SONS OF FIRE

A Novel

By Mary Elizabeth Braddon

THE AUTHOR OF

"LADY AUDLEY'S SECRET," "VIXEN,"
"ISHMAEL," ETC.

IN THREE VOLUMES

VOL. III.

LONDON
SIMPKIN, MARSHALL, HAMILTON, KENT & CO. LIMITED
STATIONERS' HALL COURT

[All rights reserved]

LONDON:
PRINTED BY WILLIAM CLOWES AND SONS, LIMITED,
STAMFORD STREET AND CHARING CROSS.

CONTENTS OF VOL. III.

SONS OF FIRE.

CHAPTER I.

ROMAN AND SABINE.

Geoffrey was not to be baulked of his purpose. He sat till long after midnight in the music-room with his mother—sat or roamed about in the ample spaces of that fine apartment, talking in his own wild way, with that restless, fitful romanticism which had marked him from childhood, from the dim hours, so vaguely remembered and so sadly sweet in his memory, when he had sat on the floor with his head leaning against the soft silken folds of her gown, and had been moved to tears by her playing. There were simple turns of melody, almost automatic phrases of Mozart's, which recalled the vague heartache of those childish hours; an idea of music so interwoven with that other idea of summer twilight in a spacious, shadowy room, that it startled him to hear one of those familiar movements in the broad glare of day, as if daylight and that music were irreconcilable.

No arguments of his mother's could shake his purpose.

"I will see her and talk with her. She alone shall be the judge of what is right. Perhaps when I am sure of her I may be able to teach myself patience. But I must be sure of her love."

He was at Bournemouth by the first train that would carry him there, and it was still early when he went roaming out towards Branksome and the borderland of Dorset. To walk suited better with his impatience than to be driven by a possibly stupid flyman, and to have the fly pulled up every five minutes for the stupid flyman to interrogate a—probably—more stupid pedestrian, who would inevitably prove "a stranger in those parts," as if the inhabitants never walked abroad.

No, he would find Rosenkrantz, Mrs. Tolmash's villa, for himself. He had been told it was near Branksome Chine.

Swift of foot and keen of apprehension, he succeeded in less time than any flyman would have done. Yes, this was the villa—red-brick, gabled, curtained with virginia creeper from chimneys downwards; virginia creeper not yet touched by autumn's ruddy fingers; and with roses enough climbing over the verandah and surrounding the windows to justify the name which fancy had given. He opened the light iron gate and went into the garden; a somewhat spacious garden. She was there, perhaps. At any rate, he would explore before confronting servant, drawing-room, and unknown lady of the house. The garden was so pretty, and the morning was so fine, that, if within the precincts, surely she would be in the garden.

He went boldly round the house by a shrubberied walk, and saw a fine lawn on a breezy height above the Chine, facing the sunlit sea and the wooded dip that went down to golden sands. The standard rose-trees were blown about in the morning air, dropping a rain of pink and yellow on the smooth short turf. He saw the sea westward—sapphire blue—through an arch of reddest roses, and beyond that archway, close to the edge of the cliff, as it seemed in the perspective, there was a bench with a red and white awning, and sitting under that awning a figure in a white frock, a slender waist, a graceful throat, a small dark head, which he would have known from a thousand girlish heads and throats and waists—for him the girl of girls.

He knew that restless foot, lightly tapping the grass as she looked seaward. Was there not weariness of life, rebellion against fate, in that quick movement of the slender foot? Was she not waiting for happiness and for him?

He ran to her, sat down by her side, had taken both her hands in his, before she could utter so much as a cry of surprise.

"My darling, my darling!" he murmured; "now and for ever my own!"

She snatched her hands away and started to her feet indignantly. Anger flashed in the dark eyes and flushed the pale olive cheeks. And then her frown changed to an ironical smile, and she stood looking at him almost contemptuously.

"I think you forget, Mr. Wornock, that it is a long time since the Romans ran away with the Sabines."

"You mean that I am too impetuous."

"I mean that you are too absurd."

"Is it absurd to love the sweetest woman in the world—the prettiest, the most enchanting? Suzette, I tore back from the Hartz Mountains because I was told you were free—free to marry the man who loves you with all the passion of his soul. When I told you of my love months ago, you were bound to another man, you were obstinately bent upon keeping your promise to him. I had no option but to withdraw, to fight my battle, and try to live without you. I did try, Suzette. I left the ground clear for my rival. I was self-banished from my own home."

"You need not have been banished. I could have kept away from Discombe."

"That would have distressed my mother, whose happiness depends on your society, Suzette. You know how she loves you. To see you my wife will make her very happy. She has taken you to her heart as a daughter."

"Not so much as she has taken Allan Carew to her heart. It was for his sake she liked me. I could see when we parted that it was of Allan she thought; it was for him she was sorry. I don't think she will ever forgive me for making Allan unhappy."

"Not if her only son's happiness is bought with that price? Suzette, why do you keep me at arm's length—now, when there is nothing to part us; now, while I know that you love me?"

"You have no right to say that. If you know it, you know more than I know myself."

"Suzette, Suzette, do you deny your love?"

She was crying, with her hands over her averted face. He tried to draw those hands away, eager to look into her eyes. He would not believe mere words. Only in her eyes could he read the truth.

"I deny your right to question me now, while my heart is aching for Allan—Allan whom I like and respect more than any man living. He is the best friend I have in the world, after my father. He will always be my cherished and trusted friend. If in some great unhappiness I needed any other friend than my father—badly, wickedly as I have behaved to him—it is to Allan I would go for help."

"What, not to me?"

"To you! No more than I would appeal to a whirlwind."

"You think me so unreasonable a creature?"

"Yes, unreasonable! It is unreasonable in you to come here to-day. You must know that I am sorry for having behaved so badly—deeply sorry for Allan's disappointment."

"I begin to think it a pity you disappointed him, if nobody is to profit by your release. Oh, forgive me, forgive me! I should have killed myself if you had persisted. At least you have saved a life. I hope you are glad of that."

"I cannot talk to you while you are so foolish."

"Is it foolish to tell you the truth? I bare my heart to you—to the woman I want for my wife. I am a creature full of faults; but for you I could become anything. I would be as wax, and you might mould me into whatever shape you chose. Oh, Suzette, is not love enough? Is it not enough for any woman to be loved as I love you?"

"You cannot love me better than Allan did, though he never talked as wildly as you."

"Allan! It is not in his nature to love or to suffer as I do. He was not born under the same burning star. All the forces of nature were at war when I was born, Suzette. My Swiss nurse told me of the tempest that was roaring over the wilderness of peaks and crags when I came into the world, with something of that storm in my heart and brain. Be my good genius, Suzette. Save me from my darker, stormier self. Make and mould me into an amiable, order-loving English gentleman. I am your slave. You have but to command me, and I shall submit as meekly as the trained dog who lies down at his mistress's feet and shams the stillness of death. Tell me to fetch and carry; tell me to die. I will do your bidding like that dog."

She gave a troubled sigh and looked at him, pale and perplexed, in deep distress. His pleading moved her as no words of Allan's had ever done, and yet there was more of fear than of love in the emotion that he awakened.

"I have only one thing in the world to ask of you," she said, in a low, agitated voice. "I ask you to leave me to myself. I came here, almost among strangers, in order that I might be calm and quiet, and away from the associations of the past year. You must forgive me, Mr. Wornock, if I say that it was cruel of you to follow me to this refuge."

"Cruel for passionate love to follow the beloved! 'Mr. Wornock,' too! How formal! Suzette, if you do not love me, if I am nothing to you, why did you jilt Carew?"

"I asked him to release me because I felt I did not love him well enough to be his wife."

"Only that?"

"Only that. As time went on, I felt more and more acutely that I could not give him love for love."

"And you cared for no one else?—there was no other reason?" he insisted, trying to take her hand.

"I have hardly asked myself that question; and I will not be questioned by you."

She rose and moved away, he following.

"Mr. Wornock, I am going into the house. I beg you not to persecute me. It was persecution to come here to-day."

"Give me hope. I cannot leave you without hope."

"I can say nothing more than I have said. My heart is sore for Allan. Allan is first in my thoughts, and must be for a long time. I hate myself for having behaved so badly to him."

"And what of your behaviour to me? How cold! how cruel!"

"Oh, thank Heaven, here come Mrs. Tolmash and her daughter. Now you must go."

Geoffrey looked round and saw a middle-aged lady in a chair being wheeled across the lawn, a girl in a pink frock pushing the chair.

He gave Suzette a despairing look, picked up his hat from the grass, and walked quickly away. He was in no mood to make the acquaintance of the pink frock or the lady in the chair, though that plump, benevolent person, with neat little grey curls clustering round a fair forehead, looked quite capable of asking him to luncheon.

He walked back to the nearest station, angry beyond measure, and paced the platform for an hour, waiting for the train for Eastleigh, and with half a mind to throw himself under the first express that came shrieking by. Yet that were basest surrender.

"She is possessed by a devil of obstinacy," he told himself. "But the stronger devil within me shall master her."

