"Yes," he cried as he fell, "it"s Simiacine!"
And he turned over with a groan of satisfaction, and lay like a dead man.
CHAPTER XXI. THE FIRST CONSIGNMENT
Since all that I can ever do for thee Is to do nothing, may"st thou never see, Never divine, the all that nothing costeth me.
One morning, three months later, Guy Oscard drew up in line his flying column. He was going back to England with the first consignment of Simiacine. During the twelve weeks that lay behind there had been constant reference made to his little body of picked men, and the leader had selected with a grave deliberation that promised well.
The lost soldier that was in him was all astir in his veins as he reviewed his command in the cool air of early morning. The journey from Msala to the Plateau had occupied a busy two months. Oscard expected to reach Msala with his men in forty days. Piled up in neat square cases, such as could be carried in pairs by a man of ordinary strength, was the crop of Simiacine, roughly valued by Victor Durnovo at forty thousand pounds. Ten men could carry the whole of it, and the twenty cases set close together on the ground made a bed for Guy Oscard. Upon this improvised couch he gravely stretched his bulk every night all through the journey that followed.
Over the whole face of the spa.r.s.ely vegetated table-land the dwarf bushes grew at intervals, each one in a little circle of its own, where no gra.s.s grew: for the dead leaves, falling, poisoned the earth. There were no leaves on the bushes now, for they had all been denuded, and the twisted branches stood out naked in the morning mist. Some of the bushes had been roughly pruned, to foster, if possible, a more bushy growth and a heavier crop of leaves near to the parent stem.
It was a strange landscape; and any pa.s.sing traveller, knowing nothing of the Simiacine, must perforce have seen at once that these insignificant little trees were something quite apart in the vegetable kingdom. Each standing with its magic circle, no bird built its nest within the branches--no insect constructed its filmy home--no spider weaved its busy web from twig to twig.
Solitary, mournful, lifeless the Plateau which had nearly cost Victor Durnovo his life lay beneath the face of heaven, far above the surrounding country--the summit of an unnamed mountain--a land lying in the heart of a tropic country which was neither tropic, temperate, nor arctic. Fauna had it none, for it produced nothing that could sustain life. Flora it knew not, for the little trees, with their perennial fortune of brilliant brown-tinted leaves, monopolised vegetable life, and slew all comers. It seemed like some stray tract of another planet, where the condition of living things was different. There was a strange sense of having been thrown up--thrown up, as it were, into mid-heaven, there to hang for ever--neither this world nor the world to come. The silence of it all was such as would drive men mad if they came to think of it. It was the silence of the stars.
The men who had lived up here for three months did not look quite natural. There was a singular heaviness of the eyelids which all had noticed, though none had spoken of it. A craving for animal food, which could only be stayed by the consumption of abnormal quant.i.ties of meat, kept the hunters ever at work on the lower slopes of the mountain. Sleep was broken, and uncanny things happened in the night. Men said that they saw other men like trees, walking abroad with sightless eyes; and Joseph said, "Gammon, my festive darky--gammon!" but he, nevertheless, glanced somewhat uneasily towards his master whenever the natives said such things.
A clearing had been made on that part of the Plateau which was most accessible from below. The Simiacine trees had been ruthlessly cut away--even the roots were grubbed up and burnt--far away on the leeward side of the little kingdom. This was done because there arose at sunset a soft and pleasant odour from the bushes which seemed to affect the nerves, and even made the teeth chatter. It was, therefore, deemed wise that the camp should stand on bare ground.
It was on this ground, in front of the tents, that Guy Oscard drew up his quick-marching column before the sun had sprung up in its fantastic tropical way from the distant line of virgin forest. As he walked along the line, making a suggestion here, pulling on a shoulder-rope there, he looked staunch and strong as any man might wish to be. His face was burnt so brown that eyebrows and moustache stood out almost blonde, though in reality they were only brown. His eyes did not seem to be suffering from the heaviness noticeable in others; altogether, the climate and the mystic breath of the Simiacine grove did not appear to affect him as it did his companions. This was probably accounted for by the fact that, being chief of the hunters, most of his days had been pa.s.sed on the lower slopes in search of game.
To him came presently Jack Meredith--the same gentle-mannered man, with an incongruously brown face and quick eyes seeing all. It is not, after all, the life that makes the man. There are gentle backwoodsmen, and ruffians among those who live in drawing-rooms.
"Well?" said Meredith, following the glance of his friend"s eye as he surveyed his men.
Oscard took his pipe from his lips and looked gravely at him.
