Chapter XXX

“_Though the gifts of the light in the end are curses,_ _Yet bides the gift of the darkness--sleep!_”

All day long war drums had been sending their wild tattoo echoing through the forest. Savage figures flitted to and fro among the ruins of ancient Kallu. War-palaver was being held in the market-square, attended by an array of warriors, blood-stained and bandaged, hardly one of them whole.

Kallu was learning that the Sultan Nanza was not the leader the Sultan Essel had been.

Away in the forest, now not more than thirty miles distant, a thin line of khaki and black, led by a trio of Englishmen, was pushing its way onwards, and no effort of the Kalluians could dislodge or turn it from its course.

When the first news of the coming expedition had been brought, Kallu had set out, a thousand strong, to annihilate the hurried advancing towards them. There had been attacks by day and by night, every one a failure. There were ambushes set, but every hiding place on the route appeared to be known to the advancing force, and the Kalluians found themselves attacked by a foe they had hoped to surprise.

A sullen crowd scowled at Nanza as he stood arranging the next move. There was no getting away from the fact that they were beaten, and the fall of Kallu was only a matter of a few hours. The warriors had lost faith in their leader. He was brave, but courage was of little use when machine guns came into play, and his skill in warfare was crude negro cunning; he had none of the finesse and strategy his cousin had inherited from a long line of English ancestors, most of them famous soldiers. In the Sultan Essel’s day they had fought in many parts of West Africa, and their portion of the campaign had been always successful. Now, to be defeated, routed day after day, by a force only a fraction of their original number, took the heart out of them, and left them with no desire to meet the advancing foe face to face.

More than three weeks had passed since Yoni had started down to Tuata.

The news she had brought, and the frantic note from Leslie delivered with it, had resulted in the whole garrison being sent up, for Fletcher knew enough of the Hyena’s following to guess they would prove no easy foe, even when deprived of their half-caste leader.

Always when the expedition halted for its few hours’ nightly rest, Fletcher would bring out Leslie’s imploring letter. In it was no mention of that brief moment of exquisite agony when her small, white face had been so close to his and her soft lips had tried to kiss the pain out of his eyes. Nothing of the confession of love that tragic parting had brought. It was a wild cry, begging him to come and save the man he had been trying to catch for years.

And it left him with the feeling that had assailed him once before, at the Harrogate hotel, on the occasion of his first round with Lebrassa over Leslie, when the mulatto had succeeded in converting his dinner invitation into consideration for her only. Now, in his end, ghastly as it was, the same thought and consideration were there, and the volume of it appeared to have driven from Leslie’s mind the knowledge of all else.

The wild, imploring note was in Fletcher’s hand, as he sat camped only ten miles from Kallu, wondering what the morrow would show him; whether Lebrassa would have withstood the tortures put upon him and kept the secret of Leslie’s hiding place, or whether he would have come too late to do more than stamp out this nest of hornets.

The blackness of night was growing faintly red when the little British force started on the last ten miles of its journey. The sun was up long before the first glimpse of the ruins came into view. The piles of masonry and tangled curtains of creeper offered excellent cover for the enemy. Every moment Fletcher expected an attack, not knowing Kallu had struck its last blow.

The little column marched on, and came out into the blaze of sunshine flooding the market-square. Everything there was quiet and peaceful; thin spirals of faint, gray smoke curled up from fires outside the mud huts clinging to the palace walls. Around them stood a crowd of women and children, sullen and resentful, watching the intruders. But there was no sign of a man of fighting age.

Fletcher knew what had happened--reverses had taken the heart out of Kallu. He had seen these evacuations before, in several expeditions against rebellious tribes, when the tide had gone against them.

However, he was taking no risks.

In spite of his desire to reach Leslie, and Yoni dragging at his arm and imploring him to come at once to the temple, he made a survey of the place to satisfy himself its peaceful attitude was no trap. At the head of the tunnel leading down to the temple he posted half his men. Then, with a supply of torches, he took the remaining half in with him.

The long, dark corridor he and his party traversed sounded strangely silent and deserted; only the booming echo of the steady tramp of feet came out of the darkness confronting them. The array of torches showed rock walls covered with signs and symbols beyond the knowledge of the present age--the work of some night-worshipers who lived when the world was dim.

