The Explorer Page 11

  IX

  But the monotonous round of Lucy's life, with its dreams and its fond imaginings, was interrupted by news of a different character. An official letter came to her from Parkhurst to say that the grave state of her father's health had decided the authorities to remit the rest of his sentence, and he would be set free the next day but one at eight o'clock in the morning. She knew not whether to feel relief or sorrow; for if she was thankful that the wretched man's long torture was ended, she could not but realise that his liberty was given him only because he was dying. Mercy had been shown him, and Fred Allerton, in sight of a freedom from which no human laws could bar him, was given up to die among those who loved him.

  Lucy went down immediately to the Isle of Wight, and there engaged rooms in the house of a woman who had formerly served her at Hamlyn's Purlieu.

  It was midwinter, and a cold drizzle was falling when she waited for him at the prison gates. Three years had passed since they had parted. She took him in her arms and kissed him silently. Her heart was too full for words. A carriage was waiting for them, and she drove to the lodging-house; breakfast was ready, and Lucy had seen that good things which he liked should be ready for him to eat. Fred Allerton looked wistfully at the clean table-cloth, and at the flowers and the dainty scones; but he shook his head. He did not speak, and the tears ran slowly down his cheeks. He sank wearily into a chair. Lucy tried to induce him to eat; she brought him a cup of tea, but he put it away. He looked at her with haggard, bloodshot eyes.

  'Give me the flowers,' he muttered.

  They were his first words. There was a large bowl of daffodils in the middle of the table, and she took them out of the water, deftly dried their stalks, and gave them to him. He took them with trembling hands and pressed them to his heart, then he buried his face in them, and the tears ran afresh, bedewing the yellow flowers.

  Lucy put her arm around her father's neck and placed her cheek against his.

  'Don't, father,' she whispered. 'You must try and forget.'

  He leaned back, exhausted, and the pretty flowers fell at his feet.

  'You know why they've let me out?' he said.

  She kissed him, but did not answer.

  'I'm so glad that we're together again,' she murmured.

  'It's because I'm going to die.'

  'No, you mustn't die. In a little while you'll get strong again. You have many years before you, and you'll be very happy.'

  He gave her a long, searching look; and when he spoke, his voice had a hollowness in it that was strangely terrifying.

  'Do you think I want to live?'

  The pain seemed almost greater than Lucy could bear, and for a moment she had to remain silent so that her voice might grow steady.

  'You must live for my sake.'

  'Don't you hate me?' he asked.

  'No, I love you more than I ever did. I shall never cease to love you.'

  'I suppose no one would marry you while I was in prison.'

  His remark was so inconsequent that Lucy found nothing to say. He gave a bitter, short laugh.

  'I ought to have shot myself. Then people would have forgotten all about it, and you might have had a chance. Why didn't you marry Bobbie?'

  'I haven't wanted to marry.'

  He was so tired that he could only speak a little at a time, and now he closed his eyes. Lucy thought that he was dozing, and began to pick up the fallen flowers. But he noticed what she was doing.

  'Let me hold them,' he moaned, with the pleading quaver of a sick child.

  As she gave them to him once more, he took her hands and began to caress them.

  'The only thing for me is to hurry up and finish with life. I'm in the way. Nobody wants me, and I shall only be a burden. I didn't want them to let me go. I wanted to die there quietly.'

  Lucy sighed deeply. She hardly recognised her father in the bent, broken man who was sitting beside her. He had aged very much and seemed now to be an old man, but it was a premature aging, and there was a horror in it as of a process contrary to nature. He was very thin, and his hands trembled constantly. Most of his teeth had gone; his cheeks were sunken, and he mumbled his words so that it was difficult to distinguish them. There was no light in his eyes, and his short hair was quite white. Now and again he was shaken with a racking cough, and this was followed by an attack of such pain in his heart that it was anguish even to watch it. The room was warm, but he shivered with cold and cowered over the roaring fire.

