The Man Who Did the Right Thing: A Romance

THE MAN WHO DID
THE RIGHT THING

A ROMANCE

SIR HARRY JOHNSTON

Mew York
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
1921

Set up and electrotyped. Published April, 1921.

NOVELS BY THE SAME AUTHOR

THE GAY-DOMBEYS
MRS. WARREN'S DAUGHTER

The central idea of this book came into my mind a great many years ago, out in Africa, and was based to some extent on what actually happened at Unguja and elsewhere. Yet, though there is more realism than might be supposed in my descriptions and incidents and the imagined personalities that appear in these pages, I have endeavoured so to disturb and re-present the facets of my truths that they shall not wound the feelings of any one living or of the surviving friends and relations of the good and bad people I have known in East Africa, or of those in my own land who were entangled in East African affairs.

But although I have pondered long over telling such a story, this Romance of East Africa was mainly projected, created and put down on paper when my wife and I stayed in the summer-autumn of last year at the Swiss home, in the mountains, of a dear friend. There we amused ourselves, as we swung in hammocks slung under pine-trees and gazed over the panorama of the Southern Alps, by arguing and discussing as to what the creations of my imagination would say to one another, how they would act under given circumstances within the four corners ruled by Common Sense and Probability: two guides who will, I hope, always guard my faltering steps in fiction-writing.

Therefore, though dedications have lost their novelty and freshness, and are now incitements to preciosity or payments in verbiage, I, to satisfy my own sentiments of gratitude for a most delightful holiday of rest and refreshment, dedicate this Romance to my hostess of the Châlet Soleil, who founded this new Abbaye de Theleme for the recuperation of tired minds and bodies, and enforced within its walls and walks and woods but one precept:

FAY CE QUE VOULDRAS.

H. H. JOHNSTON.

POLING,

March, 1921.

CONTENTS

CHAPTER

I [The Baineses]
II [John and Lucy]
III [Sibyl at Silchester]
IV [Lucy Hesitates]
V [Roger's Dismissal]
VI [The Voyage Out]
VII [Unguja—and Up-country]
VIII [Letters To and Fro]
IX [Mission Life]
X [Roger Arrives]
XI [The Happy Valley]
XII [The Attack on the Station]
XIII [The Return to Unguja]
XIV [Lucy's Second Marriage]
XV [In England]
XVI [Sibyl as Siren]
XVII [Back to the Happy Valley]
XVIII [Five Years Later]
XIX [Trouble with Stolzenberg]
XX [The Boer War]
XXI [The Morals of the Happy Valley]
XXII [Eight Years Have Passed By]
XXIII [The End of Sibyl]
XXIV [All Ends in the Happy Valley]

THE MAN WHO DID
THE RIGHT THING

CHAPTER I

THE BAINESES

It was in the last week of June, 1886, and there really were warm and early summers in the nineteenth century.

The little chapel had been so close and hot during the morning service that in spite of the interest Lucy Josling felt in the occasion—it was the first appearance of her betrothed, John Baines, as a preacher in his native place, and the delivery of his farewell sermon before starting for Africa—she could not repress a sigh of relief as she detached herself from the perspiring throng of worshippers and stood for a few moments in the bright sunlight, inhaling the perfume of distant hayfields.

"You look a trifle pale, Lucy," said Mr. Baines, senior, a stumpy red-faced man with light sandy hair and a long upper lip. "It's precious warm. I s'pose you'n John'll want to walk back together? Well, don't keep dinner waiting, 'cos that always puts me out. Now then, Sarah, come along: it's too hot to stand gossiping about. Let's get home as quick as we can."

Mrs. Baines, a gaunt, thin woman with a long parchment-coloured face and cold grey eyes, looked indignantly at her husband when he talked of gossiping, but said nothing, took his arm and walked away.

Lucy put up her parasol and leant against the ugly iron railings which interposed between the dusty chapel windows and the pavement. The congregation had not all dispersed. Two or three awkward-looking young men were standing in a group in the roadway, and, while pretending to carry on a jesting conversation amongst themselves, were casting sheepish looks at Lucy, who was deemed a beauty for ten miles round. They evidently alluded to her in the witticisms they exchanged, so that she had to restrict her angle of vision in case her eyes met theirs when she wished to ignore their offensive existence. Mrs. Garrett, the grocer's wife, who had been inquiring from Miss Simons, the little lame dressmaker—why were village dressmakers of that period, in life and in fiction, nearly always lame?—how her married sister progressed after a confinement, walked up to Lucy and said:

"Well, Miss Josling, and how d'you like the idea of parting with your young man? Ain't cher afraid of his goin' off so far, and all among savages and wild beasts too, same as 'e was tellin' on? It's all right and proper as how he should carry the news of the Gospel to them pore naked blacks, but as I says to Garrett, I says, ''E don't ought to go and engage 'isself before'and to a girl as 'e mayn't never come back to marry, and as 'll spend the best years of 'er life a-waitin' an' a-waitin' and cryin' 'er eyes put to no use.' However, 't ain't any business of mine, an' I s'pose you've set your heart upon 'im now, and won't thank me for bein' so outspoken....?

"I'm sure 'e's come back from London quite the gentleman; and lor'! 'Ow proud 'is mother did look while 'e was a-preachin'. An' 'e can preach, too! 'Alf the words 'e used was Greek to me.... S'pose they was Greek, if it comes to that"—she laughed fatly—"Though why th' Almighty should like Greek and Latin better'n plain English, or even 'Ebrew, is what I never could understand....

"And to think as I remember 'im, as it on'y seems the other day, comin' in on the sly to buy a 'aporth of sugar-candy at our shop. 'Is mother never liked 'is eatin' between meals an' 'e always 'ad to keep 'is bit o' candy 'idden away in 'is pocket till 'e was out of 'er sight.... I'm sure for my part I wonder 'ow she can bring 'erself to part with 'im, 'e bein' 'er on'y son, and she so fond of 'im too. But then she always set 'er 'eart on 'is bein' a gentleman, and give 'im a good eddication.... 'Ow's father and mother?..."

"Oh quite well, thank you," replied Lucy, wondering why John was stopping so long and exposing her to this tiresome garrulity and the hatefulness of having her private affairs discussed in a loud tone for the benefit of the Sunday strollers of Tilehurst. "They would have come over from Aldermaston to hear John preach, but father cannot bear to take his eyes off the hay till it's all carried, and mother's alone now because my sisters are away.... I just came by myself to the Baineses' for the day....

"And, Mrs. Garrett," continued Lucy, a slight flush rising to her cheek, "I don't think you quite understand about my engagement to John Baines. I—I—am not at all to be pitied. You rather ought to congratulate me. First, because I am very—er—fond of him and proud of his dedicating his life to such a work, and, secondly, because there is no question of my waiting years and years before I get married. John goes out this month and I shall follow six or seven months afterwards—just to give him time to get our home ready. We shall be married out there, at a place called Unguja, where there is a Consulate...."

Lucy stopped short. She was going on to give other good reasons for her engagement when a slight feeling of pride forbade her further to excuse herself to Mrs. Garrett—a grocer's wife! And she herself a National school-teacher! There could be no community between them. She therefore fell silent and gazed away from Mrs. Garrett's red face and blue bonnet across the white sandy road blazing with midday sunshine to the house fronts of the opposite side, with their small shops closed, the blinds drawn down and everything denoting the respectable lifelessness of the Sabbath.... At this awkward pause John Baines issued from the vestry door of the chapel, Mrs. Garrett nodded good-naturedly, and went her way.

John was about four-and-twenty—Lucy's age. He was a little over the average height but ungainly, with rather sloping shoulders, long arms, large hands and feet; a face with not well-formed features; nose coarse, fleshy, blunt-tipped; mouth wide, with his father's long upper lip, on which were the beginnings of a flaxen moustache, with tame ends curling down to meet the upward growth of the young beard. He had an under lip that was merely a band of pink skin round the mouth, without an inward curve to break its union with the broad chin. His teeth were strong and white but irregular in setting, the canines being thrust out of position. His eyes were blue-grey, and not without a pleasant twinkle. The hair was too long for tidiness, not long enough for eccentric saintliness. It was a yellow brown and was continued down the cheeks in a silken beard from ear to ear, the tangled, unclipped, uncared-for beard of a young man who has never shaved. His fresh pink-and-white complexion was marred here and there with the pimples and blotches of adolescence. Lucy, however, thought him good to look at; he only wanted a little smartening up, which she promised herself to impart to him when they were married. He looked what he was: a good-hearted, simple-minded, unintellectual Englishman, an Anglo-Saxon, with a hearty appetite for plain food, a love of cricket, who would with little difficulty remain in all things chaste and sober; slow to wrath, but, if really pushed against the wall, able to show berserker rage.

Having taken up a religious career he had acquired a certain pomposity of manner which sat ill on his boyishness; he had to remember in intervals of games or country dances or flirtations that he had been set apart for the Lord's work. But he would make an excellent husband. His class has furnished quite the best type of colonist abroad.

John gave his arm silently to Lucy, who took it with a gesture of affection, and patted it once or twice with her kid-gloved hand, which lover-like demonstrations John accepted rather solemnly. As they walked up the sunny main street there was little conversation between them, but when they turned down an old shady road running between red brick walls overgrown with ivy and Oxford weed, behind which rose the spire of St. Michael's and the tall trees of its churchyard, their good behaviour relaxed and John looking down, and seeing Lucy's fresh, pretty face looking up, and observing in a hasty glance around that nobody was in sight, bent down and kissed her: after which he looked rather silly and hurried on with great strides.

"Don't walk so fast, John dear; you quite drag me along. We need not be in such a hurry. Tell me, how did you spend your last days in London?"

"Why, Wednesday I went to the outfitters to superintend the packing of my boxes; Thursday I bid good-bye to all my friends at the Bayswater College. In the evening there was a valedictory service at the Edgware Road Chapel, when Thomas, Bayley, Anderson and I were designated for the East African Mission. The next day, Friday, I went in the morning to see my boxes put safely on board the Godavery lying in the Albert Docks; and I also chose my berth—I share a cabin with Anderson. Then in the afternoon there was a big public meeting at Plymouth Hall. Sir Powell Buckley was chairman, and Brentham, the African explorer, spoke, as well as a lot of others, and it ended with prayers and hymns. The Reverend Paul Barker, a very old African missionary, who was the first to enter Abeokuta, delivered the Blessing. Every one shook hands with us and bade us Godspeed.

"After this the three brethren designated for the Mission, and myself, of course, together with Brentham the explorer, Mr. Barker and a few others from the platform, adjourned to Sir Powell Buckley's, where we had tea. Here we four new missionaries were introduced to old Mrs. Doland, that lady who, under God, has so liberally contributed to the support of the East African Mission.... And also to Captain Brentham, who has just returned from the East coast....

"I confess I didn't like him ... altogether.... In fact, I can't quite make out why he came and spoke at the meeting, for I could see at once by the way he stared about him during the hymns he was not one of us ... in heart. In his speech at Plymouth Hall he chiefly laid stress on the advantages gained by civilization when a country was opened up by missionaries, how we taught the people trades, and so on. There was no allusion to the inestimable boon to the natives in making known the Blessed Gospel and the promises in the Old Testament....

"In fact—am I walking too fast? But father will be angry if we are late for dinner—in fact, I thought Brentham inclined to sneer at us. They say he wants a Government appointment and is making up to Sir Powell Buckley——

"Then Saturday—yesterday—I came down here and—er—well! here we are! Are you listening?"

Lucy gave John's arm an affectionate squeeze by way of assurance, but on this rare June day there was something in the still, hot air, thick with hay-scent, which lulled her sensibilities and caused her to forget to be concerned at her betrothed's departure. She had temporarily forgotten many little things stored up to be said to him, and was vexed at her own taciturnity. However, their walk had come to an end, and they stood in front of John's home.

Mr. John Parker Baines, the father of the missionary-designate, was a manufacturer of aerated drinks and cider, whose premises lay on the western side of Tilehurst and marred the beauty of the countryside and the straggling village with a patch of uncompromising vulgarity and garishness. The manufactory itself was in a simple style of architecture: a rectangular building of red brick, with two tall smoke-blackened chimneys and a number of smaller ones. "John Baines and Co., Manufacturers of Aerated Drinks," was painted in large letters across the brick front.

A Sabbath stillness prevailed, intensified by the smokeless chimneys and the closed door. Only a cur lay in the sun, and some dirty ducks squittered the water in a dirty ditch which carried off the drainage of the factory to a neighbouring brook.

A short distance apart from the main building stood the dwelling of the proprietor, Mr. Baines, who had inherited the business from his wife's father and transferred it to his own name. This home of the Baines family, though designed by the same architect, had its aboriginal ugliness modified by numerous superficial improvements. A rich mantle of ivy overgrew a portion of its red brick walls and wreathed its ugly stucco portico. The window-panes were brightly polished and gave a vivacity to the house by their gleaming reflections of light and shade. You could see through them the green Venetian blinds of the sitting-rooms and the unpolished backs of looking-glasses and clean white muslin curtains of the bedrooms. In the short strip of front garden there were beds of scarlet geraniums which added a pleasant note of bright colour.

At the grained front door a cat was waiting to be let in with an air about her as if she too had returned a little late from church or chapel. A strong, rich odour of roast beef filled the air and drowned the scent of hayfields. This intensified the feeling of vulgar comfort which permeated the house when the door was opened by Mr. Baines, senior, and increased the pious satisfaction of the cat, who arched her black body and rubbed herself coyly against her master's Sunday trousers.

"Of course, you're late," snapped Mr. Baines. "I knew you would be. Here's mother, as cross as two sticks."

Mrs. Baines, who had stalked into the narrow hall from the dining-room, gave them no greeting, but merely called to Eliza to serve the dinner, as Mr. John and Miss Josling had arrived.

For Lucy this was not a pleasant meal. Mrs. Baines was one of those unsympathetic persons that took away her appetite. She was a thoroughly good woman in the estimation of her neighbours, austerely devout, rigidly honest, an able housewife and a strict mother. But her future daughter-in-law had long since classed her as thoroughly unlovable. The one tender feeling she evinced was her passionate though undemonstrative devotion to her only son. Even this, though it might beautify her dull being in the eyes of an unconcerned observer, did not always announce itself pleasantly to her home circle. To John it had often been the reason for a cruel smacking when a child and guilty of some small childish sin; to her husband it was the excuse for vexatious economies, which while they did not materially increase the funds devoted to his son's education, had frequently interfered with his personal comfort.

Mrs. Baines's love of John was further manifested to Lucy by a jealous criticism of her speech and actions; for, like most mothers of an only son, she was bound to resent the bestowal of his affections on a sweetheart, and determined to be dissatisfied with whomever he might select for that honourable position.