Fletcher had no eyes for these. At the head of his men he marched along, wondering what the unknown beyond would show him.

Presently a flight of steps was reached, leading down to even darker depths of silence. No glimmer of light came from it, no sound.

For a moment he stood staring into the pit. It seemed as if he had come too late; that this great black void had swallowed up everything.

Yoni’s hand, pulling his sleeve in desperate, anxious haste, roused him.

The party descended into the inky well. The torches showed only further darkness. They marched on until the columns of a great arch loomed up in the feeble light.

A cry from Yoni brought Fletcher’s gaze to something lying at the foot of the wide stone steps leading up to the Throne. Something that had once been a man. Now a mass of festering sores and stumps, forgotten in the fighting that had taken his torturers from Kallu, left alone in darkness to die. Something once so strong that even death had been conquered by it, for the great bare chest, scarred and burnt till the ribs showed through, still moved with a flicker of life.

With a wail of agony Yoni sank beside Lebrassa.

Fletcher knelt beside his old enemy, marveling that a man could endure so much and still be alive. Opening his flask, he coaxed a draught of weak whiskey and water between Lebrassa’s parched lips. Tortured eyes opened, then closed again as if the light were too much for them; opened again, and rested unbelievingly on the Englishman’s face.

“Why, Fletcher!” came out in a faint gasp.

Fletcher had no love for the man he was tending. There had been a time when he had thought the worst death earth could inflict would be too good for him. But now his end had come, the cause that had brought him to it seemed to have wiped away the mass of villainy at his door.

The idea made Fletcher do the most difficult, and perhaps the most noble, deed of his life.

“Miss Graham wrote to me, asking me to come and save you. There was no thought of anything but you in her letter--you and what you were suffering on her account.”

His words made a shadow of the old arrogance cross Lebrassa’s face.

“That woman must have told her. I wanted to keep it from her.” Then he laughed, a laugh pathetic in its feebleness. “Leslie asked _you_ to save _me_!”

Lebrassa’s eyes closed weakly. Then he spoke again, in a querulous, hopeless, wandering way.

“Take me out of this black hell. I want light and whiteness and roses.”

Fletcher’s next draught brought his wandering mind back to the present. His eyes opened and rested on his captor’s face in an anxious, pleading manner.

“Those devils have left me no sight for a girl’s eyes. I’d like to look something like a man in case she should want to see me.”

Even now, in spite of all he had endured for Leslie’s sake, there was the anxious doubt that the return of her own sort and color might take her thoughts from him and bring back all the old antipathy.

Despite his desire to reach Leslie, the wistful pleading in that faint, tortured voice made Fletcher comply with the request before going further. Turning to a _Hausa_ sergeant, he gave an order for an impromptu stretcher to be made. Whilst Lebrassa was being lifted carefully on it, he scribbled a note to the doctor of the expedition, telling him to do his best for the dying man.

When this was done, in a feeble, gasping voice Lebrassa told him the secret that opened the Shadow.

In a fever of anxiety Fletcher went up the wide stone steps of the throne and crossed to the rock where the brooding Shape loomed. Slowly and carefully he followed out the complicated instructions Lebrassa had given. Presently an oblong hole appeared in the banked cloud. It revealed nothing but darkness, no sign or sound of the one entombed within.

Telling his men to hold the rock back, he lowered himself into the gaping hole. Then he took a torch from one of them and went along the empty passage.

The noise of his heavy military boots went echoing down the long, rough, rock alley, booming into the cave beyond with the sound of distant thunder. It made the girl sitting there in darkness, start up with wildly beating heart, not knowing whether it was relief at last, or whether the man suffering outside had been unable to endure more, and had told her whereabouts.

Fletcher came out of the slit with the growing fear that the horror and loneliness had proved beyond the girl’s strength.

Anxiously he stood gazing round the great cave, for the light of his torch was not sufficient to pierce its far, gloomy corners. Out of the darkness something seemed to float towards him; a wraith of a girl in crumpled purple gauze where golden stars flashed. She was so transparent and ethereal that for a moment he thought she was some conception of his own mind come to haunt his waking hours as her ghost did his dreams.

