III
It was past midnight when the stillness of the night was broken by the sound of Africans grunting beneath a burden and the clatter of many tongues. In the front of the mission there was a great commotion and M‘Crae roused Eva from her sleep. Now that the game of secrecy was over there seemed to be no point in concealment; and Eva was far too sleepy to question what he did. They stepped out together into the pale night. The sky was very high and clear, but immense billows of milky cloud were ranged along the hill horizons, which in their huge whiteness overpowered the little earth. Beneath the stoep a crowd of Waluguru were setting up a kelele. Most of them were naked and their polished skins shone in the moonlight. They swarmed like black ants about a piece of carrion, and the body which they had dragged from the forest to the mission was that of James, bleeding and torn by the thorns of the bush and smothered in red dust. Hamisi, who appeared to be in charge of the expedition, was loud and anxious in explanation.
“Hapana kufa. . . . He isn’t dead,” he hastened to tell them. Sakharani, he said, had sent him home. He had been found unconscious in the forest: even now he was unconscious, but breathing, and alive.
Now, at any rate, he had little chance of air, so completely was he surrounded by the sweating Waluguru. M‘Crae told them to go back to the forest. Already Eva was kneeling at her brother’s side, while the boy Hamisi, pleased with the importance of his mission, grinned and repeated the words: “Hapana kufa. . . . Hapana kufa. . . . He isn’t dead.”
He wasn’t dead, but, for all that, a very ghastly sight. His face was deadly pale and smeared with the blood that had trickled from a split in the skin above his right eyebrow. His right eye was full of blood. The blow must have stunned him fairly effectually, or else the rough journey would have awakened him.
“We must get him into the house,” said M‘Crae. He saw Eva help Hamisi to lift him and cursed his own maimed strength. It was beautiful of her, he thought, that she should consent to do such things. They lifted him and dragged him to his own room, and laid him on the bed. Eva brought a bowl of water from the kitchen and bathed his head. M‘Crae, miserably helpless, questioned Hamisi.
Bwana N’gombe (James), he said, had been found in the forest near Kilima ja Mweze. The cut on the head was nothing. Perhaps he had fallen against a tree. Perhaps a leopard had torn him. They had found him lying in the grass. Lying asleep. Even now he was asleep. Hamisi relapsed again into his monotonous “Hapana kufa. . . . Hapana kufa.” Perhaps he had gone to sleep for want of blood. Perhaps a devil had done it. He knew nothing whatever about it. He only knew that the man had been picked up asleep in the grass and that Sakharani had told them to carry him home. And here he was. Hamisi grinned, being satisfied that he had taken part in an excellent piece of work.
All the time that M‘Crae was questioning the Waluguru he had his eye on Eva. He watched the splendid way (as he thought) in which she suddenly adapted herself to the demands of the moment. Once again, as on the night when he had staggered out to waylay her, she was showing him her deft, practical side: the aspect which appeals most strongly to a man who has made a woman the vehicle of a tender ideal. It reminded him of that first night. It pleased him that it should do so, and so he kept Hamisi talking, and tried lovingly to recover the atmosphere of their first meeting, thinking: “You wonderful woman . . .”
He packed Hamisi off to bed in his smoky hole. He and Eva together stripped James of his torn and muddy clothes.
“You see he has been through the swamp,” he said.
It pleased him to find that he could use his arm with very little discomfort now, and the sense of helplessness which had lain upon him so heavily in the banda disappeared. It was difficult to realise that he had led the life of a prisoner in a dungeon for a month. And Eva, too, was amazed at the help which he gave her, for she had grown to think of him as a helpless and pitiable creature. When she had started to undress James she had not imagined that the task would be so difficult. The weight of his unconscious body surprised her. A poor, thin creature, wasted by fever . . . he looked as though she could easily pick him up in her arms. But she couldn’t. Even with the help of M‘Crae it was a struggle.
“It’s no good wasting your strength,” he said. “You’d better slit up the sleeve.” So she went to her room and fetched a pair of scissors, and then M‘Crae found himself watching her slim, capable fingers again.
“I won’t leave you now,” he said, and was rewarded by her smile.
They sat there for a long time together, speaking in whispers, as if they were afraid of waking James, although, in fact, they were most anxious that he should wake. It was a very strange night for M‘Crae. Removed at last from the gloom of the banda, it seemed to him that he had never really seen Eva before. In this light and spacious room she was quite a different creature from the gentle presence which had haunted his prison; endowed, in some way, with a more beautiful freedom of movement . . . more alive. More hopelessly unattainable. But it was ridiculous on the face of it that she should occur to him in these terms. He thrust the fancy aside obstinately, only to find it obstinately return. For why in the world should he not enjoy this brief interlude of beauty and light, seeing that in a very little time, a few days . . . perhaps a few hours, he himself must vanish altogether into a darkness from which he would never emerge? For, without any doubt, he must kill Godovius. There was no way out of that.