So, although Lucy was pretty, relatively well-educated, earning her living already as a National school-mistress, the daughter of a much-respected farmer, and known by the Baines family almost since she was a baby, Mrs. Baines found fault with her just because she had found favour with John. Lucy was "Church" and they were "Chapel." She was vain and worldly and quite unsuited to be the wife of a missionary. The fascination of worldliness was not denied. The Devil knew how to bait his traps. Through worldly influence one was led to read novels on the Sabbath, to dispute the Biblical account of the Creation.

Lucy, it is true, had neither scoffed at Genesis, nor spoken flippantly of Noah's Ark, nor been seen reading fiction on a Sunday; but that didn't matter. With her pretensions to an interest in botany, her talk about astronomy and the distances of the fixed stars and such like rubbish, she was quite capable of sliding into infidelity. And as to her observance of the Sabbath, it was simply disgraceful. Of course, her father was to blame in setting her a bad example and her mother, too, poor soul, was much too easy-going with her daughters. But then, when you came to consider that Lucy had been so much with John, to say nothing of the example set by John's parents, you would have thought she might have learnt by this time how the Lord's Day should be passed.

It was this last point which strained the relations between Mrs. Baines and Lucy on this particular Sunday. Lucy had asked John to take her for a walk in the afternoon. It would be their last opportunity for a quiet talk all to themselves before his departure. Although John Baines had inherited his mother's Sabbatarian scruples he consented to Lucy's proposal, partly because he was in love with her, partly because his residence in London had insensibly broadened his views. For once his mother's influence was powerless to alter his decision, and so she had refrained from further argument. But this first check to her domination over her son had considerably soured her feelings.

Moreover, Mrs. Baines honestly believed, according to her lights—for like all the millions of her class and period she knew absolutely nothing about astronomy, geology, ethnology and history—that the Creator of the Universe preferred you should spend the Sunday afternoon in a small, stuffy back parlour with the blinds half down, reading the Bible or Baxter's sermons (or, if the spiritual appetite were very weak, an illustrated edition of Pilgrim's Progress) and continue this mortification of flesh and spirit until tea time (unless you taught in the Sunday-school). You should then wind up the Day of Rest with evening chapel, supper, more sermon-reading, and bed.

The only person disposed to be talkative during the meal was John Baines the younger. His mother, at all times glum, was more than ever inclined to silence. Lucy was oppressed by her frigid demeanour and vouchsafed very few remarks, other than those called for by politeness. As to Baines, senior, he was one of those short-necked, fleshy men who are born guzzlers, and his attention was too much concentrated on his food to permit of his joining in conversation during his Sunday dinner. As a set-off against abstention from alcohol he was inordinately greedy, and his large appetite was a constant source of suffering to him, for his wife took a grim delight in mortifying it. Only on Sundays was he allowed to eat his fill without her interference. Mrs. Baines always did the carving and helped everything, even the vegetables, which were placed in front of her, flanking the joint. The maid-of-all-work, Eliza, waited at table and was evidently the slave of her mistress's eye. The family dinner on Sundays was almost invariable in its main features, as far as circumstances permitted. A well-roasted round of beef, with baked potatoes and Yorkshire pudding, was succeeded by an apple or a treacle pudding, and a dessert of some fruit or nuts in season. Of one thing there was no lack and abundant variety—effervescing, non-alcoholic drinks: Ginger Beer, Ginger Ale, Gingerade; Lemonade, Citronade, Orangeade; Phosphozone, Hedozone, Pyrodone, Sparkling Cider and Perry Champagne: all the beverages compounded of carbonic acid, tartaric acid, citric acid, sugar, water, apple and pear juice, and flavouring essences.

The Apple champagne that John gallantly poured into Lucy's glass did not lighten her spirits or loosen her tongue. What could she find to say to that guzzling father whose face and hands were always close to his plate, except during the brief intervals between the courses when he threw himself back in his chair, blew his nose, wiped his greasy lips, and passed his fat forefinger round the corners of his gums to remove the wedges of food which had escaped deglutition? Or to the gloomy mother who ate her victuals with a sullen champing, and, beyond a few directions to the submissive servant, made no attempts to sustain conversation, only according to the garrulous descriptions of her son an occasional snappish "Oh! indeed——," "Pretty doings, I can see——," "Little good can come of that——," and so on? At length, when John's experiences in London had come to an end and the two dishes of cherries had replaced the treacle pudding, whilst the servant handed round in tumblers our own superlative Sparkling Cider, Lucy cleared her throat and said, "I suppose John will be leaving you very early to-morrow morning?"

"Eh?" returned Mrs. Baines, fixing her cold grey eyes on Lucy. She had heard perfectly well, but she thought it more consistent with dignity not to lend too ready an ear to the girl's remarks. Lucy repeated more distinctly her question.

"You had better ask him all about it," replied John's mother. "I have other things to think about on the Lord's Day besides railway time-tables."

"Why? Are you coming to see me off, Lucy?" asked John.

"Well, yes; that is, if Mrs. Baines doesn't mind."

"I mind?" exclaimed the angry woman in a strident voice. "What have I got to do with it; I suppose railway stations are free to every one?"

"Yes," said Lucy, with an ache at the back of her throat and almost inclined then and there to break off her engagement. "But I thought you might like to have John all to yourself at the last. However, if you have no objection, I should much like to see him off, poor old fellow"—and Lucy gave his big-knuckled hand an affectionate pat—"I think I can manage it. Father has to come into Theale. He will drop me at the station and pick me up again, and school doesn't begin till nine. What time does your train go, John?"

"Twenty-five past seven. I shall get to London soon after nine. After going to the head-quarters of the Mission and getting my final instructions I shall drive straight down to the docks and go on board the Godavery.... The first place we stop at is Algiers, then Malta, then the Suez Canal and Aden. I expect this is just what you'll have to do, Lucy, when you come out next spring."

Lucy smiled brightly. She had gradually grown into her engagement as she grew from girlhood to womanhood, constrained by John's bland assumption that the damsel he selected was bound to be his wife. But perhaps her main inducement was his fixed determination to become a missionary and her intense longing to see "foreign parts," the wonderful and the interesting world. She was just rallying her spirits to make some animated reply about Algiers when Mrs. Baines intervened and said there were limits to all things, and if they didn't wish to pass the whole of the Lord's Day eating, drinking, and talking they had better rise and let Eliza clear away. On hearing these words, Mr. Baines turned the last cherries into his plate and hastily biting them off and ejecting the stones, pushed his chair back with a sigh. Then, rising heavily, he stumbled into the armchair near the fireplace and composed himself for a nap. The maid began to clear away, longing to get back to her Sunday dinner and concealed novelette. Lucy went to put on her hat; John yawned and drummed his fingers on the window-pane; and Mrs. Baines seated herself stiffly in the armchair opposite her satiated husband, with a large brown Bible on her lap and two or three leaflets covered with small-print references to Scripture.

When John heard Lucy tripping downstairs he went to meet her, feeling instinctively that her re-appearance in the dining-room would draw some bitter comment from his mother. He put on his felt wide-awake, took a stout stick, and soon banged the front door on his sweetheart and himself in a way which sent a shiver through the frame of Mrs. Baines, who with an impatient sigh of disgust applied herself to a gloomy portion of the Old Testament.

Probably had John remained to keep her company she would have made no attempt to entertain him; but she would have applied herself with real interest to Scriptural exegesis. Of her class and of her time what little romance and intellectuality she had was put into Bible study. She believed the British—degenerate though they might appear as to Sabbath observance—were descended from the Ten Lost Tribes, who had been led by the prophet Jeremiah to Ireland in an unnecessary spurt of energy and had then returned in coracles to the more favoured Britain, Jeremiah—age being of no moment where the Divine purpose was concerned—having taken in marriage a daughter of the Irish king——

But ... the ingratitude of her only son, who could not give up to his mother's society his last Sunday afternoon in England! She choked with unshed tears and read verse after verse of the early part of Jeremiah without understanding one word, although she was told in her leaflets that the diatribes bore special reference to England in the latter part of the nineteenth century.... No, the thought of John wandering about the hayfields with Lucy—for, of course, that girl would lead him into the hayfields, perhaps throw hay at him—constantly rose before her, and once or twice a few hot tears dimmed her sight.... "The Lord said also unto me in the days of Josiah the King: Hast thou seen that which backsliding Israel hath done?..."

She had devoted all the money she could save, all the time she could spare to the bringing-up of this boy. She had sent him to college and made him a gentleman. She had done her duty by him as a mother, and this was the return he made. He preferred to spend his last Sunday afternoon frolicking about the country with a feather-headed girl to passing it quietly by his mother's side, as he formerly used to do.... They might even have had a word of prayer together. Mrs. Baines was not usually a woman who encouraged outbursts of vocal piety outside the chapel, but on such an occasion as this.... She might not see him for another five years..

"And I said, after she had done all these things, Turn thou unto me. But she returned not."—Now was it becoming for a grown man, a missionary who had occupied the pulpit at Salem Chapel in the morning, to go gallivanting about the meadows with a young woman in the afternoon? What would any of the congregation say who saw him? A nice spectacle, to be sure!— "And the Lord said unto me, The back-sliding Israel hath justified herself more than treacherous Judah..." "Let me see," reflected Mrs. Baines, trying to give her attention to her reading, "Judah represents the Church of England, and Israel is ... Israel is ... Baines! For goodness sake don't snore like that. You ought to be ashamed of yourself! How you can reconcile it with your conscience to guzzle like a pig every Sunday at dinner and then pass the rest of the afternoon snoring and snoozing instead of reading your Bible, I don't know."

Mr. Baines's bloodshot, greenish eyes regarded his wife with dazed wonderment for a few seconds. Then their red lids dropped and a gentle breathing announced the resumption of his slumbers. For a few moments Mrs. Baines really devoted her attention to the third chapter of Jeremiah; but when once more the respirations of her spouse degenerated into raucous snores, she lost all patience with him, and put away her Bible and pamphlets. She could not stop in the house any longer. It was allowable to visit the sick on the Sabbath day. She would go and see old Mrs. Gannell in Stebling's Cottages and read some tracts to her. So she shook off imaginary crumbs from her skirts, went upstairs to put on her Sunday bonnet, and left her husband—though he was unconscious of the privilege—to snore and chuckle and drivel and snore unrebuked for a couple of hours.

CHAPTER II

JOHN AND LUCY

John and Lucy strode rapidly through the outskirts of the village, past the inspection of curious eyes from over the rim of window blinds, into the quiet country, which lay sleeping in veiled sunshine; for the warmth of the June sun had created a slight haze in the river valley and men and beasts seemed drowsy with the concentrated, undispersed odour of the newly-cut hay. They crossed a little stream by a wooden bridge, climbed two stiles—Lucy gaily, John bashfully, as if fearing that his new-born dignity of preacher might suffer thereby—walked about a quarter of a mile down a densely shaded lane where the high hedgerows were flecked with pale pink, yellow-stamened dogroses, and where the honeysuckle trailed its simple light green foliage and hung out its lank fists of yellow fingers: and then arrived at an open space and a broad high road. This they followed until they came to a white gate, marked in black letters "To Englefield. Private." Without hesitation, from long-established custom, they raised the latch and entered the dense shade of a well-timbered wood with a glimpse here and there, through the tree trunks, of open water.

Lucy sighed with relief and pleasure when the white gate swung to behind her and she was walking on a turf-covered track under the shade of great beech trees. Though the scene was familiar to her she exclaimed at its beauty. John mopped his face industriously, flapped away the flies, blew his nose, and wiped the brim of his hat. "Yes, yes," he would reply, looking to see if his boots were very dusty or whether there were any grass seeds sticking to the skirts of his frock-coat. "Canterbury bells, is that what you call them? Yes, there seem to be lots this year. Here's a nice, clean trunk of a tree. Let's sit down and have our talk...."

"Oh, not here, John. It's too midgy. We will go farther on to The View: there's a seat there."

So they followed the broad, turfy track which commenced to ascend the flank of a down. On the right hand the great trees rose higher and higher into the sky; on the left the ground sloped away to the level of the little lake with its swans and water-lilies; and the turf near at hand was dark blue and purple-green with the bugle in flower. In the ascending woodland there were tall ranks of red-mauve foxgloves. Here the owner of the park had placed an ample wooden seat for the delectation of all who loved landscape beauty.

John threw himself down with heavy abandonment on the grey planks. Had he been alone he would certainly have taken off his boots to ease his hot and compressed feet, but some instinct told him his betrothed might not think the action seemly. Lucy stood for a few moments gazing at the view over the Kennet valley and then sat down beside him.

"How dreadfully you perspire, my poor John," she said, looking at the wet red hand which clasped the rail of the seat.

"Yes. The least amount of walking makes me hot."

"Well, but how will you be able to stand Africa?"

"Oh, it's a different kind of heat there, I believe. Besides, you don't have to go about in a black coat, a waistcoat and a starched shirt; except perhaps at service time on Sundays."

"What a pity black clothes seem to be necessary to holiness!"—(then seeing a frown settling on his face) "I wonder whether we shall see anything so beautiful as this out there?"

"As beautiful as what? Oh! The view. Well, I s'pose so. I believe there are some high mountains and plenty of forest near the place where I am to live."

"What is its name?"

"Hangodi, I think—something like that. Bayley says it means 'the Place of Firewood.'"

"Oh, that doesn't sound pretty at all; just as if there were nothing but dead sticks lying about. I hoped there would be plenty of palms and those things you see in the pictures of African travel books—with great broad leaves—plantains? Is it a village?"

"Hangodi? I believe so. I think the chief reason it has been chosen is its standing high up on a mountain and being near water."

"Oh, John," said Lucy after a minute's silence, "I do look forward to joining you in Africa. I've always wanted to travel, ever since I won a geography prize at school. Just think what wonderful things we shall see. Elephants and lions and tigers. Will there be tigers? Of course not. I ought to have remembered they're only found in India. But at any rate there will be beautifully spotted leopards, and lions roaring at night, and hippopotamuses in the rivers and antelopes on the plains. And ostriches? Do you think there will be any ostriches, John?"

"My dear, how do I know? Besides, we are not going out to Africa to look for ostriches and lions, Lucy," said John, rather solemnly. "We have a great work before us, a great work. There is a mighty harvest to be gathered for the Lord."

"Of course, John, of course," Lucy hastened to reply, "I know what is the real object of your mission, and I mean to help you all I can, don't I?" (pushing back a wisp of his lank brown hair that fell over his brow—for he had taken off the hot wide-awake). "But that won't prevent me from liking to see wild beasts and other queer African things; and I don't see the harm in it, either...."

