“_Though the gifts of the light in the end are curses,_
_Yet bides the gift of the darkness--sleep!_”
All day long war drums had been sending their wild tattoo echoing
through the forest. Savage figures flitted to and fro among the ruins
of ancient Kallu. War-palaver was being held in the market-square,
attended by an array of warriors, blood-stained and bandaged, hardly
one of them whole.
Kallu was learning that the Sultan Nanza was not the leader the Sultan
Essel had been.
Away in the forest, now not more than thirty miles distant, a thin
line of khaki and black, led by a trio of Englishmen, was pushing its
way onwards, and no effort of the Kalluians could dislodge or turn it
from its course.
When the first news of the coming expedition had been brought, Kallu
had set out, a thousand strong, to annihilate the hurried advancing
towards them. There had been attacks by day and by night, every one a
failure. There were ambushes set, but every hiding place on the route
appeared to be known to the advancing force, and the Kalluians found
themselves attacked by a foe they had hoped to surprise.
A sullen crowd scowled at Nanza as he stood arranging the next move.
There was no getting away from the fact that they were beaten, and the
fall of Kallu was only a matter of a few hours. The warriors had lost
faith in their leader. He was brave, but courage was of little use
when machine guns came into play, and his skill in warfare was crude
negro cunning; he had none of the finesse and strategy his cousin had
inherited from a long line of English ancestors, most of them famous
soldiers. In the Sultan Essel’s day they had fought in many parts of
West Africa, and their portion of the campaign had been always
successful. Now, to be defeated, routed day after day, by a force only
a fraction of their original number, took the heart out of them, and
left them with no desire to meet the advancing foe face to face.
More than three weeks had passed since Yoni had started down to Tuata.
The news she had brought, and the frantic note from Leslie delivered
with it, had resulted in the whole garrison being sent up, for
Fletcher knew enough of the Hyena’s following to guess they would
prove no easy foe, even when deprived of their half-caste leader.
Always when the expedition halted for its few hours’ nightly rest,
Fletcher would bring out Leslie’s imploring letter. In it was no
mention of that brief moment of exquisite agony when her small, white
face had been so close to his and her soft lips had tried to kiss the
pain out of his eyes. Nothing of the confession of love that tragic
parting had brought. It was a wild cry, begging him to come and save
the man he had been trying to catch for years.
And it left him with the feeling that had assailed him once before, at
the Harrogate hotel, on the occasion of his first round with Lebrassa
over Leslie, when the mulatto had succeeded in converting his dinner
invitation into consideration for her only. Now, in his end, ghastly
as it was, the same thought and consideration were there, and the
volume of it appeared to have driven from Leslie’s mind the knowledge
of all else.
The wild, imploring note was in Fletcher’s hand, as he sat camped only
ten miles from Kallu, wondering what the morrow would show him;
whether Lebrassa would have withstood the tortures put upon him and
kept the secret of Leslie’s hiding place, or whether he would have
come too late to do more than stamp out this nest of hornets.
The blackness of night was growing faintly red when the little British
force started on the last ten miles of its journey. The sun was up
long before the first glimpse of the ruins came into view. The piles
of masonry and tangled curtains of creeper offered excellent cover for
the enemy. Every moment Fletcher expected an attack, not knowing Kallu
had struck its last blow.
The little column marched on, and came out into the blaze of sunshine
flooding the market-square. Everything there was quiet and peaceful;
thin spirals of faint, gray smoke curled up from fires outside the mud
huts clinging to the palace walls. Around them stood a crowd of women
and children, sullen and resentful, watching the intruders. But there
was no sign of a man of fighting age.
Fletcher knew what had happened--reverses had taken the heart out of
Kallu. He had seen these evacuations before, in several expeditions
against rebellious tribes, when the tide had gone against them.
However, he was taking no risks.
In spite of his desire to reach Leslie, and Yoni dragging at his arm
and imploring him to come at once to the temple, he made a survey of
the place to satisfy himself its peaceful attitude was no trap. At the
head of the tunnel leading down to the temple he posted half his men.
Then, with a supply of torches, he took the remaining half in with
him.
The long, dark corridor he and his party traversed sounded strangely
silent and deserted; only the booming echo of the steady tramp of feet
came out of the darkness confronting them. The array of torches showed
rock walls covered with signs and symbols beyond the knowledge of the
present age--the work of some night-worshipers who lived when the
world was dim.