While the more fiery and arrogant of Suzette's lovers was raging against her coldness, resolved to bear down all opposing forces, to ride roughshod over every obstacle, her gentler and more conscientious lover was hiding his grief in the quiet of that level and unromantic land on which his eyes had first opened. No tempest had raged when Allan was born. He had entered life amidst no grandeurs of mountain and glacier, arrested avalanche and roaring torrent. An English home—English to intensity—had been his cradle; a mild, even-tempered mother, a father in whom a gentle melancholy was the prevailing characteristic. Growing up under such home-influences, Allan Carew had something of womanly gentleness interwoven with the strong fibre of a fine manly nature. He had the womanly capacity to suffer in silence, to submit to Fate, and to take a very humble place at the banquet of life.

Well, he was not destined to be happy. She had never loved him—never. He had won her by sheer persistency; he had imposed upon her yielding nature, upon the amiability which makes it so hard for some women to say no. She had always been friendly and kind and sweet, but the signs and tokens of passionate love had been wanting. If she would have been content to marry him upon those friendly terms, content to forego the glamour of romantic love, all might have been well. Love would have followed marriage in the quiet years of domestic life. The watchful kindnesses of an adoring husband must have won her heart.

Yes, but for Geoffrey Wornock's appearance on the scene, all might have been well. Suzette would have married Allan, and the years would have ripened friendship into love. Geoffrey's was the fatal influence. Contrast with that fiery nature had made Allan seem a dullard.

This is what the forsaken lover told himself as he roamed about the autumn fields, the fertile levels, where all the soil he trod on was his own, and had belonged to his ancestors when the clank of armed feet was still a common thing in the land, and a stout Suffolk pad was your swiftest mode of travel. The shooting had begun, and the houses of Suffolk were full of guests, and the squires of Suffolk had mustered their guns, and were doing their best to beat the record of last year and all the years that were gone. But Allan had no heart for so much as a morning tramp across the stubble. The flavour and the freshness were gone out of life. He gave his shooting to a neighbour, an old friend of his father's, while his own days were dawdled through in the library, or spent in long walks by stream and mill-race, pine-wood and common, in any direction that offered the best chance of solitude.

He wrote to Suzette, with grave kindness, apologizing for his angry vehemence in the hour of their parting. He expatiated sorrowfully upon that which might have been.

"I think I must have known all along that you had no romantic love for me," he wrote; "but I would have been more than content to have your liking in exchange for my passionate love. I should not have thought myself a loser had you put the case in the plainest words. 'You idolize me, and I—well—I think you an estimable young man, and I have no objection to be your idol, accepting your devotion, and giving you a sisterly regard in exchange.' There are men who would think that a bad bargain; but I am not made of such proud stuff. Your friendship would have been more precious to me than any other woman's love; and I should have been happy, infinitely happy, could I have won you on those terms.

"But it was not to be—and now my heart turns cold every time the post-bag is opened, lest it should contain the letter that will tell me Geoffrey Wornock has won the prize that I have lost. Such things must be, Suzette. They are happening every day, and hearts are breaking, quietly. May you be happy—my dear lost love—whatever I may be."

Much as he might desire solitude, it was impossible for Allan to escape his fellow-man through the month of September in such a happy shooting-ground as that in which his property lay. In that part of Suffolk people knew of hunting as a barbarous form of sport somewhat affected in the midlands, and a fox was considered a beast of prey. The guns had it all their own way in those woods which Allan's great-grandfather had planted, and over the turnips which Allan's tenants had sown. Among the shooters who were profiting by his hospitality it was inevitable that he should meet some one he knew; and that some one happened to be a man with whom he had been on the friendliest terms five years before during a big shoot in the neighbourhood.

They met at a dinner at the house of the jovial squire to whom Allan had given his shooting—a five-mile drive from Fendyke. Lady Emily had persuaded her son to accept the invitation.

His father had been dead six months. Though she, the widow, would go nowhere, it might seem churlish in the son to hold himself aloof from old friends.

"And you don't want to be wearing the willow for that shallow-hearted girl, I hope," added Lady Emily, who was very angry with Suzette.

No, he did not want to wear the willow, to pose as a victim, so he accepted Mr. Meadowbank's invitation.

It was to be only a friendly dinner, only the house party; and among the house party Allan found his old acquaintance, Cecil Patrington, a man who had spent the best years of his life in Africa, and had won renown among sportsmen as a hunter of big game, a weather-beaten athlete, brawny, strong of limb, with bronzed forehead and copper-coloured neck.

"I think you were just back from Bechuana Land when we last met," said Allan, in the unreserve of Squire Meadowbank's luxurious smoke-room, "and you were going back to the Cape when the shooting was over. Have you been in Africa ever since?"

"Yes, I have been moving about most of the time, here and there, mostly in Central South Africa, between Brazzaville and Tabora, now on one side of the lake, now on the other?"

"Which lake?"

"Tanganyika. It's a delightful district, only it's getting a deuced deal too well known. Burton was a glorious fellow, and he had a glorious career. No man can ever enjoy life in Africa like that. There are steamers on the lake now, and one meets babies in perambulators, genuine British babies!" with a profound sigh.

"I have looked for a record of your exploits at the Geographical."

"Oh, I don't go in for that kind of thing, you see. I read a paper once, and it didn't pay. I am not a literary cove like Burton, and I haven't the gift of the gab like Stanley—who is a literary cove, too, by the way. I ain't a scientific explorer. I don't care a hang what becomes of the water, don't you know. I like the lakes for their own sake—and the niggers for their own sake—and the picturesqueness of it all, and the variety, and the danger of it all. If I discovered a new lake or an unknown forest, I should keep the secret to myself. That's my view of Africa. I ain't a geographer. I ain't a missionary. I ain't a trader. I like Africa because it's jolly, and because there ain't any other place in the world worth living in for the man who has once been there."

"Shall you ever go again?"

"Shall I ever?" Mr. Patrington laughed at the question. "I sail for Zanzibar next November."

"Do you?" said Allan. "I should like to go with you."

"Why not?" asked Mr. Patrington.

CHAPTER II.

"IF SHE BE NOT FAIR TO ME."

Geoffrey Wornock went back to Discombe, and his mother read failure and mortification in his gloomy countenance; but he vouchsafed no confidence. He was not sullen or unkind. He lived; and that was about as much as could be said of him. The fiddles, which were to him as cherished friends, lay mute in their cases. He seemed to regard that spacious music-room with its lofty ceiling and noble capacity for sound, as the captive lion regards his cage—a place in which to roam about, and pace to and fro, restless, miserable, unsatisfied. He did not complain, and his mother dared not attempt to console. Once she pressed his hand and whispered "patience;" but he only shook his head fretfully, and walked out of the room.

"Patience! yes," he muttered to himself. "I could be patient, as patient as Jacob when he waited for Rachel—if I were sure she loved me. But I have begun to doubt even that. Oh, if she knew what love meant, she would have rushed into my arms. She would have swooned upon my breast in the shock of that meeting; but she sat prim and quiet, only a little pale and tearful, while I was shaken by a tempest of passion. She is capable of no more than a schoolgirl's love—held in check by the pettiest restraints of good manners and the world's opinion—and she has hardly decided whether that feeble flame burns for me or for Allan."

And then he began to preach to himself the sermon which almost every slighted swain has preached since the world began. What was this woman that he should die of heartache for her? Was she so much fairer than other women whom he might have for the wooing? No, again and again, no. He could conjure fairer faces out of the past—faces he had gazed at and praised, and which had left him cold. She was not as handsome as Miss Simpson, at Simla, last year—that Miss Simpson who had thrown herself at his head—or as Miss Brown at Naini Tal, General Brown's daughter, who looked liked a houri, and who waltzed like a thing of air, imparting buoyancy and grace to the lumpiest of partners. He had not cared a straw for Miss Brown, even although the General had hinted to him, in the after-dinner freedom of the mess-room, that Miss Brown had an exalted opinion of him. No, he had cared for neither of these girls, though either might have been his for the asking. Perhaps that was why he did not care. He was madly in love with Suzette, whom he had known only as another man's betrothed. Suzette represented the unattainable; and for Suzette he could die.

He hardly left the bounds of Discombe during those bright autumnal days, when the music of the hounds was loud over field and down. He had dissevered himself from most of the friends of his manhood by leaving the army; and in Matcham he had only acquaintance. From these he kept scrupulously aloof. One Matcham person, however, he could not escape. Mrs. Mornington surprised him in the music-room with his mother one afternoon, and instead of running away, as he would have done from any one else, he stayed and handed tea-cups with supreme amiability.

He knew she would talk of Suzette. That was inevitable. She had scarcely settled herself in a comfortable armchair when she began.

"Well, Mrs. Wornock, have you seen anything more of this niece of mine?"

Of course there could be only one niece in question.

"No, indeed. She has not come back from Bournemouth, has she?"

"Oh yes, she has. She has come and gone. I made sure she would pay you a visit. You and she were always so thick. I believe she is fonder of you than she is of me."

Geoffrey began to walk about the room—as softly as the parquetted floor would allow—listening intently. Eager as he was to hear, he could not sit still while Suzette was being discussed.

Mrs. Wornock murmured a gentle negative.

