CHAPTER XI.
For some time after the lawyer had left the house, the letter lay unheeded at Agnes's feet. She could only say to herself, “The pity of it! The pity of it!” as her eyes overflowed with tears. It seemed very pitiful to her to see lying there the letter which the man to whom it was addressed would never see. She thought of the gladness which receiving that letter would have brought into the life that had passed away. Not for a single moment did she feel jealous because it had arrived in England unaccompanied by any letter to herself. She felt that it was fitting that the first letter written by Claude since his return to civilisation—such civilisation as was represented by the sending and receiving of letters—should be to the brother whom he loved so well.
It was some time before she could take it up and open the cover. When at last she did so, standing at the window leading into her garden to catch all the light that remained in the sky, she failed to detect any but the most distant resemblance in the handwriting to Claude's, as she had known it. But as she read the first words her tears began to flow once more, and she could only press the letter to her lips and say, “Thank God, thank God, for allowing me to see his handwriting once more!”
The letter was not a long one. The writer assumed that his brother would think that he was reading a message from another world. “And by Heaven you won't be so far wrong, old boy,” he wrote, “for I don't suppose any human being ever went so near as I did to the border-line of that undiscovered country without passing over into the land of shadows.”
He then went on to give a brief sketch of the massacre of all the members of the expedition with the exception of himself, and to tell how he had been not merely held in captivity by the strange tribes whom they had met, but promoted to the position of a god by them, owing to the accident of his having found his way into a sacred cave, after taking the precaution to knock out the brains of the two witch doctors who had previously killed every native who had attempted to enter. The position of a god he found great difficulty in living up to, he said, for the gods of that nation Were carefully guarded lest they should make a try for the liberty of an ordinary layman.
In short, the letter gave a résumé of the writer's terrible hardships when living as the captive of one of the most barbarous of African savage tribes. For nearly eight years he had lived as a savage, and when at last he contrived to escape, he had spent another six months wandering from forest to forest of the interior, in almost a naked condition, and with no weapon except a knife, which had once belonged to Baines, the explorer, and had been given by him to a friendly native when painting the falls of the Zambesi. When at the point of starving he had been fortunate enough to come in contact with an ivory hunter on his way to Uganda, where they had arrived together.
“If you only knew the difficulty I have in holding a pen you would give me unlimited praise for writing so long a letter instead of confounding me—as I fear you will—for being so brief. The chap who takes this to the coast for me will not fail to make as much as he can out of my story for transmission to the papers, so that the chances are that you will have got plenty of news about me by cable a fortnight or so before you get this.”
The writer did not indulge in any more sentimental passages than may be found in the letter of any average Englishman who writes to a brother after taking part in a campaign in a distant country, or fighting his way through savages in the hope of opening up a new land for English trade—and occasionally German.
Only as a postscript he had written: