Entering the hut I found Smellie on his knees beside the lifeless body of Daphne.
“Too late, Hawkesley! you were just too late to save this poor devoted girl,” he murmured. “Only a few seconds earlier, and you would have been in time to arrest the murderous blow. She is quite dead; indeed her death must have been instantaneous. See, the blade of the javelin is quite a foot long, and it was completely buried in her body; it must have passed clean through her heart. Poor girl! she was indeed faithful unto death, for it was my life that yonder murderous wretch thirsted for. You doubtless recognised him—the fetish-man who strove so hard to terrify us on the night of the sacrifice in the village! I am convinced that, in his anger and chagrin at our escape, he has patiently hunted us down, determined to make us feel his vengeance in one way if he failed in the other. Poor Daphne clearly read his intention, I am sure; and it was her resistance, her defence of poor helpless me, that brought this cruel death upon her. Well, God’s will be done! The poor girl was only an ignorant savage, and it is hardly possible that she can ever have heard His holy name mentioned; but for all that she had pity upon the stranger and him who had no helper, and I cannot but believe that she will therefore receive her full reward. It only remains now to so dispose of her body that it shall be secure from violation by the birds of the air and the beasts of the field. But how is that to be done?”
He might well ask. We had neither shovel nor any other appliance wherewith to dig a grave, and it was obviously impossible to do so with our bare hands alone. We at length decided to burn both the bodies, and I forthwith set about the construction of a funeral pyre. Fortunately, we had the forest close at hand; the ground beneath the trees was abundantly strewn with dry leaves, twigs, and branches, and thus I had not far to go for fuel. By the time that darkness closed in I had accumulated a goodly pile close to the edge of the open amphitheatre, and thither I at length conveyed both the bodies, laid them on the top of the pyre, and finally ignited the heap of dried leaves which I had arranged in the centre.
This done, Smellie came out of the hut, and we stood side by side mournfully watching the crematory process. Naturally, we were very keenly distressed at the untimely and tragic fate which had overtaken our staunch little friend Daphne. She had been so cheerful, so helpful, and—particularly during Smellie’s illness—so tender, so gentle, so sympathetic, and so tireless in her ministrations, that, unconsciously to ourselves, we had acquired for her quite a fraternal affection. As I stood there watching the fierce, bright flames which were steadily reducing her body to ashes, and recalled to mind the countless services she had rendered us during the short period of our mutual wanderings, and, above all, the fervent compassion which had moved her to a voluntary and permanent abandonment of home and friends for the sake of two helpless strangers of a race entirely alien to her own, my heart felt as though it would burst with sorrow at her cruel fate. As for Smellie, trembling with weakness and depressed in spirits as he was after his recent sharp attack of fever, he completely broke down, and, laying his head upon my shoulder, sobbed like a child. Poor Daphne! it seemed hard that she should thus, in the first bright flush and glory of her maidenhood, be struck down, and the light of her life extinguished by the ruthless hand of a murderer; and yet, perhaps, after all, it was better so, better that she should enjoy the bliss of laying down her life for the sake of the man she loved, rather than that, living on, she should see the day when all the vague, indefinite hopes and aspirations of her innocent, unsophisticated heart would crumble into ashes in a moment, and the man who, all unknowingly, had become the autocrat of her fate and the recipient of her blind, passionate, unreasoning love should lightly and smilingly bid her an eternal farewell.
At length the fire died down: the crematory process was completed; nothing remained of the pyre and its burden but a smouldering heap of grey, flaky ashes; and we returned sorrowfully to our hut, there to forget in sleep, if we could, the grievous loss we had sustained.
The painful incident of Daphne’s death produced so distressing an effect upon Smellie in his feeble condition that another week passed away before he was sufficiently recovered to admit of our resuming our journey. By the end of that time, however, his strength had in some measure returned, and a feverish anxiety to get away from the scene of the tragedy having taken possession of him, we made what few preparations we had it in our power to make and got under weigh directly after breakfast on one of the most delightful mornings it has ever been my good fortune to witness.
Our progress was, of course, painfully slow; but by this time speed was a matter of merely secondary importance, since we knew that we must long since have been given up by our shipmates as dead; and that the Daphne was, in all probability, hundreds of miles away in an unknown direction. It was quite possible that on reaching the river’s mouth we might have to wait weeks, or even months, before she would again make her appearance and give us an opportunity to rejoin.
Day after day we plodded on through the glorious forest, following no pathway, but shaping a course as directly west as circumstances would permit, meeting with no incidents worthy of mention, picking up a sufficient subsistence without much trouble, our way beguiled by glorious prospects of wood and river, and our curiosity fed by the countless strange glimpses into the secrets of nature afforded us as we wended our way through that lonely wilderness. We slept well at night in spite of the babel of sounds which rose and fell around us; awoke in the morning refreshed and hungry; and so entered upon another day. The life was by no means one of hardship; and what was most important of all, Smellie was slowly but steadily regaining strength and progressing toward recovery.
At length, late in the afternoon of the fifth day from that which had witnessed the resumption of our journey, our wanderings came unexpectedly to an end, for a time at least, by our stumbling, in the most unexpected manner in the world, upon a human habitation. And the strangest as well as the most fortunate part of it was that the habitation in question was the abode of civilised humanity. We had been travelling, almost uninterruptedly, along the ridge of a range of hills, and on the afternoon in question had reached a spot where the range took an abrupt turn to the southward, curving round in a sort of arm which encircled a basin or valley of perhaps half a mile in width, open to the river on the north side. The hill-side sloped gently down to the valley bottom on the eastern, southern, and western sides, and was much more thickly wooded than the country through which we had hitherto been passing. In the very thickest part of the wood, however, and about half-way down the slope, was a clearing of some ten acres in extent, and in the centre of the clearing a very neat and pretty-looking house, with a verandah running all round it, and a thatched roof. The clearing itself appeared to be in a high state of cultivation, a flower-garden of about an acre in extent lying immediately in front of the house, whilst the remainder of the ground was thickly planted with coffee, peach, banana, orange, and various other fruit-trees.
We lost no time in making our way to this very desirable haven, and had scarcely passed through the gate in the fence which surrounded the clearing when we were fortunate enough to encounter the proprietor himself. He was a very fine handsome specimen of a man, with snow-white hair and moustache, both closely cropped, and an otherwise clean-shaven face, which, with his neck and hands, were deeply bronzed by exposure to the vertical rays of the sun. He was clad in white flannel, his head being protected by a light and very finely-woven grass hat with an enormous brim, whilst his feet were encased in a pair of slippers of soft untanned leather. He was busily engaged among his coffee-trees when he first caught sight of us; and his start of surprise at our extraordinary appearance was closely followed up by a profound bow as he at once came forward and courteously addressed us in Spanish. Unhappily neither Smellie nor I understood a word of the language, so the second lieutenant answered the hail in French. The old gentleman shook his head and, I thought, looked rather annoyed, whereupon Smellie tried him in English, to which, very much to my surprise, I must confess, he responded with scarcely a trace of accent.