IN THE NICK OF TIME.
As Tom Hammond’s cab drew up at the office, another hansom drew up a yard
ahead of his. The occupant alighted at the same instant as did Hammond,
and glanced in his direction. Both men leaped forward, their hands were
clasped in a grip that told of a very warm friendship. Like simultaneous
pistol shots there leaped from their separate lips,—
“Tom Hammond!”
“Ralph Bastin?”
The friends presently passed into the great building, arm linked in arm,
laughing and talking like holiday school-boys.
“Not three minutes ago, as I drove along in my cab, I was saying, ‘Oh! if
only I could lay my hand on Ralph!”
They were seated by this time in Tom Hammond’s room.
“Why? What did you want, Tom—anything special?” the bronzed, travelled
Bastin asked.
“Rather, Ralph! My second, poor Frank Marsden, has broken down suddenly;
it’s serious, may even prove fatal, the doctors say. Anyway, he won’t be
fit (if he recovers at all) for a year or more.”
He leaned eagerly towards his friend as he spoke, and asked,
“Are you open to lay hold of the post?”
“Yes.”
“When?”
“To-morrow, if you like!”
“Good!”
Hammond stretched his hand out. Bastin grasped it. Then they talked over
terms, duties, etc.
“But you, man?” said Hammond, when the last bit of shop had been talked.
“Where have you been? What have you been doing?”
“Busy for an hour, Tom?” Bastin asked, by way of reply.
“No!”
“Come round to my diggings, then; not far—Bloomsbury. We can talk as we
go. I shall have time to give you a skeleton of my adventures, to be
filled in later. Then, when we get to my hang-out, I can tell you, when
you have seen _her_, the story of my chief adventure, for it concerns
her.”
Hammond flashed a quick, wondering glance at his friend.
“_Her!_” he said; “are you married, then?”
“No,” laughed Bastin, “but I’ve adopted a child. But come on, man!”
The pair left the office. In the cab, talking very rapidly, Bastin gave
the skeleton sketch of his wanderings, but saying no word of the promised
great adventure.
Tom Hammond never forgot the first sight of his friend’s adopted child.
There was a low grate in the room, a blazing fire of leaping, flaming
coals in the grate. Curled up in a deep saddle-bag armchair was the
loveliest girl-child Hammond had ever seen.
She must have been half asleep, or in a deep reverie, but as the two men
advanced into the room she sprang from the chair, and, with eyes gleaming
with delight, bounded to meet Bastin. Wreathing her arms about his neck,
she crooned softly over him some tongue of her own.
She was loveliness incarnated. Her eyes, black as sloes, were big, round,
and wide in their staring wonder at Hammond’s appearance. Her hair was a
mass of short curls. She was dark of skin as some Spanish beauty.
Her costume lent extra charm to her appearance; for she wore a long,
Grecian-like robe of some light, diaphanous ivory-cream fabric,
engirdled at the waist with a belt composed of some sort of glistening
peacock-green shells, buckled with frosted silver. The simple but
exquisite garment had only short shoulder-sleeves, and was cut low
round the throat and neck, and finished there—as were the edges of the
shoulder-sleeves—with a two-inch wide band of sheeny silk of the same
colour as the shells of her belt. The opening at the neck of the robe
was fastened with a brooch of frosted silver of the same pattern, only
smaller, as the buckle of the belt.
From beneath the silk-bound hem of her robe there peeped bronze slippers,
encasing the daintiest little crimsoned-stockinged feet ever used for
pedalling this rough old earth’s crust.
Bastin introduced the child. She gave Tom her hand, and lifted her
wondrous eyes to his, answering his question as to her health in the
prettiest of broken English he had ever heard.
A moment or two later the three friends were seated—Tom and Bastin in
armchairs opposite each other, the child (Viola, Bastin had christened
her) on a low stool between Bastin’s knees.
“Shall we use the old lingo—French?” Bastin asked the question in the
Bohemian Parisian they had been wont to use together years before.
“As you please, Ralph,” Hammond replied.
“I have told you hurriedly something of where I have been,” Bastin began.
“But I have reserved my _great_ story until I could tell it to you
here——” He glanced down at the child at his feet. “I heard,” he went on,
“when at La Caribe—as everyone hears who stays long in the place—that
each year, in spite of the laws of the whites, who are in power, a child
is sacrificed to the Carib deities, and I longed to know if it were true.
“During my first few week’s sojourn on the little island of Utilla, I was
able to render one of the old priests a service, which somehow became so
exaggerated in his eyes that there was almost literally nothing that he
would not do for me, and eventually he yielded to my entreaties to give
me a chance to see for myself the yearly sacrifice, which was due in a
month’s time.
