Chapter XXIX: “The blackness of darkness.”

As the great mass of rock swung back into position Leslie stood for a few moments conscious of a queer, dizzy feeling, glad of the quietness after the wild uproar she had left, wondering what had caused it. Then she went on in the darkness, groping her way along the rocky wall. An abrupt turn in the passage showed a faint light ahead. She went forward quickly, to find herself in a cave, faintly lighted by a lamp set on a table in one corner of it.

She glanced around. It was a large, high vault with a little spring oozing from a crevice at her feet, and another opening opposite the one by which she had entered, blocked by a heavy wooden door. The cave was empty but for the one corner whence the light came, which was fitted up as a chamber. There lay a suit of white drill. In that secret room behind the throne of rock, barely half an hour before, Lebrassa had put on the barbaric robes for the heathen wedding ceremony.

Crossing to the lounge, Leslie seated herself there, watching the passage by which she had entered, thinking it all part of the wild rites that made her her cousin’s wife, almost sick with dread at the thought of the man who soon would be coming along the passage, in terror not noticing how the time was passing.

The splutter of the dying lamp roused her. Fear of one darkness made her forget the other. Getting up quickly, she went to the slit, and stood there listening for some sound of her cousin’s coming. She heard nothing except the faint lapping of the spring. In an excess of terror and loneliness she crossed swiftly to the door, very conscious of the wild, moving shapes the lamp cast, thinking he might be coming that way. But, much as she tried, it was beyond her strength to open it.

Fearing the light would die away before she reached it, she ran back to the table and stood watching the flickering lamp. It gave a final upward flare of long flames, smoke and sparks, then died down to a glowing, smoldering wick. Breathlessly she watched the point of red. Then it faded, leaving her alone in utter darkness.

How long she stood with her eyes on the spot where it had been, she did not know. But it was until her legs gave way beneath her. Then she sank down on the lounge, and stayed there trying to hear something besides the gurgle of the spring.

Presently she got to her feet, her only desire now to reach the way by which she had entered.

On finding the slit she went up it blindly, with outstretched arms, until the solid rock stopped her.

“Essel! Essel!” she called wildly. “Don’t leave me here all alone.”

A sense of being buried alive seized her. With desperate hands she beat on the unresisting rock. Dull echoes answered.

She stopped, waiting until the gruesome sounds died away. Then she crept back to the lounge, trying to realize what it all meant and why her cousin had not come as he had said.

Then, presently, out of sheer fatigue, she slept.

She awoke with a stiff, cramped feeling, wondering where she was and why it was so dark. With a sudden flood came the recollection of all that had happened before sleep brought oblivion.

Louder than the gurgle of the spring, came her own heart-beats. A long shudder ran through her as she realized something must have happened or her cousin would not have left her so long in darkness. A wild wish to scream aloud, to make some human sound come out of the blackness, seized her. With an effort she repressed the feeling, conscious only of the chill, sickly fear that had her in its grip.

Then she rose and went groping for the passage, stumbling over rocks, heedless of the pool she splashed into, her only desire to reach the way by which she had entered. Then she threw herself face downwards on the ground in an effort to shut out the all-enveloping darkness.

There followed a vista of constant terrifying night.

Then forgetfulness came again. From this she awoke, dazed and blinding, in unaccustomed light that made her eyes ache.

A black face was bending over her, a woman’s face, vaguely familiar, watching her in an anxious but unfriendly manner.

“Have you come to fetch me?” Leslie asked feebly.

Yoni made no reply. She knew what the girl said. During the months the negress had spent trading on the steamers she had picked up a smattering of English. Turning toward the table, she began unwrapping the voluminous blue cloth that swathed her, bringing to light a number of parcels tied on to her person. They proved to be a quantity of hard biscuits, plantains, oranges and nuts, a bundle of candles and a couple of boxes of matches--supplies such as any native woman in an up-country African village would have bought for household stores.

In a dazed manner Leslie watched the silent woman, wondering if she were dreaming. She hardly dared speak lest this apparition should fade and leave her in total blackness again.

“Where’s Mr. Lebrassa?” she ventured at length.

The name brought Yoni’s eyes to her--black, suffering eyes full of hate and jealousy.

“He say you lib for here tree week,” she answered in broken English.

Her reply left Leslie aghast.

“But I can’t. I can’t stay here any longer. I shall go mad,” Leslie cried hysterically.

“He say you mus’ lib for here till Cap’en Fletcher come.”

Leslie stared back at her, too weak to grasp the meaning of what was said.

“Tell Mr. Lebrassa I can’t stay here. Why doesn’t he come?” she finished wildly.

“He no can come. He say I mus’ no say why.”

