"Bore us! Not a jot. I have sadly missed your wild strains. There has been a voice wanting—a voice that is almost human, and which seems so much a part of you that while that was dumb you seemed to be dead. Begin your spells. Play us something by one of your 'Owskis,—Jimowski, Bilowski, Bobowski—whichever you please."
Geoffrey drew his bow across the strings with a swelling chord, a burst of bass music like the sudden pealing of an organ, and began a Walachian dirge.
"Does that give you the scene?" he asked, pausing and looking round at them, after a tremendous presto movement. "Does it conjure up the funeral train, the wild wailing of the mourners, the groaning men, the shrieking women, even the whining and whimpering of the little children, the stormy sky, the thick darkness, the flare of the torches, the trampling of iron-shod hoofs? I can hear and see it all as I play." And then he began the slow movement, the awful ghostly adagio with its suggestion of all things horrible, its eccentric phrasing, and dissonant chords, shaping a vision of strange unearthly forms.
"It's a very jolly kind of music," Cecil Patrington said thoughtfully; "I mean jolly difficult, don't you know. But if you want my candid opinion as to what it suggests, I am free to confess it sounds to me like your improvised notion of the mukurungu—all fever and pain and confusion."
"The mukurungu! Not half a bad name for a descriptive sonata!" laughed Geoffrey, putting his fiddle to bed.
And then they brought out the cards, and played poker for cowries, Cecil Patrington, as usual, the winner, by reason of that inscrutable countenance of his, which had hardened itself in all the hazards of an adventurous career. They were particularly jovial that evening, and flung care to the winds that sobbed and muttered along the shore. Geoffrey's gaiety communicated itself to the other two. They drank their moderate potations; they smoked their pipes; and Patrington discoursed of an ideal settlement where the surplus population of Whitechapel and Bermondsey were to come and work in a new Arcadia, a place of flocks and herds and coffee-fields, under a smokeless heaven.
"For my own satisfaction, I would have Africa untrodden and unknown, a world of wonder and mystery," he said; "but the beginning has been made, and the coming century will see every missionary settlement of to-day develop into a populous centre of enterprise and labour. Crowded-out England will come here, and thrive here, as it has thriven in less fertile lands. Englishmen will flock here for sport and pleasure and profit."
"And these native sultans—these little kings and their peoples?"
"Ah, that is the problem! God grant there may be a bloodless solution!"
That was the last night these three travellers ever sat together over their cards and pipes, ever laughed and talked together with hearts at ease. They were to resume their journey next morning; but when all was ready for the start, Allan discovered that Cecil Patrington was too ill to walk.