"N—no, of course it isn't wrong. These things are among the wonderful works of the Almighty, and it is right that we should admire them in their proper place. At the same time they are apt to become a snare in leading us from the contemplation of holy things into vain disputes about science. I know more about these spiritual dangers than you do, Lucy," continued John, from the superior standing of his three years' education in London, "and I warn you against the idolatry of intellect" (squeezing her little kid-gloved hand to temper his solemnity with a lover's gesture). "I knew a very nice fellow in London once. He had studied medicine at the hospitals and he came to Bayswater College to qualify for the East African Mission; for he intended going out as a medical missionary. He was the son of a minister, too, and his father was much respected. But he was always spending his spare time at this new Natural History Museum, and he used to read Darwin and other infidel writers. Well, the result was that he took to questioning the accuracy of Genesis, and of course he had to give up all idea of joining the Mission. I don't know what became of him, but I expect he afterwards went to the bad. For my part, I am thankful to say I never was troubled with doubts. The Bible account of Creation is good enough for me, and so it ought to be for everybody else."

"John! John!" exclaimed Lucy, shaking his arm, "you are just as bad as your mother, who accuses me of disbelieving the Bible because I like to take a walk on a fine Sunday afternoon. How you do run on! I only said I wanted to see elephants and lions in Africa and you accuse me straight out of 'worshipping my intellect' or some such rubbish. Don't you know the chief reason I promised to marry you was because I thought it was so noble of you to go to Africa to teach the poor natives? Very well, if you think African wild beasts will be a snare for my soul I won't run the temptation, and you shall marry some black woman whose ears will come down to her shoulders, and a ring through her nose as well, and no doubts at all about anything."

"Lucy! I think you're very flippant."

"John! I think you're much too sanctimonious! You're a great deal too good for me, and you'd better find a more serious person than I am—Miss Jamblin, for instance."

"Ann Jamblin? And a very nice girl too. Oh! you may sneer at her. She's not pretty, I daresay, but she comes to all the prayer meetings, so mother says; and she's got a nice gift for sacred poetry."

"Yes, I know her verses—flimsy things! Just hymns-and-water, I call them. She's got a number of stock rhymes and she rings the changes on them. Any one could do that. Besides, I've caught her lots of times borrowing whole lines from Hymns, Ancient and Modern, which I suppose aren't good enough for chapel people, so they must needs go and make up hymns of their own. And as to the prayer meetings, it's just the tea and cake that attract her. Bless you! I was at school with Ann Jamblin, and I know what a pig that girl is.... But if you think she'd suit you better as a wife, don't hesitate to change your mind. Your mother would be delighted. And I've heard say that Ann's uncle, who keeps the ham-and-beef shop in Reading, means to leave her all his money. You won't find Ann Jamblin caring much for wild beasts, I can promise you! Why, I remember once when the school was out walking near Reading and we met a dancing bear coming along with its keeper, she burst out screaming and crying so loud that the youngest Miss Calthrop had to take her straight back."

"Now, Lucy! Is it kind to quarrel with me just before I am going away?" (Lucy's unexpected spitfire prettiness and the hint she might be willing to break off the engagement had roused John's latent manliness and he felt now he desired intensely to marry her.)

"My dear John, I wasn't quarrelling, I've nothing to quarrel about. I only suggested to you before it was too late to change your mind that Ann Jamblin would make you a more suitable wife than I should—there, there!" (fighting off a kiss and an attempt at a hug) "remember where we are and that any one might see us and carry the tale to your mother. Of course, I am partly in fun. I know it is unkind to tease you, but somehow I can't be as serious as you are.... Dear old John" (the attempt at a hug and the look of desire in John's eyes have somehow mollified her) "I didn't mean to hurt your feelings.... Did I? ... I'm very sorry.... Just as you're going away, too.... There, never mind.... Look bright and happy.... Now smile!"

John's lips parted reluctantly and showed his pale gums and projecting eye-teeth.

"What do you think, John? ... Let's get up and walk on to the garden gates, ... what do you think my Uncle Pardew is going to give us as a wedding present? A harmonium! Won't that be nice? I shall take it out with me, and then when you teach the people to sing hymns—only you mustn't teach them Ann Jamblin's—I can play the accompaniments. And in the evenings when you are tired I shall try to play something that will soothe you. I have never tried the harmonium yet, but while you are away I mean to practise. It's just like playing the piano, only you have to keep working the pedals with your feet, like a sewing-machine. Uncle Pardew would just as soon give us a piano, but I told him what you said about the climate being bad for them. So he settled that a harmonium would do better. I wonder what other wedding presents we shall get? I can tell to a certainty what your mother will give us."

"What?"

"Why, a very large Bible, bound in shiny brown leather like those in the waiting-rooms at railway stations, with a blue ribbon marker; and a dozen silver spoons. Six large and six small. I know she doesn't consider me worthy of the spoons, but she is bound by custom. When she was married her mother-in-law gave her spoons.... And your father will give us a dinner-service and a gross of Sparkling Cider..."

"I hope to goodness he doesn't. The cost of transporting it up-country would be quite beyond my means. I shall tell him..."

"And my father," continued Lucy, "is going to give me a gold watch and chain. And mother, my own sweet little mother—what do you think she's been working at, John?"

"Can't say, I'm sure."

"Why, all the house linen.... Sheets, pillow-cases, tablecloths, napkins, and such like. She has been getting them ready ever since I was first engaged.... John! You must be very kind to me in Africa."

"Kind to you? Why, of course! Do you suppose I should be anything else?"

"You don't know how I feel the idea of parting with mother. I love her better than any one in the world, better than you, John. She never says anything, but I know she is dreadfully unhappy at the idea of my going away so far and for so long. But then, I tell her, we can't all be old maids. Father isn't rich enough to keep us all at home, and I don't want to go on working at a National school all my life.... Oh, by the bye, talking of mother, I had something so pleasant to tell you. What do you think Lord Silchester has done? You know mother was maid to old Lady Silchester? Well, when father went the other day to see Mr. Parkins about a gate he met his lordship walking out of the agent's office. They got into conversation and father told him I was going out next year to marry you in Africa. And last Wednesday mother got a letter written by Lord Silchester himself, saying he had not forgotten her faithful care of his mother and would she give the enclosed to her daughter, out of which she might buy a wedding present, something to remember Lord Silchester by when she got out to Africa. And there were four five-pound notes in the envelope. Mother was so pleased she positively cried."

"Yes. That was very kind of his lordship. I must tell my mother when I get back to-night. It may cheer her up."

"Oh, every one has been very nice about my engagement. The Miss Calthrops, where I was at school in Reading, told me they were working at some æsthetic mantel-borders for our house in Africa...."

"Mantel-borders! Why, we shan't have any mantel-pieces!"

"No mantel-pieces? No fireplaces?"

"Only a fire for cooking, in the kitchen, and that will be outside."

"Oh well, then, we must put them to some other use; I couldn't wound their feelings by saying we didn't want them."

"Lucy, you mustn't imagine you are going to live in a mansion in Africa. Our home will be only a cottage built of bamboo and mud and tree-stems roughly trimmed, with a thatched or a corrugated-iron roof. I don't suppose it will contain more than four rooms—a bedroom, a bathroom, a sitting-room, a store and an outside kitchen."

"Well, but even a log-hut might be made pretty inside, with some 'art' draperies and cushions and a few Japanese fans. I mean to make our home as pretty as possible. Shall we have a garden?"

"Oh, I daresay—a kitchen garden, certainly. For the Mission Committee wants to encourage the planting of vegetables and even some degree of farming, so that we may live as much as possible on local products. We are taking out spades and hoes and rakes in plenty, a small plough, an incubator, and any amount of useful seeds."

"I'm sure," said Lucy, still musing, "there ought to be lovely wild flowers in Africa and beautiful ferns, too. I mean to have a little wild garden of my own, and I shall press the flowers and send them to mother in my letters."

"I daresay you will be able to do that, when you have finished your household work and done your teaching in the school."

"Teaching in the school?"

"Why, of course you will help me in that. You'll have to take the girls' class, whilst I take the boys'."

"Oh, shall I? That's rather horrid. I didn't think I was going out to Africa to teach, just the same as at home. The National School children at Aldermaston are quite tiresome enough. What will little black girls be like, I wonder?"

"I'm told they're very quick at learning.... I am sorry," continued John, rather portentously, "that you don't quite seem to realize the nature of the duties you are about to undertake. I love you very dearly, Lucy"—and a tremor in his voice showed sincerity—"but that isn't the only reason I have asked you to come out to me in Africa and be my wife. I want a helpmeet, not a playmate; one who will aid me in bringing these heathen to a knowledge of God's goodness; not an idle woman who only thinks of picking wild flowers and ornamenting her house. Don't pout, dear. I only want to save you disappointment. You are not coming out to a life of luxury, but one of hard work. Besides, it would be hardly fair to the Mission if you did not take certain duties on yourself, because when I am married they will increase my pay to two hundred and fifty pounds a year."

"What do you get when you are single?"

"One hundred and eighty. You see a married man gets extra pay because it is always supposed his wife will add her work to his. A married missionary, too, has more influence with the natives."

"All the same, John, we shall sometimes make time to steal away by ourselves and have a nice little picnic without any of those horrid black people near us...."

"Horrid black people, Lucy, have immortal souls...."

"I daresay, but that doesn't prevent their having black bodies and looking like monkeys. However, I daresay I shall get used to them. And if I don't at first ... By the bye, John, I forgot to ask, but I wanted to, so as to relieve mother's mind—are they cannibals?"

"What, the people of Hangodi? I don't know, but I scarcely think so. And if they were, we should have all the more credit in converting them."

"Yes; but suppose they wouldn't wait to be converted, but ate you first?"

"The little I've read and heard shows me they would never do that. African cannibals, it seems, are rather careful whom they eat. Generally only their war captives or their old people. They wouldn't eat a peaceful stranger, a white man. However, on the east side of Africa the negroes are not cannibals, any more than we are."

"Isn't it curious, John, to think what different ideas of right and wrong prevail amongst the peoples of the world? Here, you say, there are some tribes in Africa which eat their own relations. Well, I daresay it is thought quite a right and proper thing to do—out there—just as we in England think the old folk ought to be cherished and taken care of, and kept alive as long as possible. Only fancy how funny it would sound to us to be told that Mr. Jones showed very bad feeling because he wouldn't join his brother and sister in eating up old Aunt Brown! And yet I daresay that is what cannibal scandal-mongers often say to one another. Isn't it wonderful how one lot of human beings can think and act so differently to another lot; and yet each party considers that nobody is right but those who believe as they do? Supposing one day some black missionaries landed in England, dressed in large earrings, bead necklaces, pocket handkerchiefs and nothing else, and tried to persuade us to worship some hideous idol and leave off wearing so many clothes. How astonished we would be ... and yet they would think they were doing right, just as our missionaries do who go out to teach savages the Gospel...."

"Well, I confess I don't see the resemblance. What we preach is the Truth, the Living Truth. What they believe is a lie of the Devil."

"Yes, but they don't know it is. They must think it is the truth or they wouldn't go on believing in it year after year. When I was teaching geography the other day, I was quite astonished to find in the Manual that about four or five hundred millions of people were Buddhists. Isn't it dreadful to think of their all being wrong, all living in vain. Surely God won't punish them for it hereafter?"

"It's hard to say. If they had the means of grace offered to them and rejected the Message I should think He would. But that is the chief object of our Foreign Missions, to teach the heathen the true principles of Christianity and bring the Light of the Gospel to them that sit in darkness. When this has been done throughout the earth, no one will then be able to say he sinned in ignorance, 'because he knew not the way of Life.'"

"And yet, John, see here in England what different views of religion even good people take. Father goes to Church; you go to Chapel; and each thinks the other on the wrong road to Heaven."

"Oh no! Lucy, I wouldn't go so far as that. Of course, I believe that our Connection has been vouchsafed a special revelation of God's Will and Purpose among men. But all the same I feel sure that many a Church person comes into the way of Truth though it may be after much tribulation. Why, I wouldn't deny that even Roman Catholics may be saved, if they have led a godly life and acted up to their lights. At the same time, those who have the Truth among them and are wilfully blind to its teaching are incurring a heavy responsibility."

"Then you think father stands less chance of being saved than you do?"

"Well ... yes ... I do; because in his Church he does not possess the same means of grace as are given to our Connection."

"But he is so good, so kind to every one, so fair in his dealings..."

"Good works without faith are insufficient to save a man."

"Well, for my part, I can't believe that any one will be lost because he may not follow the most correct kind of religion. I can't believe that God will punish any one who isn't very, very wicked indeed. He is so great; we are so little.... Just think, supposing we saw an ant doing anything wrong should we feel obliged to hurt it or burn it? Should we not be rather amused and pitiful? And mustn't we seem the very tiniest of ants to God?"

"Ah, Lucy! The belief in the fierce judgments of the Almighty is a fundamental Truth of our religion, and if your faith in that is shaken, everything will begin to go.... But the subject is too solemn to be lightly discussed, so let's talk about something else. Have you finished my slippers?"

"Yes, and they're perfectly lovely. A dark blue, with J.B. embroidered in white silk. I shall bring them with me to the station to-morrow.... Why, here we are at the gates of the garden! How we've walked and how we've talked! And look, John,"—drawing him back from standing too near the iron gates, "there's his lordship on the terrace, and I do believe the young lady with him is the one he's become engaged to!"

John looked in the direction whither Lucy discreetly inclined her head, beyond triumphs of carpet-bedding to the terrace which fronted the south side of the great house. And there, foremost of several groups of Sunday callers who were taking tea at small tables, they saw specially prominent a party of three: a pretty girl rather showily dressed in the height of 1886 fashion, an old lady, and an elderly man, tall, a little inclined to stoop, dressed in dark, loose-fitting tweeds. He had a long face with a massive jaw and rather a big nose. But though they were not visible at a distance of fifty yards there were kindly wrinkles round his dark grey eyes as he suddenly lifted them from the seated ladies and glanced across the flower beds to see who was looking at him from the outer world.

This was Lord Silchester; and John, not wishing to prolong his indiscretion, raised his wide-awake and turned away with his betrothed. He and Lucy then walked directly to Aldermaston, John leaving her at the railway station, where he consummated his breach of the Sabbath by taking an evening train back to Theale, and so returned to his home at the Aerated Waters factory for the last night he was ever to pass there.

The next morning, punctually at seven o'clock, Lucy's father drew up his gig before the booking-office of Theale station, and, getting a porter to hold the horse, helped Lucy down and accompanied her on to the station platform, where they found the Baines family already assembled: Mrs. Baines gloomily seated on a bench, Mr. Baines reading the old newspaper placards of the closed bookstall, and John busy seeing his numerous boxes labelled.

"Hullo, Baines!—and ma'am—hope you're well ... a bit cast down, I expect? But there, it's a fine career he's starting on.... Still, it's always a wrench. John"—extending his hand—"I've just called in to wish you good luck and a prosperous voyage and a happy return, by and bye. Mind you make a comfortable home out there for my little girl! I shall be feeling about as bad as you feel, ma'am" (Mrs. Baines kept a perfectly impassive face during these attempts at sympathy and did not even look at the speaker), "next—when is it to be? March?—when I come to part with Lucy. But life's made up of partings and meetings, which is why, some'ow, I don't like railway stations. Now I can't stop, and if I could, I should only be in the way. Must be off to market. Leave you Lucy. She'll walk back to school. Good-bye, John...."

