Chapter Twenty Six.
The Packet Marked “B.”
With her usual frank naturalness and absence of conventionality, Nidia went to meet him in the doorway. Then, as he took her extended hands, it seemed as though he were going to hold them for ever. Yet no word had passed between them.
How well he looked! she was thinking. The light, not unpicturesque attire there prevailing, and so becoming to a good-looking, well-made man, suited him, she decided. She had first seen him in the ordinary garments of urban civilisation. She had seen him last a tattered fugitive, haggard and unshaven. Now the up-country costume—silk shirt and leather belt, and riding-trousers with gaiters—endowed his lithe well set-up form with an air of freedom and ease, and looking into the clear-cut face and full grey eyes, framed by the wide, straight brim of the up-country hat, she thought she had never seen him looking so well. “How glad I am to see you again!” she said, “Ten thousand welcomes. Do you know, I have been feeling ever since as if I were responsible for—for whatever had befallen you.”
“Yes? Imagine, then, what I must have felt at the thought of you, alone in the mountains, not knowing what to do or where to turn. I wonder it didn’t drive me stark staring mad. Imagine it, Nidia. Just try to imagine it! Words won’t convey it.”
“I did have a dreadful time. But I knew nothing would have kept you from returning to me, had you been able. And then your boy, Pukele, arrived, and took such care of me. I sent him out to find you, and he said you had been among the Matabele, but had been able to leave them again—”
“Who? My boy? Pukele?” repeated John Ames, wonderingly.
“Yes. He brought me out of the mountains. One day he went out to hunt. I heard him, as I thought, fire a couple of shots, and came up to find myself among friends again.”
“Nidia,” called a voice from within—a voice not untinged with acerbity—“won’t Mr Ames come inside?”
John Ames started, and the effect seemed to freeze him somewhat. The coldness of the greeting extended to him as he complied, completed the effect. Instinctively he set it down to its true cause.
“We met last under very different circumstances, didn’t we, Mrs Bateman?” he said easily. “None of us quite foresaw all that has happened since.”
“I should think not. The wonder is that one of us is alive to tell the tale,” was the rejoinder, in a tone which seemed to imply that no thanks were due to John Ames that ‘one of us’ was—in short, that he was responsible for the whole rising.
“And do you remember my asking if there wasn’t a chance of the natives rising and killing us all?” said Nidia. “I have often thought of that. What times we have been through!” with a little shudder. “Yet, in some ways it seems almost like a dream. Doesn’t it, Susie?”
“A dream we are not awakened from, unfortunately,” was the reply. “We don’t seem through our troubles yet. Well, as for as we are concerned, we soon shall be. I want to take Miss Commerell out of this wretched country, Mr Ames, as soon as ever it can be managed. Don’t you think it the best plan?”
“I think you are both far safer where you are, since you ask me,” he answered. “Any amount of reinforcements are on their way, and meanwhile the laager here, though uncomfortable, is absolutely safe, because absolutely impregnable. Whereas the Mafeking road, if still open, is so simply on sufferance of the rebels. Any day we may hear of the Mangwe being blocked.”
“I disagree with you entirely,” came the decisive reply. “I hear, on first-rate authority, that the coaches are running regularly, under escort, and that the risk is very slight. I think that will be our best plan. I suppose you will be joining one of the forces taking the field as soon as possible, won’t you, Mr Ames?”
If there was one thing that impressed itself upon John Ames when he first entered, it was that this woman intended to make herself supremely disagreeable; now he could not but own that she was thoroughly succeeding, and, as we said, he had instinctively seen her bent. She was, in fact, warning him off. The tone and manner, the obtrusive way in which she was mapping out his own movements for him, stirred within him a resentment he could hardly disguise, but her suggestion with regard to disposing of those of Nidia struck him with a pang of dismay, and that accentuated by considerations which will hereinafter appear. Now he replied—
“My plans are so absolutely in the clouds that I can hardly say what I may decide to do, Mrs Bateman. I might even decide to cut my connection with this country. Take a run home to England, perhaps. What if I were so fortunate as to come in as your escort?”