"Oh, but she is, you know. There is that," said Mrs. Mornington, pointing to the organ, "and that," pointing to the piano, "and your son is a fiddler. You are music mad, all of you. Suzette took to practising five hours a day. It was Chopin, Rubinstein, Beethoven, and Mendelssohn all day long. She looks upon me as an outsider, because I don't appreciate classical music. I wonder she didn't run over to see you."

"Has she gone back to Bournemouth?"

"Not she. My foolish brother took fright about her because she was looking pale and worried when she came home; so he whisked her off to London, took her to a doctor in Mayfair, who said Schwalbach; and to Schwalbach they are gone, and I believe, after a course of iron at Schwalbach—where they will meet no civilized beings at this time of year—they are to winter on the Riviera, and a pretty penny these whims and fancies will cost her father. I am glad I have no daughters. Poor Allan! such a fine, honest-hearted young man! She ought to have thanked God for such a sweetheart. I dare say, if he had been a reprobate and a bankrupt, she would have offered to go through fire and water for him."

Geoffrey walked out at the open window which afforded such a ready escape.

She was gone! Heartless, selfish girl! Gone without a word of farewell, without a whisper of hope.

Allan returned to Matcham a few days after Mrs. Mornington's appearance at Discombe, and in spite of his dark doubts about Geoffrey, his first visit was to Mrs. Wornock.

She was shocked at the change in him. He was pale, and thin, and serious looking, and, but for his grey-tweed suit, might have been mistaken for an overworked East-end parson.

She talked to him about Lady Emily and the farm. Had he been shooting? Were there many birds this year? She talked of the most frivolous things in order to ward off painful subjects. But he himself spoke of Suzette.

"She has gone away, I am told, for the whole winter. Marsh House is shut up. I never knew what a bright, home-like house it was till I saw it this morning, with the shutters shut, and the gates padlocked. There was not even a dog to bark at me. She has gone far afield; but I am going a good deal farther."

And then he told her with a certain excitement of his meeting with Cecil Patrington, and his approaching departure for Zanzibar.

"It was the luckiest thing in the world for me," he said. "I had not the least idea what to do with myself, or where to go, to get out of myself. The little I have seen of the Continent rather bored me—picture-gallery, cathedral, town-hall, a theatre, invariably shut up, a river, reported delightful when navigable, but not navigable at the time being. The same thing, and the same thing—not very interesting to a man who can't reckon the age of a cathedral to within a century or two—over and over again. But this will be new, this will mean excitement. I shall feel as if I were born again. The wonder will be—to myself, at least—that I don't come home black."

"And you think you will find consolation—in Africa?"

"I hope to find forgetfulness."

"Poor Allan! Poor Geoffrey! It is a hard thing that you should both suffer."

"Mr. Wornock's sufferings will soon be over, I take it. Rapture and not suffering will be the dominant in the scale of his life. He will have everything his own way when I am gone."

"I don't think he will. He has not confided his secrets to me, but I believe he has offered himself to her, since her engagement was broken, and has been rejected."

"He will offer himself again and will be accepted. There are conventionalities to be observed. Miss Vincent would not like people to say that she transferred her affections from lover to lover with hardly a week's interval."

"I only know that my son is very unhappy, Allan."

"So is a spoilt child when he can't have the moon. Your son will get the moon all in good time—only he will have to wait for it, and spoilt children don't like waiting."

"How bitterly you speak of him, Allan. I hope you are not going to be ill friends."

"Why should we be ill friends? It is not his fault that she has thrown me over—at the eleventh hour. It is only his good fortune to be more attractive than I am. It was the contrast with his brilliancy that showed her my dulness. He has the magnetism which I have not—genius, perhaps, or at least the air and suggestion of genius. One hardly knows what constitutes the real thing. I am one of the crowd. He has the marked individuality which fascinates or repels."

"And you will be friends still, Allan—you and my poor wilful son? He is like a ship without a rudder, now that he has left the army. He has no intimate friends. He cannot rest long in one place. I never wanted him to steal your sweetheart, Allan. I am sure you know that. But I should be very glad to see him married."

"You will see him married before long—and to the lady who was once my sweetheart."

Mrs. Wornock shook her head; and the argument was closed by the appearance of Geoffrey himself, who came sauntering in from the garden, with his favourite Clumber spaniel at his heels.

"Been shooting?" Allan asked, as they shook hands.

There was a certain aloofness in their greeting, but nothing churlish or sullen in the manner of either. On Geoffrey's side there was only listlessness; on Allan's a grave reserve.

"No. I look at my dogs every day. The keepers do the rest."

"You are not fond of shooting?"

"Not particularly—not of creeping about a copse on the look-out for a cock pheasant; still less do I love a hot corner!"

He seated himself on the bench by the organ, and began to turn over a pile of music, idly, almost mechanically, not as if he were looking for anything in particular. Allan rose to go, and Mrs. Wornock followed him to the corridor.

"Does he not look wretched? And wretchedly ill?" she asked appealingly; her own unhappiness visible in every line of her face.

"He is certainly changed for the worse since I saw him last. That was a longish time ago, you may remember. He looks hipped and worried. He should go away, as I am going."

"Not like you, Allan, to a savage country. I wish he would take me to Italy for the winter. We could move from place to place. He could change the scene as often as he liked."

"I fear the mind would be the same, though earth and sky might change. Travelling upon beaten paths would only bore him. If he is unhappy, and you are unhappy about him, you had better let him come with Patrington and me."

The offer was made on the impulse of the moment, out of sympathy with the mother rather than out of regard for the son.

"No, no, I could not bear to lose him again—so soon. What would my life be like if you were both gone? I should lapse into the old loneliness—and solitude would bring back the old dreams—the old vain longing——"

These last words were murmured brokenly, in self-communion.

Allan left her, and she went back to the music-room, where Geoffrey had seated himself at the piano, and was playing a Spanish dance by Sarasate, for the edification of the spaniel, who looked agonized.

"What have you been saying to Carew, mother?" he asked, stopping in the middle of a phrase.

"Nothing of any importance. Allan is going to Central Africa with a friend he met in Suffolk—a Mr. Patrington."

"A Mr. Patrington? I suppose you mean Cecil Patrington?"

"Yes, that is the name."

CHAPTER III.

"I GO TO PROVE MY SOUL."

Allan lost no time in making his preparations. He ordered everything that Cecil Patrington told him to order, and in all things followed the advice of that experienced traveller, who consented to spend his last fortnight in England at Beechhurst, where his appearance excited considerable interest in the local mind. He allowed Allan to mount him, and went out with the South Sarum; and as he neither dressed, rode, nor looked like anybody else, he was the object of some curiosity among those outsiders who did not know him as a famous African hunter, a man who had made himself a name among British sportsmen unawares, while following the bent of his own fancy, and caring nothing what his countrymen at home thought about him.

Lady Emily was her son's guest during the last week, anxious to be with him till he sailed, to postpone the parting till the final day. She was full of sorrow at the idea of a separation which was to last for at least two years, and might extend to double that time if the climate and the manner of life in Central Africa suited Allan. Stanley had taken nearly a year and a half going and returning between Zanzibar and Ujiji, and Stanley had been a much quicker traveller than previous explorers. And Mr. Patrington talked of Ujiji as a starting-point for journeys to the north, and to the west, rambling explorations over less familiar regions, and anon a leisurely journey down to Nyassaland, the African Arcadia. His plans, if carried out, would occupy five or six years.

That sturdy traveller laughed at the mother's apprehensions.

"My dear Lady Emily, you are under a delusion as to the remoteness of the great lake country. Should your son grow home-sick, something less than a three months' journey will bring him from the Tanganyika to the Thames. Sixty years ago, it took longer to travel from Bombay to London than it does now to come from the heart of Africa."

The mother sighed, and looked mournfully at her son. He was unhappy, and travel and adventure would perhaps afford the best cure for his low spirits. She discussed the situation with Mrs. Mornington when that lady called upon her.

"Your niece has acted very cruelly," she said.

"My niece has acted like a fool. She has made two young men unhappy, and left herself out in the cold. I saw Geoffrey Wornock last week, and he looked a perfect wreck."

"Do you think she cared for him?"

"The girl must care for somebody. Looking back now, I can see that there was a change in her—a gradual change—after Geoffrey Wornock's return. It was very unfortunate. Either young man would have been a capital match;" added Mrs. Mornington, waxing practical; "but she could not marry them both!"

Lady Emily felt angry with Geoffrey as the cause of unhappiness, the indirect cause of the coming separation between herself and her son. How happy she might have been had all gone smoothly! Allan would have settled at Beechhurst with his young wife; but they would have spent nearly half of every year in Suffolk. How happy her own life might have been with the son she loved, and the girl whom she was ready to take to her heart as a daughter, but for this wilful cruelty on the part of Suzette!

Lady Emily was sitting in the Mandarin-room with her son and his friend late in the evening, their last evening but one in England. To-morrow they were all going to London together, and on the day after the travellers would embark for Zanzibar.

The night was wet and windy, and a large wood fire burnt and crackled on the ample hearth. Lady Emily had her embroidered coverlet spread over her lap, and her work-table drawn conveniently near her elbow, in the light of a shaded lamp, while the two men lounged in luxurious chairs in front of the fire. The room looked the picture of comfort, the men companionable, content, and homely, and the mother's heart sank at the thought that years must pass before such an evening could repeat itself in that room, and before her poor Allan would be sitting in so comfortable a chair. It was not without regret that her son had contemplated the idea of their separation, or of his mother's solitary home when he should be gone. He had talked with her of the coming years, suggested the nieces or girl-friends whom she might invite to enliven the slumberous house, and to enjoy the beauty of those fertile gardens and level park-like meadows that stretched to the edge of the river.

