And now he had paid for his love with his life. He had laid himself down, like Mark Antony at the foot of his dead mistress.
He was gone, and the two young men were alone in the wide wilderness, among the mountain paths between the great lake and the far-off western sea; and in long pauses of melancholy silence by the camp-fire, or in the noontide rest, Geoffrey looked into the face that was like and yet not like his own, and thought of the woman they both loved, and of that duel to the death which there must needs be when two men have built all their hopes of happiness upon the love of one woman. A duel of deadly thoughts, if not of deadly weapons.
"If we go back, it will be to fight for her love," he thought, "to fight as the wild stags in the mountains fight for the chosen hind—forehead to forehead, fore feet planted like iron, antlers locked, clashing with a sound that is heard afar off. Yes, we shall fight for her. The battle will have to begin again. We shall hate each other."
Wakeful and unquiet in the deep, dead silence of the tropical night, he would sit outside hut or tent, mending the fire, looking listlessly at the circle of sleeping porters, listening mechanically for the qua-qua of the night-heron, or the grunt of the hippopotamus coming up from the river. The loss of Patrington's cheery companionship had wrought a dark change in Geoffrey's mind and feelings. While Patrington was with them, there had been ever-recurring distractions from sullen brooding on the inner self. Patrington was eminently a man of action, practical, matter-of-fact; and love-sick dreaming was hardly possible in his company. He was as energetic in conversation as in action, would argue, and philosophize, and quote his master of fiction, and dose them with Pickwick and Weller as he dosed them with quinine.
He was gone; and in the deep melancholy that had fallen upon the travellers after the sudden shock of bereavement, Geoffrey's thoughts dwelt with a maddening iteration upon one absorbing theme.
They had left the poor village of bee-hive huts, near which their comrade lay at rest under the great sycamore. They had travelled slowly, ten miles in a day at most, uphill and downhill, by jungle and swamp, too depressed for any strenuous effort, Geoffrey still weak after his attack of fever, and harassed with rheumatic aches after his night of reckless wandering in marsh and wilderness, in peril of being devoured by the panthers that abound in that region. They were not more than fifty miles from the great lake, and now they were delayed again by the illness of some of their porters, and perhaps also by their own listlessness—the hopeless inertia that follows a great sorrow, a state of mind in which it seems not worth while to make any effort.
They had lost their captain and guide; but they had their plans all laid down—plans discussed again and again during the rains at Ujiji. After a good deal of talk about going south to Nyassa, and back to the east coast by the Zambesi-Shire route, they had finally decided on following Trivier's route to Stanley Pool, and there to wait for the steamer. The idea of crossing the great continent from east to west pleased the younger travellers better than that notion of doubling back to the more civilized region, the Arcadia of Nyassaland, a place of Christian missions, and flocks, and herds, and prosperous homesteads, and frequent steamers.
But now life in the desert had lost its savour, and Allan and Geoffrey looked over their rough sketch-maps dully, and wished that the journey were done.
"Wouldn't it be better to turn back and take the easiest route, by Nyassa and the Shire?" Allan asked despondently.
"No, no; we must see the Congo. What should we do if we went back to England? Have either you or I anything that calls us back to civilization and its deadly monotony?" Geoffrey asked, watching his companion's face with eager eyes.