"An earth tremor," said Roger in an even voice, for Lucy looked like fainting. "A very small earthquake; nothing to be alarmed at, though it turns one a bit sick inside. They don't often happen. This is only the second I've experienced in ten years. You see, we live on the border of a volcanic region. Here, Lucy! Pull yourself together. Have a nip of brandy?...
"Better? Let's get out into the air, on the verandah, and see if any damage has been done.... I hope it won't affect our mining galleries...."
But no reports of damage from the earthquake came to hand. The natives said that these shocks were sometimes followed by outbursts of gases, smoke, steam from one or other of the craters in the north.
A week after Mrs. Stott's visit, Roger, accompanied by Maud to look after him and see he did not overstrain himself, rode down into the Happy Valley to Mwada station. Here they interviewed the redoubtable Ann, now a square-built grey-haired matron of middle age and practically no sexual charm. She had black eyes, glowering under black eyebrows, a sallow complexion, and a thin-lipped mouth, with down-turned corners, like the mouth of Queen Victoria when she was displeased. Ann listened in grim silence to Major Brentham's hesitating remonstrances. When he had finished she replied that it was more than flesh and blood could stand that she should be spending her time and the Mission money training up native girls to be Christian wives for Christian natives, and as soon as they had learnt some civilization they were sought out and snapped up by Germans, inside and outside the Concession. It wasn't for that she had come out to Africa....
"I do feel for you and will see what can be done," said Brentham; "but at the same time we must remember we are not on British territory, where they stand a good deal from the missionaries, but in German Africa. The Germans have made a handsome acknowledgment of what Mr. Stott has done in the way of industrial teaching. Don't go and spoil it all by being too ready to denounce these—these—irregularities! Things may right themselves in time. It would be such a dreadful blow to the Stotts if they were told to go, to leave the work of so many years...."
Ann would promise nothing, however. She would speak as the Spirit bade her.... For the present her time was taken up with mission work among the Wambugwe, who were quite the worst heathens she had met with. "Not only terribly depraved—they eat the corpses of their dead!!!—but the dirtiest Negroes I have ever seen, and wholly lacking in spirituality."
"Well then," said Roger, "there you've got your work cut out, for several years. Meantime I will talk to our German friends...."
"Friends, indeed?" said Ann. "They're no friends of mine!"
In spite of her fierceness of denunciation, she made both Roger and Maud as comfortable as she could at her rather Spartan station, and became so happy, friendly and even tearful during the evening with Maud, talking over the little world of Reading and Basingstoke, Aldermaston and Englefield, that evening prayers for once were intermitted. Her husband sat mostly silent, listening respectfully. It was evident that he worked very hard at material things during the day, that he stood much in awe of his wife, and had completely lost his gift of extempore prayer. Their one daughter was a thin, sickly, wistful little girl of ten, very shy, and fonder of her father than of her mother. But according to Ann she was already a good needlewoman, and helped in the sewing classes. Kind Maud proposed she should be fetched one day and taken to Magara for a week's stay. The air was so good there. Ann consented a little reluctantly.
They rode their Basuto ponies to see if there were traces of Stolzenberg's slaughter of the flamingoes. But the bodies had evidently been carried away from the lake to be skinned and because the bones were valuable; and the sole visible result of the raid was the absence of adult birds in pink plumage. There only remained of the former serried ranks a thin broken line of ugly immature flamingoes, dirty-white in plumage, streaked with brown. They were dibbling timidly in the thick waters of the lake; and this had also lost much of its former beauty—though Stolzenberg was not responsible for the slow desiccation of East Africa. The lake just now was no longer a uniform sheet of cobalt, bordered with a grey-white fringe of salt and guano mixed; it was reduced to two large areas of deep water with grey mud in between. How different from what Roger had seen in the glamour of 1888!