Roger turned away angrily.
"Lucy! ... Mrs. Baines!"
"Yes, Captain Brentham."
"I'll get a boat and we'll go over to the Mission station across the Bay. I expect they'll have room—indeed they must make room—for you there till our dau is ready to sail...."
Then turning to the Vice-Consul: "Be good enough to send a cablegram to-day to the Agency at Unguja stating that H.M. Consul for Zangia arrived here this morning from the interior with Mrs. John Baines from Ulunga, and add that I shall arrive at Unguja to report as soon as I can charter a dau; unless a gun-boat comes in first. My Camp is at Kisolutini. You can send on any letters that come for me there...."
"Well, but I say..."
Roger having been joined by the wondering and disappointed Lucy, who had taken a great fancy to the picturesque Consulate, strode out with an angry face, flushed under the tan.
No return message came for him from the Agency at Unguja. And a few days afterwards he embarked with Lucy and Halima (who had already agreed to marry the Goanese cook), his Wanyamwezi porters, and a selected collection of trophies and mineralogical specimens, in an Arab dau, for the island port of Unguja. This time—December 27, 1888—Lucy was too anxious about her future to notice or to care whether it had bugs or not in its rotting timbers or its frowsy thatch.
Meantime, unfriendly forces were at work to Roger's detriment. Here is a letter which Mrs. Spencer Bazzard probably wrote to Mr. Bennet Molyneux, of the Foreign Office. (Like most of the letters appearing in this book, it is based on my deductions as to the kind of letter that would have been written under the circumstances, rather than on textual evidence):—
H.B.M. Consulate for Zangia,