FIFTEEN YEARS AFTER
Both Stella and Tota were too weary to be moved, so we camped that
night in the baboons’ home, but were troubled by no baboons. Stella
would not sleep in the cave; she said the place terrified her, so I
made her up a kind of bed under a thorn-tree. As this rock-bound valley
was one of the hottest places I ever was in, I thought that this would
not matter; but when at sunrise on the following morning I saw a veil
of miasmatic mist hanging over the surface of the ground, I changed my
opinion. However, neither Stella nor Tota seemed the worse, so as soon
as was practical we started homewards. I had already on the previous
day sent some of the men back to the kraals to fetch a ladder, and when
we reached the cliff we found them waiting for us beneath. With the
help of the ladder the descent was easy. Stella simply got out of her
rough litter at the top of the cliff, for we found it necessary to
carry her, climbed down the ladder, and got into it again at the
bottom.
Well, we reached the kraals safely enough, seeing nothing more of
Hendrika, and, were this a story, doubtless I should end it here
with—“and lived happily ever after.” But alas! it is not so. How am I
to write it?
My dearest wife’s vital energy seemed completely to fail her now that
the danger was past, and within twelve hours of our return I saw that
her state was such as to necessitate the abandonment of any idea of
leaving Babyan Kraals at present. The bodily exertion, the anguish of
mind, and the terror which she had endured during that dreadful night,
combined with her delicate state of health, had completely broken her
down. To make matters worse, also, she was taken with an attack of
fever, contracted no doubt in the unhealthy atmosphere of that accursed
valley. In time she shook the fever off, but it left her dreadfully
weak, and quite unfit to face the trial before her.
I think she knew that she was going to die; she always spoke of my
future, never of _our_ future. It is impossible for me to tell how
sweet she was; how gentle, how patient and resigned. Nor, indeed, do I
wish to tell it, it is too sad. But this I will say, I believe that if
ever a woman drew near to perfection while yet living on the earth,
Stella Quatermain did so.
The fatal hour drew on. My boy Harry was born, and his mother lived to
kiss and bless him. Then she sank. We did what we could, but we had
little skill, and might not hold her back from death. All through one
weary night I watched her with a breaking heart.
The dawn came, the sun rose in the east. His rays falling on the peak
behind were reflected in glory upon the bosom of the western sky.
Stella awoke from her swoon and saw the light. She whispered to me to
open the door of the hut. I did so, and she fixed her dying eyes on the
splendour of the morning sky. She looked on me and smiled as an angel
might smile. Then with a last effort she lifted her hand, and, pointing
to the radiant heavens, whispered:
“_There, Allan, there!_”
It was done, and I was broken-hearted, and broken-hearted I must wander
to the end. Those who have endured my loss will know my sorrow; it
cannot be written. In such peace and at such an hour may I also die!
Yes, it is a sad story, but wander where we will about the world we can
never go beyond the sound of the passing bell. For me, as for my father
before me, and for the millions who have been and who shall be, there
is but one word of comfort. “The Lord hath given, and the Lord hath
taken away.” Let us, then, bow our heads in hope, and add with a humble
heart, “Blessed be the name of the Lord.”
I buried her by her father’s side, and the weeping of the people who
had loved her went up to heaven. Even Indaba-zimbi wept, but I could
weep no more.
On the second night from her burial I could not sleep. I rose, dressed
myself, and went out into the night. The moon was shining brightly, and
by its rays I shaped my course towards the graveyard. I drew near
silently, and as I came I thought that I heard a sound of moaning on
the further side of the wall. I looked over it. Crouched by Stella’s
grave, and tearing at its sods with her hands, as though she would
unearth that which lay within, was _Hendrika_. Her face was wild and
haggard, her form was so emaciated that when the pelts she wore slipped
aside, the shoulder-blades seemed to project almost through her skin.
Suddenly she looked up and saw me. Laughing a dreadful maniac laugh,
she put her hand to her girdle and drew her great knife from it. I
thought that she was about to attack me, and prepared to defend myself
as I best could, for I was unarmed. But she made no effort to do so.
Lifting the knife on high, for a moment she held it glittering in the
moonlight, then plunged it into her own breast, and fell headlong to
the ground.
I sprang over the wall and ran to her. She was not yet dead. Presently
she opened her eyes, and I saw that the madness had gone out of them.