And Farmer Josling hurried out of the station and his horse's hoofs sounded in quick succession on the ascent to the main road. Lucy, left behind actually found herself regretting that father had brought her in such good time as to give her five-and-twenty minutes or more of irresolute attendance on John. When she had presented him with the slippers, had squeezed his hand two or three times, and adjured him to write from the first stopping-place, besides sending a postcard from London to say he was leaving "all right"; had made a few suggestions about his luggage which, in spite of the urbanity of departure, were too futile to be answered or adopted; and had insisted on pushing the band of his blue tie under the shirt button at the back of his neck, so that it might not rise up over the collar: there seemed to be nothing left to say or do. The bookstall was not yet opened so there were no papers to be bought.

She would have talked with Mrs. Baines, who had retired to the little waiting-room and was pretending there to read a great roll of texts in big print hung against one of the walls. But at her first remark she noticed Mrs. Baines's eyelids were quivering and her under lip twitching in a way to indicate that she was a prey to almost uncontrollable emotion. Although she mechanically turned the leaves of the texts, her eyes were not focussing them, and something seemed to be moving up and down her lank throat which she could not finally swallow. She only answered Lucy's remark by an inarticulate gurgle and waved her away. There was something so pathetic in her dismal ugliness, in her awkwardly restrained emotion, that Lucy was suddenly moved to pity as she returned to the platform. Her embarrassment was cut short by the tumult occasioned by the approaching train, heralded by the clanging of the station bell. The train was full and John had hurriedly to pass all the second class compartments in review to find a place not only for himself but for the amorphous packages deemed too frail for the guard's van. When at last he had squeezed himself and his parcels past the obstructing knees of the established passengers; he had just time to twist round, stretch out over his surly neighbours' laps, and squeeze Lucy's timorously extended hand. Then the train gave a lurch forward and a slide backwards which made him nearly bite his tongue off in an attempt to say good-bye to his parents, and finally rolled slowly out of the station, while the forms of father, mother, and sweetheart left standing on the platform grouped themselves for one moment in an attitude of mute farewell before the advance of the train cut them off from his sight.

The retreating chain of carriages shut itself up like a telescope, and the station began to resume its sleepy calm. Mrs. Baines's emotion now could no longer be restrained from expression. She tottered towards the waiting-room and sinking heavily on to a hard wooden seat she choked and hiccupped and sobbed, and the tears rolled regularly, one after the other, down her cavernous cheeks. Lucy took her trembling hands and tried to soothe her; and then, Mrs. Baines, softened by this sympathy, lost all that remained of her self-control and abandoned herself limply on Lucy's shoulder.

"Oh!" she gasped, "I've parted with him in anger—he's gone! ... Perhaps I shall never see him again.... My boy.... My only son. I never said a kind word to him before he left. I thought there would be time.... I thought John would come and make it up. I was cross because he went out walking with you and came back late by train yesterday. You know I always taught him to observe the Sabbath. But I'd forgive him anything if he'd only come back and give me one kiss ... my boy...."

But John was well on his way to Reading, and the London express, and all his mother's tardy plaints were fruitless to recall him. Moreover, he was not perceptive. To him, his mother's demeanour had seemed much as usual; and he was certainly not conscious that she had parted with him in anger. He was fond of her in a way, but he had been used from childhood to her being always in a huff about something or other.

Lucy restored her future mother-in-law to partial calmness, straightened her bonnet, re-tied the bonnet strings, and walked a little of the way back with her towards Tilehurst, while Mr. Baines followed submissively behind. For the rest of that day he enjoyed unrebuked freedom to do as he liked. He ate his fill and even smoked a pipe in the parlour. His wife having regained her composure held aloof from him in silent, stony grief.

Lucy fortunately encountered the innkeeper of Aldermaston driving thither in a chaise and got a lift, nearly as far as her home, a substantial farmstead on the Mortimer road, close to both church and school. This enabled her to begin her duties punctually. She taught her girls and boys from nine to twelve and two to four. She thought of John with gentle melancholy during the day, and even shed a tear or two at night when she concentrated her mind on the scenes of her betrothed's departure, especially his mother's wild display of grief. But the next morning as she walked from the farmstead to the school she actually hummed a gay tune as she picked a spray of wild roses from the dewy hedge and arranged them round her light straw hat. At the same time she had a twinge of remorse at her forgetfulness—poor John was doubtless now at sea watching England fade from the exile's view; and she forced herself to assume before her scholars an aspect of restrained grief.

Nevertheless, as day after day of summer weather went by in her surroundings of perfect beauty, she confessed to herself she had seldom felt so happy, in spite of her sweetheart's absence.

CHAPTER III

SIBYL AT SILCHESTER

They had ridden over from opposite directions—he from Farleigh Wallop on the downs south of Basingstoke, she from Aldermaston in the Kennet Valley: to meet on the site of the Roman Calleva Atrebatum, the modern Silchester. This was in the beginning of July, 1886. The Roman city of early Christian Britain was then—and now—only marked by two-thirds of an encircling wall of rough masonry, crowned with ivy and even trees. There were grassy hummocks concealing a forum, a basilica and a few houses. An occasional capital of a column or obvious blocks of ancient hewn stone, scattered here and there among the herbage, made it clear, apart from tradition, that the place of their rendezvous had a momentous past. But its present was of purely agricultural interest—waving fields of green wheat, sheep grazing on the enclosed mounds, an opulent farmstead—unless you were a landscape painter of the Birket Foster school: then you raved about the thatched cottages, the old church and its churchyard.

On this July morning Captain Roger Brentham and Sibyl Grayburn had the untilled portion of the site of Calleva Atrebatum quite to themselves. This, no doubt, was the reason why they had decided to meet there for an explanation which the man deemed to be due to him from the young woman. He, of course, arrived first, but Sibyl was not long in making her appearance from the direction of Silchester common. A groom who rode behind her at the sight of Captain Brentham touched his hat and trotted away.... Brentham tied up the two horses in the shade of the Roman wall.

Sibyl disposed herself gracefully on a mound which covered the site of a Roman dwelling, arranged the long skirt of her riding habit so that the riding trousers and other suggestions of her limbs might not be too obvious to the male eye.

Roger was a captain in the Indian Army, about twenty-eight or twenty-nine, strongly built, tanned in complexion, supple in figure, good-looking, keen-eyed. Sibyl Grayburn was a decidedly pretty young woman of twenty-five, the daughter of Colonel Grayburn who had recently moved from Aldershot to Aldermaston and was trying to live the life of a gentleman farmer on rather slender means. The Brenthams and Grayburns of the younger generation were distant cousins.

Roger (seating himself on the mound not too near to Sibyl, and scanning her attentively): "Well, you're just as pretty as you were five years ago—a little filled out perhaps.... And this is how we meet. How utterly different from what I had been looking forward to! I remember when we said good-bye at Farleigh how you cried, and how for the first four years you scarcely missed a mail.... And you can't say I didn't write—when I got a chance.... Or that I didn't work like a nigger to get a position to afford to marry—and now I hear from Maud you're going to marry Silchester. To tell you the truth it didn't come as a complete shock. I saw hints of it in some beastly Society paper that some one posted to me at Aden—I suppose it was you! And this is what women call fidelity!"

Sibyl (at first keeps her eyes on the turf, but presently looks Brentham defiantly in the face): "If women of my own age were to discuss my case—not mere romantic school girls—they would say I had acted with ordinary common sense, and very unselfishly. I am, as you know, twenty-five, and I'm sure you won't have enough to marry on for several years—I should never again get such a chance ... and I really do like Lord Silchester, you don't know how kind he can be—and you can't really care so very much. You reached England a fortnight ago, and never even wrote to me...."

Roger: "I was too much taken aback by that paragraph in the World ... and Maud gave me a hint in the letter she sent to my club. Besides, I had to stop in London to see the Foreign Office and the India Office ... and ... and to attend a missionary meeting" (Sibyl ejaculates with scorn: "Missionary meeting!") "and get some clothes.... I had nothing fit to wear when I landed...."

Sibyl: "Well, I'm not blaming you. I only meant that if you were so madly in love with me as you pretend you would have dashed down to get a sight of me before you went hobnobbing with your missionary friends ... or bothered about clothes. I did not want my engagement to come to you as a shock, so I did post that World to you and got Gerry to address it—and I told Maud, so that she might prepare you. But do let's be calm and sensible and not waste time in needless reproaches. I must get back to lunch. We've got Aunt Christabel coming—she helped to bring it about, you know." (Roger interpolates "Damn her!") "She's got twice mother's determination.... Dear old Roger.... I am sorry ... in a way ... but you'll find heaps of girls, much nicer than I am, ready to jump at the prospect of marrying you." (Here Sibyl's eyes glanced with a little regret at his turned-away face, with the bronzed cheek, the firm profile and the upward twist of the dark moustache.) "And you know our 'engagement' was only boy-and-girl fun. Besides, now I know more about things—I was so young when you went away—I don't approve of cousins marrying.... Isn't their—I mean aren't their ... children deaf and dumb or congenital idiots, or something unpleasant?..." (And here Sibyl, appropriately to the period in which she was living, blushed a deeper rose than the ride had given her at the audacity in alluding to children as the result of marriage.)

Roger: "Nonsense. Heaps of cousins marry and everything turns out all right if they come of healthy stock as we do. Besides, we're only second cousins. But of course this is nothing but an evasion. You thought you could do better for yourself by marrying an elderly peer, and so you threw me over...."

Sibyl: "Well! I did think I might, and not selfishly. There's papa—more or less in a financial tangle over his farm.... There's mother, wearing herself ill, trying to make both ends meet ... and Clara and Juliet to be brought out, and the boys to be educated and got into professions..." (crying a little or pretending to do so out of self-pity) "...I know I'm sacrificing myself for my family, but what would you have me do? I shall soon become an old maid, and you won't be able to marry for ever so long...."

(Roger mutters: "I've five hundred a year and...")

Sibyl: "Yes, but what could we do on that? Poor papa could afford to give me nothing more than my trousseau.... Even on seven hundred a year, if you get a Consulate, we couldn't manage two households, and I'm perfectly certain I couldn't stand the African climate long, and I should have to come home. I don't like roughing it, I should dislike hot countries; and I hate black people.... No, Roger ... dear ... be sensible... If you want to carve out a great career in Africa or India you don't want to be hampered with a wife for several years to come; and then ... I'll—I'll find some really nice girl to marry you, somebody with a little money. And Silchester might help you enormously. They'll probably take him into the new Government—aren't you glad that horrid old Gladstone's gone?—He'll be at the Colonial Office or somewhere like that and I know he'd do anything I asked him, once we were married. If you still want to go back to Africa he shall get you made a Consul or a Governor or whatever it is you want...." But Roger was not going to listen to anything so cold-blooded, even though all the time an undercurrent of thought was glancing at the advantages that might accrue from Sibyl's mariage de convenance. He'd be hanged if he'd take anything from Lord Silchester.... He was entitled to some such appointment, anyway, after all he had done. But there, he had lost all interest in life and if he went to the bad, Sibyl would be to blame. All his interest in an African career had been bound up with Sibyl's sharing it. With her at his side he felt equal to anything. He would conquer all Equatorial Africa, strike at the Mahdi from the south, find Emin Pasha, lay all Equatoria at the feet of Queen Victoria, and in no time Sibyl would be Lady Brentham——

"Yes," interjected Sibyl, "and lose my complexion and be old before my time, riding after you through the jungle, or living stupidly like a grass widow at home...."

Yet as he jerked out his tirade rather theatrically she noted him with an approving eye. His anger and extravagance brought out a certain boyishness and, made him, with the freedom of the jungle about him, still additionally attractive physically.... He certainly was good-looking and in the prime of manhood ... she sighed ... the remembrance of Lord Silchester's pale, somewhat flabby face, his slightly pedantic manner, his carefulness about his health.... He rode—yes—they had already had decorous rides together, but she imagined before the ride his cob had had some of the freshness taken out of him by the groom....

Sibyl tried by broken phrases, and half-uttered hints, to convey the idea that Lord Silchester being nearly sixty—at any rate close on fifty-six—and not of robust health, might not live for ever; though really she wouldn't mind if she died first, men were so perfectly hateful, and so was your family—if you were a woman. You were expected to do all you could for your family, and abused into the bargain by others who held you bound by foolish promises made when you were a mere girl without any knowledge of the world. Still, there was a possibility—just a possibility—for weren't we all mortal?—that she might find herself a widow, a lonely widow some day. Roger by then would have made a great career, become a sort of Sir Samuel Baker; he'd have discovered and named lakes after royalty; then they might meet again; and who could say? Certainly, if it came to love, she wouldn't deny she had never felt quite the same towards any one as she had towards Roger....

But Roger checked such philosophizings rudely, saying they were positively indecent: at which she expressed herself as very angry. Then leading out the horses in eye-flashing silence, Roger helped her to mount and swung himself into the saddle. He escorted her silently to Aldermaston main street, raised his hat, and rode off up the Mortimer road with a set face and angry eyes on the way back to Basingstoke.

He paused however at Tadley to give his father's cob—borrowed for the day—a feed and a rest. His ride lay through one of the loveliest parts of England in those days, before "Dora" had commandeered timber from the woods—to find afterwards she did not want it—before farmers had changed tiles or thatch on barns to corrugated iron, and chars-à-bancs, motor cycles and side-cars with golden-haired flappers, school treats and bean feasts had made the country-side noisy, dangerous and paper-strewn.

Insensibly his mood softened as he rode. It was more than four years since he had been home. Though he had spent all of his youth in this country, save for school and military college, his eyes seemed never before to have taken in the charm of English landscapes. Here was England at its best in the early part of July: poppies blazing in the green corn and whitish green oats, hay still lingering—grey on green—in the fields, ox-eyed daisies fully out, wild roses still in bloom in the hedge-rows, blue crane's bill, blue vetch, and purple-blue campanulas in the copse borders. The plump and placid cows, with swinging udders, so different from the gaunt African cattle with a scarcely visible milk-supply, the splendid cart-horses, the sheep—neat and tidy after shearing—the cock pheasants running across the sun-and-shadow-flecked roads, the cawing rooks, and the cooing woodpigeons, the geese and donkeys on the commons. Here and there, off the main road, park gates of finely wrought iron with a trim geranium-decked lodge and a vista of some charming avenue towards an invisible great house; side turnings, half-overgrown with turf, leading to villages quaintly entitled. Some of the details his eye and ear and nose took in—such as the braying of barrel organs on the fringe of an unseen fair, on a rather burnt and blackened gipsy-befouled common; or the smell of pig-sties in a hamlet, or placards in big print pasted round an ancient stump or on an old oak paling—it was irrational to call beautiful. But together they made up England at its best, with old churches packed with the history of England, the little towns so prosperous, the straggling villages, beautiful if insanitary, the signposts with their agreeable Anglo-Saxon and Norman names, so pleasing to the eye after years of untracked wilderness; the postman trudging his round in red-and-black, the gamekeeper in velveteen, the hearty labourers in corduroy, blue-shirted, bare-armed and hairy chested. All this was England. "Was there a jollier country in the world?" (There was not, in 1886.)