Then dropping his torch he rushed forward and drew her into his arms.

“My darling!” he cried, falling on his knees before her.

Small hands, so thin and white, were on his shoulders.

“Is he--still alive?”

Leslie’s question sent a chill through her lover. In the end it seemed that Lebrassa was victor, that he had succeeded in stealing her love. The idea left Fletcher tongue-tied and clumsy, and choked back the flood of tender words on his lips.

“He’s still alive,” he said huskily.

“Is… is he much hurt?”

He knew she had no idea of the tortures savages were capable of inflicting. He knew also that Lebrassa’s end was only a matter of a few days, hours even, that his desire to see the girl for whose sake he had suffered so much had helped to keep life in him.

“I’m afraid he won’t recover.”

“Then I shall have killed him!”

“No, darling, his own wild schemings brought him to his end.”

“He’s my cousin,” Leslie said brokenly. “And something my… father did made him do all those dreadful things.”

This was no news to Fletcher. The bare fact had come into Leslie’s wild, imploring note, and it had left him wondering what the true story was.

“So you told me, little one,” he said tenderly.

“I thought you would never come,” she said wildly. “I’ve waited so long, all the time knowing they were torturing him. Perhaps I’m only dreaming now, and I shall wake up in the dark again, thinking he’s still being hurt.”

Tenderly Fletcher drew her fragile little form closer.

“Haven’t you a word of welcome for me, darling?” he asked.

Leslie was too weak and dazed to realize anything except that relief had come at last, and her only desire was to see the man who for her sake had suffered so much.

“I can’t think of anything but my cousin.”

Fletcher’s arms dropped from the slender waist they encircled. It seemed to him they had no place there; that he was usurping a dying man’s privilege.

Instinct must have told Leslie that his heart was stricken.

“Don’t be hurt and angry, dear,” she pleaded. “I must do all I can to make my cousin’s end happy. Don’t you see, he’s not a nigger to me now. He’s my cousin. My brave, dear cousin. The cousin my… father mortally injured.”

Getting to his feet, Fletcher picked up the torch. As he did so, drearily he wondered why the mulatto always succeeded in out-maneuvering him where the girl they both loved was concerned.

To Leslie the journey back to daylight was a blurred vista of sensations. She was aware of a bigger flare of light as Fletcher lifted her out through the hole and onto the rock throne. There was the vast hall to cross, a walk that made her realize how weak she was. Steps were reached, a breathless climb. Then a long corridor, like an endless black tube, with a faint speck of light at the end, that grew bigger and brighter as she stumbled on, until it almost blinded her.

Well within the screening shadow of the tunnel, where the light did not come so strongly, Fletcher came to a halt. He gave an order to a _Hausa_ sergeant to fetch a hammock to carry Leslie to the palace. Then he drew out a handkerchief and folded it thickly so as to bind her eyes when she crossed the sunlit square.

As they stood there waiting, Lieutenant Vincent came and spoke to her, telling her that Lebrassa was a hero and a gentleman, that the doctor was doing his best for him.

He said a great deal more but that was all Leslie grasped. In a dazed way she listened as he went on talking, glad some one was saying a good word for her cousin.

When the hammock came, Fletcher bound her eyes and carried her into it. Then the screening cloth was taken off, she was in the green, shady garden within the palace walls.

The big arch leading into the courtyard was reached at last, then the fretted, columned windows opening into the sitting-room that had once been hers.

The moment the bearers stopped Leslie slipped from the litter. She went on blindly, with eyes only for a man on a low couch set between the portraits of the two who were responsible for his being.

She did not realize the extent of her cousin’s injuries, for his persecutors had left his face untouched, and a coverlet screened the rest from her sight. But there was no mistaking the suffering in the tainted eyes watching so eagerly for her coming.

With a little cry she crossed and knelt beside him, flooding his worn face with her tears. The soft shower eased his look of pain and anguish and took the wistful anxiety from his eyes.

“The tears are not for me, are they, little rose?” he whispered.

“You should have told them where I was. You shouldn’t have let them hurt you,” she sobbed, as she smoothed back his crisp, wavy hair--now more white than black--in an ecstasy of loving pity.

