"Three times."
"Then every time you are hungry, and before you sit down to eat, you will give the Musungu his medicine—one of the powders, as I put them ready for you—mixed with water, as he has often given them to you. And if you forget, or don't care to give him his medicine, evil will come to you—for I shall put a spell upon the door, and wicked spirits will hurt you if you don't obey me."
After this he called his Makololos and one of the Wanyamwesis, for whom he had shown a liking, and who worshipped him with a slavish subjugation of all personal will-power. He told them he was going on a hunting expedition that might last many days—and they must take baggage enough to assure themselves against being left to starve upon the way. He counted the bales of cloth, the bags of beads, brass-headed nails, brass wire; and he set apart about a fourth of the whole stock; and with these stores he loaded his men. And so in the full blaze of the morning sun this little company went out into the jungle, turning their faces eastward, towards the mountains that rose between them and the sea of Ujiji.
CHAPTER VIII.
WHERE THE BURDEN IS HEAVIEST.
The deep-toned organ pealed through the empty manor-house in the gloom of a rainy summer afternoon. Not once in the long dull day had the sun looked through the low, dull sky; and Mrs. Wornock, always peculiarly sensible of every change in the atmosphere, felt that life was just a little sadder and emptier than it had been for her in all the long slow years of a lonely widowhood.
What had she to live for? The brief romance of her girlhood was all she had ever known of the love which for most women means a life history. For her it had been only the beginning of a chapter—ending in self-sacrifice, as blind and piteously faithful to duty as Abraham's obedience to the Divine command. And after all those years of fond fidelity to a memory, she had seen her lover again—once for a few minutes—by stealth, through an open window, undreamt of by him.
What had she to live for? A son whose restless spirit would not allow him to be her companion and friend—in whose feverish life she was of so little value that he could leave her for a pilgrimage to Central Africa, with a brief good-bye; as if it were a small thing for mother and son to live with half the world between them. It seemed to her sometimes, brooding upon the past year, that Allan Carew had cared for her more, was more in sympathy with her, than that very son—as if some hereditary sentiment, some mystic link with the father who had loved her, brought the son nearer to her heart.
And now they were both so distant that she thought of them almost as mournfully as if they were dead. Dark clouds of trouble hung over their forms, as she tried to see them in that far-off world, ever impending dangers which haunted her in her dreams, until the words of St. Paul burnt themselves into her brain, and she would awake from some dream of horror, hearing her own voice, with that awful sound of the dreamer's voice, repeating—
"In journeyings ... in perils of waters, in perils of robbers ... in perils by the heathen ... in perils in the wilderness, in perils in the sea ... in weariness and painfulness ... in hunger and thirst."