“There! I have startled you,—and no wonder; and yet how could I help it? Yes,” he repeated, calmly, “I am that unfortunate Herbert Cheyne whom his own wife believes to be dead.” 249
“Whom every one believes to be dead,” corrected Phillis, in a panting breath.
“Is it any wonder?” he returned, vehemently; and his eyes darkened, and his whole features worked, as though with the recollection of some unbearable pain. “Have I not been snatched from the very jaws of death? Has not mine been a living death, a hideous grave, for these four years?” And then, hurriedly and almost disconnectedly, as though the mere recalling the past was torture to him, he poured into the girl’s shrinking ears fragments of a story so stern in its reality, so terrible in its details, that, regardless of the children that played on the margin of the water, Phillis hid her face in her hands and wept for sheer pity.
Wounded, bereft of all his friends, and left apparently dying in the hands of a hostile tribe, Herbert Cheyne had owed his life to the mercy of a woman, a poor, degraded ill-used creature, half-witted and ugly, but who had not lost all the instincts of her womanhood, and who fed and nursed the white stranger as tenderly as though he were her own son.
While the old negress lived, Herbert Cheyne had been left in peace to languish back to life, through days and nights of intolerable suffering, until he had regained a portion of his old strength; then a fever carried off his protectress, and he became virtually a slave.
Out of pity for the tender-hearted girl who listened to him, Mr. Cheyne hurried over this part of his sorrowful past. He spoke briefly of indignities, abuse, and at last of positive ill treatment. Again and again his life had been in danger from brute violence; again and again he had striven to escape, and had been recaptured with blows.
Phillis pointed mutely to his scarred wrists, and the tears flowed down her cheeks.
“Yes, yes; these are the marks of my slavery,” he replied, bitterly. “They were a set of hideous brutes; and the fetish they worshipped was cruelty. I carry about me other marks that must go with me to my grave; but there is no need to dwell on these horrors. He sent His angel to deliver me,” he continued, reverently; “and again my benefactor was a woman.”
And then he went on to tell Phillis that one of the wives of the chief in whose service he was took pity on him, and aided him to escape on the very night before some great festival, when it had been determined to kill him. This time he had succeeded; and, after a series of hair-breadth adventures, he had fallen in with some Dutch traders who had come far into the interior in search of ivory tusks. He was so burnt by the sun and disfigured by paint that he had great difficulty in proving his identity as an Englishman. But at last they had suffered him to join them, and after some more months of wandering he had worked his way to the coast. 250
There misfortune bad again overtaken him, in the form of a long and tedious illness. Fatigue, disaster, anguish of mind, and a slight sunstroke had taken dire effect upon him; but this time he had fallen into the hands of good Samaritans. The widowed sister of the consul, a very Dorcas of good works, had received the miserable stranger into her house; and she and her son, like Elijah’s widow of Zarephath, had shared with him their scanty all.