  When the doctor whom Lucy had sent for, saw him, he could only shrug his shoulders.

  'I'm afraid nothing can be done,' he said. 'His heart is all wrong, and he's thoroughly broken up.'

  'Is there no chance of recovery?'

  'I'm afraid all we can do is to alleviate the pain.'

  'And how long can he live?'

  'It's impossible to say. He may die to-morrow, he may last six months.'

  The doctor was an old man, and his heart was touched by the sight of Lucy's grief. He had seen more cases than one of this kind.

  'He doesn't want to live. It will be a mercy when death releases him.'

  Lucy did not answer. When she returned to her father, she could not speak. He was apathetic and did not ask what the doctor had said. Lady Kelsey, hating the thought of Lucy and her father living amid the discomfort of furnished lodgings, had written to offer the use of her house in Charles Street; and Mrs. Crowley, in case they wanted complete solitude, had put Court Leys at their disposal. Lucy waited a few days to see whether her father grew stronger, but no change was apparent in him, and it seemed necessary at last to make some decision. She put before him the alternative plans, but he would have none of them.

  'Then would you rather stay here?' she said.

  He looked at the fire and did not answer. Lucy thought the sense of her question had escaped him, for often it appeared to her that his mind wandered. She was on the point of repeating it when he spoke.

  'I want to go back to the Purlieu.'

  Lucy stifled a gasp of dismay. She stared at the wretched man. Had he forgotten? He thought that the house of his fathers was his still; and all that had parted him from it was gone from his memory. How could she tell him?

  'I want to die in my own home,' he faltered.

  Lucy was in a turmoil of anxiety. She must make some reply. What he asked was impossible, and yet it was cruel to tell him the whole truth.

  'There are people living there,' she answered.

  'Are there?' he said, indifferently.

  He looked at the fire still. The silence was dreadful.

  'When can we go?' he said at last. 'I want to get there quickly.'

  Lucy hesitated.

  'We shall have to go into rooms.'

  'I don't mind.'

  He seemed to take everything as a matter of course. It was clear that he had forgotten the catastrophe that had parted him from Hamlyn's Purlieu, and yet, strangely, he asked no questions. Lucy was tortured by the thought of revisiting the place she loved so well. She had been able to deaden her passionate regret only by keeping her mind steadfastly averted from all thoughts of it, and now she must actually go there. The old wounds would be opened. But it was impossible to refuse, and she set about making the necessary arrangements. The rector, who had been given the living by Fred Allerton, was an old friend, and Lucy knew that she could trust in his affection. She wrote and told him that her father was dying and had set his heart on seeing once more his old home. She asked him to find rooms in one of the cottages. She did not mind how small nor how humble they were. The rector answered by telegram. He begged Lucy to bring her father to stay with him. She would be more comfortable than in lodgings, and, since he was a bachelor, there was plenty of room in the large rectory. Lucy, immensely touched by his kindness, gratefully accepted the invitation.

  Next day they took the short journey across the Solent.

  The rector had been a don, and Fred Allerton had offered him the living in accordance with the family tradition tha
t required a man of attainments to live in the neighbouring rectory. He had been there now for many years, a spare, grey-haired, gentle creature, who lived the life of a recluse in that distant village, doing his duty exactly, but given over for the most part to his beloved books. He seldom went away. The monotony of his daily round was broken only by the occasional receipt of a parcel of musty volumes, which he had ordered to be bought for him at some sale. He was a man of varied learning, full of remote information, eccentric from his solitariness, but with a great sweetness of nature. His life was simple, and his wants were few.

  In this house, in rooms lined from floor to ceiling with old books, Lucy and her father took up their abode. It seemed that Fred Allerton had been kept up only by the desire to get back to his native place, for he had no sooner arrived than he grew much worse. Lucy was busily occupied with nursing him and could give no time to the regrets which she had imagined would assail her. She spent long hours in her father's room; and while he dozed, half-comatose, the kindly parson sat by the window and read to her in a low voice from queer, forgotten works.

