Chapter Thirty Four.
The Alternative.
“Well? And have you now come round to a sweet and reasonable frame of mind?”
Wagram looked his persecutor steadily in the face. He was not secured, but two stalwart blacks stood on each side, ready to anticipate any aggressive movement on his part.
“You’ve not, eh? That’ll come; only the longer you hold out the more personal inconvenience you’ll lay yourself open to. I give you fair warning.”
“You intend to murder me, I suppose,” answered Wagram. “Why not do it at once? I won’t agree to your perfectly outrageous proposal.”
“Outrageous?” sneered the white fiend. “Let’s go over the ground again. A month ago I invited you to make a protracted stay with me. I further asked you to send for your son, thinking that a little wild bush life would make a wholesome change for a schoolboy, and we would have been as jolly as sandboys together. You began to make excuses. Now, I don’t like excuses. I’m not accustomed to them, as you must have learnt since you’ve been here. Then you refused point-blank, saying this was no place to bring a boy to. You yourself couldn’t refuse my hospitality, which I’m afraid I shall have to extend to you for an indefinite time. But your son and heir—I’m dying to make his acquaintance. See?”
“Yes; I see. And I give you the answer straight: I have no intention that you should make his acquaintance or he yours. Now—is that straight enough?”
“Oh, quite. Only have you reflected that in that case you yourself will never set eyes on him again? Hasn’t that struck you?”
“As a possibility, not as a probability. Look here! you are a white man, not a savage. For some purpose you are trying to frighten me. What is it? Is it that you want a larger price? If so, name it.”
“Trying to frighten you? Why, I haven’t even begun to frighten you yet. You told me one day you thought I must be the devil. Well, I am—for all purposes as far as you are concerned. Make up your mind to that.”
There was no great eagerness in Wagram’s mind to dispute this statement. He had spent a month in the power of this fiend, and scarcely a day had passed without some proof that if he were not already within the infernal regions he was at any rate well within the antechamber thereto. Apart from the fact that the conditions of his captivity had been more and more those of every conceivable harshness, he had been compelled to witness the most ghastly and horrifying sights, of which the blood tragedies of the cannibal slaughter-yard were not the worst. Other fiendish rites, hideous and obscene—hardly imaginable, in fact—he had been thrust into the very midst of; and now within that brief month it seemed that he must have lived for years in hell, and all at the bidding of this devil—his fellow-countryman. His health had suffered, his mind and spirit alike were becoming broken, and every moment he besieged high Heaven with supplications that deliverance—even through the gate of death—might be granted him. So far his tormentor had confined his malice to tortures that were mainly mental. He had been careful, too, to afford him no clue whatever as to the locality in which he was, or even as to the very name of this savage race. His own identity, of course, was undivulged.
“You have the whole situation in your own hands,” went on the latter. “You have only to place in mine the necessary letters that will bring your son and heir here. I’ll take care of the way of doing it, never fear, once I have your indisputable authority. Now—are you going to give it me?”
Something of the martyr’s resolution shone in Wagram’s face. Even the brutal savages who guarded him were struck by it, and uneasily stirred. They thought to descry some strange resemblance at that moment between the faces of the two men, between their dreaded oppressor and his—and their—helpless captive.
“No; I am not—not now, nor ever,” came the steadfast answer. “I will die first.”
Then that glaring paroxysm of rage swept over the other’s features, and his eyes seemed to start from his purpling face as he bent down and hissed rather than whispered:
“Then you shall. By God, you shall!” At a sign the two savages pounced upon their prisoner, and flung him face downwards upon the ground. They were muscular ruffians, and he was weakened by ill-treatment and anxiety. Others flocked into the hut in obedience to a call, and in a moment he was pinioned with thongs, his feet being left free enough to enable him to walk with short steps. They dragged him forth into the open, and he found himself staggering along in their midst. Then he realised what his doom was to be. He had travelled this way before, to his horror and sorrow. They were taking him to the human slaughter-yard.
There was the palisade, the stunted trees, and the horrible heads impaled upon them. The effluvium was acrid, sickening. Many hands gripped him, and before he could offer the slightest resistance he was bound down upon one of the blood-stained blocks, with throat upturned, distended, ready for the murderous knife.
In that terrible moment, expecting death amid every circumstance of agony and ignominy, a vista of his past life opened to his brain—opened with a quick flash. This, then, was what his quest had brought him to—his quest which, following the strong voice of conscience, he had undertaken and had prosecuted to his own detriment. Well, what mattered it? His son—his only son—had been left in strong and careful hands. He would carry on his life duties as he himself would have had him do. Then more sacred thoughts succeeded. He trusted he was ready.
A black fiend stood over him, and had already raised the horrible crooked knife; already he seemed to feel it shearing through nerve and artery. But it was stayed.
“One more chance,” cried the voice of his arch-tormentor. “Will you do what you have no option but to do? Remember, this is no swift death—no beheading at one blow—as you have seen. A nasty sort of butchering death for a man of your birth and breeding to end up with, eh?”
“Do your butcher work; my mind is unchanged.”
At a sign the demon with the knife lowered it. Wagram felt a slash upon his throat, and the blood flowed. In reality it was but a skin cut. The black fiend, instructed by the white arch-fiend, was but playing with him; yet the mind acting upon the strained nerves rendered the torture actual, horrible. Except a quick gasp no sound escaped the sufferer. In the concentration of the suspense every detail was stamped upon the retina of his brain—the bestial, black faces, staring and bloodthirsty; the scarcely less repulsive countenance of his—fellow-countryman, and a strange, vivid scar round the outside of the right eye defacing this. Detail is curiously to the front in moments of extreme tensity. The willing executioner looked again at his superior for the final signal. After a moment of deathly silence—to the sufferer a very lifetime of suspense—it came.