"You have troops of friends, mother, and you will have plenty of occupation with your farm, and sovereign power over the whole estate. Drake"—the bailiff—"will have to consult you about everything."

"Yes, there will be much to be looked at and thought about; but I shall miss you every hour of my life, Allan."

"Not as much as if I had been living at home."

"Every bit as much. I was quite happy thinking of you here. How can I be happy when I picture you toiling alone in the desert under a broiling sun—no water—even the camels dropping and dying under their burdens."

"Dear mother, be happy as to the camels. We shall not be in the camel country. We shall see very little of sandy deserts. Shadowy woods, fertile valleys, the margins of great lakes will be our portion."

"And you will drink the water—which is sure to be unwholesome—and you will get fever."

Allan did not tell his mother that fever was inevitable, a phase of African life which every traveller must reckon with. He represented African travel as a perpetual holiday in a land of infinite beauty.

"Would Patrington go back there if it were not a delightful life?" he argued. "He has not to get his living there, as the poor fellows have who grill and bake themselves for half a lifetime in India. He goes because he loves the life."

"He goes to shoot big game. He is a horrid, bloodthirsty creature."

Little by little, however, Lady Emily had allowed herself to be persuaded that Central Africa was not so hideous a region as she had supposed. She was told that there were bits of country like Suffolk, a home-like Arcadia on the shores of Nyassa which would remind her of her own farm.

"Then why not make that district your head-quarters?" she argued, appealing to Patrington.

"We shall have no head-quarters. We shall wander from one interesting spot to another. We shall settle down only in the Masika season, when travelling is out of the question—not so much because it couldn't be done as because the blackies won't do it. They are uncommonly careful of themselves; won't budge in the rains, won't take a canoe on the lake, if there's a bit of a swell on."

"I am glad of that," sighed Lady Emily, with an air of relief; "I am very glad the negroes are prudent and careful."

"A deuced deal too prudent, my dear Lady Emily."

The men were sitting at a table looking at a map, one of Patrington's rough sketch maps, and splotched with a blunt quill pen. He was showing Allan where more scientific map-makers had gone wrong.

"Here's the Lualaba, you see, and here's the little wood where we camped—I seldom use a tent if I can help it, but there wasn't a village within ten miles of that spot."

The door was opened and a servant announced—

"Mr. Wornock."

Allan started up, surprised, thrown off his balance by Geoffrey's entrance. It was half-past ten—Matcham bedtime.

"You have come to bid us good-bye," Allan said, recovering his self-possession as they shook hands. "This is kind and friendly of you."

"I have come to do nothing of the sort. I want to join your party, if you and your friend will have me."

He spoke in his lightest tone; but he was looking worn and ill, and there were all the signs of sleeplessness and worry in his haggard face.

"I know it's the eleventh hour," he said, "but I heard you say," looking from Allan to Patrington, "that your important preparations have to be made at Zanzibar, where you buy most of the things you want. I—I only made up my mind this evening, after dinner. I am bored to death in England. There is nothing for me to do. I get so tired of things——"

"And your mother?" hazarded Allan, feebly.

"My mother is accustomed to doing without me. I believe I only worry her when I am at home. Will you take me, Carew? 'Yes,' or 'No'?"

"Why, of course it is 'Yes,' Mr. Wornock," exclaimed Lady Emily, coming from the other end of the room, where she had been folding up her work for the night. "Allan, why don't you introduce Mr. Wornock to me?"

She was radiant, charmed at the idea of a third traveller, and such a traveller as the Squire of Discombe. It seemed to lessen the peril of the expedition, that this other man should want to go, should offer himself thus lightly, on the eve of departure.

She shook hands with Geoffrey in the friendliest way, looking at the wan, worn face with keen interest. Like Allan? Yes, he was like, but not so good-looking. His features were too sharply cut; his hollow cheeks and sunken eyes made him look ever so much older than Allan, thought the mother, admiring her own son above all the world.

"Of course they will take you," she said, looking from one to the other. "It will make the expedition ever so much pleasanter for them both. They will feel less lonely."

"I ain't afraid of loneliness," growled Patrington; "but if Mr. Wornock really wishes to go with us, and will fall into our plans, and not want to make alterations, and upset our route for whims of his own, I'm agreeable. It isn't always easy for three men to get on smoothly, you see. Even two don't always hit it—Burton and Speke, for instance. There were bothers."

"You shall be my chief and captain," protested Geoffrey, "and if you should tire of me, well, I can always wander off on my own hook, you know. I could start by myself, now, take my chance and trust to native guides, choose another line of country, where I couldn't molest you——"

"Molest! My dear Wornock, if you are really in earnest, really inclined to join us as a pleasant thing to do, and not a caprice of the moment, I shall be glad to have you, and I think Patrington will have no objection," said Allan, hastily.

"Not the slightest. I only want unity of purpose. You don't look very fit," added Patrington, bluntly; "but you can rough it, I suppose?"

"Yes; I'm not afraid of hardships."

"I should like to have a few words with you before anything is settled, if you will take a turn on the terrace," said Allan, and on Geoffrey assenting, he went over to the glass door, and led the way to the gravel walk outside.

The rain was over, and the moon was shining out of a ragged mass of cloud.

"Why do you leave this place, now, when you are master of the situation?" Allan asked abruptly, when he and Geoffrey had walked a few paces.

"I am not master, no more than a beaten hound is master. I have mastered nothing, not even the lukewarm regard which she still professes for you. She has thrown you over, but I am not to be the gainer. I went to her directly I knew she was free. I offered myself to her, an adoring slave. But she would have none of me. She did not love you enough to be your wife; but for me she had only contempt, cruel words, mocking laughter that cut me like a bunch of scorpions. I am frank with you, Carew. If I had a ghost of a chance, I would follow her to Schwalbach, to the Riviera, all round this globe on which we crawl and suffer. Distance should not divide us. But I am too much a man to pursue a woman who scorns me. I want to forget her; I mean to forget her; and I think I might have a chance if I went with you and your chum yonder. I should like to go with you, unless you dislike me too much to be at ease in my company."

"Dislike you! No, indeed, I do not."

"I'm glad of that. My mother is very fond of you. You have been to her almost as a son. It will comfort her to think that we are together, together in danger and difficulty, and if one of us should not come back——"

"Nonsense, Wornock! Of course we are coming back. Look at Patrington——"

"Ah, but he has been a solitary traveller. When two go, there is always one who stays."

"If you think that, you had much better stop at home."

"No, no; the risk is the best part of the business to a man of my temper. It's the toss-up that I like. Heads, a safe return; tails, death in the wilderness—death by niggers, wild beasts, flood, or fire. I go with my life in my hand, as the catch phrase of the day has it; and if there were no hazards, no danger—well, one might as well stay at home, or play polo at Simla. Fellows get themselves killed even at that. Allan, we have been rivals, but not enemies. Shall we be brothers, henceforward?"

"Yes, friends and brothers, if you will."

They went back to the Mandarin-room, and when Lady Emily had bidden them good night, the three men lit up pipes and cigars, and talked about that wonder-world of tropical Africa, and what they were to do there, till the night grew late, and the Manor groom, dozing on the settle by the saddle-room fire after a hearty supper of beef and beer, questioned querulously whether his guv'nor meant to go home before daylight.

CHAPTER IV.

BLACK AND WHITE.

A year and more, spring and summer, autumn and winter, had gone by since Allan Carew and his companions set their faces towards the Dark Continent; and now it was spring again, the early spring of Central Africa; and under the pale cloudless blue of a tropical sky three white men, with their modest following of Wangwana and Wanyamwezi—a company no bigger than that with which Captain Trivier crossed from shore to shore—camped beside the Sea of Ujiji. They had come from the east, and the journey from the coast opposite Zanzibar, taken very easily, with many halting-places on the way, had occupied the best part of a year. Some of those resting-places had been chosen for sport, for exploration, for repose after weary and troublesome stages. Sometimes a long halt had been forced upon the travellers by sickness, by inclement weather, by the rebellion or the perversity of their men—those porters upon whose endurance and good will their comfort and safety alike depended, in a land where it has been truly said that "luggage is life."

That march from Bagamoyo, Stanley's starting-point, through the vicissitudes of the road and the seasons, had not been all pleasure; and there were darker hours on the way, when, toiling on with aching head and blistered feet, half stifled by the rank mists and poisonous odours of a jungle that smelt of death, Allan Carew and his companions may have wished themselves back in the beaten paths of a civilized world, where there is no need to think of bed or dinner, and where all that life requires for sustenance and support seems to come of itself. But if there had been weak yearnings for the comfortable, as opposed to the adventurous, not one of the three travellers had ever given any indication of such backsliding. Each in his turn stricken down—not once, but often—by the deadly mukunguru, or African fever, had rallied and girded his loins for the journey without an hour's needless delay; and then, on recovery, there had followed a fervent joy in life and nature; a rapture in the atmosphere; a keener eye for every changeful light and colour in earth and sky; the blissful sensations of a newly created being, basking in a new world. It was almost worth a man's while to pass through the painful stages of that deadly fever, the ague fit and languor, the yawning and drowsiness which mark the beginning of sickness, the raging thirst and throbbing temples, the aching spine and hideous visions that are its later agonies, in order to feel that ecstasy of restored health in which the convalescent sees ineffable loveliness even in the dull monotony of rolling woods, and thrills with friendship and love for the dusky companions of his journey.

