“_The blackness of darkness._”
As the great mass of rock swung back into position Leslie stood for
a few moments conscious of a queer, dizzy feeling, glad of the
quietness after the wild uproar she had left, wondering what had
caused it. Then she went on in the darkness, groping her way along the
rocky wall. An abrupt turn in the passage showed a faint light ahead.
She went forward quickly, to find herself in a cave, faintly lighted
by a lamp set on a table in one corner of it.
She glanced around. It was a large, high vault with a little spring
oozing from a crevice at her feet, and another opening opposite the
one by which she had entered, blocked by a heavy wooden door. The cave
was empty but for the one corner whence the light came, which was
fitted up as a chamber. There lay a suit of white drill. In that
secret room behind the throne of rock, barely half an hour before,
Lebrassa had put on the barbaric robes for the heathen wedding
ceremony.
Crossing to the lounge, Leslie seated herself there, watching the
passage by which she had entered, thinking it all part of the wild
rites that made her her cousin’s wife, almost sick with dread at the
thought of the man who soon would be coming along the passage, in
terror not noticing how the time was passing.
The splutter of the dying lamp roused her. Fear of one darkness made
her forget the other. Getting up quickly, she went to the slit, and
stood there listening for some sound of her cousin’s coming. She heard
nothing except the faint lapping of the spring. In an excess of terror
and loneliness she crossed swiftly to the door, very conscious of the
wild, moving shapes the lamp cast, thinking he might be coming that
way. But, much as she tried, it was beyond her strength to open it.
Fearing the light would die away before she reached it, she ran back
to the table and stood watching the flickering lamp. It gave a final
upward flare of long flames, smoke and sparks, then died down to a
glowing, smoldering wick. Breathlessly she watched the point of red.
Then it faded, leaving her alone in utter darkness.
How long she stood with her eyes on the spot where it had been, she
did not know. But it was until her legs gave way beneath her. Then she
sank down on the lounge, and stayed there trying to hear something
besides the gurgle of the spring.
Presently she got to her feet, her only desire now to reach the way by
which she had entered.
On finding the slit she went up it blindly, with outstretched arms,
until the solid rock stopped her.
“Essel! Essel!” she called wildly. “Don’t leave me here all alone.”
A sense of being buried alive seized her. With desperate hands she
beat on the unresisting rock. Dull echoes answered.
She stopped, waiting until the gruesome sounds died away. Then she
crept back to the lounge, trying to realize what it all meant and why
her cousin had not come as he had said.
Then, presently, out of sheer fatigue, she slept.
She awoke with a stiff, cramped feeling, wondering where she was and
why it was so dark. With a sudden flood came the recollection of all
that had happened before sleep brought oblivion.
Louder than the gurgle of the spring, came her own heart-beats. A long
shudder ran through her as she realized something must have happened
or her cousin would not have left her so long in darkness. A wild wish
to scream aloud, to make some human sound come out of the blackness,
seized her. With an effort she repressed the feeling, conscious only
of the chill, sickly fear that had her in its grip.
Then she rose and went groping for the passage, stumbling over rocks,
heedless of the pool she splashed into, her only desire to reach the
way by which she had entered. Then she threw herself face downwards on
the ground in an effort to shut out the all-enveloping darkness.
There followed a vista of constant terrifying night.
Then forgetfulness came again. From this she awoke, dazed and
blinding, in unaccustomed light that made her eyes ache.
A black face was bending over her, a woman’s face, vaguely familiar,
watching her in an anxious but unfriendly manner.
“Have you come to fetch me?” Leslie asked feebly.
Yoni made no reply. She knew what the girl said. During the months the
negress had spent trading on the steamers she had picked up a
smattering of English. Turning toward the table, she began unwrapping
the voluminous blue cloth that swathed her, bringing to light a number
of parcels tied on to her person. They proved to be a quantity of hard
biscuits, plantains, oranges and nuts, a bundle of candles and a
couple of boxes of matches--supplies such as any native woman in an
up-country African village would have bought for household stores.
In a dazed manner Leslie watched the silent woman, wondering if she
were dreaming. She hardly dared speak lest this apparition should fade
and leave her in total blackness again.
“Where’s Mr. Lebrassa?” she ventured at length.
The name brought Yoni’s eyes to her--black, suffering eyes full of
hate and jealousy.
“He say you lib for here tree week,” she answered in broken English.
Her reply left Leslie aghast.
“But I can’t. I can’t stay here any longer. I shall go mad,” Leslie
cried hysterically.
“He say you mus’ lib for here till Cap’en Fletcher come.”
Leslie stared back at her, too weak to grasp the meaning of what was
said.
“Tell Mr. Lebrassa I can’t stay here. Why doesn’t he come?” she
finished wildly.
“He no can come. He say I mus’ no say why.”