At length, a little time before the dawn, when the night was at its coldest, James stirred in his bed. His hand uncertainly sought his bandaged head, and Eva very tenderly guided it downwards and laid it beneath the blanket. The movement was an immense relief to both of them. Neither of them spoke; and yet M‘Crae could see that a shadow had been lifted from her face.
And now James became increasingly restless. Once or twice he gave a groan of pain, and then a deep sigh, almost a sigh of content. He tried to lift himself up in the bed, though Eva gently restrained him. At last he spoke.
“I must have left it behind . . . in the church . . . it is so light.”
He tried to open his eyes. M‘Crae could see his brows wrinkling beneath the bandage. “Too light . . .” he said.
M‘Crae moved the lamp further away from the bed. His footsteps disturbed James.
“Who’s that? . . . There’s somebody there,” he said. “Oh, my poor head . . . my poor head.”
Eva laid her hand lightly upon his forehead. “It’s all right, dear, don’t worry,” she said.
For a little while he was contented; but then he said again: “There’s someone else in the room. . . . Who is it? He isn’t here, is he?”
Even in this dazed condition he was typically persistent.
“There’s somebody there . . . who is it? You’re keeping it from me. It isn’t fair. Who is it?”
Eva’s voice trembled as she answered. She was listening to her own voice.
“It’s only a friend,” she said.
“A friend? . . . We have no friends.”
“A stranger. A Mr. M‘Crae. A hunter who was lost near here and came to the mission.”
There followed a long silence. She was dreading what would come next. To her relief she found that he was treating it as a matter of course.
He said: “Oh . . . all right. My head does ache so.”
For the first time Eva breathed freely. No doubt it was strange that she should be so relieved; but the difficulty which she had dreaded most in James’ awakening had been his discovery of M‘Crae’s presence. From the very first she had wondered how he would take it. She had feared that his peculiarly jealous regard for all strangers, a thing which he had overcome with difficulty in his youth, would be too much for him. The anticipation of this had been bad enough; but after her interview with Godovius, and his most hateful insinuations, she had felt that James would be almost justified in thinking the worst of her, and that she could have no defence to offer which wouldn’t sound like the flimsiest excuse. But the pain in James’ head asserted itself too cruelly for him to think of anything else for the moment. He accepted the presence of M‘Crae as nothing more than a curiosity, and the little that she told him seemed to satisfy him. A little later, when his enhavocked brain began to clear a little, the horror of the night before, which had been mercifully forgotten, stole back again. Suddenly, as he lay there, with his hand in Eva’s, he was shaken by a fit of sobbing. At the best of times the sight of a grown man so tortured is terrible. And he was Eva’s brother. The one emotion with which she had habitually regarded him was that of pity. Now her compassion was overwhelming. She would have given anything in the world to be able to soothe him. He was clutching so hard at the hand in which his own had lain that he actually hurt her. M‘Crae saw her bending over James. He stepped through the open window out on the clammy stoep.
“You poor, poor dear,” he heard her say. “Is your head so bad?”
James spoke chokingly through his sobs.
“The pain’s nothing . . . nothing. I’ve only just awakened . . . remembered. Eva, I’ve been in hell. There can’t be anything worse in hell. I’d forgotten. Oh, my God, my God. I shall never forget again. My God. . . . My God . . .” And he started crying again.
She could do nothing with him. Her own helplessness amazed her. At times the storm of sobs would cease; but even then the light of his reason shone balefully. The words which he spoke were disconnected, and all were madly tinged with the remembrance of horror. Again and again he would say that he had been in hell, in the uttermost hell. And then his fancy would suddenly be taken with the idea of fire. “Look,” he cried, “look, they’re bringing dry wood to the fire. The heat . . . think of the heat. . . . Seven times heated. Nothing could live. The stones are white-hot. Oh, God . . . God . . . can you see it?” Then he would scream: “They’re coming . . . they’re coming . . .” and clutch at his head and grip Eva’s hand; and she would grip his in her turn, as though the consciousness of her nearness and her strength might help his lonely spirit. Once, indeed, she found that he was stroking her hand. He had never done such a thing before, and the action brought tears to her eyes. But it was not Eva, of whom he was thinking. He said: “Mother . . . dear mother.” In a little while the violence and frequency of his fits of sobbing abated. He babbled less wildly, and fell at last, as she thought, into a state that resembled sleep. Indeed, she would have left him if his fingers had not been still clutching her hand. Thus they waited, until in the hour before their sudden dawn a rain-bird sang. The sound was doubly sweet to Eva, for she knew that the daylight was at hand, and in daylight she need not be so frightened. But with the dawn she heard another sound. And the sleeper heard it in his dreams, for he surprised her by leaping up in bed, with terror in his grey face. “The drums . . .” he said. “Do you hear them? The drums of hell.”