Loneliness and horror, pleasantness and danger, a startling variety of scenes had been traversed between the red coast of Eastern Africa and that vast inland sea where many rivers meet and mingle in the deep bosom of the mountains. Across the monotony of rolling woods that rise and fall in a seemingly endless sequence; by fever-haunted plains and swampy hollows; through the dripping scrub of the Makata wilderness; in all the dull horror of the Masika season, when the long swathes of tiger-grass lie rotting under the brooding mists that curtain the foul-smelling waste, when the Makata river has changed from a narrow stream to a vast lake which covers the plain, and in whose shallow waters trees and canes and lush green parasites subside into tangled masses of putrid vegetation, until to the traveller's weary eye it seems as if this very earth were slowly rotting in universal and final decay.

They had come through many a settlement, friendly or unfriendly, through rivers difficult to cross by ford or ferry, difficult and costly too, since there are dusky sultans who take toll of these white adventurers at every ferry, sometimes rival chiefs who set up a claim to the same ferry, and have to be defied or satisfied—generally the latter; through many a guet à pens, where the "whit-whit" of the long arrows sounded athwart the woods as the travellers hurried by; through scenes of beauty and romantic grandeur; across vast expanses of green sward diversified with noble timber, calmly picturesque as an English park—a hunter's paradise of big game. They had journeyed at a leisurely pace, loitering wherever nature invited to enjoyment, their camp of the simplest, their followers as few as the absolute necessities of the route demanded.

By these same forest paths, fighting his way through the same inexorable jungle, Burton had come on his famous voyage of discovery to the unknown lake; and by the same, or almost the same, paths Stanley had followed in his search for the great God-fearing traveller, brave and calm and patient, who made Africa his own. And here had come Cameron, meeting that dead lord of untrodden lands, journeying on other men's shoulders, no longer the guide and chief, but the silent companion of a sorrowful pilgrimage. Lonely as the track might be, it was peopled with heroic memories.

"I should like to have been the first to come this way," Geoffrey had said with a vexed air, as he twirled the tattered leaves of Burton's book, which, with Stanley's and Cameron's travels, and Goethe's "Faust," composed the whole of his library.

"You would always like to be first," Allan answered, laughing. "Is it not enough for you that you are the mightiest hunter of us three—the father of meat, as our boys call you—and that finer giraffes and harte beestes have fallen before your gun than even Patrington can boast, experienced sportsman though he is?"

Patrington assented with a lazy comfortable laugh, stretched his legs on the reed mat under the rough verandah, and refilled his pipe.

He was content to take the second place in the record of sport, and to let this restless fiery spirit satisfy its feverish impulses in the toils and perils of the jungle or the plain.

Here was a young man with an insatiable love of sport, an activity of brain and body which nothing tired, and it was just as well to let him work for the party, while the older traveller, and nominal chief of the expedition, basked in the February sun, and read "Pickwick."

A little brown-leather bound Bible, which he had used a good many years before at Harrow, and a dozen or so of Tauchnitz volumes, all by the same author, and all tattered and torn in years of travel and continual reperusal, constituted Mr. Patrington's stock of literature. Allan was the only member of the party who had burdened himself with a varied library of a dozen or so of those classics which a man cannot read too much or too often; for, indeed, could any man, not actually a student, exercise so much restraint over himself as to restrict his reading for three or four years to a dozen or so of the world's greatest books, that man would possess himself of a better literary capital than the finest library in London or Paris can provide for the casual reader, hurrying from author to author, from history to metaphysics, from Homer to Horace, from Herodotus to Froude, the wasting years of careless reading upon those snares for the idle mind—books about books. Half the intelligent readers in England know more about Walter Pater's opinion of Shelley or Buxton Forman's estimate of Keats than they know of the poems that made Shelley and Keats famous.

Dickens reigned alone in Cecil Patrington's literary Valhalla. He always talked of the author of "Pickwick" as "he" or "him." Like Mr. Du Maurier's fine gentleman who thought there was only one man in London who could make a hat, Mr. Patrington would only recognize one humourist and one writer of fiction.

"How he would have enjoyed this kind of life!" he said. "What fun he would have got out of those crocodiles! What a word picture he would have made of our storms, and the Masika rains, and those rolling woods, that illimitable forest t'other side of Ukonongo! and how he would have understood all the ins and outs in the minds of our Zanzibaris, and of the various nigger-chiefs whose society we have enjoyed, and whose demands we have had to satisfy, upon the road!"

"Have they minds?" asked Geoffrey, with open scorn. "I doubt the existence of anything you can call mind in the African cranium. Hunger and greed are the motive power that moves the native mechanism; but mind, no. They have ferocious instincts, such as beasts have, and the craving for food. Feed them, and they will love you to-day; but they will rob and murder you to-morrow, if they see the chance of gaining by the transaction."

"Oh, come, I won't have our boys maligned. I have lived among them for years, remember, while you are only a new-comer. Granted that they are greedy. They are only greedy as children are. They are like children——"

"Exactly. They are like children. They could not be like anything worse."

"What!" cried Patrington, with a look of horror, "have you no faith in the goodness and purity of a child?"

"In its goodness, not a whit! Purity, yes; the purity of ignorance, which we call innocence, and pretend to admire as an exquisite and touching attribute of the undeveloped human being. These blackies are just as good and just as bad as the average child; greedy, grasping, selfish; selfish, grasping, greedy; ready to kiss the feet of the man who comes back to the village with an antelope on his shoulder; ready to send a poisoned arrow after him if on parting company he refuses to be swindled out of cloth or beads. They are bad, Patrington—if I were not a disciple of Locke, I would say they are innately bad. But what does that matter? We are all bad."

"What a pleasant way you have of looking at life and your fellow-men!" said Patrington.

"I look life and my fellow-man full in the face, and I ask myself if there is any man living whose nature—noble, perhaps, according to the world's esteem—does not include a latent capacity for evil. Every man and every woman, the best as well as the worst, is a potential criminal. Do you think that Macbeth who came over the heath at sundown after the battle, flushed with victory, was a scoundrel? Not he. There was not a captain in the Scottish army more loyal to his king. He was only an ambitious man. Temptation and opportunity did all the rest. Temptation, were it only strong enough, and opportunity, would make a murderer of you or me."

"'Lead us not into temptation.' Oh, wondrous wise and simple prayer, which riseth every night and morning out of the mouths of babes and sucklings over all the Christian world, and in a few brief phrases includes every aspiration needful for humanity!" said Cecil Patrington, who was in matters theological just where he had been when his boyish head was bowed under the Episcopal hand on the day of his confirmation.

Far away from new books and new opinions, knowing not the names of Spencer or Clifford, Schopenhauer or Hartmann, this rough traveller's religion was the unquestioning faith of Paul Dombey, of Hester Summerson and Agnes Whitfield and Little Nell, of all the gentlest creatures in the dream-world of Charles Dickens.

There was leisure and to spare for argument and discussion here in this quiet settlement on the shore of the great lake. The travellers had established themselves in a deserted tembe, which had been allotted to them by the Arab chieftain of the land, and which was pleasantly situated on a ridge of rising ground about a mile from the busy village of Ujiji. They had done all that laborious ingenuity could do to purify the rough clay structure, ridding it as far as possible of the plague of insects that crawled in the darkness below or buzzed in the thatch above, of the rats which the dusk of evening brought out in gay and familiar riot, and the snakes that followed in their train, and the huge black spiders, whose webs choked every corner. They had knocked out openings under the deep eaves of the thatched roof—openings which allowed of cross-currents of air, and were regarded by their Zanzibaris and Unyanyembis with absolute horror. Only once in their pilgrimage had the travellers found a hut with windows.

"What does a man want in his tembe but warmth and shelter? And how can these white men be so foolish as to make openings that let in the cold?" argued the native mind; nor was the native mind less exercised by the trouble these three white men took to keep their tembe and its surroundings, the verandah, the ground about it, severely clean, or by their war of extermination against that insect life whose ravages the African suffers with a stoical indifference.

The travellers had established themselves in this convenient spot—close to the port and market of Ujiji—to wait for the Masika, the season of rain that raineth every day—rain that closes round the camp like a dense wall of water—such rain as a man must go to the tropics to see, and which, once having seen, he is not likely to forget. They could hardly be better off anywhere, when the rains of April should come upon them, than they would be here. The natives were friendly; friendly too, friendly and kind and helpful, was the mighty Arab chief Roumariza, the white Arab, sovereign lord of these regions, sole master here, where the sceptre of the Sultan of Zanzibar reaches not: a man whose word is law, and in whose hand is plenty.