“Macumazahn,” she said, speaking in English and in a thick difficult
voice like one who half forgot and half remembered—“Macumazahn, I
remember now. I have been mad. Is she really dead, Macumazahn?”
“Yes,” I said, “she is dead, and you killed her.”
“I killed her!” the dying woman faltered, “and I loved her. Yes, yes, I
know now. I became a brute again and dragged her to the brutes, and now
once more I am a woman, and she is dead, and I killed her—because I
loved her so. I killed her who saved me from the brutes. I am not dead
yet, Macumazahn. Take me and torture me to death, slowly, very slowly.
It was jealousy of you that drove me mad, and I have killed her, and
now she never can forgive me.”
“Ask forgiveness from above,” I said, for Hendrika had been a
Christian, and the torment of her remorse touched me.
“I ask no forgiveness,” she said. “May God torture me for ever, because
I killed her; may I become a brute for ever till she comes to find me
and forgives me! I only want her forgiveness.” And wailing in an
anguish of the heart so strong that her bodily suffering seemed to be
forgotten, Hendrika, the Baboon-woman, died.
I went back to the kraals, and, waking Indaba-zimbi, told him what had
happened, asking him to send some one to watch the body, as I proposed
to give it burial. But next morning it was gone, and I found that the
natives, hearing of the event, had taken the corpse and thrown it to
the vultures with every mark of hate. Such, then, was the end of
Hendrika.
A week after Hendrika’s death I left Babyan Kraals. The place was
hateful to me now; it was a haunted place. I sent for old Indaba-zimbi
and told him that I was going. He answered that it was well. “The place
has served your turn,” he said; “here you have won that joy which it
was fated you should win, and have suffered those things that it was
fated you should suffer. Yes, and though you know it not now, the joy
and the suffering, like the sunshine and the storm, are the same thing,
and will rest at last in the same heaven, the heaven from which they
came. Now go, Macumazahn.”
I asked him if he was coming with me.
“No,” he answered, “our paths lie apart henceforth, Macumazahn. We met
together for certain ends. Those ends are fulfilled. Now each one goes
his own way. You have still many years before you, Macumazahn; my years
are few. When we shake hands here it will be for the last time. Perhaps
we may meet again, but it will not be in this world. Henceforth we have
each of us a friend the less.”
“Heavy words,” I said.
“True words,” he answered.
Well, I have little heart to write the rest of it. I went, leaving
Indaba-zimbi in charge of the place, and making him a present of such
cattle and goods as I did not want.
Tota, I of course took with me. Fortunately by this time she had almost
recovered the shock to her nerves. The baby Harry, as he was afterwards
named, was a fine healthy child, and I was lucky in getting a
respectable native woman, whose husband had been killed in the fight
with the baboons, to accompany me as his nurse.
Slowly, and followed for a distance by all the people, I trekked away
from Babyan Kraals. My route towards Natal was along the edge of the
Bad Lands, and my first night’s outspan was beneath that very tree
where Stella, my lost wife, had found us as we lay dying of thirst.
I did not sleep much that night. And yet I was glad that I had not died
in the desert about eleven months before. I felt then, as from year to
year I have continued to feel while I wander through the lonely
wilderness of life, that I had been preserved to an end. I had won my
darling’s love, and for a little while we had been happy together. Our
happiness was too perfect to endure. She is lost to me now, but she is
lost to be found again.
Here on the following morning I bade farewell to Indaba-zimbi.
“Good-bye, Macumazahn,” he said, nodding his white lock at me.
“Good-bye for a while. I am not a Christian; your father could not make
me that. But he was a wise man, and when he said that those who loved
each other shall meet again, he did not lie. And I too am a wise man in
my way, Macumazahn, and I say it is true that we shall meet again. All
my prophecies to you have come true, Macumazahn, and this one shall
come true also. I tell you that you shall return to Babyan Kraals and
shall not find me. I tell you that you shall journey to a further land
than Babyan Kraals and shall find me. Farewell!” and he took a pinch of
snuff, turned, and went.
Of my journey down to Natal there is little to tell. I met with many
adventures, but they were of an every-day kind, and in the end arrived
safely at Port Durban, which I now visited for the first time. Both
Tota and my baby boy bore the journey well. And here I may as well
chronicle the destiny of Tota. For a year she remained under my charge.
Then she was adopted by a lady, the wife of an English colonel, who was
stationed at the Cape. She was taken by her adopted parents to England,
where she grew up a very charming and pretty girl, and ultimately
married a clergyman in Norfolk. But I never saw her again, though we
often wrote to each other.