Fletcher had no eyes for these. At the head of his men he marched
along, wondering what the unknown beyond would show him.
Presently a flight of steps was reached, leading down to even darker
depths of silence. No glimmer of light came from it, no sound.
For a moment he stood staring into the pit. It seemed as if he had
come too late; that this great black void had swallowed up everything.
Yoni’s hand, pulling his sleeve in desperate, anxious haste, roused
him.
The party descended into the inky well. The torches showed only
further darkness. They marched on until the columns of a great arch
loomed up in the feeble light.
A cry from Yoni brought Fletcher’s gaze to something lying at the foot
of the wide stone steps leading up to the Throne. Something that had
once been a man. Now a mass of festering sores and stumps, forgotten
in the fighting that had taken his torturers from Kallu, left alone in
darkness to die. Something once so strong that even death had been
conquered by it, for the great bare chest, scarred and burnt till the
ribs showed through, still moved with a flicker of life.
With a wail of agony Yoni sank beside Lebrassa.
Fletcher knelt beside his old enemy, marveling that a man could endure
so much and still be alive. Opening his flask, he coaxed a draught of
weak whiskey and water between Lebrassa’s parched lips. Tortured eyes
opened, then closed again as if the light were too much for them;
opened again, and rested unbelievingly on the Englishman’s face.
“Why, Fletcher!” came out in a faint gasp.
Fletcher had no love for the man he was tending. There had been a time
when he had thought the worst death earth could inflict would be too
good for him. But now his end had come, the cause that had brought him
to it seemed to have wiped away the mass of villainy at his door.
The idea made Fletcher do the most difficult, and perhaps the most
noble, deed of his life.
“Miss Graham wrote to me, asking me to come and save you. There was no
thought of anything but you in her letter--you and what you were
suffering on her account.”
His words made a shadow of the old arrogance cross Lebrassa’s face.
“That woman must have told her. I wanted to keep it from her.” Then he
laughed, a laugh pathetic in its feebleness. “Leslie asked _you_ to
save _me_!”
Lebrassa’s eyes closed weakly. Then he spoke again, in a querulous,
hopeless, wandering way.
“Take me out of this black hell. I want light and whiteness and
roses.”
Fletcher’s next draught brought his wandering mind back to the
present. His eyes opened and rested on his captor’s face in an
anxious, pleading manner.
“Those devils have left me no sight for a girl’s eyes. I’d like to
look something like a man in case she should want to see me.”
Even now, in spite of all he had endured for Leslie’s sake, there was
the anxious doubt that the return of her own sort and color might take
her thoughts from him and bring back all the old antipathy.
Despite his desire to reach Leslie, the wistful pleading in that
faint, tortured voice made Fletcher comply with the request before
going further. Turning to a _Hausa_ sergeant, he gave an order for an
impromptu stretcher to be made. Whilst Lebrassa was being lifted
carefully on it, he scribbled a note to the doctor of the expedition,
telling him to do his best for the dying man.
When this was done, in a feeble, gasping voice Lebrassa told him the
secret that opened the Shadow.
In a fever of anxiety Fletcher went up the wide stone steps of the
throne and crossed to the rock where the brooding Shape loomed. Slowly
and carefully he followed out the complicated instructions Lebrassa
had given. Presently an oblong hole appeared in the banked cloud. It
revealed nothing but darkness, no sign or sound of the one entombed
within.
Telling his men to hold the rock back, he lowered himself into the
gaping hole. Then he took a torch from one of them and went along the
empty passage.
The noise of his heavy military boots went echoing down the long,
rough, rock alley, booming into the cave beyond with the sound of
distant thunder. It made the girl sitting there in darkness, start up
with wildly beating heart, not knowing whether it was relief at last,
or whether the man suffering outside had been unable to endure more,
and had told her whereabouts.
Fletcher came out of the slit with the growing fear that the horror
and loneliness had proved beyond the girl’s strength.
Anxiously he stood gazing round the great cave, for the light of his
torch was not sufficient to pierce its far, gloomy corners. Out of the
darkness something seemed to float towards him; a wraith of a girl in
crumpled purple gauze where golden stars flashed. She was so
transparent and ethereal that for a moment he thought she was some
conception of his own mind come to haunt his waking hours as her ghost
did his dreams.
