THE MAN WHO DID THE RIGHT THING (continued 2)

Unguja, John wrote, was a wonderfully interesting island, despite its horrible smells, its heat and mosquitoes, which never left you alone, day or night. Such a mixture of Arabs and Persians, Indian traders, fierce, long-haired Baluchis, plausible Goanese half-castes, Madagascar people, Japanese and Chinese, and negroes from all parts of Africa.... He had already had a touch of fever and Bayley had broken out in boils; Anderson had suffered from diarrhoea; but all three were overjoyed at the prospect of leaving, soon after this letter was posted, in an Arab "dhow" which would convey them and the porters of their expedition to Lingani on the mainland, whence they would start on a two weeks' journey up-country. They were taking with them Snider rifles and ammunition to defend their caravan against wild beasts on the road and also to shoot game for the caravan's meat supply. At Mr. Callaway's advice they had been practising with these rifles at the shooting butts of the Sultan's army for the past week.... Thomas had been told off for Taita....

Then ensued a long silence and Lucy, now thoroughly interested, was getting anxious. But in January came a letter of many pages headed "Hangodi, Ulunga, November, 1886." John wrote that he and his companions had encountered many difficulties. On the fortnight's march inland from Lingani their porters had several times run away in alarm, hearing that a bloodthirsty tribe called "Wahumba" were on the march, or that there was famine ahead. The German traders on the coast had not been friendly, and the attitude of the Arab chiefs in the coast-belt was surly. However, one of these Arabs, Ali bin Ferhani, was a kindlier man than the others and had told off some of his slaves (John feared they were, but what could you do?) to carry their loads to the Ulunga country. They also had with them a Christian convert, a native of Ulunga and a released slave (Josiah Briggs) who could speak English to some extent and was very useful as an interpreter and head man.... Well, they had reached Hangodi at last and liked its surroundings. There were mountains—quite high ones—all round. Hangodi, itself, was over three thousand feet above sea level and quite cool at nights. Indeed John now regretted he had spurned the idea of mantel-borders, for they had fireplaces in the dwelling-houses, both those already built and those they were planning. A fire at night, in fact, was often welcome and cheerful. The Chief approved of the settlement, wanted them to teach his people, and keep off the "Wa-dachi," as he called the Germans, whom he did not seem to like. But the Chief's people, the Wa-lunga, were suspicious and quarrelsome, and as he could not speak their language and had to explain the Gospel through an interpreter, they paid him little attention. The elders of the tribe liked to come and talk with him in his verandah, that is to say, they did the talking—punctuated by a good deal of snuff-taking and spitting; and he gleaned what he could of its sense from the summaries given to him by Josiah Briggs. It seemed to consist of many questions as to how the white men became so rich and why he could not teach this method to their young people. If he tried to expound Sacred things to them they asked in return for a cough medicine or to be shown how to make gunpowder and caps, and how to cure a sick cow. Yet he felt sure their minds would be pierced ere long by a gleam of Gospel light....

There were also some Muhammadan traders from the Coast settled for a time with the Chief, who, he strongly suspected, was selling them slaves, war-captives. Though the Chief seemed willing to listen to their story of the Redeemer, he nevertheless sent out his "young men," his warriors, on raiding expeditions against the tribes to the south, and they sometimes returned from such forays with cattle, with men cruelly tied with bush-rope and their necks fastened to heavy forked sticks, and with weeping young women whom they took as wives.... The Wangwana, as these black "Arabs" were called, were very hostile to his mission—more so sometimes than the real Arabs. Occasionally he had met a white-skinned Arab who reminded him most strongly of the Bible patriarchs, and who seemed very desirous of being on friendly terms with the white man. But these black Arabs who spoke Swahili, the language of Unguja, though they affected outward politeness, were working hard against the good influence of the East African Mission and trying to persuade the Chief to reconsider his first grant of land and expel the white people who were spies in the service of the great Balozi and the English men-of-war, watching to intercept slave dhows....

The children of the Wa-lunga were frightened of him and his two companions and could not be induced, even by gifts of beads, to sit on their knees. But their mothers, on the other hand, worried the white men incessantly for beads and calico, soap and salt, which last they ate as though it was a sweetmeat. Yet they ran away when he sent for the interpreter and tried to tell them about God. One woman had shouted back at him that it was very wicked to talk about God; it would only draw down the lightning ... much better leave God alone and then He left you alone—this at least was how Josiah had translated her speech.

He could not see any idols about the place. He fancied the people worshipped the spirits of the departed, which they believed to dwell in large hollow trees. They were also terribly afraid of witch-craft....

