Well, After All--

by Frank Frankfort Moore

The man had behaved cruelly toward her, for he should have known that she was not as other women. It was the feeling that the man was not worthy of her that caused Sir Percival Hope his only misgiving. He wondered if he himself had chanced to meet Agnes before she had known Claude Westwood, what would her life have been—what would his life have been?

He stood in the road and tried to form a picture of their life—of their lives joined together so as to make one life.

He hurried on. The picture was too bright to be looked upon. He found it easier to think of the picture which had been before his eyes when he had looked back hearing her voice calling him—the picture of a beautiful pale woman, with one hand leaning on the trellis-work of the porch, while the roses drooped down to her hair.

“The cruelty of it—the cruelty of it!” he groaned, as he hurried on to perform his mission.

And these were the very words that Agnes Mowbray was moaning at the same instant, as she fell on her knees beside the sofa in her dressing-room. This was all the prayer that her lips could frame at that moment.

“The cruelty of it! The cruelty of it!” That was the result of all her thoughts of the past years that she had spent in waiting.

She and God knew what those years had been—the years that had robbed her of her youth, that had planted those grey hairs where the soft brown had been. All the past seemed unfolded in front of her like a scroll. She thought of her parting from her lover on that chill October day, when every breeze sent the leaves flying in crisp flakes through the air. Not a tear did she shed while she was saying that farewell to him. She had carried herself bravely—yes, as she stood beside the privet hedge and waved her hand to him on the road on which he was driving to catch the train; but when she had returned to the house and her father had put his arm round her, she was not quite so self-possessed. Her tears came in a torrent all at once, and she cried out for him to come back to her.

He had not come back to her. Through the long desolate years that had been her cry; but he had not come back to her. Oh! the desolation of those years that followed! At first she had received many letters from him. So long as he was in touch with some form of civilisation, however rudimentary it was, he had written to her; but then the letters became few and irregular. He could only trust that one out of every six that he wrote would reach her, he said, for he only wrote on the chance of meeting an elephant-hunter or a slave-raider going to the coast who would take a letter for him—for a consideration. She had not the least objection to receive a letter, even though it had been posted by the red hand of the half-caste slave-raider.

But afterwards the letters ceased altogether. She tried to find courage in the reflection that the rascally men who had been entrusted with the letters had flung them away, or perhaps they had been killed or had died naturally before reaching the coast. Only for a time did she find some comfort in thus accounting for the absence of all news regarding him. At the end of a year she read in a newspaper an article in which the writer assumed that all hope for the safety of Claude Westwood had been abandoned. The writer of the article was clearly an expert in African exploration. He was ready to quote instance after instance since the days of Hanno, of explorers who had dared too much and had been cut off—some by what he called the legitimate enemies of pioneers, namely, disease and privation, others by that cruelty which has its habitation in the dark places of the earth, and nowhere in greater abundance than in the dark places of the Dark Continent.

She recollected what her feelings had been as she read that article and scores of other articles, dealing with the disappearance of Claude Westwood. She had not broken down. Her father had pointed out to her the extraordinary mistakes so easily made by the experts who wrote on the subject of Claude Westwood's disappearance; and if they were able to bring forward instances of the loss of intrepid men who had set out in the hope of adding to the world's knowledge of the world, the Admiral was able to give quite as many instances of the safe return of explorers who had been given up for lost. Thus she and her father kept up each other's hopes until the question of Claude's safety ceased to be even alluded to in the press as a topic of the day.