Roumariza looked upon Cecil Patrington's party with the eye of favour, and upon Patrington as an old friend—nay, almost a subject of his own, so familiar was Patrington's bronzed face in those regions, whither he had come close upon the footsteps of Cameron, and when that lake land of tropical Africa was still a new world, untrodden by the white man's foot, the northern shores of the lake still unexplored, the vast country of Rua unknown even to the Arabs.

At Ujiji provisions were plentiful and cheap. At Ujiji there were boat-builders; and canoes and rowers were at hand for the exploration of the vast fresh-water sea. Indeed, there was only too much civilization and human life to please that son of the wilderness, Cecil Patrington.

"I love the unknown better than the known," he said. "We shall never see the lake again as Burton saw it—before ever the sound of engine and paddle-wheel had been heard on that broad blue expanse, when the monkeys chattered and screamed and slung themselves from tree to tree in a tumult of wonder at sight of the white wayfarer. Nobody can ever enjoy the sense of rapture and surprise that took Cameron's breath away as he looked down from the hills and saw the wide-reaching, pale blue water flashing in the sun. He took the lake itself for a cloud at the first glance, and a little islet for the lake, and asked his men, with bitterest chagrin, 'Is this all?' And then the niggers pointed, and these vast waters spread themselves out of the cloud, and he saw this mighty sea shining out of its dark frame of mountain and plain forest. Jupiter, what a moment! I could never enjoy that surprise. I had read Cameron's book, and he had discounted the situation for me; he had swindled me out of my emotions. I knew the breadth and length of the lake to within a mile—no chance of mistake for me. Yes, I said. Here is the Tanganyika, and it is a very fine sheet of blue water; and pray where is the Swiss porter to take my luggage? or where shall I find the omnibus for the best hotel? Mark me, lads, before we have been long underground, there will be hotels and omnibuses and Swiss porters, and the Cooks and Gazes of the future will deal in through tickets to the African lakes, and this great heart of Africa will be the Englishman's favourite holiday ground. Let but the tramway Stanley talks about be laid from Bagamoyo to the interior, and 'Arry will be lord of Central Africa, as he is of the rest of the earth."

Idle talk in idle hours beside the camp-fire. Though the days were as sunny and summer-like as February on the Riviera, the nights were cold; and after sundown masters and men liked to sit by their fires and watch the pine-wood crackle and the flames leap through the smoke like living things, vanish and reappear, fade into darkness or flicker into light with swifter and more sudden movement than even the thoughts of the men who watched them.

The porters and servants had their own huts and their own fires. They had made a rough stockade round the cluster of bee-hive huts—a snug settlement, which Allan compared to a mediæval fortress, one of the Scottish castles, whose inhabitants live and move in the pages of the Wizard of the North. Allan was a devoted worshipper of Scott, whom he held second only to Shakespeare; and as Cecil Patrington claimed exactly this position for Charles Dickens, the question afforded an inexhaustible subject for argument, sometimes mild and philosophical, sometimes vehement and angry, to which Geoffrey listened yawningly, or into which he plunged with superior vehemence and arbitrary assertion if it were his humour to be interested.

In a land where there was no daily record of what mankind were doing, no newspaper at morning and evening recounting the last pages of the world's history, telling the story of yesterday's crimes and catastrophes, sickness and death, wrong and right, evil and good, adventures, successes, failures, inventions, gains and losses—every movement near or far in the great mill-wheel of human life—deprived of newspapers, of civilized society, and of all the business of money-getting and money-spending, it was only in such discussions that these exiles could find subjects for conversation. The contents of the letters and papers that had reached them three months before at Tabora, brought on from Zanzibar by an Arab caravan bound for the hunting-grounds of Rua, had been long exhausted; and now there was only the populace of the great romancers to talk about in the long chilly evenings, when they were in no mood for piquet or poker, and too lazy-brained for the arduous pleasures of chess. Then it was pleasant to lie in front of the fire and dispute the merits of one's favourite novelist, or some abstract question in the regions of philosophy. Sometimes the three men's talk would wander from Dickens to Plato, from Scott to Aristotle, from Macaulay to Thucydides. Allan was the most bookish of the three, and his knowledge of German enabled him to carry the lightest of travelling-libraries, in the shape of that handy series of little paper-covered books which includes the best German authors, together with translations of all the classics, ancient and modern, Greek, Latin, Norse, English, French, Italian, at twopence-halfpenny per volume—tiny booklets, of which he could carry half a dozen in the pockets of his flannel jacket, and which comprised the literature of the world in the smallest possible compass.

For more than a year, these three men had been dependent upon one another's society for all intellectual solace, for all mental comfort; for more than a year they had looked upon no white faces but their own, so tanned and darkened by sun and weather that they had come to talk of themselves laughingly as white Arabs, or semi-negroids, and to opine that they would never look like Englishmen again. Indeed, Cecil Patrington, whose fifteen years of manhood had been chiefly spent under tropic stars, had no desire ever again to wear the sickly aspect of the home-keeping Englishman, whom he spoke of disparagingly as a turnip-face. Bronzed and battered, and hardened by the hard life of the desert, he laughed to scorn the amenities of modern civilization and the iron bondage of the claw-hammer coat.

"Male humanity is divided into two classes—the men who dress for dinner, and the men who don't. I have always belonged to the latter half. We are the freemen; our shoulders have never bent under the yoke. I ran away from every school I was ever sent to. I played Hell and Tommy at my private tutor's Berkshire parsonage—set fire to his study when he locked me in, with an order to construe five tough pages of 'Thicksides,' for insubordination. I set fire to his waste-paper basket, lads, and his missus's muslin curtains. I knew I could put the fire out with his garden-hose, when I had given him a good scare; and after that little bit of arson, he was uncommonly glad to get rid of me. The old Herod had insisted on my dressing for dinner every night—putting on a claw-hammer coat and a white tie to eat barley-broth and boiled mutton. I wasn't going to stop in such a bouge as that. Then came the university. I was always able to scramble through an exam., so I matriculated with flying colours—passed my Little Go with a flourish of trumpets; and my people hoped I had turned over a new leaf. So I had, boys—a new leaf in a new book. I had begun to read the story of African travel—Livingstone, Burton, Baker, du Chaillu, Stanley. And from that hour I knew what manner of life I was meant for. I got my kind old dad to give me a biggish cheque—compounded with him, before my second term at Trinity was over, for the fifteen hundred my university career would have cost him—and sailed for the Cape; and from that day to this, except when I read a paper one night in Savile Row, I have never worn the garment of the white slave. I have never thrust these hairy arms of mine into the silk-lined sleeves of a swallow-tail coat."

For the eldest traveller those days before the coming of the Masika left nothing to be desired. The long coasting voyages on the great fresh-water sea, the canoes following the romantic shores or threading the southern archipelago where the river Lofu pours its broad stream into the lake, were enough for exercise, excitement, variety.

For Cecil Patrington—for the man who carried no burden of bitter memories, whose heart ached not with the yearning for home faces, the joys of Central Africa were all-sufficing. He had been happy in scenes far less lovely; happy in arid deserts such as the Roman poet pictured to himself in the luxurious repose of his suburban villa—deserts to be made endurable by the presence of Lalage. Cecil Patrington would not have exchanged his Winchester rifle for the loveliest Lalage; he wanted to kill, not to be killed. No sweetly smiling, no prettily prattling society would have made up to him for the lack of big game and the means of slaughter. Perhaps he, too, had dreamed his dream, even as Mr. Jaggers had. There is no man so unlikely of aspect that he may not once have been a lover. Is not the faithfullest, fondest lover in all modern fiction the hunchback Quasimodo? But if this rough sportsman had ever succumbed to the common fever, had ever sighed and suffered, his malady was a thing of the remote past. In his most confidential talk there had never been the faintest indication of a romantic attachment.

"Why did I never marry?" he echoed, when the question was asked jestingly, beside the camp-fire, in the early stages of their journey. "I had neither time nor inclination, nor money to waste upon such an expensive toy as a wife; a wife who would eat her head off in England while I was knocking about over here, a wife who would cost me more than a caravan."

This was all that Mr. Patrington ever said about the matrimonial question; but marriage is a subject upon which some men never reveal their real thoughts.

He took life as merrily as if it had been a march in a comic opera; and in the presence of his cheerfulness the two young men kept their troubles to themselves.

Had Allan forgotten Suzette under those tropic stars? No, he had not achieved forgetfulness; but he had learnt to live without love, without the light of a fair woman's face; and in a modified way to be happy. The changes and chances, difficulties, accidents, and adventures of the journey between the coast and Tabora had kept his mind fully occupied. Fever, and recovery from fever; failure or success with his gun; difficult negotiations with village sultans; and even an occasional skirmish in which the poisoned arrows flew fast, and the stern necessity of firing on their assailants had stared them in the face; all these things had left little leisure for love-sick dreams, for fond regrets.

CHAPTER V.

THE MEETING-PLACE OF WATERS.

