'Tis one thing to be tempted, Escalus,
Another thing to fall.
One of the peculiarities of Africa yet to be explained is the almost supernatural rapidity with which rumour travels. Across the whole breadth of this darkest continent a mere bit of gossip has made its way in a month. A man may divulge a secret, say, at St. Paul de Loanda, take ship to Zanzibar, and there his own secret will be told to him.
Rumour met Maurice Gordon almost at the outset of his journey northward.
“Small-pox is raging on the Ogowe River,” they told him. “The English expedition is stricken down with it. The three leaders are dead.”
Maurice Gordon had not lived four years on the West African coast in vain. He took this for what it was worth. But if he had acquired scepticism, he had lost his nerve. He put about and sailed back to Loango.
“I wonder,” he muttered, as he walked up from the beach to his office that same afternoon—“I wonder if Durnovo is among them?”
And he was conscious of a ray of hope in his mind. He was a kind-hearted man, in his way, this Maurice Gordon of Loango; but he could not disguise from himself the simple fact that the death of Victor Durnovo would be a distinct convenience and a most desirable relief. Even the best of us—that is to say, the present writer and his reader—have these inconvenient little feelings. There are people who have done us no particular injury, to whom we wish no particular harm, but we feel that it would be very expedient and considerate of them to die.
Thinking these thoughts, Maurice Gordon arrived at the factory and went straight to his own office, where he found the object of them—Victor Durnovo—sitting in consumption of the office sherry.
Gordon saw at once that the rumour was true. There was a hunted unwholesome look in Durnovo's eyes. He looked shaken, and failed to convey a suggestion of personal dignity.
“Hulloa!” exclaimed the proprietor of the decanter. “You look a bit chippy. I have been told there is small-pox up at Msala.”