CHAPTER XVI
“Quos Deus vult perdere, dementat prius!”—Latin Proverb.
“Quos Deus vult perdere, dementat prius!”—Latin Proverb.
The Post Office at Port Victoria is in the same block of buildings as the Government Office, though on a lower floor, and the busy staircase is thronged by officials as well as people coming for their mail or posting letters. There is no delivery in Port Victoria, for two excellent reasons—local communication is carried on solely through the telephone, or notes by bearer, and on mail days the recipients of letters besiege the office for their mail, long before the sorting is over. Most of the residents have a box, and prefer to call for their letters to having them delivered, so the postman’s duties are a farce, and by the time he goes his rounds he has no letters to carry.
Bristow Nugent rode into town early that mail day, but he had business at the A.S.C. yard, and at the garrison office, and by the time he reached the Post Office it was one o’clock, and his letters had been waiting for him in the box for two hours. At the foot of the rough staircase were a group of men he knew—Arthur White, Archie Lysle the regimental chaplain, the harbour master, Hamilton Gurney, and young Rennie—and before he had spoken a word to them their concerned faces had told him that something was wrong. Although knowing that his private affairs could not have reached them before himself, his heart contracted with the sick throb of fear peculiar to men stationed in distant corners of the earth, and feeling themselves helplessly out of reach of their nearest and dearest, and the good-looking animal face under the white helmet suddenly blanched.
“What’s up?” he said characteristically.
“It’s Lewin——” the Attorney-General answered as briefly and to the point as he was asked. “They cabled from Capetown last night, and the details are in to-day.”
“Lewin!—Ally!—what about him?”
“He’s dead!”
Nugent caught at the wooden banister as if White had struck him, and turned sharply from one to the other with the words he could not utter on his lips. They answered his questions amongst themselves without his asking them.
“He made a mess of things over the East African business, and—and cleared out of it.” Young Rennie spoke first, but shied off the explanation like a frightened horse. There was some darker meaning here than the natural fate which overtakes any man. Nugent’s face grew sharper with anxiety.
“Poor young fool!” said White. “He was the wrong man in the wrong place. Fell in with his own regiment too, and made a night of it—got drunk most likely, and talked.”
“Talked Government secrets too—Gregory’ssecrets! There will be a devil of a row to hush up now. Gregory may have to go himself.”
“Serve him right!” put in the little Chaplain with unexpected savagery. “What did he want sending a harmless fool like Ally into such a tight place? It was Halton’s job.”
“Lewin went away like a sick beast, poor devil, somewhere into the interior.” It was Arthur White who seemed to know by instinct the raging questions Nugent could not frame, and answered them with more coherence than the rest. “That was how it was they never found him for so long, and the news was delayed. It only came down to Capetown a few days since, and the mail picked up Hanney’s letter at Beira.”
“How did he die?” Brissy had found his voice at last. The curt words surprised himself that they should be in his ordinary tone. He had fancied, with his throat dry and burning like that, that he must be hoarse. “Was it fever or a scrimmage?”
There was a brief pause, and the men looked at each other.
“Neither,” said White, without glancing at the questioner. “He shot himself.”
“Funked it, by Jove!” The words came under Brissy’s breath. He did not know what it was that shocked him—the suggestion of cowardice to his mind, or the staggering realisation of the extent of Alaric Lewin’s indiscretion to have driven him to such a course. It must indeed have been a disaster that had made Ally see no way out of it, but to take his own life. What, in God’s name, had he been doing?
“Does his wife know?” he said roughly, in his fear.
“Poor girl!—no, how should she?”
“Some one must tell her. It will leak out, and she’ll hear it straight, if they don’t.”
“I pity the man who breaks it to her, that’s all!” It was Rennie who spoke, and his tones were heartfelt. “I wouldn’t for anything the world contains!”
“Some one must.” Brissy set his white teeth and looked from one to the other. There was no response in their faces, and their eyes avoided his rather than otherwise. In the pause a heavy step sounded on the landing above, and the Administrator himself appeared, leaning over the rail of the stair. His gaunt form and harsh face showed not one sign of weakness—hardly even of pity or concern—but he signed imperiously to Arthur White.
“Can you come up and speak with me?” he said. “I want you.”
As if by a common impulse all the men turned and followed the Attorney-General up the stair, and crowded into the narrow passage, looking with stern earnestness into Gregory’s face. He held some letters in his hand, and beyond him, through the open door of the office he had just left, Alfred Halton’s figure was just visible, seated by the open window. It was so hot at this hour of the day—being barely past the Miroro—and in the narrow passage between the offices, that the sweat hung in beads round the lips and on the temples of every man present, without any movement or exertion on their part, while the smell of the air seemed the essence of heat—a baked atmosphere, without actual matter to flavour it.
