Chapter XXI

“_Let me gather a little strength to think,_ _As one who reels on the outermost brink,_ _To the innermost gulf descending._”

In a summer-house of one of the several châlets perched up among the Cintra mountains sat Leslie. Far below was a vista of hill and dale, forests of cork and chestnut, groves of orange, lemon and olive trees, white villages and red, ploughed fields and, in the distance, the silver sea and Lisbon.

Behind towered rock-strewn heights, standing black and sinister against the sunlit sky, their craggy sides patched with somber pines and firs. Suspended like a jewel in the heavens, was the Palacio da Pena (the Palace of Sorrow), with its three golden domes flashing in the clear blue sky.

Nearly a fortnight ago Leslie’s employers had sent her up to their mountain resort. For suddenly she had become pale and thin, had lost interest in her duties and in the round of gaieties which fell to her lot as companion to one of the most popular women in Lisbon. In fact, she was again the sad-eyed, listless girl who had come to Lisbon nearly a year before on Major Harding’s recommendation.

Yet this sudden lack of energy was not due to overmuch dancing in the Portuguese capital as her employers suspected. It resulted from an item seen in the month-old paper now lying on her knee--a curt notice of an occurrence that frequently happens in the running of an Empire.

“News comes from Tuata, Northern Nigeria, of the death of two British officers, Captain Lindsay Fletcher and Lieutenant Paul Vincent. They, and a small company of _Hausas_, were ambushed and massacred by a party of natives. The whole of the British force was annihilated. The bodies of the _Hausas_ were recovered, but no trace of the murdered officers’ bodies has been found.”

Inside the folded newspaper were ten letters from West Africa, all written by Fletcher--letters with a curious air of restraint about them.

Over a year had passed since Leslie had said good-by to Dr. Atherley. Her new life in a strange land, with its round of pleasures and slight duties, together with the kindness and consideration of her new friends, had eased the blow of Molly’s tragic end. Lebrassa she still thought of with a shudder. But as time passed he faded somewhat from her mind and was no longer the constant, haunting specter he had been during the early months following her departure from West Africa.

She sat, white and tearless, thinking of the man she loved, murdered out in darkest Africa, wondering, in a numb, heartbroken way, why the world went on just as usual.

As she sat there brooding, the approach of a servant, with a letter on a salver, roused her.

Picking it up, she glanced at the envelope. The postmark was Lisbon, re-addressed to her from her employers’ house there. The writing was vaguely familiar, yet she could not put it down to any one of her acquaintances in that city.

Thinking it must be some invitation she opened it. She drew out no card, but thin sheets of foreign correspondence paper. The opening phrase brought a gasp of alarm to her lips. Quickly she turned it over and looked at the signature.

It was one she had seen before, on a letter that had come to her eighteen months ago in London--a brief note telling her the name of the boat that was to take her to West Africa, the time of sailing and the best train to Liverpool.

“_Essel Lebrassa._”

Big and all-powerful the name looked back at her, blinding her to everything but the fact of its presence.

With wide, dilated eyes she scanned the letter her shaking hands held.

_Little White Rose_,

There is so much I want to tell you, that I want you to believe, that I would have told you, but you fled away from me. Why did you, Leslie? I thought I had been through most of the phases of mental agony this existence can offer, but the knowledge that you were out in that driving gale, battling with wind and rain through miles of forest, and that fear of me had sent you there, caused me the deepest suffering I have yet known. You will not believe me when I say that the greatest joy of my life was when I heard you had recovered from the effects of that night. Yet I am such a savage. I am writing to you now to make you come back to me.

Little friend, you once had so much sympathy. Why did you take it from me? Just when I needed it most. When you knew me for who I was, the depths of vile blackness in me, the red flood wherein I had sought oblivion. And some of the white, too, that _you_ could always bring to the top.

I was a brute that night. I think I touched the bottom of a seemingly bottomless hell. I would have injured the little girl who trusted me. But your scorn and contempt maddened me, roused every atom of the vile black blood in me.