“During that month of waiting I made many sketches of this wonderful
neighbourhood, and became acquainted with this little Carib maiden,
painting her in three or four different ways. The child became intensely
attached to me, and I to her, and we were always together in the daytime.
“As the time drew near for the sacrifice I noticed that the little one
grew very elated, and there was a new flash in her eyes, a kind of
rapturous pride. I asked her no question as to this change, putting it
down as girlish pride in being painted by the ‘white prince,’ as she
insisted on calling me.
“I need not trouble you, my dear fellow, with unnecessary details of how
and where the old priest led me on the eventful night, which was a black
as Erebus, but come to the point where the real interest begins.
“It was midnight when at last I had been smuggled into that mysterious
cave, which, if only a tithe of what is reported be half true, has been
damned by some of the awfullest deeds ever perpetrated. My priest-guide
had made me swear, before starting, that whatever I saw I would make no
sign, utter no sound, telling me that if I did, and we were discovered,
we should both be murdered there and then.
“We had hardly hidden ourselves before the whole centre of the cave
became illuminated with a mauve-coloured flame that burned up from a
flat brass brazier, and seemed like the coloured fires used in pantomime
effects on the English stage. By this wonderful light I saw a hundred
and fifty or more Carib men and women file silently into the cave, and
take up their positions in orderly rows all round the place. When they
had all mustered, a sharp note was struck upon the carimba, a curious
one-stringed instrument, and the circles of silent savages dropped into
squatting position on their heels. Then the weirdest of all weird music
began, the instruments being a drum, a flute, and the carimba.
“But my whole attention became absorbed by the grouping in the centre of
the room—the fire-dish had been shifted to one side, and I saw a hideous
statue, squatted on a rudely-constructed, massive table, the carved hands
gripping a bowl that rested on the stone knees of the image. The head of
the hideous god was encircled with a very curious band, that looked, from
where I stood, like bead and grass and feather work. The face—cheeks and
forehead—was scored with black, green and red paint, the symbolic colours
of that wondrous race that once filled all Central America.
“In the back part of the wide, saucer-like edge of the bowl which rested
on the knees of the statue, there burned a light-blue flame, and whether
it was from this fire, or from the larger one that burned in the wide,
shallow brazier on the floor, I cannot positively say, but a lovely
fragrance was diffused from one or the other.
“Before this strange altar stood three very old priests, while seven
women (sukias,) as grizzled as the men, stood at stated intervals about
the altar. One of these hideous hags had a dove in her hand; another
held a young kid clasped between her strong brown feet; a third held the
sacrificial knife, a murderous-looking thing, made of volcano glass,
short in blade, and with a peculiar jagged kind of edge; another of these
hags grasped a snake by the neck—a blood-curdling-looking tamagas, a
snake as deadly as a rattle-snake.
“Opposite the centre-man of the three old priests stood a girl-child,
about ten years of age, and perfectly nude. During the first few moments
the vapourous kind of smoke that was wafted by a draught somewhere, from
the fire-pan on the floor of the cave, hid the child’s features, though
I could see how beautiful of form she was; then, as the smoke-wreath
presently climbed straight up, I was startled to see that the child was
my little friend.
“In my amaze I had almost given vent to some exclamation, but my old
priest-guide was watching me, and checked me.
“My little one’s beautiful head was wreathed with jasmine, and a garland
of purple madre-de-cacoa blossoms hung about her lovely shoulders.
“Suddenly, like the barely-audible notes of the opening music of some
orchestral number, the voice of one of the priests began to chant; in
turn the two other priests took up the strain; then each of the seven
hags in their turn, and anon each in the first circle of squatting
worshippers, followed by each woman in the second row: and in this order
the chant proceeded, until, weird and low, every voice was engaged.
“Suddenly the combined voices ceased, and one woman’s voice alone rose
upon the stillness; and following the sound of the voice, I saw that it
was the mother of my little native child-friend. I had not noticed her
before—she had been squatting out of sight. Hers was not the chant of
the others, but a strange, mournful wail. It lasted about a minute and
a-half; then, rising to her feet, she gently thrust the child forward
towards the altar, then laid herself face down on the floor of the cave.
“The little one leaned against the edge of the altar, and taking up, with
a tiny pair of bright metal tongs, a little fire out of the back edge of
the bowl on the knees of the god, she lighted another fire on the front
edge of the bowl, her suddenly-illuminated face filled with a glowing
pride.
“Then, at a signal from the head priest, the child lifted her two hands,
extended them across the altar, when they were each seized by the two
other priests, and the beautiful little body was drawn slowly, gently
over, until the smooth breast almost touched the sacrificial fire she had
herself lighted.