  One day Allerton appeared to be far better. For a week he had wandered much in his mind, and more than once Lucy had suspected that the end was near; but now he was singularly lucid. He wanted to get up, and Lucy felt it would be brutal to balk any wish he had. He asked if he might go out. The day was fine and warm. It was February, and there was a feeling in the air as if the spring were at hand. In sheltered places the snowdrops and the crocuses gave the garden the blitheness of an Italian picture; and you felt that on that multi-coloured floor might fitly trip the delicate angels of Messer Perugino. The rector had an old pony-chaise, in which he was used to visit his parishioners, and in this all three drove out.

  'Let us go down to the marshes,' said Allerton.

  They drove slowly along the winding road till they came to the broad salt marshes. Beyond glittered the placid sea. There was no wind. Near them a cow looked up from her grazing and lazily whisked her tail. Lucy's heart began to beat more quickly. She felt that her father, too, looked upon that scene as the most typical of his home. Other places had broad acres and fine trees, other places had forest land and purple heather, but there was something in those green flats that made them seem peculiarly their own. She took her father's hand, and silently their eyes looked onwards. A more peaceful look came into Fred Allerton's worn face, and the sigh that broke from him was not altogether of pain. Lucy prayed that it might still remain hidden from him that those fair, broad fields were his no longer.

  That night, she had an intuition that death was at hand. Fred Allerton was very silent. Since his release from prison he had spoken barely a dozen sentences a day, and nothing served to wake him from his lethargy. But there was a curious restlessness about him now, and he would not go to bed. He sat in an armchair, and begged them to draw it near the window. The sky was cloudless, and the moon shone brightly. Fred Allerton could see the great old elms that surrounded Hamlyn's Purlieu; and his eyes were fixed steadily upon them. Lucy saw them, too, and she thought sadly of the garden which she had loved so well, and of the dear trees which old masters of the place had tended so lovingly. Her heart filled when she thought of the grey stone house and its happy, spacious rooms.

  Suddenly there was a sound, and she looked up quickly. Her father's head had fallen back, and he was breathing with a strange noisiness. She called her friend.

  'I think the end has come at last,' she said.

  'Would you like me to fetch the doctor?'

  'It will be useless.'

  The rector looked at the man's wan face, lit dimly by the light of the shaded lamp, and falling on his knees, began to recite the prayers for the dying. A shiver passed through Lucy. In the farmyard a cock crew, and in the distance another cock answered cheerily. Lucy put her hand on the good rector's shoulder.

  'It's all over,' she whispered.

  She bent down and kissed her father's eyes.

  * * *

  A week later Lucy took a walk by the seashore. They had buried Fred Allerton three days before among the ancestors whom he had dishonoured. It was a lonely funeral, for Lucy had asked Robert Boulger, her only friend then in England, not to come; and she was the solitary mourner. The coffin was lowered into the grave, and the rector read the sad, beautiful words of the burial service. She could not grieve. Her father was at peace. She could only hope that his errors and his crimes would be soon forgotten; and perhaps those who had known him would remember then that he had been a charming friend, and a clever, sympathetic companion. It was little enough in all conscience that Lucy asked.

  On the morrow she was leaving the roof of the hospitable parson. Surmising her wish to walk alone once more through the country which was so dear to her, he had not offered his company. Lucy's heart was full of sadness, but there was a certain peace in it, too; the peace of her father's death had entered into her, and she experienced a new feeling, the feeling of resignation.

  Now her mind was set upon the future, and she was filled with hope. She stood by the water's edge, looking upon the sea as three years before, when she was staying at Court Leys, she had looked upon the sea that washed the shores of Kent. Many things had passed since then, and many griefs had fallen upon her; but for all that she was happier than then; since on that distant day--and it seemed ages ago--there had been scarcely a ray of brightness in her life, and now she had a great love which made every burden light.

