he was
alive. Don't let us cant about him now. The man was an unmitigated
scoundrel--perhaps he deserved all he got.”
“Perhaps he did. He was Marie's husband.”
“The devil he was!”
Meredith fell into a long reverie. He was thinking of Jocelyn and her
dislike for Durnovo, of the scene in the drawing-room of the bungalow at
Loango; of a thousand incidents all connected with Jocelyn.
“How I hate that man!” he exclaimed at length. “Thank God--he is
dead--because I should have killed him.”
Guy Oscard looked at him with a slow pensive wonder. Perhaps he knew
more than Jack Meredith knew himself of the thoughts that conceived
those words--so out of place in that quiet room, from those suave and
courtly lips.
All the emotions of his life seemed to be concentrated into this one
day of Jack Meredith's existence. Oscard's presence was a comfort to
him--the presence of a calm, strong man is better than many words.
“So this,” he said, “is the end of the Simiacine. It did not look like a
tragedy when we went into it.”
“So far as I am concerned,” replied Oscard, with quiet determination,
“it certainly is the end of the Simiacine! I have had enough of it. I,
for one, am not going to look for that Plateau again.”
“Nor I. I suppose it will be started as a limited liability company by
a German in six months. Some of the natives will leave landmarks as they
come down so as to find their way back.”
“I don't think so!”
“Why?”
Oscard took his pipe from his lips.
“When Durnovo came down to Msala,” he explained, “he had the sleeping
sickness on him. Where did he get it from?”
“By God!” ejaculated Jack Meredith, “I never thought of that. He got
it up at the Plateau. He left it behind him. They have got it up there
now.”
“Not now--”
“What do you mean, Oscard?”
“Merely that all those fellows up there are dead. There is ninety
thousand pounds worth of Simiacine packed ready for carrying to the
coast, standing in a pile on the Plateau, and there are thirty-four dead
men keeping watch over it.”
“Is it as infectious as that?”
“When it first shows itself, infectious is not the word. It is nothing
but a plague. Not one of those fellows can have escaped.”
Jack Meredith sat forward and rubbed his two hands pensively over his
knees.
“So,” he said, “only you and I and Joseph know where the Simiacine
Plateau is.”
“That is so,” answered Oscard.
“And Joseph won't go back?”
“Not if you were to give him that ninety thousand pounds worth of
stuff.”
“And you will not go back?”
“Not for nine hundred thousand pounds. There is a curse on that place.”
“I believe there is,” said Meredith.
And such was the end of the great Simiacine Scheme--the wonder of a few
seasons. Some day, when the great Sahara is turned into an inland sea,
when steamers shall ply where sand now flies before the desert wind, the
Plateau may be found again. Some day, when Africa is cut from east to
west by a railway line, some adventurous soul will scale the height of
one of many mountains, one that seems no different from the rest and yet
is held in awe by the phantom-haunted denizens of the gloomy forest, and
there he will find a pyramid of wooden cases surrounded by bleached and
scattered bones where vultures have fed.
In the meantime the precious drug will grow scarcer day by day, and
the human race will be poorer by the loss of one of those half-matured
discoveries which have more than once in the world's history been on
the point of raising the animal called man to a higher, stronger, finer
development of brain and muscle than we can conceive of under existing
circumstances. Who can tell? Perhaps the strange solitary bush may be
found growing elsewhere--in some other continent across the ocean. The
ways of Nature are past comprehension, and no man can say who sows the
seed that crops up in strange places. The wind bloweth where it listeth,
and none can tell what germs it bears. It seems hardly credible that the
Plateau, no bigger than a cricket field, far away in the waste land of
Central Africa, can be the only spot on this planet where the magic
leaf grows in sufficient profusion to supply suffering humanity with an
alleviating drug, unrivalled--a strength-giving herb, unapproached in
power. But as yet no other Simiacine has been found and the Plateau is
lost.
And the end of it was two men who had gone to look for it two years
before--young and hearty--returning from the search successful beyond
their highest hopes, with a shadow in their eyes and grey upon their
heads.
They sat for nearly two hours in that room in the quiet house in Russell
Square, where the cabs do not pass; and their conversation was of
money. They sat until they had closed the Simiacine account, never to
be reopened. They discussed the question of renouncement, and, after due
consideration, concluded that the gain was rightly theirs seeing that
the risk had all been theirs. Slaves and slave-owner had both taken
their cause to a Higher Court, where the defendant has no worry and the
plaintiff is at rest. They were beyond the reach of money--beyond the
glitter of gold--far from the cry of anguish. A fortune was set aside
for Marie Durnovo, to be held in trust for the children of the man who
had found the Simiacine Plateau; another was apportioned to Joseph.
“Seventy-seven thousand one hundred and four pounds for you,” said Jack
Meredith at length, laying aside his pen, “seventy-seven thousand one
hundred and four pounds for me.”
“And,” he added, after a little pause, “it was not worth it.”
Guy Oscard smoked his pipe and shook his head.
“Now,” said Jack Meredith, “I must go. I must be out of London by
to-morrow morning. I shall go abroad--America or somewhere.”
He rose as he spoke, and Oscard made no attempt to restrain him.
They went out into the passage together. Oscard opened the door and
followed his companion to the step.
“I suppose,” said Meredith, “we shall meet some time--somewhere?”
“Yes.”
They shook hands.
Jack Meredith went down the steps almost reluctantly. At the foot of the
short flight he turned and looked up at the strong, peaceful form of his
friend.
“What will you do?” he said.
“I shall go back to my big-game,” replied Guy Oscard. “I am best at
that. But I shall not go to Africa.”