Chapter Three.
Major Henderson becomes confidential and advisory.
The house at Triannon, built in a sort of elbow formed by one of the spurs of the Great Winter Berg, was not visible from the direction in which I approached until one had rounded the kopje concealing it, when one found oneself close upon it. But as I drew near to my destination I became aware of a deep, ominous silence pervading the scene, which caused me to entertain the most gloomy forebodings. True, the hour was rather late, according to our notions of lateness in the country districts, and the sheep and cattle would have long ago been kraaled for the night; yet, even so, it was seldom that the stock settled down to rest so early, seldom that, among so many animals, there were not a few restless ones proclaiming their restlessness by bleat or bellow—and on this particular night there was not a sound of any description to apprise the wayfarer that he was within a quarter of a mile of an opulent farm. As I rounded the extremity of the spur, however, and the house swung into view, a great sigh of relief escaped me, for there, within shouting distance, stood the building to all appearances intact. True, it was in complete darkness; but that of course might very easily arise from the fact that Mr Lestrange, after a busy day in the open, had retired to rest early.
Yet somehow the darkness seemed to me to be as ominous as the silence, and, urging Prince to a canter, I dashed forward, leaped the fence without pausing to take down the slip rails, and reined up at the steps which gave access to the stoep. Then I perceived that the front door and all the windows were wide-open, which struck me as being peculiar in the extreme, taken in conjunction with the total darkness in which the house was wrapped; for though of course we habitually slept with our bedroom windows wide-open, we usually closed the front doors and the windows giving access to unoccupied rooms the last thing before retiring at night: therefore, moved by the sudden return in full flood of my anxiety, I gave vent to a loud whoop as I swung out of the saddle, and without waiting for a reply rushed up the steps, across the stoep, and into the house, shouting as I went: “Mr Lestrange! Mr Lestrange! where are you? It is I, Ned Laurence. Where are you?”
The echo of my voice was, however, the only reply I received; but I had no sooner entered the hall than I perceived that something was very seriously wrong, for the furniture was all disarranged, one of the chairs was overturned, and, so far as I could see in the semi-obscurity, it appeared that Lestrange’s guns were not in their usual places in the rack.
Of course I never went anywhere without carrying in my pocket the means to obtain a light; therefore without waiting for further developments I drew forth my flint and steel, and presently lighted the lamp which hung from the hall ceiling, and which fortunately still contained a fair quantity of oil. Then, removing the lamp from the frame in which it hung, I proceeded forthwith to explore.
Now that I had a light, and could plainly distinguish my surroundings, my worst forebodings were confirmed, for everything in the place was disarranged, the weapons were all gone, as well as the skin rugs which usually covered the floor and several valuable karosses with which the chairs and sofa were wont to be draped, while the various hunting trophies had been torn from the walls, and some were gone. Fearing now, and indeed quite expecting, the worst, after casting a hurried glance about the hall I made my way straight to Mr Lestrange’s bedroom; and there, just inside the wide-open door, lay the poor fellow, clad only in his sleeping garb, with three ghastly assagai wounds in his body, and one through his throat which had severed the jugular vein. This room, too, was in a terrible state of disorder, having evidently been subjected to a thorough search for anything that might appeal to the fancy of a savage. But there had been no fight, that was perfectly clear; the surprise had been complete, and the savages had contrived to gain entrance to the house in time to massacre the inmates before they had a chance to defend themselves.
The inmates! There were none but Mr Lestrange—who was a widower—and Nell; and where was she? I was sufficiently intimate with the arrangements of the house to know which was Nell’s room, and my next dash was thither. The door of the room was wide-open, but I paused in the opening when I reached it, with the feeling strong upon me that I should commit something very like sacrilege by entering. A single glance, however, sufficed to reveal that the shrine of innocent girlhood had already been violated, for it, too, like Mr Lestrange’s, had been turned topsy-turvy by the savages. But Nell—where was she? Instinctively I scanned the floor of the room in search of her dead body, but it was not there; furthermore, I could not find the slightest trace of a bloodstain to indicate that the tragedy had been a double one; only the bed was stripped of its coverings, and when I came to investigate more closely I found her night robe flung carelessly upon the floor, but none of her day garments lying about. And the conclusion to which I was finally driven was that the poor child, instead of having been slain in cold blood, like her father, had been surprised in her sleep, compelled to dress, and been carried off alive and perhaps unhurt by the savages. Poor child! Poor darling little Nell! Oh, if I were right in my reading of the signs, what an unspeakably awful fate was hers! And yet—and yet—perhaps it might not be so very terrible after all. She was but a child—and a sweetly pretty child, too; and I had heard of cases where white girl children had been kidnapped by the blacks and carried off by them to their fastnesses in the wilds, there to become, first the pet, and ultimately the ’nkosikaas or chieftainess of the tribe. True, it was not often that that was done, but there was a kind of legend among the natives that somewhere far up in the interior there was a great and very powerful tribe ruled over by a white ’nkosikaas; while within my own recollection a young girl, the daughter of a Boer farmer, had been carried off by the Bechuanas, and was in like manner said to be still living as the ’nkosikaas of the tribe. If this were true—and there seemed to be no good reason to doubt it—one could only hope that poor little Nell Lestrange might meet with no worse a fate.
But it was a horrible thing to think of that sweet, lovable little creature being suddenly awakened out of a sound sleep in the middle of the night by a horde of ferocious, bloodthirsty savages, and carried off by them, perhaps in ignorance of her father’s fate, and in deadly terror of what was to befall her. I was very fond of Nell—I had grown to regard her almost as a sister; and my first impulse was to set out there and then, seek her until I found her, and never rest until I had effected her rescue from her savage jailers. But a few moments’ reflection sufficed to convince me of the utter futility of such a mad project. These two outrages—the attacks upon Lestrange’s and our own farms—clearly indicated that the long-expected rising of the natives had at last taken place, so suddenly that Lestrange at least had been caught unawares, and no doubt the whole country was at that moment ablaze and being overrun by the blacks in overwhelming numbers. The mystery to me was that I had not heard so much as a hint of the actual rising from any of the folk whom I had met on my return journey from Port Elizabeth; and the fact that I had not done so seemed to indicate that the outbreak, although in a general way expected, had been so skilfully managed that, after all, the settlers had been caught more or less off their guard. And, so far from it being possible for me to undertake singlehanded an expedition for the rescue of Nell, I was liable at any moment to blunder upon a war party of savages and either be slain by them forthwith, or, still worse, be carried off a captive, to suffer death by torture; indeed, the wonder was that something of this kind had not already happened to me, as doubtless it had to many another unsuspecting traveller. No, to attempt alone to rescue Nell would be worse than useless, it would simply be the wanton throwing away of a life that, later on, might be of service to her; and I could only hope that, meanwhile, no worse thing than simple captivity might befall her.