"Don"t half like it, you know," he said in a low voice; for Durnovo was talking with a head porter a few yards away.
"Don"t half like what?--the flavour of that pipe? It looks a little strong."
"No, leaving you here," replied Oscard.
"Oh, that"s all right, old chap! You can"t take me with you, you know.
I intended to stick to it when I came away from home, and I am not going to turn back now."
Oscard gave a queer little upward jerk of the head, as if he had just collected further evidence in support of a theory which chronically surprised him. Then he turned away and looked down over the vast untrodden tract of Africa that lay beneath them. He kept his eyes fixed there, after the manner of a man who has no fluency in personal comment.
"You know," he said jerkily, "I didn"t think--I mean you"re not the sort of chap I took you for. When I first saw you I thought you were a bit of a dandy and--all that. Not the sort of man for this work. I thought that the thing was bound to be a failure. I knew Durnovo, and had no faith in him. You"ve got a gentle way about you, and your clothes are so confoundedly neat. But--" Here he paused and pulled down the folds of his Norfolk jacket. "But I liked the way you shot that leopard the day we first met."
"Beastly fluke," put in Meredith, with his pleasant laugh.
Oscard contented himself with a denying shake of the head.
"Of course," he continued, with obvious determination to get it all off his mind, "I know as well as you do that you are the chief of this concern--have been chief since we left Msala--and I never want to work under a better man."
He put his pipe back between his lips and turned round with a contented smile, as much as to say, "There, that is the sort of man I am! When I want to say that sort of thing I can say it with the best of you."
"We have pulled along very comfortably, haven"t we?" said Meredith; "thanks to your angelic temper. And you"ll deliver that packet of letters to the governor, won"t you? I have sent them in one packet, addressed to him, as it is easier to carry. I will let you hear of us somehow within the next six months. Do not go and get married before I get home. I want to be your best man."
Oscard laughed and gave the signal for the men to start, and the long caravan defiled before them. The porters nodded to Meredith with a great display of white teeth, while the head men, the captains of tens, stepped out of the ranks and shook hands. Before they had disappeared over the edge of the plateau, Joseph came forward to say good-bye to Oscard.
"And it is understood," said the latter, "that I pay in to your account at Lloyd"s Bank your share of the proceeds?"
Joseph grinned. "Yes, sir, if you please, presumin" it"s a safe bank."
"Safe as houses."
""Cos it"s a tolerable big amount," settling himself into his boots in the manner of a millionaire.
"Lot of money--about four hundred pounds! But you can trust me to see to it all right."
"No fear, sir," replied Joseph grandly. "I"m quite content, I"m sure, that you should have the--fingering o" the dibs."
As he finished--somewhat lamely perhaps--his rounded periods, he looked very deliberately over Oscard"s shoulder towards Durnovo, who was approaching them.
Meredith walked a little way down the slope with Oscard.
"Good-bye, old chap!" he said when the parting came. "Good luck, and all that. Hope you will find all right at home. By the way," he shouted after him, "give my kind regards to the Gordons at Loango."
And so the first consignment of Simiacine was sent from the Plateau to the coast.
Guy Oscard was one of those deceptive men who only do a few things, and do those few very well. In forty-three days he deposited the twenty precious cases in Gordon"s G.o.downs at Loango, and paid off the porters, of whom he had not lost one. These duties performed, he turned his steps towards the bungalow. He had refused Gordon"s invitation to stay with him until the next day, when the coasting steamer was expected. To tell the truth, he was not very much prepossessed in Maurice"s favour, and it was with a doubtful mind that he turned his steps towards the little house in the forest between Loango and the sea.
The room was the first surprise that awaited him, its youthful mistress the second. Guy Oscard was rather afraid of most women. He did not understand them, and probably he despised them. Men who are afraid or ignorant often do.
"And when did you leave them?" asked Jocelyn, after her visitor had explained who he was. He was rather taken aback by so much dainty refinement in remote Africa, and explained rather badly. But she helped him out by intimating that she knew all about him.
"I left them forty-four days ago," he replied.
"And were they well?"
"She is very much interested," reflected Oscard, upon whom her eagerness of manner had not been lost. "Surely, it cannot be that fellow Durnovo?"
"Oh, yes," he replied with unconscious curtness.
"Mr. Durnovo cannot ever remain inland for long without feeling the effect of the climate."
Guy Oscard, with the perspicacity of his s.e.x, gobbled up the bait. "It IS Durnovo," he reflected.
"Oh, he is all right," he said; "wonderfully well, and so are the others--Joseph and Meredith. You know Meredith?"