With the feeling of some nightmare on her, Leslie watched the silent figure that stolidly continued unpacking the parcels.

All at once Yoni faced the girl, looking at her in a wild, jealous way.

“He say I no mus’ say. But I say. He tink only ob you. You--who hab lose him everyting.”

There came a flood of wild words in broken English. As Leslie deciphered their meaning, it left her frozen.

They told of all Lebrassa was suffering, and for what reason; of the weeks of agony that lay before him; of how Yoni had reached him; of the secret of the whereabouts of the forest entrance to the rocky chamber which he had entrusted into her keeping; of the provisions she was to bring before starting to Tuata, over two hundred miles away to bring up the British force which meant Leslie’s rescue and the downfall of Kallu.

“An’ I hate you, you white gel!” Yoni’s frantic, sobbing voice finished. “An’ I kill you, but dat I no can sabe him, an’ he wan’ see you ’fore he die.”

Petrified Leslie listened. The hopeless tragedy was more than she could bear. Just as surely as her father had stolen her cousin’s English birthright, so she, unwittingly, had deprived him of his African heritage and brought him to this ghastly end. All the aversion and dread she had felt were lost in a flood of pity, so great that it was almost love.

She got up, looking with desperate eyes at Yoni’s dark, distorted face.

“Take me to Mr. Lebrassa at once,” she commanded.

The negress stopped sobbing and gazed at her with curiosity.

“You no lub him, an’ you wan’ go an’ sabe him?”

“I won’t have him tortured because of me.”

Yoni pushed her back on the lounge.

“No good now. Dey kill him all same. An’ you, de one he wan’ sabe. He say you write note to Cap’en Fletcher, so dat white mans see I say true.”

Yoni plunged into a big calico pocket that was tied round her waist and produced a stump of lead pencil. With trembling fingers Leslie took it and looked round for something to write on.

The candle Yoni had fixed on the table by means of a drop of grease showed a strange picture. A big, gloomy cavern full of groping shadows, and, in one corner of it, a worn, white girl sat scribbling a frantic message on a piece of soiled paper that had been round one of the packages. The light flashed on slim, gem-laden fingers that wrote with desperate pleading, begging her distant countryman to come and save a man whose head had had a price on it for the last seventeen years; it played on the rainbow mass of jewels gleaming on her slender bare arms and shoulders, and on the golden stars strewn about the gauzy, billowing robe she wore. The light showed, too, a black woman standing half-naked, silent as a statue, her coarse blue cloth trailing on the ground, with eyes full of jealousy, hatred and suffering fixed on the frail, ethereal beauty beside her.

When the note was finished Leslie rose, determined to make another effort to save Lebrassa from further suffering.

“You must let me out. Perhaps they won’t torture him if they have me.”

Savagely Yoni laughed, in a way strangely reminiscent of her brother.

“If dat sabe him, you no be here now. I tell hem fetch you so soon I know how get here. I take you now, but I know it hurt de Sultan more see you hurt dan all dey hurt him. Dere is only to do what he say. You here. He dere--hoping dat de white mans come ’fore he die, an’ he know you safe. It all you--you--you!”

Dazed and stunned Leslie stood conscious of the truth of all Yoni said, aghast at her own helplessness. There was nothing to do but wait, knowing a man was being tortured to death on her account. The fact left her sick and shivering. And above all was the knowledge that her cousin had tried to keep this last horror from her.

In an ecstasy of pity and helplessness she touched Yoni’s arm.

“Is there nothing I can do?” she asked.

Roughly the negress shook off that small, anxious, white hand.

“You can do what he say. No more.”

Yoni took the candle from the table and made for the wooden door by which she had entered, and started wrestling with the catch.

Leslie followed her. In what the woman had said, the girl had forgotten her own weeks of imprisonment and dire loneliness.

“Why do you do so much for the Sultan?” she asked.

For a moment Yoni ceased her struggles with the door. Turning, she scanned Leslie from head to foot, a glance that showed all the hatred she felt for the one responsible for her god’s suffering and downfall.

“For de reason he do so much for you.”

Then she turned her back on Leslie and re-attacked the door. Presently it gave way under her efforts. Without a word she went out, banging it behind her almost before Leslie had realized what was happening.

She flew to the door, trying to reach Yoni, still hoping that if she gave herself up her cousin’s torments might cease, but as she got there she heard a heavy bar slipped into position. She pulled and banged at the door, but her efforts brought no response from the woman outside.

Presently, worn out with her three days of starvation, she groped her way back to the table and felt round for candle and matches.

There were only a dozen candles and these would have to last her for three weeks at least. But although light was so precious, she could not sit in darkness alone with her thoughts.