A Yellow God: An Idol of Africa

by H. Rider Haggard

At eleven o’clock on that same morning, for he had slept late, Alan rose from his breakfast and went to smoke his pipe at the open door of the beautiful old hall in Yarleys that was clad with brown Elizabethan oak for which any dealer would have given hundreds of pounds. It was a charming morning, one of those that comes to us sometimes in an English April when the air is soft like that of Italy and the smell of the earth rises like that of incense, and little clouds float idly across a sky of tender blue. Standing thus he looked out upon the park where the elms already showed a tinge of green and the ash-buds were coal black. Only the walnuts and the great oaks, some of them pollards of a thousand years of age, remained stark and stern in their winter dress.

Alan was in a reflective mood and involuntarily began to wonder how many of his forefathers had stood in that same spot upon such April mornings and looked out upon those identical trees wakening in the breath of spring. Only the trees and the landscape knew, those trees which had seen every one of them borne to baptism, to bridal and to burial. The men and women themselves were forgotten. Their portraits, each in the garb of his or her generation, hung here and there upon the walls of the ancient house which once they had owned or inhabited, but who remembered anything of them to-day? In many cases their names even were lost, for believing that they, so important in their time, could never sink into oblivion, they had not thought it necessary to record them upon their pictures.

And now the thing was coming to an end. Unless in this way or in that he could save it, what remained of the old place, for the outlying lands had long since been sold, must go to the hammer and become the property of some pushing and successful person who desired to found a family, and perhaps in days to be would claim these very pictures that hung upon the walls as those of his own ancestors, declaring that he had brought in the estate because he was a relative of the ancient and ruined race.

Well, it was the way of the world, and perhaps it must be so, but the thought of it made Alan Vernon sad. If he could have continued that business, it might have been otherwise. By this hour his late partners, Sir Robert Aylward and Mr. Champers-Haswell, were doubtless sitting in their granite office in the City, probably in consultation with Lord Specton, who had taken his place upon the Board of the great Company which was being subscribed that day. No doubt applications for shares were pouring in by the early posts and by telegram, and from time to time Mr. Jeffreys respectfully reported their number and amount, while Sir Robert looked unconcerned and Mr. Haswell rubbed his hands and whistled cheerfully. Almost he could envy them, these men who were realizing great fortunes amidst the bustle and excitement of that fierce financial life, whilst he stood penniless and stared at the trees and the ewes which wandered among them with their lambs, he who, after all his work, was but a failure. With a sigh he turned away to fetch his cap and go out walking—there was a tenant whom he must see, a shifty, new-fangled kind of man who was always clamouring for fresh buildings and reductions in his rent. How was he to pay for more buildings? He must put him off, or let him go.

Just then a sharp sound caught his ear, that of an electric bell. It came from the telephone which, since he had been a member of a City firm, he had caused to be put into Yarleys at considerable expense in order that he might be able to communicate with the office in London. “Were they calling him up from force of habit?” he wondered. He went to the instrument which was fixed in a little room he used as a study, and took down the receiver.

“Who is it?” he asked. “I am Yarleys. Alan Vernon.”

“And I am Barbara,” came the answer. “How are you, dear? Did you sleep well?”

“No, very badly.”

“Nerves—Alan, you have got nerves. Now although I had a worse day than you did, I went to bed at nine, and protected by a perfect conscience, slumbered till nine this morning, exactly twelve hours. Isn’t it clever of me to think of this telephone, which is more than you would ever have done? My uncle has departed to London vowing that no letter from you shall enter this house, but he forgot that there is a telephone in every room, and in fact at this moment I am speaking round by his office within a yard or two of his head. However, he can’t hear, so that doesn’t matter. My blessing be on the man who invented telephones, which hitherto I have always thought an awful nuisance. Are you feeling cheerful, Alan?”

“Very much the reverse,” he answered; “never was more gloomy in my life, not even when I thought I had to die within six hours of blackwater fever. Also I have lots that I want to talk to you about and I can’t do it at the end of this confounded wire that your uncle may be tapping.”