While he worked over the microscope, he noticed that his own flesh was developing the symptom. He put aside his work when he saw that. He concluded that Lionel and he were marked for death within twenty-four hours. Before death (as he had learned in the village) they might look to suffer much pain. After some hours of suffering they would become unconscious and delirious. After raving for a while they would die there in the lonely hut, and presently the ants would march in in regular ranks to give them cleanly burial. Their bones would lie on the cots till some thunderstorm swept them under mud. Nobody would ever hear of them. They would be forgotten. People in England would wonder what had become of them; they would wonder less as time went on, and at last they would cease to wonder. Newspapers would allude to him from time to time in paragraphs two lines long. Then, as his contemporaries grew older, that would stop, too. He would be forgotten, utterly, and nobody would know, and nobody would care.
It was dreadful to him to think that nobody would know. He could count on an hour or two of freedom from pain. Before the pain shut out the world from him, he would try to leave some record of what they were. He sat down to write a death-letter. It was useless, of course, and yet it might, perhaps, by a rare chance, some day, come to the knowledge of those whom he had known in England. He wondered who would find the letter, if it were ever found. Some great German scientist about to banish the disease. Some drunken English gold prospector with a cockney accent. Some missionary, or sportsman, or commercial traveller. More likely it would be some roving savage with a snuff-box in his earlobe, and a stone of copper wire about his limbs. He wrote out a short letter:
"Lionel Uppingham Huntley Heseltine, Roger Monkhouse Naldrett. Dying here of blood poisoning, following the use of koodoo serum for trypanosomiasis. Should this come to the hands of a European, he is requested to communicate with Dr. Heseltine, 47A Harley Square, Wimpole Street, W., London, England, and with the British Consul at Shirikanga, C. F. S."
He added a few words more; but afterwards erased them. He had given the essentials. There was no need to say more. He translated the brief message into French, Spanish, and German, and signed the copies. He placed the document in a tin soap box which he chained to an iron rod driven into the floor of the hut. When that was done, he felt that he had taken his farewell to life.
He thought of Ottalie, without hope of any kind. He was daunted by the thought of her. He could not feel that his soul would ever reach to her soul, across all those wilds. He was heavy with the growing of the change upon him. This death of which he had thought so grandly seemed very stupid now that he was coming to know it. He remembered reproving a young poet for the remark that death could not possibly be so stupid as life. It was monstrous to suppose that the young poet could be right after all. And yet——
He went out hurriedly and released all the laboratory animals: guinea-pigs, monkeys, and white rats. They should not die of starvation, poor beasts. They squeaked and gibbered excitedly for a minute or two, as they moved off to explore. Probably the snakes had them all within the week.
After some hours of waiting for the agony to begin, Roger fell asleep, and slept till the next morning. When he woke he sat up and looked about him, being not quite sure at first that he was still alive. His pulse was normal, his tongue was normal, his heart was normal. He felt particularly well. He looked at his flesh. The bladdery look had relapsed, the skin was normal again. Looking over to Lionel's cot, he saw that Lionel was not in the hut. Fearing that he had wandered out to die in a fit of delirium, he went out into the open to look for him.
It was a bright, windy, tropic morning, with a tonic briskness in the air such as one feels sometimes in England, in April and late September. One of the released monkeys was fast by the neck again upon his perch. He was munching a biscuit with his entire vitality. Lionel sat upon the wall, sunning himself in a blanket. His attitude suggested both great physical weakness, and entire self-confidence.
"I say, Roger," he began. "It's too bad. You are a juggins! You've let all our menagerie go. What are we to do for laboratory animals? I caught McGinty here. Otherwise we'd have been without a single one. Every cage in the place is wide open. What have you been doing?"
"My God!" said Roger. "He's cured!"