Hangodi was, however, rather a pretty district, and Lucy would be pleased with the site the Mission had chosen. Bayley, who had some knowledge of surveying, made out its altitude above sea-level to be 3,500 feet, more or less. There was a clear stream of water running through a gorge below the Mission enclosure—for they had constructed a rough hedge. A few wild date palms might be seen in the stream valley and there were plenty of pretty ferns and wild flowers.

As to lions; they could be heard roaring every night in the open country, but hitherto he had not actually seen one. Then with a few devout phrases and others expressive of his longing for her to join him the letter came to a conclusion.

During all this time Lucy saw little of the Baines family. But a few days after she had read this letter from Hangodi, Mr. Baines called on Lucy at the school—it was at the beginning of February—and put into her hands a copy of Light to Them that Sit in Darkness. "There's a letter in here of John's which they've printed," said Mr. Baines with considerable exultation, "and mother thought you might like to read it. Mind you return the magazine to her when you've done so. Good-bye. S'pose you are starting in a couple of months?"

Lucy found a column scored at the side with pencil, where the following matter appeared:

BLESSED NEWS FROM EAST AFRICA

We have received the following intelligence from Brother John Baines, who has recently joined the East African Mission:

HANGODI, NGURU,

November 20, 1886.

MY DEAR MR. THOMPSON,—

We arrived here about a month ago after a pleasant stay with the brethren at Unguja. We reached Hangodi in about two weeks of travel from the port of Lingani, accompanied by Broth's Anderson and Bayley, and were greeted most warmly on arrival by Brothers Boley and Batworth—the "busy B.'s," as they are called—who feared from the rumours afloat that we should be stopped by native disturbances on the road. We brought with us from Unguja Josiah Briggs, a convert who was originally a freed slave from this very district of Hangodi. He has lived for five years at our depôt in Unguja or at the Presbyterian Mission station at Dombasi. He will be able to assist me materially as interpreter among the Wa-lunga as Kagulu is his native tongue.

The journey from Lingani to Hangodi was rather a fatiguing one as the donkeys we took with us to ride either fell sick poisoned by some herb, or strayed and were eaten by lions. So we ended by having to walk. Our Unguja porters ran away before we had got far inland, scared by rumours of Wahumba raids or stories of the famine raging in the interior; but a kindly Arab, who is supposed to have known Dr. Livingstone, came to our assistance and sent a large number of his people to convey us and our loads to Ulunga, as this district is called (the root—lunga—means the "good" or the "beautiful" country, as indeed it will be, when it has received the Blessed Gospel).

Mr. Goulburn, who is pioneering and is "spying out the land" to the north, travelled with us as far as Gonja and then quitted us, after we had prayed together in my tent. We turned south and continued our journey to the Ulunga mountains with the Arab's porters and guided by Josiah Briggs.

The country became very hilly, and as it was the beginning of the rainy season we had occasional violent thunder-storms and the streams were difficult to cross. Fortunately, however, the early arrival of the rains kept us from attacks on the part of the terrible roving tribes of Masai or "Wahumba," who only seem to exist to raid and ravage their agricultural neighbours, but who don't like doing so in wet weather. Moreover, they appreciate the springing up of the new green grass after the drought and prefer taking their cattle—whom they worship—out to graze. This new grass attracts to the district incredible herds of antelopes and zebras and gives the lions and leopards such abundance of food and occupation that they never deemed it worth their while to attack our caravan, though during the dry season—the Arabs told us—you could hardly get through the plains without losing a proportion of your carriers from lions, leopards or hyenas. This early breaking of the rainy season therefore seemed to us an act of special intervention on the part of Divine Providence to ensure our safe arrival at our destination. When we reached Hangodi we were hospitably received by the Chief Mbogo, to whom Brother Batworth introduced us. Mbogo rules over the district of Ulunga. He rejoiced greatly that we had come to teach the Gospel and asked me many questions about the Christian faith. An earnest spirit of inquiry prevails amongst all his people, who are flocking to see us and who listen with rapt attention to my simple exhortations delivered through the medium of Josiah. The Arab traders at this place are very annoyed that an English missionary should settle here and expose their wicked traffic in slaves, but I hope to be able to frustrate their intrigues and induce the Chief to expel them. For that reason I am working hard at the language with Josiah and with the vocabularies I have obtained from Mr. Goulburn and Mr. Boley.

Many of the women in this place are eager to hear the blessed tidings and bring their little ones with them while they listen spell-bound to our teaching. I trust soon to have beside me one whose sweet duty it will be to lead these poor sinful creatures into the way of Truth and Life....

