Kate Meredith, Financier

by Charles John Cutcliffe Wright Hyne

But to Kate, who knew her West Africa by heart, it was all dull enough reading till he came to almost the last paragraph.

"It is by a peculiar irony," the type report read, "that an agreement should recently have been come to by which the notorious King of Okky promises to discontinue his practice of human sacrifice. It is six-and-twenty years since I first went out to West Africa, and my immediate superior then was Major Meredith. He was a man of the highest ideals, and we all thought of tremendous capabilities. He saw what was wanted on the spot, and carried out his theories with small enough regard for ignorant criticism at home. By the exercise of tremendous personal influence, and at a fearful risk, he made his way to Okky City itself, saw its unspeakable horrors, and made a treaty with the then king. In return for certain concessions the king was to come under British protection, and of course give up objectionable practices. Well, I don't know whether there are any of the Anti-British party here, but I daresay most of you will think that the addition of a quarter of a million of square miles of rich country to the empire was no mean gift. Ladies and gentlemen, you little know what the Government was then. 'Perish West Africa' was one of their many creeds, and with Exeter—" [here the reporter had written the word "Disturbance," and evidently missed the next few sentences]—"I don't care whether you like it or whether you are decently ashamed, the thing's true. They refused to ratify the treaty, and my poor chief was censured for exceeding instructions. Well, the backers of the high-minded potentate, as I believe they called themselves, got their way, and I wish they were not too ignorant to realize what their mean little action caused in human lives. Putting the human sacrifice in Okky City at the very low estimate of eight thousand a year, in five-and-twenty years that brings the figure up to two hundred thousand black men and women whose blood lies at the door of those unctuous hypocrites who made it their business to break Major Meredith because he was an Imperialist."

Again the reporter put in the word "Disturbance," but he apparently managed to catch the next sentence. "Aye, you may yap," the old administrator went on, "and I dare say from the snug looks of some of you you're own sons of the men who did it, and I hope you feel the weight of their bloodguiltiness. Two hundred thousand lives, gentlemen, and all thrown away to pander to the fads of some ignorant theorists who had never been beyond the shores of England. If Major Meredith could have held out against the clamor, I believe that he would have been a man to stand beside Clive, and Rhodes, and Hastings, in the work he would have done for the Empire; but as it was he left the service in disgust, and drifted away into the savage depths of that Africa he knew so well, and had so vainly tried to help. His wife went with him, and, so I heard, bore him a daughter before she died. A rumor reached me that some trader brought the child to England and adopted her, but poor Meredith—well, he has disappeared from the record...."

The lecture closed, a few paragraphs farther on, again with "Disturbance."

Kate folded the sheets and put them on the table. She was somehow conscious of a queer thrill of elation. One of the discomforts that an adopted child who does not know her history must always carry through life, is the feeling of having been bred of parents that were probably discreditable. She had vague memories of her babyhood. There was a village of thatched houses and shade trees. She had clear recollection of one day playing in the dust with the village dogs and the other babies—black babies, they were—when a huge spotted beast sprang amongst them, roared, and for a moment stood over her, the white baby. At intervals she had dreamed of that beast ever since. From maturer knowledge she knew it must have been a leopard, and leopards do not grow beyond a certain normal size. But in dreamland that leopard was always enormous.... She could never remember whether in the dusty village street under the heat and the sunshine it had done damage, or whether the pariah dogs had frightened it away.

Try how she would, she could remember no mother. The women of the village were all black, and she lived, so faint memory said, first with one and then with another. She had no clear recollection of any of them.... And, indeed, there might have been many villages, because there were hammock journeys, with a pet monkey riding on the pole, and walls of thick green bush on either hand that held dangers.... She still had a scar just below the nail on the first finger of her right hand where the monkey bit her one day when she teased it.

But plainest of all these dim pictures of the memory was one of a white man who at rare intervals came into the scene and took her on his knee. He had iron-gray hair and beard which were shaggy and matted, and he always had a pipe between his lips and a glittering eye-glass on a black watered-silk ribbon for her to play with. Furthermore, he always brought some present when he came to see her, and gave another present also, if he was pleased, to the black women with whom she lived. It was he who hung round her neck the Aggry bead that she still had locked away in the bottom tray of her jewel case.

She remembered this man with a vague kindness. But if Godfrey O'Neill cut her off from him with such completeness it must have been for some profoundly good reason. Uncle Godfrey had been far from squeamish. Uncle Godfrey in his lazy way stuck to friends when everybody else voted them far outside the pale. And therefore, she had argued, the iron-gray haired man with the eyeglass must have done something peculiarly disgraceful.

That he was her father she was entirely sure. Occasionally she had tried to argue with herself that she was little more than a babe when she saw him last, and was no judge, and that possibly the iron-gray man was her father's friend. But something stronger than mere human reason always rose up in arms against such a suggestion.

Sir Edward's halting lecture had roused up one recollection in her head that heretofore had persistently eluded her. A thousand times in those dreams of Africa, and the hot villages, and the pet monkey with its red seed necklace, and all the other old dim scenes, she had on the tip of her memory the name of the iron-gray man with the eyeglass, and a thousand times she had missed catching it by the smallest hair. In a flash it came back—he was Meredith.