At Tabora there had been a long halt, a delay forced upon the travellers by the conditions of climate, by the sickness and the idleness of their caravan; but this interval of rest had not been altogether disagreeable. The place was a place of fatness, a settlement in the midst of a fertile plan where the flocks and herds, the Arab population, the pastoral life suggested those familiar pictures in that first book of ancient history which the child takes into his newly awakened consciousness; and which the hard and battered wayfarer—believer or agnostic—loves and admires to the end of life. In just such a scene as this Rebecca might have given Isaac the fateful draught of water from the wayside well; upon just such a level pasture Joseph and his brethren might have tended their flocks and watched the stars. The visions of the young dreamer would have shown him this pale milky azure, over-arching the rich level where the sheaves bowed down to his sheaves; and in just such a reposeful atmosphere would he have laid himself down for the noontide siesta, and let his fancy slide into the dim labyrinth of dreamland.

At Tabora there had been overmuch time for thought, and the yearning for a far-away face must needs have been in the hearts of both those young Englishmen, whose bronzed features were sternly and steadily set with the resolute calm of men who do not mean to waste in despair and die for love of the fairest woman upon earth.

Often and often in the dusk, Allan heard his comrade's rich baritone rolling out that old song—

"Shall I, wasting in despair,

Die, because a woman's fair?

Or make pale my cheeks with care

Because another's rosy are?"

The voice thrilled him. What a gift is that music which gives a man power over his fellow-men? Geoffrey's fiddle talked to them nearly every night beside the camp-fire, talked to them sometimes at daybreak, when its owner had been sleepless; for that restless spirit had watched too many long blank hours in the course of his travels. It had been hard work to convey that fiddle-case across the rolling woods, through swamp and river, guarded from the crass stupidity of native porters—from the obstinacy of the African donkey—the curiosity of the inhabitants of the villages on the way. Geoffrey had carried it himself for the greater part of the journey; refusing to trust Arab or Negroid with so precious a burden. Riding or walking, he had managed to take care of his little Amati, the smallest but not the least valuable of all his fiddles.

There were some among his dark followers to whom Geoffrey's Amati was an enchanted thing, a thing that ought to have been alive if it was not; indeed, there were some who secretly believed that it was a living creature. The velvet nest in which he kept the strange thing, the delicate care with which he laid it in that luxurious resting-place, or took it out into the light of day; the loving movement with which he rested his chin on the shining wood, while his long lissome fingers twined themselves caressingly about the creature's neck; the strange light that came into his eyes as he drew the bow across the strings, and the ineffable sounds which those strings gave forth; all these were tokens of a living presence, a something to be loved and feared.

When he tuned his fiddle, they thought that he was punishing it, and that it shrieked and groaned in its agony. Why else were those sounds so harsh and discordant, so unlike the melting strains which the thing gave forth when he laid his chin upon it and loved it, when his lips smiled, and his melancholy eyes looked far away into the purple distances, across the woods and the plains, to the remoteness of the mountain range beyond?

If it were not actually alive—if it had neither heart nor blood as they had, why, then, it was a familiar demon—a charm—by which he who possessed it could influence his fellow-men. He could rouse them to savage raptures, to shrieks and wild leaps that were meant for dancing. He could melt them to tears.

From the first hour when he played by the camp-fire, on the third night after they left Bagamoyo, Geoffrey's music had given him a hold over the more intelligent members of the caravan. They had listened at first almost as the dog listens, and had been ready to lift up their heads and howl as the dog howls. But gradually those singing sounds had exercised a soothing influence, they had sprawled at his feet, a ring of listeners, with elbows on the ground, looking up at him out of onyx eyes that flashed in the firelight.

Among their followers there were some Makololos from the Shire Valley, men of superior courage and determination, a finer race than the common herd of African porters, of the same race as those faithful followers of Livingstone's first great journey, who afterwards became chiefs and rulers of the land. These Makololos adored Geoffrey. His music, the achievements of his Winchester rifle, that ardent fitful temperament of his, exercised an extraordinary influence over these men; and it seemed as if they would have followed him without fee or reward, for sheer love of the man himself; not for meat, and cloth, and beads, and brass wire.

Never a word said Geoffrey or Allan of that one woman whose image filled the minds of both. They talked of other people freely enough. Each spoke of his mother tenderly, regretfully even, Allan taking comfort from the thought of Lady Emily's delight in her farm, the occupation and interest which every change of the seasons brought for her. Such letters as had reached him on his wanderings had been resigned and uncomplaining, although dwelling sorrowfully upon the husband she had lost.

"He used to live so much apart, shut in his library day after day, and only joining me in the evening, that I could hardly have believed my life could seem so empty without him. But I know now how much his presence in the house—even his silent, unseen presence—meant for me; and I realize now how often I used to go to him, interrupting his dreamy life with my petty household questions, my little bits of news from the farmyard or the cow-houses, or the garden. He was so kind and sympathetic. He would look up from his books to interest himself in some story about my Brahmas or my Cochins, and if he was bored, he never allowed me to see the faintest sign of impatience. I think he was the best and truest man that ever lived. And my Allan is like him. May God protect and bless my dearest, my only dear, in all the perils of the desert!"

Lady Emily's mental picture of Africa represented one far-reaching waste of level sand, a desert flatness incompatible with a spherical earth, pervaded by camels, and occasionally varied by a mirage. A pair of pyramids—like tall candlesticks at the end of a board-room table—a sphinx and a crocodily river occupied the north-east corner of this vast plateau, while the south-west was distinguished by a colony of ostriches, and the place to which Indian officials used to resort for change of air some fifty years since. To these narrow limits were restricted Lady Emily's notions of the continent on which her son was now a wanderer. She feared that if he got out of the way of the crocodiles he might fall in with the ostriches, which doubtless were dangerous when encountered in large numbers; and she shuddered at the sight of her feather fan.

Mrs. Wornock's letters were in a sadder strain. The key was distinctly minor. She wrote of her loneliness; of the monotonous days; the longing for the face that had vanished.

"My organ talks to me of you—Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, Mendelssohn, all tell me the same story. You are far away—away for a long time—and life is very sad."

There was not a word of Suzette in those letters. If she was ever at the Manor, if Mrs. Wornock retained her affection and found solace in her society, there was no hint of that consoling presence. It might be that the girl hated the house because of that vehement stormy love which had assailed her there; the love that would not let her be faithful to a more reasonable lover.

"And yet—and yet!" thought Geoffrey, hardly caring even in his own mind to put the question positively.

In his innermost consciousness there was the belief that she loved him—him, Geoffrey Wornock—that she had refused him perversely and foolishly, out of a mistaken sense of honour. She would not marry Allan whom she did not love; and she refused to marry Geoffrey whom she did love, in order to spare her jilted lover the pain of seeing a rival's triumph.

"But I am not beaten yet," Geoffrey told himself. "When I go back to England—if I but find her free—I shall try again. Allan's wounds will have healed by that time; and even her Quixotic temper will have satisfied itself by the sacrifice of two years of her lover's life."

"When I go back!" Musing sometimes on that prospect of the homeward journey, whether returning by the road they had come, or dropping down southward by Trivier's route to the Nyassa and the Zambesi, or by the more adventurous westward line by the forest and the Congo, the way by which Trivier had come to the Lake, whichever way were eventually chosen, Geoffrey asked himself if the three travellers would all go back?

"One shall be taken and the other left."

Throughout the record of African travel, there is that dark feature of the story; the traveller who is left behind. Sometimes it is the fever fiend that lays a scorching hand upon the fearless adventurer, flings him down to suffer thirst and pain and heaviness, and delirious horrors, in the foul darkness of a bee-hive hut, to die in a dream of home, with shadowy faces looking down at him, familiar voices talking with him. Sometimes he falls in a ring of savage foes, hemmed round with hideous faces, foes as fierce and implacable as lion or leopard; foes who kill for the sake of killing; or cannibals, for whom a murdered man provides the choicest banquet. The hazards of the pilgrimage take every shape, death by drowning, death by massacre, death by small-pox or jungle fever, death by starvation, by the bursting of a gun, by beasts of prey. In every story of travel there is always that dark page which tells of the man who is left. Dillon, Farquhar, the two Pococks, Jameson, Bartelott, Weissemburger—the ghosts that haunt the pathways of tropical Africa are many; but those melancholy shadows exercise no deterring influence on the traveller who sets out to-day, strong, elate, hopeful, inspired by an eager curiosity which takes no heed of trouble or of risk.

"Which of us three is to stay behind?" Geoffrey asked himself in a gloomy wonder. Not Patrington. He had come to the stage at which the traveller bears a charmed life. It is seldom the experienced wanderer, the man of many journeys, who falls by the wayside. Hot-headed youth, bold in its ignorance of danger, perishes like a bird caught in a trap. The strong frame of the trained athlete shrivels like a leaf in the hot blast of fever. The careless boatman tempts the perils of a difficult passage, and is swept over the stony bed of the torrent, and vanishes in the fathomless pool. The hardened traveller knows what he is about, and can reckon with the forces of that gigantic nature which he faces and defies. It is the tyro who pays the price of his inexperience, and, in the history of African travel, the survival of the fittest is the rule.

"Which of us?" That question had entered into the very fabric of Geoffrey's thoughts. Sometimes, sitting by the camp-fire as the chillness of night crept round them, a grisly fancy would flash across his reverie, and he would think that the pale mist that rose about Allan's figure, on the other side of the circle, was the shroud which the Highlander sees upon the shoulders of a friend marked for death.