The building of the houses, school and chapel was commenced, as you know, two years ago by Brothers Boley and Batworth, whom we relieved, and who are going to Taita to perform similar work for Mr. Goulburn. In completing the station we shall be our own architects, but Mr. Callaway has sent us up two Swahili masons and a Goanese carpenter from Unguja. Anderson is already doing a brisk business at our improvised store.

And now, dear Mr. Thompson, I remain in all Christian love,

Yours sincerely,

JOHN BAINES.

CHAPTER V

ROGER'S DISMISSAL

"So it is really settled, Roger, that you are to go out to that African place with the violent name—something about 'gouging' I know," said Lady Silchester, one evening in the winter-spring of 1887.

She believed she was enceinte and treated herself—and was being treated—with the utmost consideration. Lord Silchester was transfused with delight at the possibility of having a direct heir and promised himself the delicious revenge of taunting those officious friends and advisers who had taxed him with folly in marrying a woman thirty years younger than himself. So she was lying on a couch in the magnificent drawing-room of 6a Carlton House Terrace, clad in some anticipation of the tea-gown. It was nine o'clock in the evening, and Roger Brentham had been summoned to dine alone with her and her husband and talk over his personal affairs. Lord Silchester would presently leave for the House of Lords; meantime he was half listening to their conversation, half absorbed in a volume of Cascionovo's Neapolitan Society in the Eighteenth Century in its French edition.

Roger, with one eye and one ear on Lord Silchester, replied "Yes. Lord Wiltshire has definitely offered me the appointment—through Tarrington, of course—his Private Secretary; and equally definitely I've accepted it. But technically it's not Unguja, nothing so big. Unguja is an Agency and Consulate-General and is still held by Sir James Eccles, who is only at home on leave of absence. My post is a Consulate for the mainland, for the part the German company is taking over. It is styled 'for the mainland of Zangia with residence at the port of Medina.' It is supposed the Germans are going to style their new protectorate 'Zangia,' the old classical name of the Persians for that part of East Africa."

Sibyl Silchester yawned slightly and concealed the yawn with her fan of Somali ostrich plumes which Roger had given her. Lord Silchester put down his book and turned suddenly towards Roger.

"How do you get on at the F.O.?"

"Oh, pretty well, sir," replied Roger, who still kept up his military manners with older men in higher positions than his own. "Pretty well. I've been working in the African Department all the autumn and I think I've got the hang of things; I mean, how to conduct a Consulate and the sort of policy we are to observe in East Africa. I've been down in Kent, also, staying with Sir James Eccles and being indoctrinated by him with the aims and ambitions he has been pursuing ever since 1866. He's a grand man! I hope they send him back. I should be proud to serve under him. Of course, I saw something of him at Unguja in '85-'86..."

"H'm, well, I've no business to express an opinion, but I much doubt whether Wiltshire will send him back—Wiltshire sets much value on good terms with Germany, and Eccles is hated by the Germans...."

Roger: "I know.... They've told me I must try to maintain friendly relations with our Teutonic friends, especially as I am to be, when the Consul-General returns, 'on my own,' so to speak, in the German sphere of influence. Meantime I am to live at Unguja and 'act' for the Consul-General till he or some one else comes out. Awfully good of you, sir, to get this chance for me ... it's rare good luck to be going out to act straight away for a man like Eccles.... I'll try my utmost to do you credit."

Silchester: "I don't doubt you will. But don't rely too much on my personal influence. I'm only Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster ... a minister without portfolio, so to speak. Cultivate the friendship of the permanent officials. Once you're in—I mean once a Secretary of State has given you the appointment, they are the people who count. I remember when I was in diplomacy there was rather an uppish young fellow from the 11th Hussars who'd been somebody's A.D.C. in the Abyssinian War. Dizzy, to oblige 'somebody,' shoved him into the Slave Trade Commission. He took himself and his duties seriously and really did go for the American slave-traders. An Under Secretary hauled him over the coals for trop de zèle. Lord Knowsley supported him. The Under Secretary sent for him afterwards and said, 'Remember this, Bellamy; Lord Knowsley is not always here. WE ARE.' And sure enough after Knowsley left they found out something against him and 'outed' him from the service. Moral: always keep in with the permanent officials and you'll never fall out with the Secretary of State. Do you get on all right with 'Lamps'?"