And as to Sibyl.... How differently he saw her now, after four years! As pretty as paint, though rather overheated after a short ride; but how artificial! What a delusion to suppose such a woman would have cared for a rough life in Africa. Why she even spoke slightingly of India, a country of romance far exceeding Africa. Indeed, he had only turned to Africa and African problems because all the great careers to be made in India were seemingly over.... There was nothing to be done in India without powerful backing....

Backing? It was perhaps silly to have flouted the suggestion of Lord Silchester's influence.... It was difficult unless you were related to permanent officials or members of Parliament to get a Consular commission in East Africa. Why not gradually—gradually of course—it wouldn't do to forgive her too quickly—become reconciled to Sibyl's marriage and pursue instead his second desire, a great African career?...

So it was a comparatively happy Roger Brentham who cantered up the road to the vicarage at Farleigh Wallop in the late afternoon of that day and sat with his sister Maud in the arbour enjoying a sound English tea. Maud, a pleasant-faced young woman of thirty, the only sister of three stalwart brothers, one a soldier, another a sailor and the third intending to be a barrister; housekeeper to her father, an absent-minded archæologist; could not be called pretty, because she was too much like a young man of twenty-five with almost a young man's flat figure, but she was in every way satisfactory as a sister. Her father was out on some archæological ramble and she was glad of it because she thought Roger might have come to her with a heart to mend. No doubt he felt heart-broken over Sibyl's defection. She looked at him inquiringly while she poured out tea, but would not of course broach the subject.

"You've been out a long time with the cob. I hope you haven't over-ridden him? Where did you go?"

"To Silchester and back; but I baited him at Tadley and gave him an hour's rest in Basingstoke; and another hour at Silchester. I've jogged along very quietly, looking up old haunts—and—and I've seen Sibyl Grayburn. She told me all about her engagement."

"Sibyl? Then—you don't mind so much? I hardly knew how to break it to you...."

"Mind? Oh, well, there was a boy-and-girl engagement, a flirtation between us before I went away, as you knew. But Africa drove all that out of my mind. Besides, how can I marry on five hundred a year? I dare say Sibyl has done well for herself, and she's getting on. Girls can't afford to wait and look about them like a man can. By the bye, old girl, why doesn't some one come along and marry you? I don't know a better sort of wife than you'd make...."

Maud: "Thank you, Roger, I'm sure you mean it. But I don't suppose I shall ever marry. My line is to look after father for the rest of his life, and then become everybody's aunt. I'm really his curate, you know. And his clerk and his congregation, very often. Oh, I'm quite happy; don't pity me; I couldn't have nicer brothers ... or perhaps a nicer life. I love Farleigh——"

Roger (not noticing, man-like, the tiny, tiny sigh that accompanied this renunciation of marriage): "Jove! How jolly all this is: you're right. If I wasn't a man I should think like you. What could one have better than this?" And he looked away from the arbour and the prettily furnished tea-table to the well-kept lawn with long shadows from the herbaceous border. Beyond that the wooded slopes of Farleigh Down and the distant meadows of the lowland, and then the sun-gilt roofs of Basingstoke's northern suburb, and the distant trains, three, four, five miles away with their trails of cotton-wool smoke indicating a busy world beyond the quietude of the vicarage garden. He could see the slight trace of a straight Roman road athwart the northern landscape, Winchester to Silchester; the downs of Hannington and Sydmonton and the far-off woods of Sherborne. When he was queer with sun-fever in Somaliland he would sometimes be tantalized by this view, like a mirage, instead of the brown-grey sun-scorched plains ringed by low ridges of table-topped mountains and dotted with scrubby acacias, whitened by the drought ... and would pull himself together, sit upright in the saddle and wonder if he would ever see home again. And here he was.... Hang Sibyl!...

So when Sibyl Grayburn married Lord Silchester at the end of that July—because he was fifty-six and impatient to have some summer for his honeymoon before returning to take up the burden—a well-padded one—of office in the Conservative Government—Captain Roger Brentham was among the guests, the relations of the bride. And his best leopard skin, suitably mounted, was in Sibyl's boudoir at Englefield awaiting Lady Silchester's return from the Tyrol.

* * * * *

And in the winter of 1886, Captain Brentham received from Lord Wiltshire the offer of a Consulate on the Last Coast of Africa and accepted it. It was provisionally styled the Consulate for the Mainland of Zangia where the Germans were already beginning to take up the administration, but Brentham was instructed to reside at first at Unguja, the island immediately opposite the temporary German capital. The British Consul-General for the whole of Zangia had been recalled because of heated relations with Germany. Pending his return Captain Brentham was to act as Consul-General without, however, taking too much on himself, as Mr. Bennet Molyneux of the African Department rather acidly told him.

Molyneux, at the Foreign Office, was not at all pleased at Brentham's appointment: one of those things that Lord Wiltshire was wont to do without consulting the permanent officials. Molyneux had not long been in the new African Department (hitherto disparagingly connected with the Slave Trade section); and as Africa had barely entered world-politics, British Ministers of State showed themselves usually indifferent as to how the necessary appointments were filled up, adopting generally names suggested by Molyneux, so that he was accustomed to nominating his poor relations—he had a reserve of wastrel nephews and cousins—or the friends of his friends—such as Spencer Bazzard (q.v., as they say in Encyclopædias). If they were "rotters," the climate generally killed them off in a few months; if they made good, they established in time a claim on the Foreign Office regard and got transferred to Consular posts in South America, the Mediterranean, and Western Europe.

But Lord Wiltshire was not always asleep or uninformed, as he sometimes appeared to be. So his Private Secretary countered Bennet Molyneux's querulous Memo on Captain Brentham's lack of qualification for such a responsible East African post by reminding him that the gentleman in question was well versed in Arabic through having accompanied a Political Mission to the Persian Gulf, that he had served in Aden and Somaliland and had conducted an expedition to the Snow Mountains of East Africa for the Intelligence Division, had contributed papers to the Royal Geographical Society, was a silver medallist of the Zoological Society, and was personally vouched for by a colleague of Lord Wiltshire's: all of which information for the African Department was summed up by the Private Secretary to Molyneux in a few words: "See here, Molly; take this and look pleasant. You can't have all the African appointments in your gift. You must leave a few to the Old Man. He generally knows what he's about." So Molyneux asked Brentham to dine with him and apparently made the best of a bad job ... as he said with a grin to his colleague, Sir Mulberry Hawk.

CHAPTER IV

LUCY HESITATES

When the school holidays supervened, Lucy spent her vacation quietly at Aldermaston working at her African outfit—material and mental—in a desultory way. She supposed she would have to leave in the following April to join her betrothed. April seemed a long while ahead. She had not even given notice to the school managers yet of her intention to give up teaching. It would not be necessary to do so or to brace her mind for the agony of separation from her home until John had announced that all was in readiness and she had received the formal intimation of his Missionary Society that they approved of her going out to join him and would make the necessary arrangements for a steamer passage.

Meantime she gave herself up to the delight of reading such books about African exploration or mission life in Africa as she could obtain from the Reading libraries. They served to strengthen her determination to keep faith with John; while other ties and loves were pulling the other way. She had in her veins that imaginational longing to see strange lands and travel which is such an English trait; yet this longing alternated with fits of absolute horror at her foolishness in having consented to such an engagement. Why could she not have recognized when she was well off? Could any one in her station of life have a more delightful home?

The farmstead stood on a slope about a hundred feet above the Kennet Valley. The river was a mile away, though little subsidiary brooks and channels permeated the meadows in between, and in spring, summer and autumn produced miracles of loveliness in flower shows: purple loosestrife, magenta-coloured willow herb, mauve-tinted valerian, cream-coloured meadow-sweet, yellow flags, golden king-cups, yellow and white water-lilies, water-crowsfoot and flowering rush. Lucy was an unexpressed, undeveloped artist, with an exceptional appreciation (for a country girl) of the beauty in colour and form of flowers and herbage of the velvety, blue-green, black-green cedars which rose above the wall of the Park and overshadowed the churchyard, of the superb elms, oaks, horse-chestnuts, ashes and hawthorns studding the grassy slopes between the house and the water meadows. She loved the rich crimson colour of the high old brick walls of the Park and the same tint in the farm buildings, varied with scarlet and orange and the lemon and grey of lichen and weather-stain. The old farm-house in which she had been born and had passed all her twenty-four years of placid life, save when she was at boarding-school, seemed to her just perfect in its picturesque ancientry and its stored smells of preserved good things to eat and drink. Their garden was carelessly ordered, but from March to October had a wealth of flowers, the spicy odours of box borders, the pungent scent of briar and honeysuckle.

She did take much interest in the details of farming—a trifle of self-conceit made her think herself superior in her bookishness and feeble water-colour painting to her younger sisters, who were already experts in poultry-tending, butter-making, and bread-baking. But she accepted as a matter of course the delicious results (as we should think them now) of living at a well-furnished, well-managed farm: the milk and cream, the fresh butter and new-laid eggs, the home-cured bacon, the occasional roast duck and chicken; the smell of the new-mown hay, the sight of ripe wheat or wheat neatly grouped in its golden sheaves in chessboard pattern; the September charms of the glinting stubble with its whirring coveys of partridges, its revived flower shows—scarlet and blue, bright yellow, dead white, lavender, russet, and mauve; the walnuts in the autumn from their own trees; the Spanish chestnuts from the Park; impromptu Christmas dances in the big barn; an occasional visit to a theatre or a magic-lantern-illustrated lecture in Reading. On one such occasion she saw for the first time Captain Roger Brentham, the explorer, who whilst staying with Lord and Lady Silchester gave a lecture on his recent travels and some wonderful snow mountain he had visited in East Africa.... Why should she seek to leave such surroundings? She could read and hear about all that was most interesting in the world without leaving her parents and her home. Yet, to disappoint poor John, who counted on her coming out to share his work—and if she threw him over she might never get another offer of marriage and grow stout and florid like Bessie Rayner, ten years older than she was, up at the Grange farm....

But was marriage after all, with its children and illnesses and house drudgery, so very attractive to a dreamer? Might she not be happier if she passed all the rest of her life at Aldermaston, saving up her salary as a school-mistress against old age and a possible leaving of the farm if—ever so far ahead—dear father died? She had often thought, with a little encouragement she might write ... write stories! ... and she thrilled at the idea. But then, what experience had she of the world—the great world beyond southern Berkshire—which she could set down on paper?

So far, no one had proposed to her—even John had hardly asked her definitely to marry him. He had always taken it for granted, since he was eighteen, that she would, and from that age herself she had tacitly accepted the position of his fiancée. Why had she acquiesced? There was a weakness of fibre about her and John's stronger will had impressed itself on her smiling compliance. Her mother had rather pursed her lips at the alliance, having her doubts as to John being good enough, and John's mother being even bearable as a mother-in-law. This faint opposition had made Lucy determined to persevere with the engagement. She had a distaste for a farmer type of husband; it seemed too earthy. And she wanted to travel. A missionary ought to make a refined spouse and be able to show her the strange places of the earth.

There were sides of John's character she did not like. She was not naturally pious. The easy-going Church of England and its decorous faith were good enough for her; she loved this world—the world of the Kennet Valley with genial, worldly Reading on one side and not-too-disreputable, racing Newbury on the other—too well to care overmuch for the Heavenly Home in which John was staking out claims; if she had known the word she would have called John priggish; instead, she said "sanctimonious." Yet withal she was conscious of a certain manliness, a determined purpose about him....

Perhaps, however, in the summer months and the rich contentment of September the balance of her inclination might have been tilted against him, she might have nerved herself to writing that cruel letter which should say she shrank from joining him in Africa; were it not that he wrote faithfully from each stopping place, each crisis on his journey. His letters—closely written in a facile running hand on thin foreign paper—were stuffed with conventionally pious phrases, they contained diatribes on his ungodly fellow-passengers who broke the Sabbath (with an added zest from his remonstrances), played cards for money, told shocking stories in the smoking-room, and conducted themselves on shore in a manner which he could not describe. But then he gave very good descriptions of Algiers, of Port Said, Suez and Aden, and made her wish to see these places with her own eyes, smell their strange smells, and eat their strange viands. His letter from Unguja announcing his arrival there in August finally decided Lucy to throw in her lot with John.

There was also the further incentive that African adventure—missionary and political—was again becoming fashionable and attracting attention. Stanley was starting to find Emin Pasha; others had embarked or threatened to embark on the same quest. More and more missionaries were going out. It was rumoured that Ann Jamblin had announced her intention to take up a missionary career. Lucy wrote a little anxiously to inquire. Ann admitted she had toyed with the idea as she believed herself capable of teaching and even of preaching to the savage. But if she did go it would probably be to West Africa where the climate was even more deadly than in the South and East, and such a sacrifice might be more acceptable before the Heavenly Throne than the comfortable and assured position of a missionary's wife, not expected to do more than make a home for her husband.

John's first Unguja letter said that Thomas, Bayley, Anderson and himself had been very kindly received there by the Commercial Agent to the East African Mission—commercial because from the first it had been decided that a reasonable degree of trade should go hand in hand with fervent propaganda and Brotherhood work. The Mission must strive to make itself self-supporting in the long run as it had no rich church behind it. So there were to be lay agents who traded in the products of the country and whose stores would prove an additional attraction to the native visitor and inquirer. The Agent at their Unguja depôt—Mr. Callaway—had been a trader on the West Coast of Africa, agent there to a great distilling firm; who had become so shocked at the effects of cheap intoxicants on the native mind and morals that he had thrown up his employ and enlisted under the banner of a Trading Mission, pledged not to deal in alcohol or gunpowder. Mr. Callaway had "got religion" and "found Christ" (in Liverpool), but in spite of that—the naïve John wrote thus unthinkingly—was a very pleasant fellow who had soon picked up the native language and got on good terms with the Arabs of Unguja. The latter fully approved of his teetotalism—avoidance of alcohol being one of the few good points in their religion. John described with unction the prayer meetings and services they held in Mr. Callaway's sheds and go-downs on the shore of Unguja's port; though he had to admit that his fervour had been a little modified by the rancid smell of the copra[#] stored in these quarters and the appalling stench that arose from the filth on the beach. But there was plenty of good Christian fellowship at Unguja. The representatives of the great Anglican Mission established there—with a Cathedral and a Bishop and a thoroughly popish style of service—had shown themselves unexpectedly good fellows. One of them, Archdeacon Gravening, had presented the four young recruits for the East African Mission to the Arab sultan, and they had seen him review his Baluchi and Persian troops at the head of whom was an English ex-naval officer. Even the Fathers of the French Roman Catholic settlement had a certain elemental Christianity he had never thought to find in the followers of the Scarlet Woman....