With the feeling of some nightmare on her, Leslie watched the silent
figure that stolidly continued unpacking the parcels.
All at once Yoni faced the girl, looking at her in a wild, jealous
way.
“He say I no mus’ say. But I say. He tink only ob you. You--who hab
lose him everyting.”
There came a flood of wild words in broken English. As Leslie
deciphered their meaning, it left her frozen.
They told of all Lebrassa was suffering, and for what reason; of the
weeks of agony that lay before him; of how Yoni had reached him; of
the secret of the whereabouts of the forest entrance to the rocky
chamber which he had entrusted into her keeping; of the provisions she
was to bring before starting to Tuata, over two hundred miles away to
bring up the British force which meant Leslie’s rescue and the
downfall of Kallu.
“An’ I hate you, you white gel!” Yoni’s frantic, sobbing voice
finished. “An’ I kill you, but dat I no can sabe him, an’ he wan’ see
you ’fore he die.”
Petrified Leslie listened. The hopeless tragedy was more than she
could bear. Just as surely as her father had stolen her cousin’s
English birthright, so she, unwittingly, had deprived him of his
African heritage and brought him to this ghastly end. All the aversion
and dread she had felt were lost in a flood of pity, so great that it
was almost love.
She got up, looking with desperate eyes at Yoni’s dark, distorted
face.
“Take me to Mr. Lebrassa at once,” she commanded.
The negress stopped sobbing and gazed at her with curiosity.
“You no lub him, an’ you wan’ go an’ sabe him?”
“I won’t have him tortured because of me.”
Yoni pushed her back on the lounge.
“No good now. Dey kill him all same. An’ you, de one he wan’ sabe. He
say you write note to Cap’en Fletcher, so dat white mans see I say
true.”
Yoni plunged into a big calico pocket that was tied round her waist
and produced a stump of lead pencil. With trembling fingers Leslie
took it and looked round for something to write on.
The candle Yoni had fixed on the table by means of a drop of grease
showed a strange picture. A big, gloomy cavern full of groping
shadows, and, in one corner of it, a worn, white girl sat scribbling a
frantic message on a piece of soiled paper that had been round one of
the packages. The light flashed on slim, gem-laden fingers that wrote
with desperate pleading, begging her distant countryman to come and
save a man whose head had had a price on it for the last seventeen
years; it played on the rainbow mass of jewels gleaming on her slender
bare arms and shoulders, and on the golden stars strewn about the
gauzy, billowing robe she wore. The light showed, too, a black woman
standing half-naked, silent as a statue, her coarse blue cloth
trailing on the ground, with eyes full of jealousy, hatred and
suffering fixed on the frail, ethereal beauty beside her.
When the note was finished Leslie rose, determined to make another
effort to save Lebrassa from further suffering.
“You must let me out. Perhaps they won’t torture him if they have me.”
Savagely Yoni laughed, in a way strangely reminiscent of her brother.
“If dat sabe him, you no be here now. I tell hem fetch you so soon I
know how get here. I take you now, but I know it hurt de Sultan more
see you hurt dan all dey hurt him. Dere is only to do what he say. You
here. He dere--hoping dat de white mans come ’fore he die, an’ he know
you safe. It all you--you--you!”
Dazed and stunned Leslie stood conscious of the truth of all Yoni
said, aghast at her own helplessness. There was nothing to do but
wait, knowing a man was being tortured to death on her account. The
fact left her sick and shivering. And above all was the knowledge that
her cousin had tried to keep this last horror from her.
In an ecstasy of pity and helplessness she touched Yoni’s arm.
“Is there nothing I can do?” she asked.
Roughly the negress shook off that small, anxious, white hand.
“You can do what he say. No more.”
Yoni took the candle from the table and made for the wooden door by
which she had entered, and started wrestling with the catch.
Leslie followed her. In what the woman had said, the girl had
forgotten her own weeks of imprisonment and dire loneliness.
“Why do you do so much for the Sultan?” she asked.
For a moment Yoni ceased her struggles with the door. Turning, she
scanned Leslie from head to foot, a glance that showed all the hatred
she felt for the one responsible for her god’s suffering and downfall.
“For de reason he do so much for you.”
Then she turned her back on Leslie and re-attacked the door. Presently
it gave way under her efforts. Without a word she went out, banging it
behind her almost before Leslie had realized what was happening.
She flew to the door, trying to reach Yoni, still hoping that if she
gave herself up her cousin’s torments might cease, but as she got
there she heard a heavy bar slipped into position. She pulled and
banged at the door, but her efforts brought no response from the woman
outside.
Presently, worn out with her three days of starvation, she groped her
way back to the table and felt round for candle and matches.
There were only a dozen candles and these would have to last her for
three weeks at least. But although light was so precious, she could
not sit in darkness alone with her thoughts.