Roger: "Sir Mulberry? I scarcely ever see him. He's much too big a pot to take an interest in me. Besides, he's keenest about the Niger just now. No, I have mostly to do with Bennet Molyneux, who is head of the Department; and I'm afraid I don't care overmuch for him. I like awfully the clerks in the Department except that they don't take Africa very seriously, think it all a joke, a joke bordering rather on boredom. Still, they're some of the jolliest fellows I know. It's Molyneux I can't hit it off with, and they say in the Department it's because I've come in between some poor relation, some cousin of his he wants to push on out there. He got him appointed a Vice-Consul a year or two back and thought he was going to be asked to act for Eccles whilst he was on leave. And now that Lord Wiltshire has said I am to—I don't doubt at your suggestion, sir—Molyneux has turned quite acid. Especially when he had to draft my instructions! I think also he didn't like my setting him right when I first came to work in the office. He wrote some minutes about the Slave Trade and about the Germans which were the uttermost rubbish you ever read, and he never forgave me for not backing him up at a departmental committee they held—Sir Mulberry presided. And the mere fact that Thrumball and Landsdell have been awfully kind to me and had me to dine with them seems to have soured him. And when one day Lord Wiltshire sent for me to answer some questions—Well, I thought afterwards Molyneux would have burst with spleen. He threw official reserve to the winds and walked up and down in his big room raving—'I've been in this office since 1869,' he said, 'and I don't believe Lord Wiltshire knows me by sight. Yet he's ready to send for the veriest outsider if he thinks he can get any information out of him. The Office is going to the dogs—and so on....'"

Lord Silchester: "Molyneux, Bennet Molyneux. I know him. Not a bad fellow in some respects, but a bad enemy to make. He is a kind of cousin of Feenix's—Colonial Office, you know. Well, your fate is in your own hands ... you must walk warily..." (at this a servant enters and informs his lordship that the carriage is waiting) "I must be off. Sibyl! you won't stay up late? Roger, don't talk to her for more than an hour. Good-bye. Of course, you'll come and see us before you actually sail?..." (goes out).

A pause.

Sibyl: "You may smoke now; but only a cigarette, not a cigar." (Roger lights a cigarette.)

Sibyl: "What dear old Francis said was very good advice. Mind you follow it. Get on the right side of these old permanencies. Whenever Francis begins his instances and illustrations I feel what a perfect book of reminiscences he will some day write. But, of course, it wouldn't do till he's reached an age when he can no longer serve in the Government.... I want him some day to be at the Foreign Office or at least the India Office. I do so love the pomp of those positions, the great parties in the season, the entertaining of delightful creatures from the East with jewelled turbans...."

Roger (a little abruptly): "Are you happy....?"

Sibyl (turning her head and looking at him intently): "Happy? Why, of course. Perfectly happy. Everything has gone splendidly. And now that I'm going to have a child.... I do hope it'll be a boy. Francis would be so happy. You quite realize if he has no heir the peerage and all the entailed estates go away to some perfectly horrid second cousin out in Australia...."

Roger: "In view of that possibility I wonder he did not marry years ago, when he was a young man...."

Sibyl: "My dear! How could he? He was a younger son and in the diplomatic service with barely enough to live on, respectably. And then he got tangled up with another man's wife. He thinks I know nothing about that side of him, but as a matter of fact I know everything. His elder brother, the fifth Lord Silchester, was an awfully bad lot—treated his wife very badly—they were separated and their only son was brought up by his mother to be dreadfully goody-goody. Francis's elder brother died in Paris—I daresay you have heard or read where and how. It was one of the closing scandals of the Second Empire. But then the goody-goody son married after he succeeded—married a sister of Lord Towcester. She was killed in the hunting field and her rather limp husband died of grief afterwards, or of consumption, and Francis came into the title rather unexpectedly five years ago. Then he was embarrassed by his Darby and Joan attachment to Mrs. Bolsover.—However, then she died—and so—at last he felt free to marry....

"I met him first at a croquet party at Aldermaston Park. I saw at once he was struck with me.... However, we won't go over the old argument again which we talked out that day at Silchester.... D'you remember? My ankles were so bitten by harvest-bugs after sitting on those mounds, I shan't forget!..." (meditates).... "I'm much happier than if I had married you.... My dear, that would never have done.... But that need not prevent our being the best of friends, the most attached of cousins.... It's a bore having a confinement in the Jubilee year.... I'd meant to rival Suzanne Feenix in my entertainments.... But if I give Silchester a boy, he will refuse me nothing.... And I mean, as soon as I'm up and about again, to push him on. He's rich—those Staffordshire mines and potteries. He's got lots of ability, but he's too fond of leisure and isn't quite ambitious enough. Complains of being tired.... He's only 57 ... but he much prefers spending the evening at home and reading history and memoirs. Still, if Lord Wiltshire gets overworked at the Foreign Office, Francis simply must succeed him. He knows everything about foreign policy from A to Z, after serving so many years in Vienna and Rome.... Well, dear old boy, this is really good-bye. Make good out there, and don't make a fool of yourself with some grass widow going out, or some fair missionaryess.... I suppose some of them are fit to look at? ... Play up to the permanencies, and try to write some dispatch that'll interest Lord Wiltshire. Then Silchester may get a chance of putting his oar in and have you shifted to a better post and a more healthy one. After that I'll take a hand and marry you to some nice girl with a little money.... I wonder whether you'll feel lonely out there? But men never are, so long as they can move about and get some shooting ... which reminds me I want a lot more leopard skins. Don't mount them: I like to choose my own colours——"

(Enter Lady Silchester's maid.)