“A life in hell makes one oblivious to pain, little cousin.”

“You should have spoken! You should have spoken! You shouldn’t have let them torture you because of me.”

In a weak, pleased, tender manner Lebrassa laughed.

“There’s no pain now, little rose, only sweetness.”

The depth of love and suffering in his voice was more than Leslie could bear.

Her head sank on the coverlet and stayed there in an agony of suppressed weeping. A mangled limb that had been bandaged back to some semblance of an arm came out from beneath the screening coverlet, and was put around her with a vestige of its old fierce protection.

“You mustn’t cry, dearest,” he whispered. “I’ve got a better end than I deserve.”

“You mustn’t die, Essel. You mustn’t. I want you.”

“I’d go through any hell, Leslie, to come out finding you weeping over me, _wanting me!_”

Then his faint, tired voice stopped. Happiness seemed to have taken away his last remaining mite of strength. He lay just watching the girl who knelt beside him, smoothing his grizzled hair and touching his haggard face with gentle, caressing fingers, a touch that took all pain from his eyes.

The doctor’s entry roused them. Coming to the couch, he stood looking at Lebrassa, wondering how much he would endure for the sake of the girl with him, knowing what pain the moving of that encircling arm must have caused.

“I shall have to send you away now, Miss Graham,” he said in a kindly manner. “I haven’t quite finished making your cousin comfortable.”

The mere suggestion of her leaving him made Lebrassa’s arm tighten round the girl.

His action brought a tearful smile to Leslie’s lips. All was weakness and suffering where once there had been such strength and power. She did not draw back from that feeble hold, instead even more tenderly she smoothed his worn face.

“Let me go, Essel dear,” she whispered. “I’ll come back the moment the doctor will let me.”

With a touch of savage jealousy he held her tighter, kissing her caressing hands passionately.

“There’s no one but me now, is there, little angel? In spite of the blackness,” he asked anxiously.

“No one,” she whispered.

She bent over him until the cloud of her hair screened from his sight everything but herself. Gently she smoothed his worn face, and he gazed at her in worship and adoration, whispering all the wild love that, up to now, the knowledge of her aversion and dread of him had kept stifled.

When Leslie returned to his bedside she was no sultan’s bride, but a little English girl in a straight, short-sleeved muslin frock with hair done in tight coils round her ears. All afternoon she stayed beside him, fanning him gently, for the breathless, tropical heat had taken all but the faintest spark of life from him, and that was in the tainted eyes that never left her face.

The dim, shaded room was all peace and quiet, the silence broken only by the girl’s slight movements, the occasional gentle murmur of her voice and the tramp of the sentry on duty outside--the only thing that said Lebrassa was a prisoner.

For nearly a week he lingered, patient, quiet and happy, with Leslie his nurse by day and Yoni taking night duty.

There came a time when he was a little exacting with Leslie, anxious she should stay with him all morning instead of going for her usual half hour walk in the garden as he had always insisted, peevish if she left him even for a moment. He was irritable with Yoni, not wanting her near him; angry if any of the Englishmen came into the room, holding Leslie in a weak yet savage, jealous way, if they spoke to her.

All morning he lay watching his cousin, refusing everything but the sips of water she coaxed between his lips. But when lunch-time came he asked her to go and have her meal in some cool spot in the garden, as an excuse saying she had been tied to the room all morning and that now he felt like sleeping a little.

But once she was out of sight, he asked if he might see his captor.

The request surprised Fletcher. Generally Lebrassa ignored him, if he chanced to come in the room, granting him neither look nor word. The message was from a dying man so Fletcher went, wondering why his prisoner should suddenly ask for him.

On approaching the couch, Lebrassa’s gaze met his in a pleading, anxious manner. Then he looked at the doctor who usually sat in the room.

“Could we be quite alone, Captain Fletcher?” he asked faintly.

Fletcher glanced toward his medical officer.

“I’ll take a turn with the patient, if you’d like to get along for lunch now.”

Once the doctor was out of earshot, Lebrassa spoke again.

“You love my cousin, Captain Fletcher?”