Then dropping his torch he rushed forward and drew her into his arms.
“My darling!” he cried, falling on his knees before her.
Small hands, so thin and white, were on his shoulders.
“Is he--still alive?”
Leslie’s question sent a chill through her lover. In the end it seemed
that Lebrassa was victor, that he had succeeded in stealing her love.
The idea left Fletcher tongue-tied and clumsy, and choked back the
flood of tender words on his lips.
“He’s still alive,” he said huskily.
“Is… is he much hurt?”
He knew she had no idea of the tortures savages were capable of
inflicting. He knew also that Lebrassa’s end was only a matter of a
few days, hours even, that his desire to see the girl for whose sake
he had suffered so much had helped to keep life in him.
“I’m afraid he won’t recover.”
“Then I shall have killed him!”
“No, darling, his own wild schemings brought him to his end.”
“He’s my cousin,” Leslie said brokenly. “And something my… father did
made him do all those dreadful things.”
This was no news to Fletcher. The bare fact had come into Leslie’s
wild, imploring note, and it had left him wondering what the true
story was.
“So you told me, little one,” he said tenderly.
“I thought you would never come,” she said wildly. “I’ve waited so
long, all the time knowing they were torturing him. Perhaps I’m only
dreaming now, and I shall wake up in the dark again, thinking he’s
still being hurt.”
Tenderly Fletcher drew her fragile little form closer.
“Haven’t you a word of welcome for me, darling?” he asked.
Leslie was too weak and dazed to realize anything except that relief
had come at last, and her only desire was to see the man who for her
sake had suffered so much.
“I can’t think of anything but my cousin.”
Fletcher’s arms dropped from the slender waist they encircled. It
seemed to him they had no place there; that he was usurping a dying
man’s privilege.
Instinct must have told Leslie that his heart was stricken.
“Don’t be hurt and angry, dear,” she pleaded. “I must do all I can to
make my cousin’s end happy. Don’t you see, he’s not a nigger to me
now. He’s my cousin. My brave, dear cousin. The cousin my… father
mortally injured.”
Getting to his feet, Fletcher picked up the torch. As he did so,
drearily he wondered why the mulatto always succeeded in
out-maneuvering him where the girl they both loved was concerned.
To Leslie the journey back to daylight was a blurred vista of
sensations. She was aware of a bigger flare of light as Fletcher
lifted her out through the hole and onto the rock throne. There was
the vast hall to cross, a walk that made her realize how weak she was.
Steps were reached, a breathless climb. Then a long corridor, like an
endless black tube, with a faint speck of light at the end, that grew
bigger and brighter as she stumbled on, until it almost blinded her.
Well within the screening shadow of the tunnel, where the light did
not come so strongly, Fletcher came to a halt. He gave an order to a
_Hausa_ sergeant to fetch a hammock to carry Leslie to the palace.
Then he drew out a handkerchief and folded it thickly so as to bind
her eyes when she crossed the sunlit square.
As they stood there waiting, Lieutenant Vincent came and spoke to her,
telling her that Lebrassa was a hero and a gentleman, that the doctor
was doing his best for him.
He said a great deal more but that was all Leslie grasped. In a dazed
way she listened as he went on talking, glad some one was saying a
good word for her cousin.
When the hammock came, Fletcher bound her eyes and carried her into
it. Then the screening cloth was taken off, she was in the green,
shady garden within the palace walls.
The big arch leading into the courtyard was reached at last, then the
fretted, columned windows opening into the sitting-room that had once
been hers.
The moment the bearers stopped Leslie slipped from the litter. She
went on blindly, with eyes only for a man on a low couch set between
the portraits of the two who were responsible for his being.
She did not realize the extent of her cousin’s injuries, for his
persecutors had left his face untouched, and a coverlet screened the
rest from her sight. But there was no mistaking the suffering in the
tainted eyes watching so eagerly for her coming.
With a little cry she crossed and knelt beside him, flooding his worn
face with her tears. The soft shower eased his look of pain and
anguish and took the wistful anxiety from his eyes.
“The tears are not for me, are they, little rose?” he whispered.
“You should have told them where I was. You shouldn’t have let them
hurt you,” she sobbed, as she smoothed back his crisp, wavy hair--now
more white than black--in an ecstasy of loving pity.