Maid: "My lady, before his lordship went out he said I was to remind your ladyship about going to bed early, so I ventured..."

"Quite right, Sophie.... I'll come up in one minute." (Exit maid.) "By the bye, Roger, I ought to ask after the other cousins. How's Maud?" (Roger intimates that good old Maud's all right.) "Maud is an excellent creature; I've always said so, though in a sort of tight-lipped way she's never approved of me. Because she's lost her own complexion in field sports and parish work Maud suspects all other young women of powdering and painting. And Geoffrey?"

"Geoffrey's ship is coming back in May and then he ought to get some leave; and to save your time, I might mention that Maurice will probably be called to the bar in the autumn if he satisfies the Benchers; and as to father, he's more gone over to Rome than ever...."

"You mean Silchester?"

"Yes. The vicar there is as frantic a 'Romanist' as he is, and together they've had a rare old quarrel with the farmer who grows corn where you got the harvest-bug bites, and objects to excavations. I think father forgets at times he's a nineteenth century Christian.... He is awfully annoyed at the general opinion that Silchester only dates from Christian times in Britain and that the Temple to Venus is really a Christian church. That's what comes from a Classical education.... Now I shall get into a row with your spouse for keeping you up. Besides. You don't really care for the others...."

Sibyl: "To be frank, I don't. You were the only one that interested me.... I ... well, then, Roger, this is the last good-bye but one..." (extends her hand on which he imprints a kiss). "That's quite enough show of affection; Sophie might come back at any moment and forget we are cousins. By the bye, it might be wise if you got some one—I dare say Francis would—to introduce you to the Feenixes before you go. They might serve to mitigate the hostility of Bennet Molyneux. Only don't fall in love with Suzanne and desert me! She's got the Colonies, it's true, but I'm going to have the Foreign Office before you're back.... You mark my words! Ta-ta! Coming, Sophie."

CHAPTER VI

THE VOYAGE OUT

Lucy said to herself she had never felt so miserable in her life as she did during the first night on board the Jeddah, the British India Co.'s steamer that was taking her to East Africa. She occupied one of the upper berths in the cabins off the Ladies' Saloon, in which there were, as far as she could reckon, five or six other occupants, including the stewardess, who passed her time alternately snoring on a mattress in a coign off the main entrance and waiting on such of the ladies as were sea-sick.

The Jeddah was rolling about in a choppy sea oft the Downs. Lucy felt a horrible sensation of nausea creep over her at times, and she clenched her teeth to repress her inclination to vomit; for she was too shy to call upon the much-occupied stewardess for assistance. The back of her head throbbed with pain, her eyes were burning hot with unshed tears, and her poor throat ached with suppressed sobs. Far worse than the physical discomfort of sea-sickness was the intensity of her mental agony, the bitterness of her unavailing regrets. She lay motionless in her narrow bunk, gazing up at the ceiling which seemed almost to rest on her face, and turned over in her memory ceaselessly and with minute detail the events of the last three days: her farewell to home and "darling" Aldermaston; her parting with mother on the platform at Reading ... and father ... the flying journey to London, when she had almost forgotten her grief in the excitement of seeing the metropolis; her two days stay with Aunt Pardew, who with her husband kept Pardew's Family Hotel in Great Ormond Street. Then: the sight-seeing, the shopping, the visit to the offices of the East African Mission. Here she had received her saloon passage ticket in the Jeddah, and twenty pounds in bright sovereigns for her out-of-pocket expenses by the way. The Secretary had spoken to her so kindly and earnestly that she had felt ashamed of her indifference to the real work of converting black people.

The Secretary, however, had said one thing that somehow perturbed her. He had mentioned that a sweet-natured young woman from her neighbourhood—Sister Jamblin—might also be going to their Mission in East Africa—by the next boat. He thought this would cheer Lucy up; instead of which it annoyed her greatly.... Then came the early rising on what seemed like her execution morning; the hasty breakfast, interrupted with trickling tears and nose-blowing on Aunt Pardew's—Aunt Ellen's—part, as well as hers.... Aunt Ellen was so like darling mother—and yet—it wasn't mother—...