"Would it be Allan?" If it were Allan, he, Geoffrey, would hasten home to tell the sad story, and then—to claim her whose too-tender conscientiousness had refused happiness at Allan's expense. Allan gone, there would be no reason why she should deny her love.

"For I know, I know that she loves me," Geoffrey repeated to himself.

He had been telling himself that story ever since he left England. No denial from those lovely lips, no words of scorn, would convince him that he was unloved. He could recall looks and tones that told another story. He had seen the gradual change in her which told of an awakening heart.

"She never knew what love means till she knew me," he told himself. Did he wish for Allan's death? No, there was no such hideous thought in the dark labyrinth of his mind; or, at least, he believed that there was not. One must perish! He had so brooded over the story of former victims that he had taught himself to look upon one lost life as inevitable. But the lot was as likely to fall upon him as upon Allan. More likely, since his habits were more reckless and more adventurous than Allan's. If there was danger to be found, he and his Makololos courted it. Shooting expeditions, raids upon unfriendly villages, hand-to-hand skirmishes with Mirambo's brigand tribes; he and his Makololos were ready for anything. He had travelled over hundreds of miles with his warlike little gang—exploring, shooting, fighting—while Patrington and Allan were living in dreamy inaction, waiting for better weather, or for the recovery of half a dozen ailing pagazis. Assuredly he who ran such superfluous risks was the more likely to fall by the way. Well, death is a solution of all difficulties.

"If I am dead, it will matter to me very little that my bright, ineffable coquette is transformed into a sober, middle-aged wife, and that she and Allan are smiling at each other across the family breakfast-table, in their calm heaven of domestic hum-drum. But while I live and am young I shall think of her and long for her, and hate the lucky wretch who wins her. If we should both go back; if Patrington's tough bones are the bones that are to whiten by the way, and not Allan's or mine; why, then, we shall again be rivals; and the years of exile will be only a dream that we have dreamt."

It was a strange position in which these two young men found themselves. Friends, almost as brothers in the close intimacy of that solitude of three, only three civilized thinking beings amidst a crowd of creatures who seemed as far apart as if they had belonged to the forest fauna—the great antelope family—or the simian race; these two, so nearly of an age, reared in the same country and the same social sphere, united and sympathetic at every point of contact between mind and mind, and yet keeping this one deep gulf of silence between them.

They spoke to each other freely of all things, except of her; and yet each knew that she was the one absorbing subject in the mind of the other. Each knew that her image went along with them, was never absent, never less distinctly lovely, even when the way was fullest of hardship and peril, when every yard of progress meant a struggle with thorns that tore them, and brambles that lashed them, and the tough, rank verdure-carpet that clogged their feet. Neither had ever ceased to remember her, or to think of these adventurous days as anything else than exile from her. Whatever interest or enjoyment there might be in that varied experience of a land where beauty and ugliness alternated with startling transitions, it was not possible that either Allan or Geoffrey could forget the reason they were there, far from the fair faces of women, and from all the ease and pleasantness of civilized life.

Geoffrey had the better chance of oblivion, since those wild excursions and explorations of his afforded the excitement of the untrodden and the hazardous. The caravan road from the coast to Ujiji, with all its varieties of hardship, was too beaten a track for this fiery spirit. At every halting-place he went off at a tangent; and if his comrades threatened not to wait for his return, he would pledge himself to rejoin them further on, laughing to scorn every suggestion that he and his little company of Makololos and Wanyamwesis could lose themselves in the wilderness.

He was more in touch with the men than Allan—as familiar with their ways and ideas as Patrington after many years of travel. He had learnt their languages with a marvellous quickness—not the copious language of civilization and literature, be it remembered, but the concise vocabulary of the camp and the hunting-ground, the river and the road. He understood his men and their different temperaments as few travellers learn to understand, or desire to understand them. And yet there was but little Christian benevolence at the root of this quick sympathy and comprehension. Although, as an Englishman, Geoffrey would have given no sanction to the sale and barter of his fellow-creatures, these dark servants were to him no more than slaves—so much carrying power and so much fighting power, subject to his domination. It pleased him to know their characters, to be able to play upon their strength and weakness, their ferocity and their greed, just as surely as he manipulated the stops of the great organ at Discombe.

These Africans gave a name of their own choosing to almost everybody. They christened the great Sultan of the interior Tippo-Tib, because of a curious blinking of his eyes. Captain Trivier obtained his nickname on account of his eye-glass. Another man was named after his spectacles. The Sultan of Ujiji was called Roumariza—"It is ended,"—because he had succeeded in reducing belligerent tribes to peaceful settlement. For the Englishman in particular, Africa could always find a nickname, based on some insignificant detail of manner or appearance. For Englishmen in general she had found a nobler-sounding name. She called them Sons of Fire.

Geoffrey, with his tireless energy, his rapid decision, his angry impatience of delay, seemed to his followers the very highest exemplar of the fiery race that can persevere and conquer difficulties which the native of the soil recoils from as insurmountable.

Sons of Fire! Were they not worthy of the name, these white men, when far out in midstream, while the boatmen bent and cowered over their paddles, these Englishmen looked in the face of the lightning and sat calm and unmoved while day darkened to the pitchy blackness of a starless midnight, and the thunder reverberated from hill to hill, with roar upon roar and peal upon peal, like the booming of heavy batteries, and anon crashed and rattled with a sharper, nearer sound. Blinding lightning, torrential rain, war of thunder and tempestuous waters, were all as nothing to these sons of fire. Their spirits rose amidst hurricane or thunderstorm; they were full of life and gaiety while the cockleshell canoes were being tossed upon the short, choppy sea, like forest leaves upon a forest brook, and when every sudden gust threatened destruction. They laughed at peril, and insisted upon having the canoes out when their native followers saw danger riding on the wind and death brooding over the waters. They met the spirit of murder, and were not afraid. They lay down to sleep in the midst of an unknown wilderness, with savage beasts lurking in the darkness that surrounded their tents. They forded rivers that swarmed with crocodiles—horrible stealthy creatures, swimming deep down below the surface of the water, the placid, beautiful water, with lotus flowers sleeping in the sunlight, and scaly monsters waiting underneath in the shadow.

Panther, crocodile, tempest, fever, or sunstroke, poisoned arrows from murderous foes, were only so many varieties in the story of adventure. Through every vicissitude the ready wit and calm courage of the Englishmen rose superior to accident, discomfort, or danger; and to the native temper these wanderers from a far country, an island which they had heard of as a speck in a narrow sea, seemed men of iron with souls of fire.

Geoffrey would admit no malingering, would accept no idle pretexts for inaction or delay. His little band, picked out from the ruck of their porters, were always on the move, save in those rainy interludes which made movement impossible; and even then Geoffrey fretted and fumed, and was inclined to question the impracticability of a hunting expedition through those torrential rains.

"Did you ever hear of a fox-hunter stopping at home because of a wet day?" he asked Cecil Patrington, impatiently.

"Did you ever see such rain as this in a fox-hunting country?" retorted Patrington, pointing through an opening in the door of the hut to the sheet of falling water, which blotted out all beyond, and splashed with a thud into the pool that filled the enclosure.

The deep eaves kept the rain out of the huts, but not without occasional accident—spoilt provisions, damp gunpowder. It was a rude awakening from dreams of home to find one's bed afloat on a pond of rising waters.

Geoffrey had taken upon himself the task of providing meat for the party, Patrington's lazy, happy-go-lucky temper readily ceding that post of distinction to the new-comer. A man who had shot every species of beast that inhabits the great continent could easily surrender the privilege of finding meat-dinners along the route; so he only used his gun when the quarry was worthy and his humour prompted; and for the most part smoked the pipe of peace and read Dickens in the repose of a day's halt, while Geoffrey roamed off with his Winchester rifle and his little band of obsequious dark-skins.

And now in this period of waiting there was the great inland sea to explore; those romantic shores with their wealth of animal life; those waters teeming with fish, hemmed round and guarded by the majesty of mountains whose lofty peaks and hollows no foot of man had ever trodden. There was plenty of scope for movement and adventure here, so long as the rains held off; and the three men made good use of their time, and the canoes were rarely idle, or the rowers allowed to shirk upon the favourite pretence of bad weather.

So long as there was something to be done, Geoffrey and Allan were happy; but with every interval of repose there came the familiar heartache, the longing for home-faces, the sense of disappointment and loss.

Sometimes alone by the lake, while the lamp was shining on the faces of his two friends yonder in the verandah, where they sat playing chess, alone in the awful stillness of that vast mountain gorge, the waters rippling with placid movement, only faintly flecked with whiteness here and there in the blue distance, Geoffrey's longing for that vanished face grew to an almost unendurable agony. He felt as if he could bear this anguish of severance no more. He began to calculate the length of the homeward journey. Oh, the weariness of it! for him for whose impatience the fastest express train would be too slow. He shrank appalled from the contemplation of the distance that he had put between himself and the woman he loved, the intolerable distance—thousands and thousands of miles—and the difficulties and vicissitudes of the journey; all the forces of tropical nature to contend with, dependent upon savages, subject to fevers that hinder and stop the eager feet, and lay the weary body low, a helpless log—to waste days and nights in burning agony—to awaken and find a caravan dwindled by desertion, luggage plundered, new impediments to progress.