  Low clouds hung upon the sky, and on the horizon the greyness of the heavens mingled with the greyness of the sea. She looked into the distance with longing eyes. Now all her life was set upon that far-off corner of unknown Africa, where Alec and George were doing great deeds. She wondered what was the meaning of the silence which had covered them so long.

  'Oh, if I could only see,' she murmured.

  She sent her spirit upon that vast journey, trying to pierce the realms of space, but her spirit came back baffled. She could not know what they were at.

  * * *

  If Lucy's love had been able to bridge the abyss that parted them, if in some miraculous way she had been able to see what actions they did at that time, she would have witnessed a greater tragedy than any which she had yet seen.

  X

  The night was stormy and dark. The rain was falling, and the ground in Alec's camp was heavy with mud. The faithful Swahilis whom he had brought from the coast, chattered with cold around their fires; and the sentries shivered at their posts. It was a night that took the spirit out of a man and made all that he longed for seem vain and trifling. In Alec's tent the water was streaming. Great rats ran about boldly. The stout canvas bellied before each gust of wind, and the cordage creaked, so that one might have thought the whole thing would be blown clean away. The tent was unusually crowded, though there was in it nothing but Alec's bed, covered with a mosquito-curtain, a folding table, with a couple of garden chairs, and the cases which contained his more precious belongings. A small tarpaulin on the floor squelched as one walked on it.

  On one of the chairs a man sat, asleep, with his face resting on his arms. His gun was on the table in front of him. It was Walker, a young man who had been freshly sent out to take charge of the North East Africa Company's most northerly station, and had joined Alec's expedition a year before, taking the place of an older man who had gone home on leave. He was a funny, fat person with a round face and a comic manner, the most unexpected sort of fellow to find in the wildest of African districts; and he was eminently unsuited for the life he led. He had come into a little money on attaining his majority, and this he had set himself resolutely to squander in every unprofitable way that occurred to him. When his last penny was spent he had been offered a post by a friend of his family's, who happened to be a director of the company, and had accepted it as his only refuge from starvation. Adversity had not been able to affect his happy nature. He was always cheerful no matter what difficulties he was in, and neither regretted the follies of his past nor repined ove
r the hardships which had followed them. Alec had taken a great liking to him. A silent man himself, he found a certain relaxation in people like Dick Lomas and Walker who talked incessantly; and the young man's simplicity, his constant surprise at the difference between Africa and Mayfair, never ceased to divert him.

  Presently Adamson came into the tent. He was the Scotch doctor who had already been Alec's companion on two of his expeditions; and there was a firm friendship between them. He was an Edinburgh man, with a slow drawl and a pawky humour, a great big fellow, far and away the largest of any of the whites; and his movements were no less deliberate than his conversation.

  'Hulloa, there,' he called out, as he came in.

  Walker started to his feet as if he were shot and instinctively seized his gun.

  'All right!' laughed the doctor, putting up his hand. 'Don't shoot. It's only me.'

  Walker put down the gun and looked at the doctor with a blank face.

  'Nerves are a bit groggy, aren't they?'

  The fat, cheerful man recovered his wits and gave a short laugh.

  'Why the dickens did you wake me up? I was dreaming--dreaming of a high-heeled boot and a neat ankle and the swirl of a white lace petticoat.'

  'Were you indeed?' said the doctor, with a slow smile. 'Then it's as well I woke ye up in the middle of it before ye made a fool of yourself. I thought I'd better have a look at your arm.'

  'It's one of the most æsthetic sights I know.'

  'Your arm?' asked the doctor, drily.

  'No,' answered Walker. 'A pretty woman crossing Piccadilly at Swan & Edgar's. You are a savage, my good doctor, and a barbarian; you don't know the care and forethought, the hours of anxious meditation, it has needed to hold up that well-made skirt with the elegant grace that enchants you.'