"For I know, I know that she loves me," Geoffrey repeated to himself.
He had been telling himself that story ever since he left England. No denial from those lovely lips, no words of scorn, would convince him that he was unloved. He could recall looks and tones that told another story. He had seen the gradual change in her which told of an awakening heart.
"She never knew what love means till she knew me," he told himself. Did he wish for Allan's death? No, there was no such hideous thought in the dark labyrinth of his mind; or, at least, he believed that there was not. One must perish! He had so brooded over the story of former victims that he had taught himself to look upon one lost life as inevitable. But the lot was as likely to fall upon him as upon Allan. More likely, since his habits were more reckless and more adventurous than Allan's. If there was danger to be found, he and his Makololos courted it. Shooting expeditions, raids upon unfriendly villages, hand-to-hand skirmishes with Mirambo's brigand tribes; he and his Makololos were ready for anything. He had travelled over hundreds of miles with his warlike little gang—exploring, shooting, fighting—while Patrington and Allan were living in dreamy inaction, waiting for better weather, or for the recovery of half a dozen ailing pagazis. Assuredly he who ran such superfluous risks was the more likely to fall by the way. Well, death is a solution of all difficulties.
"If I am dead, it will matter to me very little that my bright, ineffable coquette is transformed into a sober, middle-aged wife, and that she and Allan are smiling at each other across the family breakfast-table, in their calm heaven of domestic hum-drum. But while I live and am young I shall think of her and long for her, and hate the lucky wretch who wins her. If we should both go back; if Patrington's tough bones are the bones that are to whiten by the way, and not Allan's or mine; why, then, we shall again be rivals; and the years of exile will be only a dream that we have dreamt."
It was a strange position in which these two young men found themselves. Friends, almost as brothers in the close intimacy of that solitude of three, only three civilized thinking beings amidst a crowd of creatures who seemed as far apart as if they had belonged to the forest fauna—the great antelope family—or the simian race; these two, so nearly of an age, reared in the same country and the same social sphere, united and sympathetic at every point of contact between mind and mind, and yet keeping this one deep gulf of silence between them.
They spoke to each other freely of all things, except of her; and yet each knew that she was the one absorbing subject in the mind of the other. Each knew that her image went along with them, was never absent, never less distinctly lovely, even when the way was fullest of hardship and peril, when every yard of progress meant a struggle with thorns that tore them, and brambles that lashed them, and the tough, rank verdure-carpet that clogged their feet. Neither had ever ceased to remember her, or to think of these adventurous days as anything else than exile from her. Whatever interest or enjoyment there might be in that varied experience of a land where beauty and ugliness alternated with startling transitions, it was not possible that either Allan or Geoffrey could forget the reason they were there, far from the fair faces of women, and from all the ease and pleasantness of civilized life.
Geoffrey had the better chance of oblivion, since those wild excursions and explorations of his afforded the excitement of the untrodden and the hazardous. The caravan road from the coast to Ujiji, with all its varieties of hardship, was too beaten a track for this fiery spirit. At every halting-place he went off at a tangent; and if his comrades threatened not to wait for his return, he would pledge himself to rejoin them further on, laughing to scorn every suggestion that he and his little company of Makololos and Wanyamwesis could lose themselves in the wilderness.
He was more in touch with the men than Allan—as familiar with their ways and ideas as Patrington after many years of travel. He had learnt their languages with a marvellous quickness—not the copious language of civilization and literature, be it remembered, but the concise vocabulary of the camp and the hunting-ground, the river and the road. He understood his men and their different temperaments as few travellers learn to understand, or desire to understand them. And yet there was but little Christian benevolence at the root of this quick sympathy and comprehension. Although, as an Englishman, Geoffrey would have given no sanction to the sale and barter of his fellow-creatures, these dark servants were to him no more than slaves—so much carrying power and so much fighting power, subject to his domination. It pleased him to know their characters, to be able to play upon their strength and weakness, their ferocity and their greed, just as surely as he manipulated the stops of the great organ at Discombe.
These Africans gave a name of their own choosing to almost everybody. They christened the great Sultan of the interior Tippo-Tib, because of a curious blinking of his eyes. Captain Trivier obtained his nickname on account of his eye-glass. Another man was named after his spectacles. The Sultan of Ujiji was called Roumariza—"It is ended,"—because he had succeeded in reducing belligerent tribes to peaceful settlement. For the Englishman in particular, Africa could always find a nickname, based on some insignificant detail of manner or appearance. For Englishmen in general she had found a nobler-sounding name. She called them Sons of Fire.
Geoffrey, with his tireless energy, his rapid decision, his angry impatience of delay, seemed to his followers the very highest exemplar of the fiery race that can persevere and conquer difficulties which the native of the soil recoils from as insurmountable.