Chapter Fifteen.
A Revelation—with a Vengeance.
“Then, it wouldn’t have killed him, Vine?”
“I think not. I could not quite locate the stuff. You see I have had no opportunity of making a study of these native drugs. They take precious good care we shan’t,” answered the District Surgeon.
Elvesdon was conscious of a sense of relief at this verdict. It would save complications at any rate. He would not now be obliged to open up a serious enquiry at a time when the native pulse had to be fingered very carefully.
“But why the deuce should they give him the stuff if it wasn’t to get him out of the way?” he said.
“Well, you see, a drug, even of a poisonous nature, may have other uses than to cause death. It may be administered in sufficiently small proportions to cause a sort of waking stupefaction, a semi-consciousness in which the will power lies torpid, and the recipient may be made to do or say anything which others may choose to make him do or say. Now Zavula is an important chief—a very important chief—and respected as a singularly able and level-headed one, consequently his ‘word’ once uttered would carry more weight than that of upstarts like Babatyana and half a dozen others put together. See?”
“Yes. In other words he’d be of more use to them alive than dead?”
“That’s it. But—by the way, Elvesdon, it’s a pity I didn’t have that bowl a bit sooner. You know traces of some poisons are easier located if investigated early.”
“Yes, but we were both of us so infernally busy. And perhaps neither of us took the thing sufficiently seriously.”
The two were seated in Elvesdon’s inner office, and were, so to say, holding an inquest on the District Surgeon’s investigation of old Zavula’s drinking bowl. The doctor was a sturdy, thick-set man, of anything from fifty onwards but probably much more; grizzled and red-faced; very downright in manner, but genial and well-liked. He and the new magistrate had taken to each other at once.
“Think there’ll be trouble Elvesdon—over the new tax for instance?” said the doctor.
“The Lord only knows, and He won’t tell. I’m doing all I can, but this business of Zavula’s looks more than a bit ugly. I don’t mind telling you. Babatyana’s an infernal scoundrel, and he’s practically chief of the Amahluzi. Poor old Zavula is for all practical purposes only a sleeping partner, I’m afraid.”
“M-m,” said the other.
“Well I think, as you can’t certify that this stuff was enough to constitute an attempt on old Zavula’s life, there’s nothing to be gained by stirring up any mud over the job. He’s cute enough, and obviously able to take care of himself. The jolly old boy sent me quite an affectionate message only the day before yesterday—no—it was the day before that.”
The grisly side to this statement lay in the fact that on the day named the said ‘jolly old boy’ was lying in his unknown grave in the rock cleft—had been for some time—and the whole of the Amahluzi tribe was in a simmering state of incipient rebellion.
“You see a good deal of the Thornhills, don’t you, Elvesdon?” said the doctor, changing the subject.
“Yes. I like them too. It’s a jolly lucky thing, I reckon, to find a man like Thornhill at one’s elbow in a place like this. He’s such a rational, level-headed chap—cultured too, and rattling good company.”
“And the girl—what do you think of her?”
“She’s charming—so unconventional, and high bred to the finger tips, as the French say, or, to put it literally, ‘to the ends of the nails.’ I don’t mind telling you, Vine, that she’s clean outside my experience.”
The older man smiled queerly.
“Yes. She’s a nice girl,” he said, “but—peculiar.”
Now Elvesdon had just reached that stage with regard to Edala that this damning of her with faint praise rather jarred upon him.
“Well but—isn’t she?” he retorted, unwittingly sharply. “Nice—I mean.”
“I said so,” answered the other.
Still Elvesdon was not satisfied. There was something infernally, provokingly, shut-up-like-an-oyster about the tone. He felt moved to ‘draw’ the utterer.
“Peculiar, you said,” he went on. “Yes, that I can believe. Do you know, Vine, the first Sunday I went over there, I had a queer experience. You know that big mountain on their place just opposite the house— Sipazi it is called?” The doctor nodded. “Well then, they took me up there in the afternoon to show me the view. You’ll remember that tremendous krantz that literally overhangs the valley?” Again the other nodded. “Well there’s a beast of a tree that grows out from its brink, horizontally at first, then upwards. There’s just room for one—fool, I was nearly saying—or one and a half, to sit on it. Well what does the young lady do but climb down and sit on it as if she was in an armchair on the stoep at home. It turned me nearly sick to see her do it, I can tell you.”
“I daresay.”
“That’s not all. She skipped up again, and—invited me to do the same.”
“And did you?”
“Well I had to. It was in the nature of a challenge, you see. I tell you squarely and as man to man, I would willingly have forfeited a year’s pay to have got out of it—when I got on to the beastly log, I believe I would have forfeited five. But how could I have backed out of doing a thing a girl had just done, and thought nothing of? Ugh! it gives me the cold shivers all down the back even now, to look back on those few moments when I sat, hung out in mid-air, over that ghastly height. And, you must remember the krantz slopes away inwards from the top just there. Ugh!”
Vine sat back in his chair and chuckled. Elvesdon was obviously an imaginative chap, he was saying to himself. Why, as he told the story he was going through the experience again, and part of its horror had taken hold on him.
“Well, what did she say when you came back?” he said.
“That I was the only one besides herself who had ever done it. She had asked several, and they had all cried off. I don’t say it to brag, mind—in proof whereof I don’t mind adding that she said she could see I was in a beastly funk all the time, because my hand on the branch of the infernal tree shook, and, by the Lord, it did.”
“Reminds one of the old yam about the lady and the knight and the jay’s nest on the castle wall,” said the doctor. “Never mind, Elvesdon. I’m one of those who funked going on it. She asked me to once.”
“The devil she did.”