And the long rattle through dirty and dirtier streets in a four-wheel cab with the rest of her luggage on top. The arrival on board the steamer in the docks, where everything was noisy, hurried, and confused with preparations for departure.... Only this morning! Only some twelve hours since she had taken leave with despairing hugs of Aunt Ellen! Why, it seemed at least a month ago. And only three days since she had seen her mother!...

When she mentally uttered the word "mother," she lost control over herself and gave vent to a convulsive choking sob..

"Would you oblige me," exclaimed a peevish voice from the berth below, "by calling for the stewardess to bring you a basin if you have any inclination to be sick? It would be much better than trying to keep it back and making those disagreeable clicking noises in your throat. Excuse me for remarking it, but it is really most distressing, and it fidgets me so I can hardly get to sleep. You really suffer much more by endeavouring to repress sea-sickness than by giving way at once and having it over...." This the speaker added because she had just given way herself—eruptively—and was now resting from her labours. Lucy was so startled and overawed by this unexpected interruption to her thoughts that she made no answer; but lay quite silent with flushing cheeks and beating heart. "It must be the tall, thin lady," she thought to herself, "I didn't remember she was so close."

Then her thoughts turned to her fellow-passengers. As far as she had ascertained, there were only nine besides herself: five ladies, two Roman Catholic priests or missionaries, and two men, one of whom was a Captain Brentham going out to Unguja, where he was to be Consul.

So, at least, she had heard the pink-cheeked lady say, rather tossing her head when she said it. Her aunt had timidly accosted two of the ladies before leaving the steamer. She had asked them with a redundancy of polite phrases to take Lucy under their protection as far as they might be travelling together. One of them was tall and thin, with a large bony face and cold grey eyes—a little suggestive of Mrs. Baines (Lucy thought); the other was pretty, though the expression of her face, even when she smiled and showed all her white teeth, was somehow rather insincere. But she had the most lovely complexion Lucy had ever seen. It was perfect: very pink in the middle of the cheeks and the palest blush tint over the rest of the face and neck. Her eyes were a dark blueish grey, with very black rims; and her hair a rich golden brown. Lucy was so much fascinated by her appearance and stared at her with such unconscious persistence while her aunt was talking, that at last the pink-cheeked lady encountered her steady gaze with a look of haughty surprise which caused Lucy to lower her eyes.

Neither lady responded very cordially to Mrs. Pardew's deferential request. The tall thin one had said she was only going as far as Algiers, but asked if Lucy was "a Church person" because the East African Mission, she had heard, was run by Methodists. The pretty lady, whose attire Lucy was again scanning with attention, because it was in the latest fashion, had looked at her with rather more interest and said: "Going out to marry a missionary? Well, I can't say I envy your experiences. It must be a wretched life up-country, from all I hear. We shall travel together as far as Unguja, but I can't offer to act as your chaperon. It is very likely my husband may marry you when you get there. I mean—" (seeing Lucy's look of dismay)—"he is the 'marriage' officer there at present, unless Captain Brentham is to deprive him of that privilege, also"—(here she had given a bitter laugh).... "If you feel lonely at any time on the voyage you may come and chat with me ... occasionally; though I can't tell you very much about Africa as I have never been there before."

Slowly the night wore away. Lucy as she lay awake stifled her regrets by vowing that when the steamer called at Plymouth she would instantly leave it and return home to her parents, and write to John telling him she was not fitted to be a missionary's wife. He would soon get over his disappointment as Ann Jamblin was going out by the next steamer. She would marry him like a shot....

In the small hours of the morning the sea calmed down and the ship rolled less. The passenger who had suffered most from sea-sickness—a poor tired-looking woman, mother of too many children—ceased to retch and groan and sank into exhausted repose. Even Lucy at last wove her troubled thoughts into dreams, but just as she had dreamt that this was only a dream and that in reality she was embracing her mother in a transport of happiness, she awoke with tears wet on her face and saw the cabin lit up with garish daylight streaming through the now open skylight. A fresh, exhilarating breeze was sweeping through the stuffy saloon and chasing the nasty odour of sea-sickness. She sat up in her bunk and gazed blankly round, trying to realize the difference between dreamland and reality.

"Would ye like a bath, Miss?" said the stewardess, a coarse-looking but kind-hearted Irishwoman, never quite free from a suspicion of spirit drinking: "Would ye like a bath? Becase if so, ye'd betther follow Mrs. Bazzard."

