Nosèmbè had not gone very far before she met her father and two of her brothers, who, when they had discovered her absence, guessed where she had gone to and started out to seek for her. She met their railing and reproaches with the utmost composure. However, when night again came she found herself so carefully guarded that escape was impossible, so she was unable to keep the appointment with her lover.
Mangèlè waited the whole night through, hoping against hope that she would come. He correctly guessed the cause of her absence. When day broke he took his sticks and went forth to carry out a design he had formed in the course of his long vigil.
During the next forty-eight hours he personally visited every one of the lepers belonging to his clan in the district, and arranged with them to meet a day later in the vicinity of the Residency.
In the morning, just after the Magistrate had reached his office, he received a message asking him to meet the lepers under a certain tree, where, by tacit understanding, they had been accustomed to assemble on the rare occasions when they required to communicate direct with the authorities. Soon afterward he walked to the spot, which was situated in a kloof about three hundred yards distant.
There they sat, twenty-four in number. Ten of them were women. All, with the exception of Mangèlè, were old. What an awful spectacle they afforded, these four-and-twenty human creatures; all save one crushed almost out of human semblance by the wheels of the chariot of pitiless, unregarding Nature. There, against the lovely background of graceful fern and fragrant clematis, beneath the twinkling, poplar-like leaves of the spreading erethryna-tree—through which the blue sky smiled—were huddled these poor sufferers without hope of relief, guiltless vessels marred by the mysterious hand of The Great Potter. Twisted limb and crumbling stump, visages from which the gracious human lines had been obliterated by a slow, fell process more awful than the snake’s fang or the lightning’s stroke.
Over what remained of nearly every countenance seemed to hover a suggestion of that strange, leonine look which was so strongly marked in the case of Mangèlè; and to the Magistrate it seemed as if this were the only relief from a horror almost too absolute to look upon for long and keep his senses. It was as though what Schopenhauer called “the genius of the genus” had arisen from the depths of being to protest mutely against this piteous desecration of its temple by unregarding Nature and iron-visaged Fate. It was the very sublimation of tragic pathos, in the presence of which pity seemed to die of its own intensity.
All but Mangèlè sat upon the ground and endeavoured to hide, so far as possible, their worst individual disfigurements, but he stood forth as though proudly conscious of his almost perfect symmetry, and met the Magistrate’s sympathetic glance with his sombre, lion-like gaze. Then, after the usual salutations, Mangèlè began his speech. As is usual with natives to whom oratory is an inborn art, his delivery was excellent and full of dignity.
“We, men and women who are dead, though living, come to our Father, the Government, to ask for a little thing.
“God, whom the White Man has taught us to know, smote us with this sickness which has filled our bones with water for marrow, and caused our quick flesh to rot slowly, like dead wood. We acknowledge that it is only right we should be separated from other men, so that we may not give the disease to those who are clean, but we cannot dwell apart from our kindred, our cattle and the fields wherein our fathers saw the corn growing when they were little children—therefore we wish to die now, this day. Then will the sickness die with us, and our Father, the Government, will not be put to any further trouble on our account.
“What we ask of the White Chief, our Magistrate, is this: that he now, before the sun has begun to fall, send hither his policemen with rifles, and bid them shoot us skilfully so that we may suffer little pain.