[#] Dried coco-nut pulp.

The great British Balozi or Consul-General who had been the unacknowledged ruler of Unguja had just left for home ... rumour said because he could not get on with the aggressive Germans, who were obtaining a hold over the country. They had paid their respects instead to British authority in the person of a very uppish and sneering Vice-Consul—Mr. Spencer Bazzard ... who had great doubts of the value of Christianity so far as the negro was concerned. Mr. Bazzard, however, was dead against the Germans and wanted as many British subjects as possible to enter the interior behind the German coast so as to "queer their pitch," if they attempted to put their "rotten protectorate," in force.

Unguja, John wrote, was a wonderfully interesting island, despite its horrible smells, its heat and mosquitoes, which never left you alone, day or night. Such a mixture of Arabs and Persians, Indian traders, fierce, long-haired Baluchis, plausible Goanese half-castes, Madagascar people, Japanese and Chinese, and negroes from all parts of Africa.... He had already had a touch of fever and Bayley had broken out in boils; Anderson had suffered from diarrhoea; but all three were overjoyed at the prospect of leaving, soon after this letter was posted, in an Arab "dhow" which would convey them and the porters of their expedition to Lingani on the mainland, whence they would start on a two weeks' journey up-country. They were taking with them Snider rifles and ammunition to defend their caravan against wild beasts on the road and also to shoot game for the caravan's meat supply. At Mr. Callaway's advice they had been practising with these rifles at the shooting butts of the Sultan's army for the past week.... Thomas had been told off for Taita....

Then ensued a long silence and Lucy, now thoroughly interested, was getting anxious. But in January came a letter of many pages headed "Hangodi, Ulunga, November, 1886." John wrote that he and his companions had encountered many difficulties. On the fortnight's march inland from Lingani their porters had several times run away in alarm, hearing that a bloodthirsty tribe called "Wahumba" were on the march, or that there was famine ahead. The German traders on the coast had not been friendly, and the attitude of the Arab chiefs in the coast-belt was surly. However, one of these Arabs, Ali bin Ferhani, was a kindlier man than the others and had told off some of his slaves (John feared they were, but what could you do?) to carry their loads to the Ulunga country. They also had with them a Christian convert, a native of Ulunga and a released slave (Josiah Briggs) who could speak English to some extent and was very useful as an interpreter and head man.... Well, they had reached Hangodi at last and liked its surroundings. There were mountains—quite high ones—all round. Hangodi, itself, was over three thousand feet above sea level and quite cool at nights. Indeed John now regretted he had spurned the idea of mantel-borders, for they had fireplaces in the dwelling-houses, both those already built and those they were planning. A fire at night, in fact, was often welcome and cheerful. The Chief approved of the settlement, wanted them to teach his people, and keep off the "Wa-dachi," as he called the Germans, whom he did not seem to like. But the Chief's people, the Wa-lunga, were suspicious and quarrelsome, and as he could not speak their language and had to explain the Gospel through an interpreter, they paid him little attention. The elders of the tribe liked to come and talk with him in his verandah, that is to say, they did the talking—punctuated by a good deal of snuff-taking and spitting; and he gleaned what he could of its sense from the summaries given to him by Josiah Briggs. It seemed to consist of many questions as to how the white men became so rich and why he could not teach this method to their young people. If he tried to expound Sacred things to them they asked in return for a cough medicine or to be shown how to make gunpowder and caps, and how to cure a sick cow. Yet he felt sure their minds would be pierced ere long by a gleam of Gospel light....

There were also some Muhammadan traders from the Coast settled for a time with the Chief, who, he strongly suspected, was selling them slaves, war-captives. Though the Chief seemed willing to listen to their story of the Redeemer, he nevertheless sent out his "young men," his warriors, on raiding expeditions against the tribes to the south, and they sometimes returned from such forays with cattle, with men cruelly tied with bush-rope and their necks fastened to heavy forked sticks, and with weeping young women whom they took as wives.... The Wangwana, as these black "Arabs" were called, were very hostile to his mission—more so sometimes than the real Arabs. Occasionally he had met a white-skinned Arab who reminded him most strongly of the Bible patriarchs, and who seemed very desirous of being on friendly terms with the white man. But these black Arabs who spoke Swahili, the language of Unguja, though they affected outward politeness, were working hard against the good influence of the East African Mission and trying to persuade the Chief to reconsider his first grant of land and expel the white people who were spies in the service of the great Balozi and the English men-of-war, watching to intercept slave dhows....

The children of the Wa-lunga were frightened of him and his two companions and could not be induced, even by gifts of beads, to sit on their knees. But their mothers, on the other hand, worried the white men incessantly for beads and calico, soap and salt, which last they ate as though it was a sweetmeat. Yet they ran away when he sent for the interpreter and tried to tell them about God. One woman had shouted back at him that it was very wicked to talk about God; it would only draw down the lightning ... much better leave God alone and then He left you alone—this at least was how Josiah had translated her speech.

He could not see any idols about the place. He fancied the people worshipped the spirits of the departed, which they believed to dwell in large hollow trees. They were also terribly afraid of witch-craft....

Hangodi was, however, rather a pretty district, and Lucy would be pleased with the site the Mission had chosen. Bayley, who had some knowledge of surveying, made out its altitude above sea-level to be 3,500 feet, more or less. There was a clear stream of water running through a gorge below the Mission enclosure—for they had constructed a rough hedge. A few wild date palms might be seen in the stream valley and there were plenty of pretty ferns and wild flowers.

As to lions; they could be heard roaring every night in the open country, but hitherto he had not actually seen one. Then with a few devout phrases and others expressive of his longing for her to join him the letter came to a conclusion.

During all this time Lucy saw little of the Baines family. But a few days after she had read this letter from Hangodi, Mr. Baines called on Lucy at the school—it was at the beginning of February—and put into her hands a copy of Light to Them that Sit in Darkness. "There's a letter in here of John's which they've printed," said Mr. Baines with considerable exultation, "and mother thought you might like to read it. Mind you return the magazine to her when you've done so. Good-bye. S'pose you are starting in a couple of months?"

Lucy found a column scored at the side with pencil, where the following matter appeared:

BLESSED NEWS FROM EAST AFRICA

We have received the following intelligence from Brother John Baines, who has recently joined the East African Mission:

HANGODI, NGURU,

November 20, 1886.

MY DEAR MR. THOMPSON,—

We arrived here about a month ago after a pleasant stay with the brethren at Unguja. We reached Hangodi in about two weeks of travel from the port of Lingani, accompanied by Broth's Anderson and Bayley, and were greeted most warmly on arrival by Brothers Boley and Batworth—the "busy B.'s," as they are called—who feared from the rumours afloat that we should be stopped by native disturbances on the road. We brought with us from Unguja Josiah Briggs, a convert who was originally a freed slave from this very district of Hangodi. He has lived for five years at our depôt in Unguja or at the Presbyterian Mission station at Dombasi. He will be able to assist me materially as interpreter among the Wa-lunga as Kagulu is his native tongue.

The journey from Lingani to Hangodi was rather a fatiguing one as the donkeys we took with us to ride either fell sick poisoned by some herb, or strayed and were eaten by lions. So we ended by having to walk. Our Unguja porters ran away before we had got far inland, scared by rumours of Wahumba raids or stories of the famine raging in the interior; but a kindly Arab, who is supposed to have known Dr. Livingstone, came to our assistance and sent a large number of his people to convey us and our loads to Ulunga, as this district is called (the root—lunga—means the "good" or the "beautiful" country, as indeed it will be, when it has received the Blessed Gospel).

Mr. Goulburn, who is pioneering and is "spying out the land" to the north, travelled with us as far as Gonja and then quitted us, after we had prayed together in my tent. We turned south and continued our journey to the Ulunga mountains with the Arab's porters and guided by Josiah Briggs.

The country became very hilly, and as it was the beginning of the rainy season we had occasional violent thunder-storms and the streams were difficult to cross. Fortunately, however, the early arrival of the rains kept us from attacks on the part of the terrible roving tribes of Masai or "Wahumba," who only seem to exist to raid and ravage their agricultural neighbours, but who don't like doing so in wet weather. Moreover, they appreciate the springing up of the new green grass after the drought and prefer taking their cattle—whom they worship—out to graze. This new grass attracts to the district incredible herds of antelopes and zebras and gives the lions and leopards such abundance of food and occupation that they never deemed it worth their while to attack our caravan, though during the dry season—the Arabs told us—you could hardly get through the plains without losing a proportion of your carriers from lions, leopards or hyenas. This early breaking of the rainy season therefore seemed to us an act of special intervention on the part of Divine Providence to ensure our safe arrival at our destination. When we reached Hangodi we were hospitably received by the Chief Mbogo, to whom Brother Batworth introduced us. Mbogo rules over the district of Ulunga. He rejoiced greatly that we had come to teach the Gospel and asked me many questions about the Christian faith. An earnest spirit of inquiry prevails amongst all his people, who are flocking to see us and who listen with rapt attention to my simple exhortations delivered through the medium of Josiah. The Arab traders at this place are very annoyed that an English missionary should settle here and expose their wicked traffic in slaves, but I hope to be able to frustrate their intrigues and induce the Chief to expel them. For that reason I am working hard at the language with Josiah and with the vocabularies I have obtained from Mr. Goulburn and Mr. Boley.

Many of the women in this place are eager to hear the blessed tidings and bring their little ones with them while they listen spell-bound to our teaching. I trust soon to have beside me one whose sweet duty it will be to lead these poor sinful creatures into the way of Truth and Life....

The building of the houses, school and chapel was commenced, as you know, two years ago by Brothers Boley and Batworth, whom we relieved, and who are going to Taita to perform similar work for Mr. Goulburn. In completing the station we shall be our own architects, but Mr. Callaway has sent us up two Swahili masons and a Goanese carpenter from Unguja. Anderson is already doing a brisk business at our improvised store.

And now, dear Mr. Thompson, I remain in all Christian love,

Yours sincerely,

JOHN BAINES.

CHAPTER V

ROGER'S DISMISSAL

"So it is really settled, Roger, that you are to go out to that African place with the violent name—something about 'gouging' I know," said Lady Silchester, one evening in the winter-spring of 1887.

She believed she was enceinte and treated herself—and was being treated—with the utmost consideration. Lord Silchester was transfused with delight at the possibility of having a direct heir and promised himself the delicious revenge of taunting those officious friends and advisers who had taxed him with folly in marrying a woman thirty years younger than himself. So she was lying on a couch in the magnificent drawing-room of 6a Carlton House Terrace, clad in some anticipation of the tea-gown. It was nine o'clock in the evening, and Roger Brentham had been summoned to dine alone with her and her husband and talk over his personal affairs. Lord Silchester would presently leave for the House of Lords; meantime he was half listening to their conversation, half absorbed in a volume of Cascionovo's Neapolitan Society in the Eighteenth Century in its French edition.

Roger, with one eye and one ear on Lord Silchester, replied "Yes. Lord Wiltshire has definitely offered me the appointment—through Tarrington, of course—his Private Secretary; and equally definitely I've accepted it. But technically it's not Unguja, nothing so big. Unguja is an Agency and Consulate-General and is still held by Sir James Eccles, who is only at home on leave of absence. My post is a Consulate for the mainland, for the part the German company is taking over. It is styled 'for the mainland of Zangia with residence at the port of Medina.' It is supposed the Germans are going to style their new protectorate 'Zangia,' the old classical name of the Persians for that part of East Africa."

Sibyl Silchester yawned slightly and concealed the yawn with her fan of Somali ostrich plumes which Roger had given her. Lord Silchester put down his book and turned suddenly towards Roger.

"How do you get on at the F.O.?"

"Oh, pretty well, sir," replied Roger, who still kept up his military manners with older men in higher positions than his own. "Pretty well. I've been working in the African Department all the autumn and I think I've got the hang of things; I mean, how to conduct a Consulate and the sort of policy we are to observe in East Africa. I've been down in Kent, also, staying with Sir James Eccles and being indoctrinated by him with the aims and ambitions he has been pursuing ever since 1866. He's a grand man! I hope they send him back. I should be proud to serve under him. Of course, I saw something of him at Unguja in '85-'86..."

"H'm, well, I've no business to express an opinion, but I much doubt whether Wiltshire will send him back—Wiltshire sets much value on good terms with Germany, and Eccles is hated by the Germans...."

Roger: "I know.... They've told me I must try to maintain friendly relations with our Teutonic friends, especially as I am to be, when the Consul-General returns, 'on my own,' so to speak, in the German sphere of influence. Meantime I am to live at Unguja and 'act' for the Consul-General till he or some one else comes out. Awfully good of you, sir, to get this chance for me ... it's rare good luck to be going out to act straight away for a man like Eccles.... I'll try my utmost to do you credit."

Silchester: "I don't doubt you will. But don't rely too much on my personal influence. I'm only Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster ... a minister without portfolio, so to speak. Cultivate the friendship of the permanent officials. Once you're in—I mean once a Secretary of State has given you the appointment, they are the people who count. I remember when I was in diplomacy there was rather an uppish young fellow from the 11th Hussars who'd been somebody's A.D.C. in the Abyssinian War. Dizzy, to oblige 'somebody,' shoved him into the Slave Trade Commission. He took himself and his duties seriously and really did go for the American slave-traders. An Under Secretary hauled him over the coals for trop de zèle. Lord Knowsley supported him. The Under Secretary sent for him afterwards and said, 'Remember this, Bellamy; Lord Knowsley is not always here. WE ARE.' And sure enough after Knowsley left they found out something against him and 'outed' him from the service. Moral: always keep in with the permanent officials and you'll never fall out with the Secretary of State. Do you get on all right with 'Lamps'?"

Roger: "Sir Mulberry? I scarcely ever see him. He's much too big a pot to take an interest in me. Besides, he's keenest about the Niger just now. No, I have mostly to do with Bennet Molyneux, who is head of the Department; and I'm afraid I don't care overmuch for him. I like awfully the clerks in the Department except that they don't take Africa very seriously, think it all a joke, a joke bordering rather on boredom. Still, they're some of the jolliest fellows I know. It's Molyneux I can't hit it off with, and they say in the Department it's because I've come in between some poor relation, some cousin of his he wants to push on out there. He got him appointed a Vice-Consul a year or two back and thought he was going to be asked to act for Eccles whilst he was on leave. And now that Lord Wiltshire has said I am to—I don't doubt at your suggestion, sir—Molyneux has turned quite acid. Especially when he had to draft my instructions! I think also he didn't like my setting him right when I first came to work in the office. He wrote some minutes about the Slave Trade and about the Germans which were the uttermost rubbish you ever read, and he never forgave me for not backing him up at a departmental committee they held—Sir Mulberry presided. And the mere fact that Thrumball and Landsdell have been awfully kind to me and had me to dine with them seems to have soured him. And when one day Lord Wiltshire sent for me to answer some questions—Well, I thought afterwards Molyneux would have burst with spleen. He threw official reserve to the winds and walked up and down in his big room raving—'I've been in this office since 1869,' he said, 'and I don't believe Lord Wiltshire knows me by sight. Yet he's ready to send for the veriest outsider if he thinks he can get any information out of him. The Office is going to the dogs—and so on....'"