But, what was this? He had been quickly unbound, and rolled to the ground, and as he lay there, dazed with the sudden revulsion, the voice of his arch-tormentor fell once more upon his ears.
“That’ll do for to-day, Wagram. You’ve gone through hell—yes, hell—in the last few minutes, but it’s nothing to what’s sticking out for you. You thought you’d have been in heaven by now, but, no fear. Moreover, you’ll never get there, for before I’ve done with you you’re going to blaspheme Heaven in such a manner that even it’ll have nothing to do with you at the end, in spite of your life of piety and sanctimoniousness. Wait a bit. You haven’t felt any real pain yet—don’t know what it is. To-morrow you shall begin. A little roasting, you understand; not too much—enough to keep you wriggling for an hour or so. You shall have the whole night to think of it.”
“You are wrong, devil,” was the answer. “Whatever might escape me through weakness under your hellish treatment will not count, rest assured. And the Heaven which you blaspheme has a longer arm than you think.”
“All right. It can’t reach as far as this,” returned the other, with a hideous laugh.
The sufferer was roughly seized, jerked to his feet, and dragged back to the hut; but even this gloomy prison-house was no longer to be his undisturbed, for now the two black horrors entered it with him, and disposed themselves in such wise as to render it evident they meant to spend the night there. He himself was secured by thongs in such wise as to render any attempt at escape impossible.
And there in the black darkness—with loathsome insects creeping over him, the close, stuffy air rendered absolutely poisonous by the rancid stench exhaling from the musky bodies of his guards—Wagram underwent to the full all the trials of the martyrs destined for the Coliseum of old. He had passed through, as it were, the very extremity of death that day, and had been put back that he might die many deaths. He knew that the words of the white savage had been no empty threat, for among the awful sights he had been forced to witness in that hell-centre had been that of a human being done to death over a slow fire in exactly the manner that had been promised for himself. Well, if that were so, and he were called upon to suffer the fiery ordeal, he trusted that strength might be given him as to the martyrs of old, the prayers of all of whom he fervently invoked, including those of his martyred relative—the recollection of whom turned back his thoughts to Hilversea, and those he had left there; and it was with deep thankfulness that he realised that no flaw existed in the provisions he had made before leaving in the event of accident to himself. These had been effected with business-like foresight and accuracy. All who had claims upon him had been remembered, and Gerard had been left under the joint guardianship of Haldane and the family solicitor. Even Delia Calmour he had not omitted to provide for, by reason of the interest he and his father had taken in the girl, and the disadvantages under which she was placed. Perhaps she would bless his memory and pray for him, and the recollection of her bright young beauty was pleasant now in the gloomy hour of his bondage and the horrible fate which impended. Yvonne, too—she would not forget him, and the prayers of the young and the pure seemed as though they must be tenfold precious and efficacious.
Hour by hour his thoughts ran on, interluded by snatches of sleep, begotten of sheer mental exhaustion, haunted, however, by gusty, disturbing dreams, in which the horrors he had witnessed and gone through would rise up to mock and distress him, as though instigated by the malice of the powers of hell. The same sun which would rise upon Hilversea, and its joyous, peaceful English life, would rise upon him and the drear abode of blood-stained heathendom; would witness his death amid horrible torment, and that not at the word of merciless, ruthless barbarians but at the bidding of a fellow-countryman—a white man. The situation seemed so impossible, so grotesque, as to wear the aspect of a veritable nightmare. It was incredible.
With the thought came another. Why had this devil in human shape laid such stress on getting Gerard into his power, even to the length of torturing him—Wagram—to induce him to send for the boy? Why had he repudiated his agreement to enlarge him for what was really a princely ransom, and that all in a moment? There was something behind it all—but what? And then upon the deepest darkness of his thoughts one thought flashed in. This man had known Everard—had possibly murdered him. He designed to personate him and claim Hilversea, but in order to do this he must first cut off the present occupant and his heir. That was why he had striven to get Gerard into his power. Yes; the whole thing now stood explained: the effect the name had had upon him—everything. He had got at Everard’s history, and now rejoiced that another Wagram—the reigning one—had fallen into his hands. Develin Hunt, too, had come from somewhere about this part. What if the adventurer had lied to him, had sent him off to South Africa on a fool’s errand when it should have been West Africa? What if his threat to produce Everard had referred to this spurious adventurer? And yet—and yet—how was Develin Hunt ever to guess that he himself should come to be wrecked and cast away on that identical coast? The puzzle was a tangled one, and at the moment beyond his unravelling. One thing, however, held his mind—a resolve that, come what might, he would defeat this ferocious villain’s schemes by the sacrifice of himself if need be.
Hour followed hour, and that dread, suffocating, tropical night seemed to embody a lifetime of haunting fear. Yes; fear, for all the human in this man shrank from the fearful ordeal he would be called upon to undergo. There was no escape—no, none—for did he succeed even in breaking away into the wilderness he had not the remotest notion what direction to take in his flight, or of any aim or objective on which to direct that flight. He recalled the rough, brutal treatment he had already undergone; and what made it worse was his absolute inability to offer any resistance whatever to such indignity as his proud, sensitive nature could never have conceived it possible he should be called upon to undergo. Then, once more, that uneasy slumber came upon him—for how long he knew not—until it was broken in upon by strange, muffled sounds and mysterious vibrations—together with something that sounded like a smothered groan. He started up, and instinctively put forth a hand. It encountered something warm and wet and clammy—in the black darkness causing him to shudder. The ground was soaked with it; and he detected that acrid odour he had learnt to know only too well of late.