This he said out of sheer devilment, and he was rewarded, for if ever a human countenance betrayed disgust, repressed wrath, baffled scheming, all at once, that countenance belonged to Susie Bateman at that moment Nidia came to the rescue.
“You have not told us your adventures yet,” she said. “I want to know all that happened since you left me. I only hope none of these tiresome men will come in and interrupt.”
All that happened! He could not tell her all, for he had pledged his word to the Umlimo. The latter had predicted that he would meet with every temptation to violate that pledge, and here was one of them. No, not even to her could he reveal all. But he told her of his fall from the dwala, his unconsciousness, and, leaving out that strange and startling experience, he went on to tell her what the reader has yet to learn—how he awoke in the broad light of day to find himself surrounded by armed natives, friendly to himself, however, who, of course, acting under orders from the Umlimo, had escorted him to within safe distance of Bulawayo.
Unconsciously their tones—he narrating, she commenting upon the narrative—became soft. Their glances, too, seemed to say something more than words. Both, in fact, were back again in imagination, roaming the wilds together, alone. They seemed to lose themselves in the recollection, oblivious of the presence of a third party.
The said third party, however, was by no means oblivious of them. Her ear weighed every tone, her keen eye noted every glance, every expression, and she grew proportionately venomous. Yet, looking at the man, she could hardly wonder at Nidia’s preference, and the uncomfortable consciousness was forced upon her that whoever might be the object of it, this man or any other, her own feeling would be just the same—one of acute powerless jealousy, to wit, that any should ever stand before herself in her darling’s preferences.
“Don’t go,” said Nidia, putting forth a hand to detain him, for his story had run on late, and he was rising with an apology. “Stay and have dinner with us. It’s siege fare, but even then a little more varied than our precarious ration under the rocks—not that one did not positively enjoy that at the time,” she added with a laugh. He joined in.
“Did you? I’m sure I did. Considering we were without any adjuncts, your cooking was marvellous, Nidia.”
“Nidia” again! Heavens! It had come to that, then! Susie Bateman’s hair nearly rose on end.
“Well, you shall see if it is any better now,” went on the girl, airily. “Oh, I do hope none of those stupid men will drop in. I want to have a nice long talk.”
“You haven’t found them so stupid up till now, Nidia,” struck in Susie Bateman. “Why, there isn’t an evening some of them haven’t been in to cheer us up.”
This for the benefit of John Ames, to whom the speaker divined it might in some way not be palatable. He for his part noted that she did not second the invitation, but he had reached that stage when he really didn’t care to consider any Susie Bateman overmuch. Wherefore he accepted. But the latter, for her part, was resolved to pursue the campaign, and that vigorously, and to this end she never left them for one moment alone together. Likewise was she rather oftener than necessary very emphatic in referring to “Miss Commerell;” and when, later on, some of “those stupid men” did drop in, her joy was unbounded, equally so that they stayed late enough to leave John Ames no pretext for sitting them out.
Resisting a pressing invite to finish up the evening at the Silver Grill, the latter went back to his quarters in by no means an elated frame of mind. Yet he had to some extent foreseen what had happened. Nidia had been kind and cordial to him, but there it was—as one of a crowd. There was no longer that sweet day-to-day companionship, they two isolated from the world. We repeat that he had foreseen this eventuality, yet now that it had arrived he liked it not one whit the more; nor was there consolation in the thought that here was another confirmation of the general accuracy of his forecasting faculty. Already he began to realise the Umlimo’s forecast: “There will come a time when you will look back upon these rough wanderings of yours—the two of you—as a dream of paradise.” Of a truth that strange being possessed the gift of prophecy to an extraordinary degree.