Lord Silchester: "Molyneux, Bennet Molyneux. I know him. Not a bad fellow in some respects, but a bad enemy to make. He is a kind of cousin of Feenix's—Colonial Office, you know. Well, your fate is in your own hands ... you must walk warily..." (at this a servant enters and informs his lordship that the carriage is waiting) "I must be off. Sibyl! you won't stay up late? Roger, don't talk to her for more than an hour. Good-bye. Of course, you'll come and see us before you actually sail?..." (goes out).

A pause.

Sibyl: "You may smoke now; but only a cigarette, not a cigar." (Roger lights a cigarette.)

Sibyl: "What dear old Francis said was very good advice. Mind you follow it. Get on the right side of these old permanencies. Whenever Francis begins his instances and illustrations I feel what a perfect book of reminiscences he will some day write. But, of course, it wouldn't do till he's reached an age when he can no longer serve in the Government.... I want him some day to be at the Foreign Office or at least the India Office. I do so love the pomp of those positions, the great parties in the season, the entertaining of delightful creatures from the East with jewelled turbans...."

Roger (a little abruptly): "Are you happy....?"

Sibyl (turning her head and looking at him intently): "Happy? Why, of course. Perfectly happy. Everything has gone splendidly. And now that I'm going to have a child.... I do hope it'll be a boy. Francis would be so happy. You quite realize if he has no heir the peerage and all the entailed estates go away to some perfectly horrid second cousin out in Australia...."

Roger: "In view of that possibility I wonder he did not marry years ago, when he was a young man...."

Sibyl: "My dear! How could he? He was a younger son and in the diplomatic service with barely enough to live on, respectably. And then he got tangled up with another man's wife. He thinks I know nothing about that side of him, but as a matter of fact I know everything. His elder brother, the fifth Lord Silchester, was an awfully bad lot—treated his wife very badly—they were separated and their only son was brought up by his mother to be dreadfully goody-goody. Francis's elder brother died in Paris—I daresay you have heard or read where and how. It was one of the closing scandals of the Second Empire. But then the goody-goody son married after he succeeded—married a sister of Lord Towcester. She was killed in the hunting field and her rather limp husband died of grief afterwards, or of consumption, and Francis came into the title rather unexpectedly five years ago. Then he was embarrassed by his Darby and Joan attachment to Mrs. Bolsover.—However, then she died—and so—at last he felt free to marry....

"I met him first at a croquet party at Aldermaston Park. I saw at once he was struck with me.... However, we won't go over the old argument again which we talked out that day at Silchester.... D'you remember? My ankles were so bitten by harvest-bugs after sitting on those mounds, I shan't forget!..." (meditates).... "I'm much happier than if I had married you.... My dear, that would never have done.... But that need not prevent our being the best of friends, the most attached of cousins.... It's a bore having a confinement in the Jubilee year.... I'd meant to rival Suzanne Feenix in my entertainments.... But if I give Silchester a boy, he will refuse me nothing.... And I mean, as soon as I'm up and about again, to push him on. He's rich—those Staffordshire mines and potteries. He's got lots of ability, but he's too fond of leisure and isn't quite ambitious enough. Complains of being tired.... He's only 57 ... but he much prefers spending the evening at home and reading history and memoirs. Still, if Lord Wiltshire gets overworked at the Foreign Office, Francis simply must succeed him. He knows everything about foreign policy from A to Z, after serving so many years in Vienna and Rome.... Well, dear old boy, this is really good-bye. Make good out there, and don't make a fool of yourself with some grass widow going out, or some fair missionaryess.... I suppose some of them are fit to look at? ... Play up to the permanencies, and try to write some dispatch that'll interest Lord Wiltshire. Then Silchester may get a chance of putting his oar in and have you shifted to a better post and a more healthy one. After that I'll take a hand and marry you to some nice girl with a little money.... I wonder whether you'll feel lonely out there? But men never are, so long as they can move about and get some shooting ... which reminds me I want a lot more leopard skins. Don't mount them: I like to choose my own colours——"

(Enter Lady Silchester's maid.)

Maid: "My lady, before his lordship went out he said I was to remind your ladyship about going to bed early, so I ventured..."

"Quite right, Sophie.... I'll come up in one minute." (Exit maid.) "By the bye, Roger, I ought to ask after the other cousins. How's Maud?" (Roger intimates that good old Maud's all right.) "Maud is an excellent creature; I've always said so, though in a sort of tight-lipped way she's never approved of me. Because she's lost her own complexion in field sports and parish work Maud suspects all other young women of powdering and painting. And Geoffrey?"

"Geoffrey's ship is coming back in May and then he ought to get some leave; and to save your time, I might mention that Maurice will probably be called to the bar in the autumn if he satisfies the Benchers; and as to father, he's more gone over to Rome than ever...."

"You mean Silchester?"

"Yes. The vicar there is as frantic a 'Romanist' as he is, and together they've had a rare old quarrel with the farmer who grows corn where you got the harvest-bug bites, and objects to excavations. I think father forgets at times he's a nineteenth century Christian.... He is awfully annoyed at the general opinion that Silchester only dates from Christian times in Britain and that the Temple to Venus is really a Christian church. That's what comes from a Classical education.... Now I shall get into a row with your spouse for keeping you up. Besides. You don't really care for the others...."

Sibyl: "To be frank, I don't. You were the only one that interested me.... I ... well, then, Roger, this is the last good-bye but one..." (extends her hand on which he imprints a kiss). "That's quite enough show of affection; Sophie might come back at any moment and forget we are cousins. By the bye, it might be wise if you got some one—I dare say Francis would—to introduce you to the Feenixes before you go. They might serve to mitigate the hostility of Bennet Molyneux. Only don't fall in love with Suzanne and desert me! She's got the Colonies, it's true, but I'm going to have the Foreign Office before you're back.... You mark my words! Ta-ta! Coming, Sophie."

CHAPTER VI

THE VOYAGE OUT

Lucy said to herself she had never felt so miserable in her life as she did during the first night on board the Jeddah, the British India Co.'s steamer that was taking her to East Africa. She occupied one of the upper berths in the cabins off the Ladies' Saloon, in which there were, as far as she could reckon, five or six other occupants, including the stewardess, who passed her time alternately snoring on a mattress in a coign off the main entrance and waiting on such of the ladies as were sea-sick.

The Jeddah was rolling about in a choppy sea oft the Downs. Lucy felt a horrible sensation of nausea creep over her at times, and she clenched her teeth to repress her inclination to vomit; for she was too shy to call upon the much-occupied stewardess for assistance. The back of her head throbbed with pain, her eyes were burning hot with unshed tears, and her poor throat ached with suppressed sobs. Far worse than the physical discomfort of sea-sickness was the intensity of her mental agony, the bitterness of her unavailing regrets. She lay motionless in her narrow bunk, gazing up at the ceiling which seemed almost to rest on her face, and turned over in her memory ceaselessly and with minute detail the events of the last three days: her farewell to home and "darling" Aldermaston; her parting with mother on the platform at Reading ... and father ... the flying journey to London, when she had almost forgotten her grief in the excitement of seeing the metropolis; her two days stay with Aunt Pardew, who with her husband kept Pardew's Family Hotel in Great Ormond Street. Then: the sight-seeing, the shopping, the visit to the offices of the East African Mission. Here she had received her saloon passage ticket in the Jeddah, and twenty pounds in bright sovereigns for her out-of-pocket expenses by the way. The Secretary had spoken to her so kindly and earnestly that she had felt ashamed of her indifference to the real work of converting black people.

The Secretary, however, had said one thing that somehow perturbed her. He had mentioned that a sweet-natured young woman from her neighbourhood—Sister Jamblin—might also be going to their Mission in East Africa—by the next boat. He thought this would cheer Lucy up; instead of which it annoyed her greatly.... Then came the early rising on what seemed like her execution morning; the hasty breakfast, interrupted with trickling tears and nose-blowing on Aunt Pardew's—Aunt Ellen's—part, as well as hers.... Aunt Ellen was so like darling mother—and yet—it wasn't mother—...

And the long rattle through dirty and dirtier streets in a four-wheel cab with the rest of her luggage on top. The arrival on board the steamer in the docks, where everything was noisy, hurried, and confused with preparations for departure.... Only this morning! Only some twelve hours since she had taken leave with despairing hugs of Aunt Ellen! Why, it seemed at least a month ago. And only three days since she had seen her mother!...

When she mentally uttered the word "mother," she lost control over herself and gave vent to a convulsive choking sob..

"Would you oblige me," exclaimed a peevish voice from the berth below, "by calling for the stewardess to bring you a basin if you have any inclination to be sick? It would be much better than trying to keep it back and making those disagreeable clicking noises in your throat. Excuse me for remarking it, but it is really most distressing, and it fidgets me so I can hardly get to sleep. You really suffer much more by endeavouring to repress sea-sickness than by giving way at once and having it over...." This the speaker added because she had just given way herself—eruptively—and was now resting from her labours. Lucy was so startled and overawed by this unexpected interruption to her thoughts that she made no answer; but lay quite silent with flushing cheeks and beating heart. "It must be the tall, thin lady," she thought to herself, "I didn't remember she was so close."

Then her thoughts turned to her fellow-passengers. As far as she had ascertained, there were only nine besides herself: five ladies, two Roman Catholic priests or missionaries, and two men, one of whom was a Captain Brentham going out to Unguja, where he was to be Consul.

So, at least, she had heard the pink-cheeked lady say, rather tossing her head when she said it. Her aunt had timidly accosted two of the ladies before leaving the steamer. She had asked them with a redundancy of polite phrases to take Lucy under their protection as far as they might be travelling together. One of them was tall and thin, with a large bony face and cold grey eyes—a little suggestive of Mrs. Baines (Lucy thought); the other was pretty, though the expression of her face, even when she smiled and showed all her white teeth, was somehow rather insincere. But she had the most lovely complexion Lucy had ever seen. It was perfect: very pink in the middle of the cheeks and the palest blush tint over the rest of the face and neck. Her eyes were a dark blueish grey, with very black rims; and her hair a rich golden brown. Lucy was so much fascinated by her appearance and stared at her with such unconscious persistence while her aunt was talking, that at last the pink-cheeked lady encountered her steady gaze with a look of haughty surprise which caused Lucy to lower her eyes.

Neither lady responded very cordially to Mrs. Pardew's deferential request. The tall thin one had said she was only going as far as Algiers, but asked if Lucy was "a Church person" because the East African Mission, she had heard, was run by Methodists. The pretty lady, whose attire Lucy was again scanning with attention, because it was in the latest fashion, had looked at her with rather more interest and said: "Going out to marry a missionary? Well, I can't say I envy your experiences. It must be a wretched life up-country, from all I hear. We shall travel together as far as Unguja, but I can't offer to act as your chaperon. It is very likely my husband may marry you when you get there. I mean—" (seeing Lucy's look of dismay)—"he is the 'marriage' officer there at present, unless Captain Brentham is to deprive him of that privilege, also"—(here she had given a bitter laugh).... "If you feel lonely at any time on the voyage you may come and chat with me ... occasionally; though I can't tell you very much about Africa as I have never been there before."

Slowly the night wore away. Lucy as she lay awake stifled her regrets by vowing that when the steamer called at Plymouth she would instantly leave it and return home to her parents, and write to John telling him she was not fitted to be a missionary's wife. He would soon get over his disappointment as Ann Jamblin was going out by the next steamer. She would marry him like a shot....

In the small hours of the morning the sea calmed down and the ship rolled less. The passenger who had suffered most from sea-sickness—a poor tired-looking woman, mother of too many children—ceased to retch and groan and sank into exhausted repose. Even Lucy at last wove her troubled thoughts into dreams, but just as she had dreamt that this was only a dream and that in reality she was embracing her mother in a transport of happiness, she awoke with tears wet on her face and saw the cabin lit up with garish daylight streaming through the now open skylight. A fresh, exhilarating breeze was sweeping through the stuffy saloon and chasing the nasty odour of sea-sickness. She sat up in her bunk and gazed blankly round, trying to realize the difference between dreamland and reality.

"Would ye like a bath, Miss?" said the stewardess, a coarse-looking but kind-hearted Irishwoman, never quite free from a suspicion of spirit drinking: "Would ye like a bath? Becase if so, ye'd betther follow Mrs. Bazzard."

"I—I—don't know ... well, yes, I think I will," replied Lucy, wondering who Mrs. Bazzard was ... didn't the name come into John's letters? Just then the door leading out of the saloon towards the bathroom opened and presumably Mrs. Bazzard entered the Ladies' quarters, carrying towels and robed in a white lace-trimmed peignoir, and with her hair roughly piled on the top of her head and a lank fringe parted to either side. "Why, it must be the lady with the beautiful complexion," Lucy was saying to herself, when she saw on nearer approach that the rosy cheeks and blush tints had disappeared, and that the incomer, though otherwise resembling her acquaintance of yesterday, yet had a pale face, colourless and sad. "Poor thing!" thought Lucy, "how she must have suffered last night." And so great was her compassion that it overcame her shyness, and she was about to condole with the lady, when Mrs. Bazzard swept by her abruptly without recognition.

When her toilet was finished, she felt ill-at-ease among the uncongenial inmates of the Ladies' Saloon, and they directed towards her at times a look of hatred as at one who was prying into the mysteries of their clothing and bedizenment; so acting on the advice of the stewardess "to get up a bit of appetite," she staggered along the corridor and climbed the slippery brass-bound stairway till she reached the upper-deck. Here she sank on to the nearest seat and derived her first pleasurable sensation on board the steamer from inhaling the sea-scented breeze in the sunshine of April. It was indeed a fine morning, one of the first emphatic days of spring. The sky was a pale azure in the zenith and along the northern horizon a thin film of pinkish mist veiled the distant line of coast. A man cleaning the brasswork told Lucy they were passing the Isle of Wight; yonder was Bournemouth and presently she would see Portland Bill looming up.

A tall man, smoking a cheroot, was gazing in the direction of Portland Bill. Presently he turned round in Lucy's direction, looked at her rather hard then began pacing the deck. "That," she reflected, "must be Captain Brentham, who lectured at Reading on that snow mountain.... How extraordinary! And he must be the man Mrs. ... Mrs. ... Bazzard said was to marry me to John when I arrived." She raised her eyes and they met his. On his next turn in walking the deck he paused irresolute, then raising his cap said: "Are you the young lady from my part of the country who is going out to Unguja to be married? The Captain told me about you—unless I have made some mistake and ought to be addressing another lady."

