All this had happened ten years and more before the critical events of 1940. From time to time during that period little-credited reports reached England concerning a certain white prisoner in the hands of the Mahdi, who was believed by some to be none other than Renshaw, the missing man. But, except with a few, these rumours carried little weight. It was not the first time that tales of that sort had reached home after the disappearance of well-known men in remote regions of the Dark Continent. Many, recalling the explorations of Dr. Livingstone, and Stanley's expedition for the rescue of Emin Pasha, said that when Renshaw was found and brought home they would believe that he was alive—and not before.
Meanwhile, in England, Nicholas Jardine carried everything before him. The Constitutional Party, leaderless and disorganized, seemed to sink into helpless apathy, and right and left the rapid shrinkage of the British Empire bore witness to the ruinous success of new and revolutionary parties in the State. Sometimes, in the House of Commons, old followers of the Labour Leader's missing rival asked questions, which, for the moment, attracted marked attention and, in some minds, roused most sinister suspicions. Had the President received any information that tended to confirm the rumour that Mr. Renshaw was still living and undergoing the tortures of a barbarous imprisonment? Was it a fact that, after a specified date, the Government, or any members of it, had been notified, not only that Mr. Renshaw was alive, but that on payment of a ransom he might be restored to his country? Had any confidential information been received from certain oriental visitors who, from time to time, had come to this country? Was it, or was it not, a fact that certain periodical payments of large amount had been made out of secret service funds in relation to Mr. Renshaw and his alleged imprisonment?
These searching questions were evaded in the usual Parliamentary manner, and it was observed that never was President Jardine—such was his official title as chief of the new Council of State—so black and taciturn as when this suggestive topic was from time to time revived in Parliament.
A PRISONER OF THE MAHDI.
Through all those dreadful years Wilson Renshaw lived—lived day and night the tortured life of a white man at the mercy of the black. Year after year the iron entered his soul, even as the Mahdi's fetters ate into his swollen and bleeding limbs.
There were others who suffered with him in the barbaric prison-house. What he endured was no less, no more, than they were made to bear. Happy indeed were those whom death released from misery and anguish that tongue could never tell, nor pen describe. Hell itself, as pictured by maddest brain of the most fiendish fanatic, could not have shown greater resources in the way of physical and mental torture. The Black Hole of Calcutta lacked many of the special horrors of the inner den in which the prophet's prisoners were herded during all the awful hours of night. The bloodstained walls of the Tower of London, if walls could speak, whispering of the rack, the thumbscrew, and the boot, might tell indeed of sharper anguish, sooner over. The secret history of the Spanish Inquisition, if published, would reveal not less ingenuity—perhaps greater, in the refined subtleties of cruelty. But the prison at Khartum excelled them all at least in one respect—the prolongation of the agony inflicted.
Not for weeks or months, but for years, if life endured, the prisoner had to suffer. Wearing three sets of shackles, with an iron ring round his neck, to which was attached a heavy chain, Renshaw—the White Kaffir—the man of culture and social ease in London, but here the reviled unbeliever, when night came was thrust into a stone-walled room measuring some thirty feet each way. A large pillar, supporting the roof, reduced the space available. Two prisoners, in chains, were dying of smallpox in a corner; some thirty others, suffering from various diseases, lay about the floor, which reeked with filth and swarmed with vermin. A compound stench, sickening and over-powering, assailed the nostrils, and every moment this increased as more prisoners, and yet more, were driven in for the night. The groans of the sick, the screams of the mad, the curses of others as they fought fiercely for places against one or another of the walls, blended in awful tumult as the door was closed upon the darkness within. Yet again and again that door was opened, and more prisoners were crowded in; until, at last, they fought and bit and raved even for standing room.