Now, too, and in the days that followed, he found subject-matter for some very serious thinking, and one of the main subjects of his thoughts was that of the Umlimo. No abstraction, then, was this cult, such as he and others had supposed. Probably it had been originally, but he who now used the title had seized the opportunity of turning it into a most formidable weapon against his enemies, in furtherance of one of the most ruthless, daring, and far-reaching schemes of vengeance which the mind of man could ever conceive and foster; and the object of this terrible monomania, the man’s own nationality. John Ames was in a quandary. Here he stood, possessed of most important knowledge, yet powerless to divulge it; cognisant of a fact of most vital moment to those who employed him, and whose pay he was receiving, yet tied and bound by his pledged word.
There was one way out of this difficulty, and that way, not being an unscrupulous man, he decided to take. He resigned his position in the service of the Chartered Company. Even then his mind was by no means at ease. There seemed still to be a duty to perform to humanity in general. Were he to keep this knowledge to himself, how many lives would be sacrificed which otherwise might have been saved? The capture or death of the Umlimo—would it not be effectual to stop the rising? and was he not in duty bound to further this end in the interests of his fellow-countrymen? Conscience told him he might do this; for with all the care and secrecy that had attended both his entrance to and exit from the cave of mystery, he could not disguise from himself that, by careful calculations as to time and locality, he might be able to find the spot again. But then would rise before him his pledged word. He had given it when in the power of this extraordinary being, when both his own life and that of Nidia had lain in his hand, and he could not now go back on it—no, not on any consideration. His countrymen must take their chance. He had done all that could reasonably be expected of him in resigning his position and its emoluments.
In doing this, however, it was pre-eminently a case of looking to virtue as its own reward. Certainly it brought him no nearer the realisation of his hopes; for so slender were his private means of existence, that only by the exercise of the most rigid economy could he get along at all, and the necessaries of life, be it remembered, were at famine prices. Decidedly, indeed, his prospects were looking blacker and yet more black.
And what of Nidia herself? As the days went by she seemed to draw no nearer. Seldom now was he suffered to be alone with her, and then only for a minute or so, when an ever-present feeling of gêne and flurry would be there to mar the effect of any opportunity he might have had to improve the occasion, and, indeed, he was beginning to regard matters as hopeless. The persistent hostility of Mrs Bateman was ever on the watch to defeat his every move; and as to this, even, there were times when it seemed to him that Nidia was a trifle too acquiescent in the latter’s objectionable and scarcely concealed efforts at railing him off. Then, too, Nidia was constantly surrounded by a knot of men, many of them fine gallant-looking fellows, already distinguished for some feat of intrepidity. There was the commander of the relief troop which had brought her in, for instance, and Carbutt and Tarrant and several others. He, John Ames, so far from being the one to bring her in, as he used to pride himself would be the case, had merely imperilled her the more by his own sheer incautious blundering. Sick at heart, he would fain be lying where he had fallen—a battered, lifeless heap at the base of the great dwala.
From this his thoughts would wander to the mysterious rock-dwelling, and to him who inhabited it. Why, and with what object to serve, had the Umlimo spared and tended him? That he might deliver his message to the outside world? Well, he had done that. And then—and the very thought sent a thrill as of needles and pins throughout his whole system. He had delivered the one message, but what of the other enclosure, the one which in some mysterious way concerned himself, the packet marked “B”? He got it out and eyed it. The Umlimo’s words were vividly imprinted in his memory. “The time may come when you will see everything dark around you, and there is no outlook, and life hardly worth prolonging. Then, and then only, open it.”
Solemn and weighty now did those words seem. Great Heaven! had not just such a time come? Was not everything dark enough in all conscience, and what outlook did life afford? Yes, he would do it. His heart beat fast as he undid the sealed oilskin wrappings of the packet. What would it contain, and how could such contents in any way conduce to his own welfare? The last wrapping was off, revealing an enclosure. Only a sealed letter, directed to the same names and address as that in the packet marked “A”—a firm in Cape Town—of solicitors or agents, he conjectured. One word of instructions accompanied this, one single word—
“Forward.”
“And that is all?” he said to himself, perhaps a trifle disappointedly, turning the enclosure round and round. “Well, that’s no trouble. I’ll go and do it.”