"I think it must be me," said Lucy. "I ... I've heard you lecture once at Reading. You're a friend of Lord Silchester's, aren't you? My father is one of his tenants. We live at Aldermaston." Her voice trembled a little in pronouncing the name of the place she now loved—too late—beyond any other.

"Aldermaston—of course I know it, known it from boyhood. I rode over there several times last year to see my cousins, the Grayburns. One of them married Lord Silchester last July, and that's why I stayed at Englefield and gave the Reading lecture.... So you came and heard it?"

"I did; because, as I was going out to marry a missionary, I thought I ought to learn something about East Africa. Your ... your lecture made me want to go—awfully.... That wonderful mountain, those clumps of palms, the river and the hippopotami—or was it a lake?"

"Well, you'll see lots of such things if you are going up-country. Whom are you going to marry and where is he stationed?"

"Mr. John Baines, the East African Mission, Ulunga...."

"Oh" (rather depreciatively), "Nonconformist, Plymouth Brethren, or something of the kind. Now I think of it I went to a big meeting of theirs last year soon as I came back. Yes, I remember. They're a trading and industrial mission some distance inland, in the British as well as the German sphere ... good sort of folk, though their mouths are full of texts ... but they took me in once when I was half dead with fever and nursed me back to health. And I liked the way they set to work to make the best of the country and the people.... But it will be awfully rough for you; you don't look cut out for what they have to go through. I should have thought the Anglican Mission more your style, if, indeed, you went out as a Missionary at all."

He wished to add, "You're much too pretty," but restrained himself. Just then the breakfast gong sounded and they went down to the Dining Saloon. Brentham rather masterfully strode to near the top of the long table as though knowing he was the most important person on board, and placed himself next but one to the Captain's seat and Lucy on his right, with a wink at the same time to the Chief Steward as though to say "Fix this arrangement."

A moment after another lady with gold hair and a dazzling complexion glided up and nimbly took the seat on Brentham's left hand. The Captain was absent and intimated that they needn't expect him till the Jeddah was away from Plymouth and out of the Channel. The other lady passengers were breakfasting in the Ladies' Saloon. As soon as they were seated and porridge was being offered, the lady on Brentham's left introduced herself as the wife of a colleague: "My husband is Spencer Bazzard, the Vice-Consul at Unguja—I dare say you've heard about him at the F.O.? He's a friend of that dear Bennet Molyneux's, to whom we're both devoted.... Such a grasp of African affairs, don't you think so? My husband already knows Unguja through and through. I'm sure he'll be glad to put you up to the ropes. I've never been there before. Spencer thought he ought to go out first and make a home for me, so I've been a forlorn grass widow for over a year. However, we shall soon be reunited. And I understand we're to look on you as our chief till the Consul-General returns. Spencer's been Sir James's right-hand man. Thank you. Toast, please. No, I won't take butter: it looks so odd. Like honey! Ugh!"

After breakfast, Brentham escorted Lucy to the upper-deck, got her a folding chair and secured it in a sheltered corner, made her comfortable, lent her a novel and a rug, and then resumed his pacing of the deck or occasional study of a language book—he was trying, he told Lucy, to master Swahili by doing Steere's exercises in that harmonious tongue. Mrs. Bazzard commandeered a steward and a deck-chair and established herself close to Lucy with a piece of showy embroidery, bought at Liberty's with half the embroidery done. In a condescending manner she set herself to pump Lucy about Brentham.... Did she know him well? Didn't she think him good-looking? Mrs. Bazzard thought of the two her husband was the finer-looking man. He had longer moustaches and they were a golden brown, like Mrs. Bazzard's hair; he wasn't perhaps quite so tall; but how she was looking forward to reunion with him. He was a paragon of husbands, one of the Norfolk Bazzards. His elder brother, a person of great legal acumen, had from time to time tendered advice of signal value to Mr. Bennet Molyneux.... It was thus they had got "in" with the Foreign Office, and if Mrs. Bazzard were not pledged to inviolable secrecy (because of Spencer's career) there were things she knew and things she could tell about Lord Wiltshire's intentions regarding Africa—and Spencer.... However.... Did Miss—she begged pardon—she had not caught Lucy's name.... Josselin? any connexion of Sir Martin Josselin? Oh, Josling.... Did Miss Josling come from Captain Brentham's part of the country? Not a relation? No, of course not.... Well, did she think him clever? Some—in the Foreign Office—regarded him as superficial. It was his good looks that had got him on, and the friendship of a great lady ... but then what scandal-mongers men were! And how jealous of one another! Mrs. Bazzard's husband had got his commission through sheer, outstanding ability, yet at the time people said the most horrid things, both of him and her.... But Lord Wiltshire had remained unshaken, knowing Spencer's value; and undoubtedly held him in view for a very important post in Africa as soon as he should have inducted Captain Brentham into his duties.

Lunch came in due course and was eaten in better appetite by most of the passengers. It was served with coarse plenty, on a lower-middle-class standard of selection and cuisine.

It was a sunny afternoon when the Jeddah anchored in Plymouth harbour. The passengers were informed they might spend four hours on shore, so Captain Brentham proposed to Lucy and to Mrs. Bazzard that he should take them under his escort and give them their last chance of eating a decent dinner at an English hotel. Mrs. Bazzard accepted with a gush of thanks and a determination to commence a discreet flirtation with the acting Consul-General, who was undoubtedly a handsome man. Lucy assented simply to the proposition. She was still a little dazed in the dawn of her new life. But as she went off with the others in the tug she put aside as an unreasonable absurdity any idea of flight to the railway station and a return home. It was a great stay to her home-sickness that there should be on board some one she knew who almost shared her home country, who had actually met people she had met, and who would carry this home knowledge out with him to the same region in Africa as that she was going to. This removed the sting of her regret and remedied her sense of utter friendlessness in the wilds. Was he not actually to be her Consul?

These reflections caused her to sit down in the Hotel Writing Room, whilst dinner was being got ready, and Mrs. Bazzard was titivating, and dash off a hasty letter to "dearest mother" informing her of the brighter outlook. Her mother, overjoyed at this silver lining to the cloud of bereavement, spread the news; and so it reached Englefield, where Lord Silchester was spending the Easter recess. He retailed it to Sibyl ... who stamped her foot on the library carpet and said: "There! Didn't I predict it? I said he'd fall in love with a missionaryess!"

"And why not, my love?" replied Lord Silchester. "What if he does?"

A little tossing on the Bay of Biscay sent Mrs. Bazzard to her cabin, and made more scanty the public attendance at meals. But Lucy proved as good a sailor as Brentham, and a great solace to him. For he had his unacknowledged home-sickness too. You could not spend nine months in the best of English country life and the most interesting aspects of London without a revulsion of feeling when you found yourself cut off from all communication with those scenes of beauty, splendour and absolute comfort, and before high ambition had been once more aroused, and the unexplored wilderness had again beckoned her future ravisher. Lucy might be merely a farmer's daughter, a little better educated than such usually were at that period, still an unsophisticated country chit (as Mrs. Bazzard had already summed her up to the tall thin lady); yet she could talk with some slight knowledge about the Silchesters—her mother had been maid to Lord Silchester's mother, and her father was Lord Silchester's tenant. Colonel Grayburn was—or tried to be—a gentleman farmer within a mile of Lucy's home; she had seen Sibyl occasionally during the three years in which the Grayburns had lived in Aldermaston parish. Lucy had never been so far afield as Farleigh Wallop, but she knew Reading, Mortimer, Silchester, Tadley, and even Basingstoke. Merely to mention names like these consoled them both as the steamer ploughed her twelve knots an hour through the "roaring forties."

And when the Jeddah turned into the Mediterranean, with a passing view of the Rock of Gibraltar, and entered upon calm seas, blue and dazzling, their camaraderie increased under Mrs. Bazzard's baleful gaze and interchange of eyebrow-raisings with the thin bony-nosed lady of Lucy's cabin.

The Jeddah anchored off Algiers. The thin lady, who here passes out of the story—-I think she was the wife of a British Chaplain—had invited Mrs. Bazzard to lunch with her on shore. Mrs. Bazzard had hastened to accept the invitation, the more willingly since Captain Brentham seemed to have forgotten her existence; except at meal times, when he was obliged to pass the mustard and the sugar. Brentham and Lucy went off together into the picturesque white city, rising high into the half-circle of the hills. They lunched at the Café des Anglais and dined at an hotel near the quay. They climbed the ladder-like streets of the Arab quarter, bought useless trifles, and had a drive out into the country which was gay with genista in full bloom, with red-purple irises and roses, and dignified by its hoary olives, sombre cypresses and rigid palms.

If Lucy had never been so miserable as she was nine days previously, she had probably never felt so happy as now. Certainly she had never looked so pretty. Her violet eyes had a depth of colour new to them; her brown hair a lustre and a tendency to curl in the little strands and wisps that escaped control about her forehead. Her cheeks, ordinarily pale, and her milk-white complexion generally were suffused with a wild rose flush and a warmth of tint caused by the quickened circulation. The sea air and the sunshine chased away the languor that had accompanied a sedentary life. She had not been unobservant, and had taken several hints in costume from Mrs. Bazzard's dress. She had tightened this, expanded that, cut short skirts that might have flopped, diminished a bustle, inserted a frill, and adapted herself to the warmth of the tropics without losing grace of outline or donning headgear of repellent aspect.

At Port Said he already called her "Lucy," and she saw nothing in it that she mightn't accept, a permissible brotherliness due to country associations and the position of guardian, protector that he had assumed. He showed her those sights of Port Said that need not shock a modest girl. They sat side by side to enjoy the thrill with which the unsophisticated then passed through the Suez Canal. One woman passenger had left the ship at Port Said; another at Suez. There only remained the third one—the mother of many babies—changing at Aden into a Bombay boat—besides Mrs. Bazzard and herself in the Ladies' Saloon. The two missionary priests told their breviaries, gave at times a pleasant smile to her pretty face, and concerned themselves no more with her affairs than if she had been an uncriticizable member of the crew. They were Belgians going out for a life's work to Tanganyika, and to them the Protestant English and their ways were unaccountable by ordinary human standards. The captain of the ship had known Captain Brentham in the Persian Gulf and had the utmost confidence in his uprightness. What more reasonable to suppose than that this girl had been placed under his charge, inasmuch as it was he who would be the official to register her marriage when she met her missionary betrothed at Unguja?

Nor had Brentham any but the most honourable intentions. He felt tenderly and pitifully towards Lucy, carrying her country prettiness and innocency into savage Africa, embarking on a life of unexpected frightfulness, unspeakable weariness, of monotony, varied by shocks of terror, by sights of bloodshed and obscenity that might thrill or titillate a strong man, but must inevitably take the bloom off a woman's mind. He even thought, once or twice, of dissuading her from completing the contract, yet shrank from the upset this would entail. Perhaps she really liked this missionary chap? From the description she gave he didn't seem so bad—he was tall and strong and seemingly a man of his hands, with a turn for carpentry, and was the Agent of a very practical Mission. If she recoiled from this marriage, what was she going to do? It was impossible to think of her remaining at Unguja "on her own," and if he sent her back to England at his own expense her parents might resent very strongly his interference. There was his own career to be thought of ... and Sibyl.... To a woman like Lucy a marriage with most men of her class, or below it, or immediately above it, would come with rather a shock. She was so marriageable, so marked out as a man's prey that she was bound to go through it some day. Then, when she was married, she would live more or less in his Consular district, and he could keep an eye on her without being unduly attentive. Perhaps Mrs. Ewart Stott was still settled in the Zigula country of the German sphere ... she might help her. Very likely she would be able to stick her three years of residence which the Mission generally stipulated for and then return to England.—What a lark if they both went home together and compared experiences?

He might have revolutionized East African affairs in that space of time...

He was quite unconscious that in the two-to-three weeks of their close association on board he had won Lucy's love to such an extent that she was growing slowly to look upon the end of the voyage and the meeting with John as a point of blackness, the entrance to a dark tunnel....

Meantime, without assuming a forwardness of demeanour which her upbringing discountenanced and the watchfulness of Mrs. Bazzard forbade, she accepted all he gave her voluntarily of his society. The Red Sea was kind to them at the end of April: clear cobalt skies, purple waves, a cool breeze against them, no steamy mist in the atmosphere, and occasional views of gaunt mountains or bird-whitened rocks and islands. They sat in their chairs and talked: talked of everything that came into Lucy's mind. She put to his superior wisdom a hundred enigmas to answer, which her mind was now able to formulate with an aroused imagination.

"You say you approve of missionaries, yet you seem to dislike religion; you tried to get out of attending the Sunday service in the Saloon, and you looked very angry when the Captain asked you to read the Lessons. Don't you believe in anything then?"

"You'll find, Lucy"—Brentham would reply—"that the word 'believe' is very much abused. You may 'think' of such and such a thing as probable, as possible, as desirable—often, indeed, the wish is father to the thought. But to imagine it, is not to believe in it; in the same way in which we are compelled by irresistible conviction to believe in some fact or consequence or event, whether we like it or not. We can only 'believe' what can be tested by the evidence of our senses, by some incontestable piling up of evidence or record of historical facts.... Beyond that there are probabilities and possibilities and suppositions. I can believe the fire would burn my finger if I put it in the flame; or that the earth goes round the sun and that the moon is more or less 240,000 miles away from the earth: because my senses or my reason convince me of the truth of these facts. I can believe that you're a very dear little girl seated next me in a deck-chair on a steamer going out to East Africa: because I can put such a belief to some conclusive test of the senses. But I can't in the same way 'believe' in most of what are called 'religious truths,' because they are only suppositions, guesses, tentative explanations which have lost their value ... indeed, have lost their interest. I can't therefore waste my time on such——"

"But," Lucy stammered, "the Bible?"

"Just so: the Bible. How many of you stop to think what the Bible is? A collection of comparatively ancient writings in Hebrew and in Greek, very beautifully translated into Shakespeare's English, with lots of gaps filled up by suggested words and even—as we now think—lots of words and phrases wrongly translated. The Hebrew books may have first been written down at any time between six hundred and one hundred years B.C.; and the New Testament between fifty and a hundred-and-fifty years after Christ—at any rate in the form in which we know them. The original texts were uttered or written by men who only knew a small part of the Mediterranean world, who thought the earth was flat and the rest of the Universe only an arched dome over the earth. Job may have had grander conceptions, but the early Christian writers were ignorance embodied. They were ready to believe anything and everything to be a miracle, and to invent the most preposterous fairy stories to account for commonplace facts. At the same time they often overlooked the beauty and simplicity and practical value of Christ's teaching and also the fact that a good many of his..."