“A life in hell makes one oblivious to pain, little cousin.”
“You should have spoken! You should have spoken! You shouldn’t have
let them torture you because of me.”
In a weak, pleased, tender manner Lebrassa laughed.
“There’s no pain now, little rose, only sweetness.”
The depth of love and suffering in his voice was more than Leslie
could bear.
Her head sank on the coverlet and stayed there in an agony of
suppressed weeping. A mangled limb that had been bandaged back to some
semblance of an arm came out from beneath the screening coverlet, and
was put around her with a vestige of its old fierce protection.
“You mustn’t cry, dearest,” he whispered. “I’ve got a better end than
I deserve.”
“You mustn’t die, Essel. You mustn’t. I want you.”
“I’d go through any hell, Leslie, to come out finding you weeping over
me, _wanting me!_”
Then his faint, tired voice stopped. Happiness seemed to have taken
away his last remaining mite of strength. He lay just watching the
girl who knelt beside him, smoothing his grizzled hair and touching
his haggard face with gentle, caressing fingers, a touch that took all
pain from his eyes.
The doctor’s entry roused them. Coming to the couch, he stood looking
at Lebrassa, wondering how much he would endure for the sake of the
girl with him, knowing what pain the moving of that encircling arm
must have caused.
“I shall have to send you away now, Miss Graham,” he said in a kindly
manner. “I haven’t quite finished making your cousin comfortable.”
The mere suggestion of her leaving him made Lebrassa’s arm tighten
round the girl.
His action brought a tearful smile to Leslie’s lips. All was weakness
and suffering where once there had been such strength and power. She
did not draw back from that feeble hold, instead even more tenderly
she smoothed his worn face.
“Let me go, Essel dear,” she whispered. “I’ll come back the moment the
doctor will let me.”
With a touch of savage jealousy he held her tighter, kissing her
caressing hands passionately.
“There’s no one but me now, is there, little angel? In spite of the
blackness,” he asked anxiously.
“No one,” she whispered.
She bent over him until the cloud of her hair screened from his sight
everything but herself. Gently she smoothed his worn face, and he
gazed at her in worship and adoration, whispering all the wild love
that, up to now, the knowledge of her aversion and dread of him had
kept stifled.
When Leslie returned to his bedside she was no sultan’s bride, but a
little English girl in a straight, short-sleeved muslin frock with
hair done in tight coils round her ears. All afternoon she stayed
beside him, fanning him gently, for the breathless, tropical heat had
taken all but the faintest spark of life from him, and that was in the
tainted eyes that never left her face.
The dim, shaded room was all peace and quiet, the silence broken only
by the girl’s slight movements, the occasional gentle murmur of her
voice and the tramp of the sentry on duty outside--the only thing that
said Lebrassa was a prisoner.
For nearly a week he lingered, patient, quiet and happy, with Leslie
his nurse by day and Yoni taking night duty.
There came a time when he was a little exacting with Leslie, anxious
she should stay with him all morning instead of going for her usual
half hour walk in the garden as he had always insisted, peevish if she
left him even for a moment. He was irritable with Yoni, not wanting
her near him; angry if any of the Englishmen came into the room,
holding Leslie in a weak yet savage, jealous way, if they spoke to
her.
All morning he lay watching his cousin, refusing everything but the
sips of water she coaxed between his lips. But when lunch-time came he
asked her to go and have her meal in some cool spot in the garden, as
an excuse saying she had been tied to the room all morning and that
now he felt like sleeping a little.
But once she was out of sight, he asked if he might see his captor.
The request surprised Fletcher. Generally Lebrassa ignored him, if he
chanced to come in the room, granting him neither look nor word. The
message was from a dying man so Fletcher went, wondering why his
prisoner should suddenly ask for him.
On approaching the couch, Lebrassa’s gaze met his in a pleading,
anxious manner. Then he looked at the doctor who usually sat in the
room.
“Could we be quite alone, Captain Fletcher?” he asked faintly.
Fletcher glanced toward his medical officer.
“I’ll take a turn with the patient, if you’d like to get along for
lunch now.”
Once the doctor was out of earshot, Lebrassa spoke again.
“You love my cousin, Captain Fletcher?”
From such a source the captain once would have resented this question.
