“What have I to gain by making it up? Have I not rather to gain by not telling it? Go home, Untúswa, and be happy with your new wives; they are young and bright-eyed, and round, as I was once. Yau! Rest content now you know Lalusini can never return. A returning inkosikazi is not always welcome; ha, ha!”
I stood gazing at her in silence, and the old hag went on.
“Yet it is better to lose an inkosikazi, if by that loss you sit in the seat of a King! Ah, ah! Untúswa; there will be food for the alligators then.”
“Meanwhile they shall have some now. You have lived too long, Gegesa, and you know too much. I trust not that croaking old tongue. This is the price I pay for thy news—the price it is worth.”
So saying, I picked her up by her ragged old blanket where it was knotted round her, and before she had time to utter a cry, tossed her clean over the brink of the rock. I heard the splash in the water beneath, and without troubling to look over, I turned away.
With the blood-wave surging around my brain, I strode quickly onward. Now the mystery of Lalusini’s disappearance was a mystery no more. Any last hope I might have clung to that she might one day reappear was shattered. She had died as my first inkosikazi had died, a death of horror and of blood. Whau! but other blood should flow—should flow in rivers—before many days had gone by. When the King had rid me of Nangeza I had been well pleased, for her pestilent tongue and evil temper had gone far towards rendering life a weariness; but I had lived even longer with Lalusini than with Nangeza, but so far from doing aught that should cause my love for her to decrease, Lalusini had taken care that it should grow instead.
By the time I reached my kraal, night had fallen. Entering my large hut, I called for Jambúla the slave who had been with me in the slaying of the ghost-bull. By birth Jambúla was of the Amaxosa, a numerous and warlike people whose land is to the southward, as you know, Nkose. When a young man his family had been “eaten up” by order of its chief; and he, narrowly escaping with is life, had at last found refuge with a tribe of Basuti, among whom we had captured him. And now I knew that if there was one man upon whose fidelity I could entirely reckon, that man was Jambúla.
Having made sure that none could overhear us, to him now I opened the plot. His face lighted up with joy as he listened.
“To-morrow, by this time, we shall both be ghosts in the shadow world, or I sit in the seat of Umzilikazi, and you among the izinduna of this nation. How like you that, Jambúla?”
“If you are dead, my father, I too am dead,” he answered. “Not too soon, either, is it to strike, for my eyes and ears have not been closed in these days, nor have those of the Great Great One. It is his life or ours. The time when this place shall awaken hemmed in by the spear-points of the slayers is but a question of a few nights more or less.”