"I—I—don't know ... well, yes, I think I will," replied Lucy, wondering who Mrs. Bazzard was ... didn't the name come into John's letters? Just then the door leading out of the saloon towards the bathroom opened and presumably Mrs. Bazzard entered the Ladies' quarters, carrying towels and robed in a white lace-trimmed peignoir, and with her hair roughly piled on the top of her head and a lank fringe parted to either side. "Why, it must be the lady with the beautiful complexion," Lucy was saying to herself, when she saw on nearer approach that the rosy cheeks and blush tints had disappeared, and that the incomer, though otherwise resembling her acquaintance of yesterday, yet had a pale face, colourless and sad. "Poor thing!" thought Lucy, "how she must have suffered last night." And so great was her compassion that it overcame her shyness, and she was about to condole with the lady, when Mrs. Bazzard swept by her abruptly without recognition.

When her toilet was finished, she felt ill-at-ease among the uncongenial inmates of the Ladies' Saloon, and they directed towards her at times a look of hatred as at one who was prying into the mysteries of their clothing and bedizenment; so acting on the advice of the stewardess "to get up a bit of appetite," she staggered along the corridor and climbed the slippery brass-bound stairway till she reached the upper-deck. Here she sank on to the nearest seat and derived her first pleasurable sensation on board the steamer from inhaling the sea-scented breeze in the sunshine of April. It was indeed a fine morning, one of the first emphatic days of spring. The sky was a pale azure in the zenith and along the northern horizon a thin film of pinkish mist veiled the distant line of coast. A man cleaning the brasswork told Lucy they were passing the Isle of Wight; yonder was Bournemouth and presently she would see Portland Bill looming up.

A tall man, smoking a cheroot, was gazing in the direction of Portland Bill. Presently he turned round in Lucy's direction, looked at her rather hard then began pacing the deck. "That," she reflected, "must be Captain Brentham, who lectured at Reading on that snow mountain.... How extraordinary! And he must be the man Mrs. ... Mrs. ... Bazzard said was to marry me to John when I arrived." She raised her eyes and they met his. On his next turn in walking the deck he paused irresolute, then raising his cap said: "Are you the young lady from my part of the country who is going out to Unguja to be married? The Captain told me about you—unless I have made some mistake and ought to be addressing another lady."

"I think it must be me," said Lucy. "I ... I've heard you lecture once at Reading. You're a friend of Lord Silchester's, aren't you? My father is one of his tenants. We live at Aldermaston." Her voice trembled a little in pronouncing the name of the place she now loved—too late—beyond any other.

"Aldermaston—of course I know it, known it from boyhood. I rode over there several times last year to see my cousins, the Grayburns. One of them married Lord Silchester last July, and that's why I stayed at Englefield and gave the Reading lecture.... So you came and heard it?"

"I did; because, as I was going out to marry a missionary, I thought I ought to learn something about East Africa. Your ... your lecture made me want to go—awfully.... That wonderful mountain, those clumps of palms, the river and the hippopotami—or was it a lake?"

"Well, you'll see lots of such things if you are going up-country. Whom are you going to marry and where is he stationed?"

"Mr. John Baines, the East African Mission, Ulunga...."

"Oh" (rather depreciatively), "Nonconformist, Plymouth Brethren, or something of the kind. Now I think of it I went to a big meeting of theirs last year soon as I came back. Yes, I remember. They're a trading and industrial mission some distance inland, in the British as well as the German sphere ... good sort of folk, though their mouths are full of texts ... but they took me in once when I was half dead with fever and nursed me back to health. And I liked the way they set to work to make the best of the country and the people.... But it will be awfully rough for you; you don't look cut out for what they have to go through. I should have thought the Anglican Mission more your style, if, indeed, you went out as a Missionary at all."

He wished to add, "You're much too pretty," but restrained himself. Just then the breakfast gong sounded and they went down to the Dining Saloon. Brentham rather masterfully strode to near the top of the long table as though knowing he was the most important person on board, and placed himself next but one to the Captain's seat and Lucy on his right, with a wink at the same time to the Chief Steward as though to say "Fix this arrangement."

A moment after another lady with gold hair and a dazzling complexion glided up and nimbly took the seat on Brentham's left hand. The Captain was absent and intimated that they needn't expect him till the Jeddah was away from Plymouth and out of the Channel. The other lady passengers were breakfasting in the Ladies' Saloon. As soon as they were seated and porridge was being offered, the lady on Brentham's left introduced herself as the wife of a colleague: "My husband is Spencer Bazzard, the Vice-Consul at Unguja—I dare say you've heard about him at the F.O.? He's a friend of that dear Bennet Molyneux's, to whom we're both devoted.... Such a grasp of African affairs, don't you think so? My husband already knows Unguja through and through. I'm sure he'll be glad to put you up to the ropes. I've never been there before. Spencer thought he ought to go out first and make a home for me, so I've been a forlorn grass widow for over a year. However, we shall soon be reunited. And I understand we're to look on you as our chief till the Consul-General returns. Spencer's been Sir James's right-hand man. Thank you. Toast, please. No, I won't take butter: it looks so odd. Like honey! Ugh!"