“Then I saw the woman who had held the knife suddenly yield it up to the
head priest, and I made an unconscious movement to spring forward.
“My guide held me, and whispered his warning in my ear: yet, even though
I must be murdered myself, I felt I dared not see that sweet young life
taken.
“Like a man suffering with nightmare, who wants to move, but cannot, I
stood transfixed, fascinated, one instant longer. But in that flashing
instant the head priest had swept, with lightning speed, the edge of that
hideous knife twice across the little one’s breast, and she stood smiling
upwards like one hypnotized.
“The priest caught a few drops of the child’s blood, and shook them into
the bowl of the god; then I saw the little one fall into her mother’s
arms; there was a second sudden flashing of that hideous knife, a
piteous, screaming cry, and I gave vent to a yell—but not _voice_ to
it,—for the watching guide at my side clapped one hand tightly over my
mouth, while with the other he held me from flying out into the ring of
devils, whispering in my ear as he held me back,
“‘It is the goat that is slain, not the child.’
“Another glance, and I saw that this was so; one flash of that obsidian
sacrificial blade across the throat of the kid had been enough, and now
the blood was being drained into the bowl of the god.
“I need not detail all the other hideous ceremonies; they lasted for
nearly two hours longer, ending with a mad frenzied dance, in which all
joined save the priests and the mother and child.
“Every dancer, man and woman, flung off every rag of clothing, and
whirled and leaped and gyrated in their perfect nudity, until, utterly
exhausted, one after another they sank upon the floor.
“Then slowly they gathered themselves up, reclothed themselves, and left
the cave. And now some large pine torches were lighted, and my guide drew
me further back, that the increased glare might not reveal our presence,
and I saw the curious ending to this weird night’s work. The priests
and their seven women sukias opened a pit in the floor of the cave by
shifting a great slab of stone, and lowered the idol into the pit. The
remains of the kid, the sacrificial knife, and the dove were dropped into
the bowl of blood that rested on the knees of the idol; then the sukia
that had held the tamagas snake during the whole of those hideous night
hours, dropped the writhing thing into the bowl, and the slab was lowered
quickly over the pit, every seam around the slab being carefully filled,
and the whole thing hidden by sprinkling loose dust and the ashes from
the fire over the spot.
“Then, as soon as the last of the performers had cleared the cave, I
followed my guide, and with a throbbing head, and full of a sense of
strange sickness, I went to the house where I was staying.
“I lay down upon my bed, but could not sleep; and as early as I dared I
went round to my little Martarae’s home—Martarae was her native name. Her
mother met me, said that the child would not come out in the sun to-day,
that I might see her for a moment if I pleased, but that she was not very
well.
“Sweet little soul! I found her lying on her little bed, with a proud
light in her eyes, and a very flushed face.
“A fortnight later the light flesh wounds were healed. She showed me her
breast, confided to me the story, and asked me if I did not think she had
much to be proud of.
“‘Will you keep a secret?’ I asked her. She gave me her promise, and I
told her how I had seen the whole thing, and all my fears for her.
“A week later she was orphaned. Her mother was stung by a deadly
scorpion, and died in an hour, and I made the child my care.
“She has travelled everywhere with me ever since, and you see how fair
and sweet she is, and how beautifully she speaks our English. She is
barely twelve, is naturally gifted, and is the very light of my life.”
“Would she let me see her breast, Ralph, do you think?” Hammond asked.
Bastin smiled, and spoke a word to the child, and she, rising to her feet
and smiling back at him, unfastened the broach at her throat, and, laying
back her breast-covering, showed the gleaming, shiny scars. Then as she
re-covered her chest, she said softly:
“Ralph has taught me that those gods were evil; but though I shall ever
wear this cross in the flesh of my breast, I shall ever love the Christ
who died on the world’s great cross at Calvary.”
“It is a most marvellous story, Ralph,” he said tearing his eyes away
from the child’s clear, searching gaze.
“The more marvellous because absolutely true,” returned Bastin.
Then, addressing Viola, and relapsing, of course, into English for her
sake, he explained who Tom Hammond was, and that he (Ralph) was going to
be associated with him on the same great newspaper.
“Mr. Hammond and you, Viola, must be real good friends,” he added.
“Sure, daddy!” the girl said smilingly; “I like him much already——”
She lifted herself slightly until she rested on her knees, and stretching
one hand across the hearthrug to Tom Hammond, she laid the other in her
guardian’s, as she went on:
“Mr. Hammond is good! I know, I know, for his eyes shine true.”
A ripple of merry laughter escaped her, as she gazed back into her
guardian’s face, and added:
“But you, daddy, are always first.”