"Then," she said slowly, "one can only tell you to go. Some time, perhaps, you will come back again?"
She rose, and Ormsgill with an effort stood up awkwardly, and taking the hand she held out held it a moment. "I do not know," he said with a faint trace of hoarseness. "It is not often possible for one to do what one would wish, and there are—duties—laid on me. Still, if it should be possible—" He broke off for a moment, and then went on again in a different tone very quietly, "In the meanwhile I must thank you. I owe you a good deal."
He watched her go down the stairway, and then leaned on the balustrade for awhile wondering vaguely what would have happened if he had flung off all restraint and let himself go. He did not know that while he was nearest to doing so Benicia Figuera had laid a restraint on him, and that had she permitted it he would have rushed headlong to a fall. There are times when the strength of a usually resolute man is apt to prove a snare to him. Then he sat down wearily in the canvas chair again, and when the land breeze swept through the city that night he and his handful of carriers slipped quietly out of it.
CHAPTER XXIII
THE SLACKENING OF RESTRAINT
A half moon had just sailed up above the shoulder of a hill, and its pale light streamed into the veranda of the little mission house which stood in a rift of the great scarp where the high inland plateau breaks down to the levels of the sun-scorched littoral. The barren hillslopes round about it were streaked with belts of gleaming sand, and above them scrubby forests, destitute of anything that man or beast could eat, rolled back to the vast marshes of the western watershed, but the bottom of the deep valley was green and fertile as a garden. It had, however, only been made so by patient labor, for even in the tropics there is no escape from the primeval ban. It is by somebody's tense effort that man is provided with his daily bread, and where he labors least he lives most like the animals, for nature unsubdued is very rarely bountiful. She sends thorns and creepers to choke the young plantations, and the forest invades the clearing when the planter stays his hand. But in Western Africa the white man sees that the negro fights the ceaseless battle for him. It is, in his opinion, what the black man was made for, and those who know by what methods he obtains and controls his dusky laborers in certain tracts of the dark land wonder now and then why such things are permitted and if there will never be a reckoning. That is, however, only one aspect of a very old question, and it is admittedly difficult to be an optimist in Africa.
Still, there was, for the time being, at least, quietness and good will in that lonely rift among the hills, and Nares, sitting on the mission house veranda in the moonlight, felt its beneficent influence, though he was suffering from that most exasperating thing the prickly heat, which had, as it frequently does, followed a slight attack of fever. Two patient men from his own country sat with him, and it was clear that their toil had not been in vain. He could see the sprinkling of white blossom on the trees beneath him that bore green limes, and beyond these were rows of mangoes, coffee plants, and sweet potato vines, but the huts of the dusky converts were silent and hidden among the leaves. There was no sound but the soft murmur of running water. A deep serenity brooded over it all.
"A garden!" he said. "In this country one could call it a garden of the Lord."
The elder of his two companions smiled, for he had shrewdness as well as faith.
"Thanks in part, at least, to our mountain wall," he said. "We lie several leagues from the only road, and that is not a much frequented one. There is, most fortunately, little commerce in this strip of country, and the great roads lie as you know far to the south of us. Still, I sometimes wonder how we have been left alone so long, and we have had our warnings."