From such a source the captain once would have resented this question. Even now it rubbed him on the raw, but remembering the cause for which his rival was dying he answered from his heart.

“I loved Miss Graham from the first moment I saw her.”

“Leslie loves you, too, though she tries to hide it from me,” Lebrassa replied. “But in her generous, unselfish way she has given me one week in heaven, and for that I’m grateful.”

As if getting his words together Lebrassa paused.

“My cousin is penniless,” he continued a moment later. “She can’t prove her claim to anything that was once my father’s. As an indemnity your government will seize all I own out here, so it’s no use for me to make a will in her favor.”

Realizing the truth of these statements, Fletcher said nothing. He had decided what Leslie’s future was to be. That she was penniless did not trouble him at all; he had a comfortable income apart from his pay. But he still wondered what the interview was leading up to.

“I want Leslie to be happy,” that weak, gasping voice continued. “And she can’t be with the weight of her father’s sins upon her. And because of them, she won’t marry you either.”

This fact Fletcher had not grasped. Now it made him listen eagerly to what the dying man was saying.

“I can’t bear to think of her missing happiness because of her father. Because of his sins going through life feeling a leper. I know that feeling only too well. And I won’t have Leslie suffer in the way I have.”

Fletcher saw his own paradise retreating, and the fact stunned him.

“But what can you do?” he asked rather helplessly.

His question brought a slight smile to Lebrassa’s drawn lips.

“In strategy and finesse I’ve always been the better man of the two,” he remarked.

Fletcher knew the Sultan was referring to their many rounds in past days, when he had always proved himself more than a match for the Englishman.

“I’m going to tell my cousin another story,” Lebrassa went on. “And _you_ must uphold my second confession. Now listen carefully.”

Fletcher stooped over the bed to miss no word of that faint, gasping speech. With heads close together they stayed talking, two men, once mortal enemies, now brought together as friends in defense of the girl they both loved.

“But it’s going back on a brave man,” Fletcher protested when Lebrassa had finished.

“Better to go back on a ‘brave man’ as you please to call me, than leave an innocent, honorable girl suffering for the rest of her life. And you’ll be the braver man, Captain Fletcher, for you’ll have to tell lies and stick to them, knowing that by cheating you’ll win the prize.”

To Fletcher it seemed no sacrifice could be greater than the one his old enemy was prepared to make for the sake of the girl they both loved.

“You will back me up,” Lebrassa pleaded.

Fletcher was past speaking; he just nodded.

A bandaged arm made a movement in his direction, as if to shake hands on their bargain. Then Lebrassa seemed to recollect what he was and the mutilated limb was drawn back. Slight as the gesture was, Fletcher saw it and he put his own hand carefully on the stump where his enemy’s hand had once been.

When Leslie returned to her vigil by her cousin’s couch there was no sign of Fletcher. Nor did the doctor who was sitting in the room make any mention of his visit.

The long, hot, trying afternoon dragged on. It left Lebrassa lying with closed eyes, that opened only to smile when she touched him caressingly. But the coolness of evening brought a little life to him.

For a long time he stayed watching her in an anxious, hungry, jealous way. Then a whisper brought her bending over him.

“There’s something I want to tell you, Leslie. Something that will take all your love away from me.”

“What is it, dear?” she asked. “What do you want to tell me now?”

The whole of his nightmare life, black, white and red, had been poured out before her during the past few days.

“It’s about you, dearest,” he whispered, in a hesitating manner, as if afraid of what the result of his confession would be.

“I’m listening, Essel,” she said, patting his hollow face tenderly.

“It’s what I once told you about your father. It wasn’t true. Not a word of it, except that I am your cousin, but not legally. My father married my mother by heathen rites only. Think of it, Leslie, would such a thing as a legal marriage be likely? My father was the reprobate, not yours. He was a just and honorable man, even to me. Accidentally I learned who my dead father was. I forged that letter and went to my uncle, claiming to be the legal son of his elder brother. He listened to me. Read my letter. Said if my story was true, he would give me my title and estates, but I must first produce my mother’s marriage certificate and my own birth certificate. She had been dead long before I went to him, and I swore she had hidden the proofs I wanted and that the secret of their hiding-place had died with her.”