“We were speaking of Mrs. Lewin, sir,” said the Attorney-General firmly. “Does she know of Captain Lewin’s death?”
“Not unless some one has already ridden out and told her, or she is in town.”
“She isn’t in town, I think, because her groom came down at eleven and took out her mail.”
“She could not have heard through the mail, I suppose?” said the Administrator quickly. “No, of course not—there was nothing but the cable from Capetown. My information came from Beira, and Mrs. Lewin would not hear from there.”
“They do not know any details at Capetown then?”
“No. Some one will have to break it to Mrs. Lewin.”
Again that reluctant pause, while each man in his own mind saw Chum as she had appeared to him at some moment when she made the most vivid picture of herself to him individually. So, Rennie saw her on horseback, managing a fractious pony—Arthur White recalled one evening when he had seen her with his wife in the nursery, bending over a child’s cot. Hamilton Gurney fancied her in her own pretty shaded room, lying back against some coloured cushions, while he sang to her,—but no man offered to face her with such news as that the Administrator held in the loose letters in his hand.
It was Bristow Nugent who spoke at last,—the least expected of the group.
“All right—I’m going.”
He turned on his heel, as if he could not wait to think, and ran down the uncarpeted stairs, his spurs clicking and jingling, and some metal trapping or other adding to the audible hurry. Outside he caught his pony by the mane, swung into the saddle far quicker than he had ever done at a fourth chucker on the Polo ground, and was tearing past the stores and out towards Maitso Hill before any one on the landing had quite realised that it was Captain Nugent who had risen to the occasion.
“Bristles has no nerves,” said Rennie in selfish excuse. “He was about the best man to go—he won’t really care much. He’s stolid.”
“Pity you’re so sensitive,” retorted the Chaplain cuttingly. “A little of Nugent’s stolidity might do you good.... Lewin was his friend, too!”
Such a thought was in Bristow Nugent’s mind all through that dusty gallop up the tangled green road, while the sweat poured down his brown face, and his heart beat thickly with his errand. Memories of Ally—old Ally Sloper!—at Sandhurst with him, when they both came perilously near being “chucked” because of a certain escapade connected with a frying-pan and the senior captain’s banjo;—that night too, when Forrester of the Duke’s (Forrester always did lay it on so thick!) borrowed his man’s uniform and went out with Ally as his “girl,” Ally in a hat and feathers after the style of a London flower-seller! Lucky thing they were not spotted that time. And his own special breed of fox-terriers from which Ally had that bitch he was so fond of—what was her name? Kiddy—yes, of course, after some girl on whom he was awfully gone. Kiddy went to India with Ally, and he confessed that he cried like a fool when she died from a karait’s bite. He could understand that too—a fellow got as fond of a dog as of a child. He thought inconsistently of his own boy in England, and wondered how he should feel if his unopened letters contained bad news. Then his thoughts harked back to Sandhurst—poor old Ally!... Such stupid, lovable times!... Men make tenderer friendships in their young manhood than they care to express.
He was covered with dust—caked with it—and streaked with the heat as he dismounted in the stable yard of the bungalow. Not the state in which to go into a lady’s drawing-room, he thought ruefully, pulling the handkerchief out of his sleeve to wipe his shining face! The hair clung to his damp forehead as he slipped off his helmet and dropped it with a little clang of the chain, on to the table in the hall. Mrs. Lewin was in the further room, Abdallah said—oh, yes, she was at home to visitors. Brissy tried instinctively to muffle his spurs as he walked across the bare boards, through the hanging curtains, and into her white presence.
She was sitting by the window, looking out through an open door to the hot riot of the hillside, where the wind sang in the grasses and came back laden with sweetness from the flowering trees, but she turned her head sharply at the sound of his ringing step (why did those spurs jar so?) and rose and met him. The instant he got close to her he saw that she knew, though how he did not stop to puzzle out, and with the tears running down his scorched face he took her hands in his and tried to speak.
“This is kind of you, Brissy,” she said in a quick, low voice, looking up into the eyes she had called soulless. The first thing she had realised was that he had made the simple self-sacrifice from which other men had flinched, and come to tell her as he best could, with less self-consciousness than they, but suffering far more from a personal feeling. Another of her theories fell from her while he stood there holding her hands, and with a bewildered humiliation she felt that she would never judge any one again. For this man of all the Station she had always held a little in contempt.