Before I returned to the country of my birth, she too had been gathered
to the land of shadows, leaving three children behind her. Ah me! all
this took place so long ago, when I was young who now am old.
Perhaps it may interest the reader to know the fate of Mr. Carson’s
property, which should of course have gone to his grandson Harry. I
wrote to England to claim the estate on his behalf, but the lawyer to
whom the matter was submitted said that my marriage to Stella, not
having been celebrated by an ordained priest, was not legal according
to English law, and therefore Harry could not inherit. Foolishly enough
I acquiesced in this, and the property passed to a cousin of my
father-in-law’s; but since I have come to live in England I have been
informed that this opinion is open to great suspicion, and that there
is every probability that the courts would have declared the marriage
perfectly binding as having been solemnly entered into in accordance
with the custom of the place where it was contracted. But I am now so
rich that it is not worth while to move in the matter. The cousin is
dead, his son is in possession, so let him keep it.
Once, and once only, did I revisit Babyan Kraals. Some fifteen years
after my darling’s death, when I was a man in middle life, I undertook
an expedition to the Zambesi, and one night outspanned at the mouth of
the well-known valley beneath the shadow of the great peak. I mounted
my horse, and, quite alone, rode up the valley, noticing with a strange
prescience of evil that the road was overgrown, and, save for the music
of the waterfalls, the place silent as death. The kraals that used to
be to the left of the road by the river had vanished. I rode towards
their site; the mealie fields were choked with weeds, the paths were
dumb with grass. Presently I reached the place. There, overgrown with
grass, were the burnt ashes of the kraals, and there among the ashes,
gleaming in the moonlight, lay the white bones of men. Now it was clear
to me. The settlement had been fallen on by some powerful foe, and its
inhabitants put to the assegai. The forebodings of the natives had come
true; Babyan Kraals were peopled by memories alone.
I passed on up the terraces. There shone the roofs of the marble huts.
They would not burn, and were too strong to be easily pulled down. I
entered one of them—it had been our sleeping hut—and lit a candle which
I had with me. The huts had been sacked; leaves of books and broken
mouldering fragments of the familiar furniture lay about. Then I
remembered that there was a secret place hollowed in the floor and
concealed by a stone, where Stella used to hide her little treasures. I
went to the stone and dragged it up. There was something within wrapped
in rotting native cloth. I undid it. It was the dress my wife had been
married in. In the centre of the dress were the withered wreath and
flowers she had worn, and with them a little paper packet. I opened it;
it contained a lock of my own hair!
I remembered then that I had searched for this dress when I came away
and could not find it, for I had forgotten the secret recess in the
floor.
Taking the dress with me, I left the hut for the last time. Leaving my
horse tied to a tree, I walked to the graveyard, through the ruined
garden. There it was a mass of weeds, but over my darling’s grave grew
a self-sown orange bush, of which the scented petals fell in showers on
to the mound beneath. As I drew near, there was a crash and a rush. A
great baboon leapt from the centre of the graveyard and vanished into
the trees. I could almost believe that it was the wraith of Hendrika
doomed to keep an eternal watch over the bones of the woman her jealous
rage had done to death.
I tarried there a while, filled with such thoughts as may not be
written. Then, leaving my dead wife to her long sleep where the waters
fall in melancholy music beneath the shadow of the everlasting
mountain, I turned and sought that spot where first we had told our
love. Now the orange grove was nothing but a tangled thicket; many of
the trees were dead, choked with creepers, but some still flourished.
There stood the one beneath which we had lingered, there was the rock
that had been our seat, and there on the rock sat the wraith of
_Stella_, the Stella whom I had wed! Ay! there she sat, and on her
upturned face was that same spiritual look which I saw upon it in the
hour when we first had kissed. The moonlight shone in her dark eyes,
the breeze wavered in her curling hair, her breast rose and fell, a
gentle smile played about her parted lips. I stood transfixed with awe
and joy, gazing on that lost loveliness which once was mine. I could
not speak, and she spoke no word; she did not even seem to see me. Now
her eyes fell. For a moment they met mine, and their message entered
into me.
Then she was gone. She was gone; nothing was left but the tremulous
moonlight falling where she had been, the melancholy music of the
waters, the shadow of the everlasting mountain, and, in my heart, the
sorrow and the hope.