There was a time--so long ago that I had almost forgotten it until I met you--when I tried to conquer every evil passion the negro blood brought with it. And I succeeded. Yet it proved no use. All I had been working for was swept from me by an act of treachery, by a man who should have been my best friend. I left England for Africa, went back to a heritage I knew was mine, where I was welcomed and worshipped as a god and Sultan, not an object of contempt, as I was in your country, to be sneered at and called a “nigger,” and treated as though I were immeasurably beneath the poorest white trash civilization produces.

I was not twenty when I left the white world, to take up every rite and custom of my mother’s people, and very bitter against my father’s race because they had dealt out to me nothing but sneers and insults and injustice.

I had once hoped to make a name for myself, not in the way I have since done, but honorably. My birth and one man’s crime barred me out from that, so I tried another way, and succeeded. I think I am born for success, provided there is no honor attached to it. I tried to win you honorably, Leslie, though you will not believe me. And all the time I knew how poor my chance was. You were mine, more mine even than you know, the white side of me that had come back embodied in an angel who had deigned to be my friend.

I want to tell you, little rose, of the worship and adoration in my heart. Yet I know you have no wish to hear it. No pleading or love I could offer would bring you to me willingly, as I had once hoped, foolishly, wildly. Your white hands had touched me gently once or twice with such sympathy and understanding, that I dared to think you might give yourself into my keeping.

I was always a dreamer, Leslie, and always rudely awakened. I had forgotten what I was--a creature black and bloodstained. Such a flood of blood and blackness that it swept away the one friend life had given me; one I would have chosen had fate made me as other men.

I must have the one pure thing that has come into this nightmare life of mine. I am so thirsty down here at the bottom of my black hell, thirstier than ever before for goodness and purity. My little angel knows the truth about me; no small white hands will touch me willingly again; no rose will flood me with its sweetness.

Because of the vile depths of blackness in me, I must make a bargain with the whiteness that has spurned me.

Little Rose, I hold a life in my hand. I will give it to you in exchange for yourself. A man’s life for one sweet white flower from an English garden. One whom you now call “friend,” as you once called me. It is Captain Fletcher.

What a threat to use! One that will make you loathe and despise me more utterly than ever. I am a brute even to my most cherished treasure, whom I would have know only the best in me, but to whom Fate has determined to show the worst.

Captain Fletcher is my prisoner, not dead, as will be reported, but captured by me with but one motive--to learn your whereabouts. If you will come to me his life is yours--his and that of his brother officer whom I took at the same time. The day you arrive at Kallu they will be sent back to the nearest British station. If you refuse to come they both die. It is for you to choose. Even if you refuse to come, you cannot escape me. I know where you are now. My servants will be watching your every movement, awaiting an opportunity to trap you and bring you out here. The first is the quicker method, that is why I have adopted it. I am so hungry for you; so hungry to have my little English rose set in the sweetest garden earth holds. And I must make a further compact with my rose, lest she betray me.

I have sent a guardian to Lisbon for you, Dr. Hillman, who, for the next week will wait all day in the Rocio. If you are willing to give yourself in exchange for Captain Fletcher, you have only to stand by the statue in the middle, with a white rosebud in your hand. He will give you another letter. You must do what it says, and say nothing to any one of where you are going. You will come out to Africa as his daughter. There will be eyes watching you always. Any attempt on your part to betray either me or my servant will result in Captain Fletcher’s death.

How can I expect you to do anything but hate and loathe me? I am the Sultan of Kallu, with ten thousand souls to treat as I please, yet I am the son of an English nobleman, an upright and honorable man who would have had me the same, but he reckoned without my mother and the race of savage rulers she sprang from. _You_ can keep me the son of my father, even after twenty years of savagery, if you will. Be my sweet angel of pity, as you once were. Don’t drive me quite back to barbarism, Leslie. Try to have toleration and pity on your side. Love I could not hope for, but just a little something, dearest, that would hold us together outside the power of my arms.

Essel Lebrassa.

With trembling hands Leslie put the letter down. The first feeling that came out of the chill, sick daze enveloping her was one of relief to know Fletcher was alive. The full meaning of what the price of his life meant she was too stunned to realize. She only knew he was not dead and that she could save him.

None of the pathos and the pleading in the letter came to her.