Even now it rubbed him on the raw, but remembering the cause for which
his rival was dying he answered from his heart.
“I loved Miss Graham from the first moment I saw her.”
“Leslie loves you, too, though she tries to hide it from me,” Lebrassa
replied. “But in her generous, unselfish way she has given me one week
in heaven, and for that I’m grateful.”
As if getting his words together Lebrassa paused.
“My cousin is penniless,” he continued a moment later. “She can’t
prove her claim to anything that was once my father’s. As an indemnity
your government will seize all I own out here, so it’s no use for me
to make a will in her favor.”
Realizing the truth of these statements, Fletcher said nothing. He had
decided what Leslie’s future was to be. That she was penniless did not
trouble him at all; he had a comfortable income apart from his pay.
But he still wondered what the interview was leading up to.
“I want Leslie to be happy,” that weak, gasping voice continued. “And
she can’t be with the weight of her father’s sins upon her. And
because of them, she won’t marry you either.”
This fact Fletcher had not grasped. Now it made him listen eagerly to
what the dying man was saying.
“I can’t bear to think of her missing happiness because of her father.
Because of his sins going through life feeling a leper. I know that
feeling only too well. And I won’t have Leslie suffer in the way I
have.”
Fletcher saw his own paradise retreating, and the fact stunned him.
“But what can you do?” he asked rather helplessly.
His question brought a slight smile to Lebrassa’s drawn lips.
“In strategy and finesse I’ve always been the better man of the two,”
he remarked.
Fletcher knew the Sultan was referring to their many rounds in past
days, when he had always proved himself more than a match for the
Englishman.
“I’m going to tell my cousin another story,” Lebrassa went on. “And
_you_ must uphold my second confession. Now listen carefully.”
Fletcher stooped over the bed to miss no word of that faint, gasping
speech. With heads close together they stayed talking, two men, once
mortal enemies, now brought together as friends in defense of the girl
they both loved.
“But it’s going back on a brave man,” Fletcher protested when Lebrassa
had finished.
“Better to go back on a ‘brave man’ as you please to call me, than
leave an innocent, honorable girl suffering for the rest of her life.
And you’ll be the braver man, Captain Fletcher, for you’ll have to
tell lies and stick to them, knowing that by cheating you’ll win the
prize.”
To Fletcher it seemed no sacrifice could be greater than the one his
old enemy was prepared to make for the sake of the girl they both
loved.
“You will back me up,” Lebrassa pleaded.
Fletcher was past speaking; he just nodded.
A bandaged arm made a movement in his direction, as if to shake hands
on their bargain. Then Lebrassa seemed to recollect what he was and
the mutilated limb was drawn back. Slight as the gesture was, Fletcher
saw it and he put his own hand carefully on the stump where his
enemy’s hand had once been.
When Leslie returned to her vigil by her cousin’s couch there was no
sign of Fletcher. Nor did the doctor who was sitting in the room make
any mention of his visit.
The long, hot, trying afternoon dragged on. It left Lebrassa lying
with closed eyes, that opened only to smile when she touched him
caressingly. But the coolness of evening brought a little life to him.
For a long time he stayed watching her in an anxious, hungry, jealous
way. Then a whisper brought her bending over him.
“There’s something I want to tell you, Leslie. Something that will
take all your love away from me.”
“What is it, dear?” she asked. “What do you want to tell me now?”
The whole of his nightmare life, black, white and red, had been poured
out before her during the past few days.
“It’s about you, dearest,” he whispered, in a hesitating manner, as if
afraid of what the result of his confession would be.
“I’m listening, Essel,” she said, patting his hollow face tenderly.
“It’s what I once told you about your father. It wasn’t true. Not a
word of it, except that I am your cousin, but not legally. My father
married my mother by heathen rites only. Think of it, Leslie, would
such a thing as a legal marriage be likely? My father was the
reprobate, not yours. He was a just and honorable man, even to me.
Accidentally I learned who my dead father was. I forged that letter
and went to my uncle, claiming to be the legal son of his elder
brother. He listened to me. Read my letter. Said if my story was true,
he would give me my title and estates, but I must first produce my
mother’s marriage certificate and my own birth certificate. She had
been dead long before I went to him, and I swore she had hidden the
proofs I wanted and that the secret of their hiding-place had died
with her.”