“Yes. I told her straight I was much too old and fat to launch out in those circus experiments. But that excuse wouldn’t do with an athletic young ’un like you.”
“Well, several other ‘athletic young ’uns’ seem to have shied at it anyway. Here, I seem to be bragging again but I don’t mean to. Of course a man’s a fool to try and do a thing of that sort if he knows he can’t. Still, I thought I could—at a pinch.” And again the listener chuckled.
“By the way, Vine,” said Elvesdon tentatively, “you’ve been here a long time and I’m only a new broom. Did you know Thornhill’s wife?”
“Yes.”
“What was she like. You know I’ve been over at their place several times, and have never seen any portrait of her of any kind. Nor have I ever heard her alluded to in any way.”
“No. You wouldn’t be likely to.”
Elvesdon nodded.
“I see,” he said.
“No—not that. You’re on the wrong track. Look here, Elvesdon,” went on the doctor, gravely. “You’d better have the real position from me, since you’re sure to have it sooner or later from somebody else, and then probably more or less inaccurately given. The wonder to me is that you’ve heard nothing about it already, but I suppose the few people round here, seeing you were rather thick with Thornhill, concluded to keep their heads shut.”
“But, Vine, what is the mystery? What the devil is the mystery? Let’s have it.”
He was speaking quickly, excitedly. For the life of him he could not help it.
“Thornhill is supposed to have murdered his wife,” answered Vine.
“Good God!”
Elvesdon had started up in his chair, as if he had suddenly realised the presence of a pin in the cushion, and then sat back, staring at the other; and indeed his amazement was little to be wondered at, for to be suddenly told that a man for whom he had conceived a sincere liking and regard, and a growing friendship, was a probable murderer, was disconcerting, to say the least of it.
“‘Supposed’? Exactly. But it was never proved against him?” he said, recovering himself and feeling somewhat relieved. “As, of course it couldn’t have been or he wouldn’t be where he is now. What were the facts?”
“Mrs Thornhill disappeared.”
“How and where?”
“‘How’ is just what nobody knows. ‘Where’—on their own place, same place they’re living on now.”
“What would the motive have been?” Elvesdon had collected himself. He was vividly interested but was becoming magisterial again.
“Motive? Plenty of that; in fact that’s what made things look sultry against Thornhill. She led him the devil of a life. To put it briefly, Thornhill’s version was that she rushed out of the house one night after a more than ordinarily violent ‘breeze,’ making all sorts of insane announcements. He did not follow her immediately, as he said at the time, partly because he wanted to give her time to come to her senses, partly because—and here he was injudiciously frank, in that he supplied motive and turned public opinion against himself—he honestly did not care what happened to her, so sick was he of the life she had been leading him. He said nothing about her disappearance at first, explaining that he expected her back at any minute, in which case he would have made a fool of himself all about nothing.”
“Couldn’t he have taken up her spoor?” said Elvesdon.
“Not much. There had been a succession of violent thunder-storms, and the face of the veldt was washed smooth by torrential rains. No spoor to be taken up.”
“By Jove, it’s a mysterious affair,” said Elvesdon. “How long ago was it, by the way?”
“Eighteen or nineteen years. He was arrested and kept in the tronk for some weeks, while every hole and corner of his farm was searched. They even dug up the cattle-kraals in search of remains—you know, Elvesdon, like that Moat Farm business in England a year or two ago—only of course in this case they found nothing. Thornhill half laughed when he was told of this, only saying that he had never for a moment imagined they would. Well of course, there was only one way out; for no one knows better than yourself that a man can’t be put upon his trial for murder until it is proved that a murder has been committed, which in this case it seemed impossible to do. So our friend was turned loose again.”
“Of course. But what of the general opinion. Was it believed he’d done it?”
“That’s just how it was. Not a man Jack or woman Jill but was firmly convinced of it, and for a long time he was practically boycotted. For the matter of that, even now they don’t get many visitors you may have noticed.”
“Yes. That has occurred to me. By the way. Vine, what about the children. How did the suspicion affect them as they grew up? Did they believe it?”
“The boys didn’t, but the strange and sad part of it is that the girl did, and does still.”
Elvesdon started.
“And—does still?” he echoed. “I see.”
Now the situation stood explained. Edala’s strange behaviour, the cold aloofness with which she treated her father, except at rare intervals. Heavens, what a ghastly shadow to lie between them! Yet, as it did so he, perhaps her behaviour was not altogether unnatural.
“The boys didn’t believe it?” he repeated.
“No—never. They grew up firmly refusing to believe it. They were fine youngsters. Jim, poor chap, was killed in the Matopos in ’96. He was the eldest. Hyland is broking at the Rand. By the way, Thornhill was telling me the other day that he expected him down on a visit.”
“Yes, I know. There was someone else he was expecting, an English relative. She wrote to him from Durban, inviting herself, and he wired her back to roll up as soon as she liked. Then he heard nothing more about her. By the Lord, I wonder,” he broke off. “I wonder if she got hold of this yam about him, and concluded to stop away. It might be.”
“So it might. But what I wonder at, Elvesdon, is that this affair should be all news to you. Why it caused some considerable kick up at the time.”
“At the time. That’s just it. It must have been during the couple of years I was over in England and the States.—Come in,” as a knock came at the door.
“Please sir,” said the native constable, who was proud of airing his English, “dere’s one lady—like see Nkose.”
“One lady? Look here Isaac. Do you mean a ‘lady’ or some bywoner vrouw, come for a summons against somebody?”
“Dis one lady, sir. She ask for Mr Elvesdon, not for de magistrate.”
“Oh, show her in. Don’t go, doctor, till we see what she wants.”