“I had a letter by the mail,” she said, quite quietly and collectedly, but as if a little weary. “He sent it by a runner, just before—he.... And the man got through in time to deliver it and catch the mail—almost before any one knew. Mustn’t it have been a wonderful journey? All down through the German territory, and by Lake Nyassa into Rhodesia, I suppose. But he was a Malagasy—Ally’s own servant, Longa—and they are marvellous runners. You know Longa meansfriendin the vernacular—strange, isn’t it?”
She paused, as if she were thinking, and put her hand up to her hair as if a little uncertain that it lay in its usual correct masses. He only said brokenly, “Poor old Ally!—he backed out,”—that seemed to trouble Brissy!—“I wish I had been there.”
“You would never have done it,”—she shook her head with a flash of intuition. “You were stronger than he.” She thought a moment, and then went on in the same curious fashion. “Yes, Longa (and that means a friend!) brought the letter to Capetown, and sent it on to me by the mail. Here it is—oh yes! do look at it!”
She nearly thrust it into his hands, which trembled as they held it. He almost felt that he ought not to look, as his blurred eyes travelled over the blotted sheets.
Poor Ally! Poor, handsome, unreliable Ally—proved incompetent, and such a failure!
It was a disconnected letter at best, and nothing really but a confession of the man’s shame, which had to be pieced together from a knowledge of him, for he had made no coherent statement. He had fallen in with his own regiment, who were camped just outside Port Cecil, and what with the reaction in getting out of Key Island, and “the fellows” being glad to welcome him—well, the result was the same as it had been when he failed before, and the Administrator wanted him on the night of the threatened rising. He did not remember very much. He was not dead drunk this time—if he had been it might have saved him—but after dining with the regiment (and God knows what he had said to them, only they were decent fellows and would shield him), he had had an important interview with the men most involved in the insurrection. It was a private interview, and a diplomatic affair that was to be kept very dark. Melton Hanney arranged it, he had been most decent all through—there was no blame attached to him. He had settled with Ally as to when the meeting should take place, but had not been present at the interview. There was an argument—Ally did not remember the details very well—only his head was heated, and he got impatient, and lost his temper and threatened. The men saw his condition and drew him on—then he bragged of his Government, and their powers; and then—then—all that Gregory had explained to him so carefully lest he should make mistakes, was blurted out, and the very nation perhaps involved by his folly. He knew what he had done almost before they left him with smooth, guarded speeches, though no hint of animosity, and a kind of sullen despair settled down on him. That was three days ago, before his letter was written—three days of agonising suspense, and time to think over what he had done. Nothing was known as yet; he was supposed to be communicating with his chiefs, or forming an ultimatum. In the meantime he had arranged for a shooting excursion inland—and there was more truth in it than would appear! It seemed the only thing to do—but he must write the truth to Hanney. It was not Hanney’s fault, and it might leave him a chance to do something, and avert disaster.
“He is a thoroughly capable man, and knows the whole situation—in my opinion, if that goes for anything now, he ought to have managed it from the first,” wrote Alaric Lewin a few hours before death. “Why did they send me? You said I could not do it—you were right as usual. I’m no good, Chum—you always wanted me to do something, but you would never have made me. I’m better out of it—it’s the least I can do, for I should only disgrace you if I lived. You don’t know what I’ve done this time—it was a big thing, bigger than you all imagine, and I’ve hashed it. I only trust I shan’t get Gregory into the mess with me. It is not his fault any more than Hanney’s. The Home Government ought to leave it to the man on the spot, or be sure who they send. And there have been worse things in my life that concern you, that I can’t tell you either. They involve others. Only forgive us, and believe that I’m doing the best thing possible for you now. Good-bye, Chum—and God bless you!”
It was signed with his full name, but the letters were more scrawled than usual, and the whole letter was blotted and uncertain. The suspicion that hurt Brissy more than all was what the trembling handwriting betrayed—the man had been so afraid of the thing he was going to do! He had not wanted to die. Only his desperation and the stress of circumstances in which he found himself had driven him to a last bold action—forced him, morally at least, to go down with his back against the wall.
For the idea of cowardice had faded out of Captain Nugent’s mind. He saw from that piteous, confused letter of the man who had hardly understood his own disaster, that what might have been weakness in himself was a kind of furious bravery in Ally. With an unusual stretch of imagination, he fancied the beautiful set face, the splendidly-built figure in the lonely place in which his friend had chosen to die, and heard the crash of the revolver. Curiously enough he knew Ally’s revolvers; they were a pair he had given him himself. That they should come to such a use as this!
Mrs. Lewin had been standing beside him patiently while he read the letter. She made no comment, and asked no question as he handed back the sheets, but with a curious new speculation in her face she turned upon him suddenly.
“They know—at Government House?”
“Yes, there was a cable, and a letter followed by the mail from Beira.”