There was a brief pause, then the weak voice went on, gradually
gaining force and power and conviction--a dying man’s effort to remove
a heritage of sin from a girl’s white conscience.
“He came out to Kallu, to see how much of my wild story was true, and
spent a lot of time in trying to find out the truth. Then he
discovered it, and accused me of being the imposter I was. I tried to
terrorize him into giving me what was his, and acknowledge me as his
brother’s legal son. I said I’d have his life and the lives of his
wife and child if he did not give me my father’s title and estates.
Fear for them drove him from England. It was not true, anything I told
you that day you came to Kallu, Leslie. I said it to make you be kind
to me, so that you wouldn’t quite hate me, knowing it would be so easy
to deceive you, that I might get sympathy that way, if not love.”
Stunned, Leslie listened.
For a moment it seemed as though the burden of her father’s infamy had
slipped from her. Then other thoughts came that made her bend over her
cousin in an ecstasy of love and pity.
“I don’t believe you, Essel.”
“It is true. You must believe me,” he said with weak determination. “I
said it to make you like me. I’ve deceived everybody, so why not you,
the one I plotted and schemed and did murder to get? Why not you, the
little girl whose love I wanted, who always paid her debts so nobly?
Why not forge a debt to make you pay me back in the sympathy and
sweetness I couldn’t get otherwise?”
There was conviction in the voice that had gathered strength for this
last effort at deception. But in Leslie’s mind were childish
recollections of a drunken, dissipated man who had habits and ways and
ideas that the light of advancing years had shown her were neither
just nor honorable. Above all was the knowledge of her cousin’s wild
love and depth of sacrifice for herself.
She leaned over him, anxious these last few hours should be as happy
as she could make them.
“Never mind, dear. If you deceived me, it was because you loved me.”
Searchingly, he watched her.
“You believe me, don’t you, little rose? I swear it on my dying oath.”
She took his anxious, watching face between her hands.
“I believe you, Essel, but it doesn’t make any difference now. You’re
my cousin just the same. The dear, brave cousin I love.”
This effort to remove the burden of sin from her shoulders to his own,
left him almost unconscious.
Daylight died away, and brought shadows creeping into the room.
Lebrassa lay in a fitful, uneasy doze, starting and waking to gaze
round anxiously for Leslie. The doctor came in to light the lamp and
look at his patient, and out again to fetch Fletcher. The two
Englishmen stayed in the screening shadows so that the dying man could
not see them, knowing their presence might raise a flood of negro
jealousy he was now too feeble to keep under control.
Midnight came. Lebrassa still lay muttering, sometimes in the language
of his mother’s people, sometimes in English--back again to his
boyhood spent in England.
All at once he started up with the wild war-cry of his negro
ancestors. Fletcher and the doctor darted forward to hold down the
maimed, distorted thing howling on the couch. Their presence maddened
him, and brought back all the hatred of the whites that had once been
his.
A savage roar of fury greeted them in the heathen dialect that, in
past days, had led many a charge against their color.
There was a quick movement beside him, and a slim, white hand was laid
on his shoulder.
“Essel! Essel, dear.”
Leslie’s voice brought his mad, blazing eyes from the two white men.
For a moment he looked at her in bewilderment, then a smile came.
“Why, little rose!” he exclaimed, as if brought out of some nightmare.
Falling back weakly, he lay watching her.
“Keep hold of me, little cousin,” he gasped presently. “Hell is so
close now. Hell here and hereafter.”
With an arm around his neck, she sat with her face pressed close
against his brown one.
His voice came again, peevish and fretful.
“It’s so dark now, I can’t see you, dearest. You won’t go where I
can’t find you, will you?”
“No, dear, I’ll stay with you always.”
There was no reply. But a bandaged arm came out from beneath the
coverlet and groped round blindly as if feeling for something.
Leslie put it round her waist where it stayed contentedly.
For some time there was silence. The night wind came creeping through
the fretted arches, bringing the moaning sigh of the surrounding
wilderness, and distant, weird, wild, forest howls.
Then a whisper came, faint and far away, from just on the Verge--the
last, tired sigh of a soul slipping into eternity.
“I deceived you, little rose. I swear it on my dying oath. Say you
believe--”
“I believe you, dear. Of course I do,” she whispered, stooping.
But the lips Leslie kissed were dead ones.