There was a brief pause, then the weak voice went on, gradually gaining force and power and conviction--a dying man’s effort to remove a heritage of sin from a girl’s white conscience.

“He came out to Kallu, to see how much of my wild story was true, and spent a lot of time in trying to find out the truth. Then he discovered it, and accused me of being the imposter I was. I tried to terrorize him into giving me what was his, and acknowledge me as his brother’s legal son. I said I’d have his life and the lives of his wife and child if he did not give me my father’s title and estates. Fear for them drove him from England. It was not true, anything I told you that day you came to Kallu, Leslie. I said it to make you be kind to me, so that you wouldn’t quite hate me, knowing it would be so easy to deceive you, that I might get sympathy that way, if not love.”

Stunned, Leslie listened.

For a moment it seemed as though the burden of her father’s infamy had slipped from her. Then other thoughts came that made her bend over her cousin in an ecstasy of love and pity.

“I don’t believe you, Essel.”

“It is true. You must believe me,” he said with weak determination. “I said it to make you like me. I’ve deceived everybody, so why not you, the one I plotted and schemed and did murder to get? Why not you, the little girl whose love I wanted, who always paid her debts so nobly? Why not forge a debt to make you pay me back in the sympathy and sweetness I couldn’t get otherwise?”

There was conviction in the voice that had gathered strength for this last effort at deception. But in Leslie’s mind were childish recollections of a drunken, dissipated man who had habits and ways and ideas that the light of advancing years had shown her were neither just nor honorable. Above all was the knowledge of her cousin’s wild love and depth of sacrifice for herself.

She leaned over him, anxious these last few hours should be as happy as she could make them.

“Never mind, dear. If you deceived me, it was because you loved me.”

Searchingly, he watched her.

“You believe me, don’t you, little rose? I swear it on my dying oath.”

She took his anxious, watching face between her hands.

“I believe you, Essel, but it doesn’t make any difference now. You’re my cousin just the same. The dear, brave cousin I love.”

This effort to remove the burden of sin from her shoulders to his own, left him almost unconscious.

Daylight died away, and brought shadows creeping into the room.

Lebrassa lay in a fitful, uneasy doze, starting and waking to gaze round anxiously for Leslie. The doctor came in to light the lamp and look at his patient, and out again to fetch Fletcher. The two Englishmen stayed in the screening shadows so that the dying man could not see them, knowing their presence might raise a flood of negro jealousy he was now too feeble to keep under control.

Midnight came. Lebrassa still lay muttering, sometimes in the language of his mother’s people, sometimes in English--back again to his boyhood spent in England.

All at once he started up with the wild war-cry of his negro ancestors. Fletcher and the doctor darted forward to hold down the maimed, distorted thing howling on the couch. Their presence maddened him, and brought back all the hatred of the whites that had once been his.

A savage roar of fury greeted them in the heathen dialect that, in past days, had led many a charge against their color.

There was a quick movement beside him, and a slim, white hand was laid on his shoulder.

“Essel! Essel, dear.”

Leslie’s voice brought his mad, blazing eyes from the two white men. For a moment he looked at her in bewilderment, then a smile came.

“Why, little rose!” he exclaimed, as if brought out of some nightmare.

Falling back weakly, he lay watching her.

“Keep hold of me, little cousin,” he gasped presently. “Hell is so close now. Hell here and hereafter.”

With an arm around his neck, she sat with her face pressed close against his brown one.

His voice came again, peevish and fretful.

“It’s so dark now, I can’t see you, dearest. You won’t go where I can’t find you, will you?”

“No, dear, I’ll stay with you always.”

There was no reply. But a bandaged arm came out from beneath the coverlet and groped round blindly as if feeling for something.

Leslie put it round her waist where it stayed contentedly.

For some time there was silence. The night wind came creeping through the fretted arches, bringing the moaning sigh of the surrounding wilderness, and distant, weird, wild, forest howls.

Then a whisper came, faint and far away, from just on the Verge--the last, tired sigh of a soul slipping into eternity.

“I deceived you, little rose. I swear it on my dying oath. Say you believe--”

“I believe you, dear. Of course I do,” she whispered, stooping.

But the lips Leslie kissed were dead ones.