“When did the cable come?”
Brissy hesitated. “This morning, I suppose. I did not hear.”
“You are wrong,” she said quietly. “It came last night.”
The conviction was so strong in her mind that it seemed to revolutionise her thoughts. Gregory had certainly known last night, it accounted for his disturbed manner and his sudden appearance. But why had he not prepared her at least? Why had he thought that when she knew it would prove a barrier between them—unless he had expected this beforehand, calculated upon it, plotted some such solution of the problem that had threatened to keep them apart! The dreadful suspicion was so intolerable that she began to fancy she was going mad. She could not think consecutively—she could not reason, or judge with mercy. She seemed to have lost her power to be charitable, and almost to think of him as a deliberate murderer. For the time all other feeling was dead in her, stunned with the shock, and her one dread was that she might have to see him or speak to him. Her last night’s self seemed as far removed from herself of to-day as though they were two separate beings. She could not remember even her love for him; there seemed only the dull pain of it left.
When Mrs. Gilderoy came in later to see her, she found her lying on her own bed in a kind of stupour; yet the instant she spoke to her Leoline’s brain responded, and she answered with perfect coherence—it was only her feeling that was numb. She had even settled her plans too, and knew what she meant to do.
“I cannot leave in this mail boat. I must wait to see if there are more details to be got, and to arrange things also. There is business to settle here that could not be done by to-morrow, and much to go into.”
“What will you do then? You will not remain here?”
“I shall go to Vohitra as soon as I have packed up our things and left this house ready for—for the next people. I want you to stay here with me for the few days if you will.”
“I’ll go with you to Vohitra too, if my good man can spare me. Or if I can’t actually start with you (of course you’ll want to get away as soon as ever you can) I’ll follow you.”
“I shall stay here until the next mail,” said Leoline levelly. “I have no black clothes of course—is there a sewing woman in the town who could make me something?”
“Yes, a very decent little woman too for such a place. I will see about that for you. You won’t go out, I suppose?”
“No.”
“She can come up to you. Oh, I am the bearer of a message from Mr. Gregory himself. His sincere——”
“Don’t!” said Leoline sharply. For a moment her calm seemed broken through. She put her hands over her horror-stricken eyes as if she saw something that Mrs. Gilderoy could not see. “The Administrator was the man who appointed Captain Lewin to East Africa,” she continued in a low voice. “You can understand how I feel. Of course it is unreasonable.”
“But natural at the moment. I quite understand. Under the circumstances you would rather not see him?”
“He has not asked to see me, surely!”
“No, but a visit of condolence is almost inevitable. I will see that he does not come. If he wants to express his sympathy he can lend you his yacht to take you round to Port Albert. That is a much more practical and sensible thing to do.”
But Mrs. Lewin did not answer. She lay with closed eyes, not bearing, but enduring, until thought was kind to her, and instead of the nightmare of her new suspicions, or the recollection of that blotted letter, she remembered the revelation of Bristow Nugent—poor Brissy, who had come to her with the tears running down his face, and whom she had always good-humouredly despised as too coarsely moulded for fine feeling. Truly, our God creates strange and hidden beauties in the vessels which He makes of clay. And who shall know His mind as to which were fashioned to honour and which to dishonour?
Two days later the mail went out, and carried Alfred Halton through the Gates, out of prison back to England. Half Port Victoria, still talking of “poor Lewin’s death,” came down to the wharf to see him off, and the Administrator came also. Hardly a word had passed between the two men on the subject in everybody’s mouth beyond what was necessary, but before they said good-bye Halton expressed an official regret over the gravity of the situation in Port Cecil, and his eyes, meeting Gregory’s, declared war.
“I have already stated my opinion that Lewin was the wrong man to send,” he said quietly, “I can only wish you well out of the unfortunate complication!” The small man was turning to bay at last.
“The Colonial Office will not hold you responsible, at any rate,” said Gregory with his insolent lidless stare. “My course of action was entirely my own.”
“And any disaster that followed.”
“Melton Hanney is at Port Cecil,” said Gregory with a shrug of his shoulders. “If one cannot trust the man in place one may as well throw up the sponge. I do not suppose that Lewin’s indiscretions will lead to international trouble, but if they did—it means a certain expenditure of men and money,” he ended composedly.
Halton turned his face slowly to the man who was his better by just the larger qualities that made him without fear, and it was ugly to see. As the Administrator put his foot on the gang-plank to leave the ship, his fellow in office spoke softly, barbed words that were intended for, and reached no other ears.
“‘Some of the King’s servants be dead,’” he quoted slowly, “‘and thy servant Uriah the Hittite is dead also!’” It was the last that passed between them.