But Annie made no reply. She turned abruptly away, walked slowly down the red carpeted stairs of the hotel, and never once looked back. It was done—it was all over! Useless to attempt to dissuade him—he was as wax in the hands of his parent.
Annie travelled to Battsbridge, a changed woman, and shut herself up in her dismal house for many weeks. From time to time—through the neighbours’ talk—she heard that Cecil Brandon was doing capitally in the Congo, had been promoted to a post in the rubber district, far up in the Interior, exerted a wonderful influence on the natives, and had achieved success at last!
Eight months had elapsed, when the district was electrified by the news of his death. A brief telegram announced that he had been suddenly carried off by a virulent fever, prevalent in the jungle. His mother was prostrate and inconsolable; but by and by she roused herself sufficiently to dispatch a beautiful white marble tombstone to be erected over Cecil’s grave. The common grief had not drawn her and her neighbour any closer together; on the contrary, Annie was now a hard, hopeless, embittered creature, who burnt with inextinguishable rage against a mother who had murdered her son. Oh, that she could punish her! Oh, that she might avenge him! Vainly and vainly did she cast about in search of a weapon. At last—she found it!
Miss Fleude, who was now comfortably off, expended a good deal of money on books, magazines, and journals; and, since Cecil had been in Africa, had subscribed to many African papers. By chance an ill-printed West Coast “rag” fell into her hands, and there she found, with other weird information, a terrible story of cannibalism—in which no ghastly detail was spared.
It appeared that a certain unpopular, tyrannical overseer had visited an outlying village; that in the jungle, on his return towards headquarters, he had become mysteriously separated from his escort, and some of the natives, finding him, seized and carried him off, a prisoner. These happened to be of the Lokele, a tribe of well-known river cannibals, who wore necklaces of the teeth of those whom they had eaten. Such had been unquestionably the fate of the unfortunate official, whose boots and pocket-book were found, and whose name it had been proved was “C. Brandon.”
When the agonised reader had come to the end of this description, she fainted dead away, and was subsequently confined to her bed for a whole week. At the end of the week Miss Fleude had recovered her strength, renewed her animosity, and rekindled her hatred; she marked the terrible paragraph with three crosses in ink, folded the paper neatly, and then addressed and posted it to her next-door neighbour.
It had even more than the desired effect!
Shortly after the postman’s arrival the following morning, a grating shriek rang through the house, and when the servants ran to see what had happened, they found Mrs. Brandon lying back in her chair, with staring open eyes, quite dead—with the fatal journal clenched in her hands.
Miss Fleude still continues to reside at Battsbridge; she is kind and charitable to the poor, but holds herself coldly aloof from her neighbours, who, to tell the truth, are secretly afraid of the lady, and no longer speak of her as “Gentle Annie.”