So now it was death, and not life, that was talked of, and Evelyn lived on in dry–eyed misery until Fairholme hinted one day that she ought to return home, as the climate was beginning to affect her health.
There were not lacking indications that the merry–souled little peer had quickly reconciled himself to the loss of Mrs. Laing. He was the most popular man in Lagos, and he hardly ever visited Evelyn when he did not assure her that he was “havin’ a giddy time with the dear girls.“ Yet she knew that he was only waiting until the last hope of Warden’s escape from the desert must be abandoned. When that hour came, and she was prepared to take ship for England, Fairholme would ask her to marry him.
The belief became an obsession. To get away from it, to cut herself wholly adrift from painful associations, she offered her help to an American Baptist missionary and his wife who were going up the Benuë. They tried to dissuade her, pointing out the hardships and positive dangers of the undertaking and the humdrum nature of the nursing, teaching, and doctoring that constituted the lot of a medical missionary in West Africa. Finally, they consented, but stipulated that she should give her new career a six months’ trial.
Fairholme protested, and stormed, and was only prevented from proposing on the spot by Evelyn’s placid statement that no matter what the future might decide, she should not be happy unless she had visited the little–known land to which her lover had given the best years of his life.
The reference to Warden effectually sealed his lips. He hastened to the club, asked a man to dine with him, drank the larger part of a bottle of champagne, and mournfully informed his friends that he had never enjoyed a moment’s real fun since he ceased to be hard up.
So Evelyn said good–by to the hospitable people who entertained her at Lagos, and made the long voyage up the great river that perplexed mankind during so many centuries. Even yet its whole course has not been surveyed, and it has important tributaries that are unknown beyond their confluence with the main stream. But the river steamer followed the established trade route through Old Calabar and Asabao and Idah to Lokoja; thence a steam launch took the small party of Europeans up the Benuë to Ibi, and they completed the journey in a roofed boat of shallow draft manned by krooboys.
The girl seemed now to have left behind the cares and troubles of the outer world. Busying herself with the daily life of the mission compound—once a stockaded trading–station and noted center for the distribution of gin, but now a peaceful hive of simple tuition and industry—she soon experienced a calm sense of duty accomplished that had certainly been denied her in the Baumgartner household. At Lagos she had received one letter from Beryl, who complained bitterly of her “desertion.“ A police patrol–boat brought her a letter from home, in which her stepmother expressed the strongest disapproval of her new departure as announced by a hurried note sent from Lagos. And that was all. The links that bound her with England were completely snapped. She might almost be the kidnapped Domenico Garcia, of whom she thought occasionally when some chance aspect of a negro’s face startled her by its close resemblance to the black mask on the calabash.
Mindful of the Lagos official’s warning, she never showed the carved head to any one. Not even Mr. and Mrs. Hume, the mission couple, knew that it was in her possession.
She had been nearly two months in Kadana, as the group of houses and huts in the clearing by the side of the yellow Benuë was called, when an apparently trivial incident upset the placid routine of the mission. One evening, just before sunset, a ju–ju man, fearsomely bedaubed, and decked with an amazing headdress and skirt of scarlet feathers, came into the native section of the compound. He cut off the head of an unhappy fowl that he carried with him, sprinkled its warm blood in a circle on the ground, chanted some hoarse incantation, and vanished into the bush.