After breakfast, Brentham escorted Lucy to the upper-deck, got her a folding chair and secured it in a sheltered corner, made her comfortable, lent her a novel and a rug, and then resumed his pacing of the deck or occasional study of a language book—he was trying, he told Lucy, to master Swahili by doing Steere's exercises in that harmonious tongue. Mrs. Bazzard commandeered a steward and a deck-chair and established herself close to Lucy with a piece of showy embroidery, bought at Liberty's with half the embroidery done. In a condescending manner she set herself to pump Lucy about Brentham.... Did she know him well? Didn't she think him good-looking? Mrs. Bazzard thought of the two her husband was the finer-looking man. He had longer moustaches and they were a golden brown, like Mrs. Bazzard's hair; he wasn't perhaps quite so tall; but how she was looking forward to reunion with him. He was a paragon of husbands, one of the Norfolk Bazzards. His elder brother, a person of great legal acumen, had from time to time tendered advice of signal value to Mr. Bennet Molyneux.... It was thus they had got "in" with the Foreign Office, and if Mrs. Bazzard were not pledged to inviolable secrecy (because of Spencer's career) there were things she knew and things she could tell about Lord Wiltshire's intentions regarding Africa—and Spencer.... However.... Did Miss—she begged pardon—she had not caught Lucy's name.... Josselin? any connexion of Sir Martin Josselin? Oh, Josling.... Did Miss Josling come from Captain Brentham's part of the country? Not a relation? No, of course not.... Well, did she think him clever? Some—in the Foreign Office—regarded him as superficial. It was his good looks that had got him on, and the friendship of a great lady ... but then what scandal-mongers men were! And how jealous of one another! Mrs. Bazzard's husband had got his commission through sheer, outstanding ability, yet at the time people said the most horrid things, both of him and her.... But Lord Wiltshire had remained unshaken, knowing Spencer's value; and undoubtedly held him in view for a very important post in Africa as soon as he should have inducted Captain Brentham into his duties.

Lunch came in due course and was eaten in better appetite by most of the passengers. It was served with coarse plenty, on a lower-middle-class standard of selection and cuisine.

It was a sunny afternoon when the Jeddah anchored in Plymouth harbour. The passengers were informed they might spend four hours on shore, so Captain Brentham proposed to Lucy and to Mrs. Bazzard that he should take them under his escort and give them their last chance of eating a decent dinner at an English hotel. Mrs. Bazzard accepted with a gush of thanks and a determination to commence a discreet flirtation with the acting Consul-General, who was undoubtedly a handsome man. Lucy assented simply to the proposition. She was still a little dazed in the dawn of her new life. But as she went off with the others in the tug she put aside as an unreasonable absurdity any idea of flight to the railway station and a return home. It was a great stay to her home-sickness that there should be on board some one she knew who almost shared her home country, who had actually met people she had met, and who would carry this home knowledge out with him to the same region in Africa as that she was going to. This removed the sting of her regret and remedied her sense of utter friendlessness in the wilds. Was he not actually to be her Consul?

These reflections caused her to sit down in the Hotel Writing Room, whilst dinner was being got ready, and Mrs. Bazzard was titivating, and dash off a hasty letter to "dearest mother" informing her of the brighter outlook. Her mother, overjoyed at this silver lining to the cloud of bereavement, spread the news; and so it reached Englefield, where Lord Silchester was spending the Easter recess. He retailed it to Sibyl ... who stamped her foot on the library carpet and said: "There! Didn't I predict it? I said he'd fall in love with a missionaryess!"

"And why not, my love?" replied Lord Silchester. "What if he does?"

A little tossing on the Bay of Biscay sent Mrs. Bazzard to her cabin, and made more scanty the public attendance at meals. But Lucy proved as good a sailor as Brentham, and a great solace to him. For he had his unacknowledged home-sickness too. You could not spend nine months in the best of English country life and the most interesting aspects of London without a revulsion of feeling when you found yourself cut off from all communication with those scenes of beauty, splendour and absolute comfort, and before high ambition had been once more aroused, and the unexplored wilderness had again beckoned her future ravisher. Lucy might be merely a farmer's daughter, a little better educated than such usually were at that period, still an unsophisticated country chit (as Mrs. Bazzard had already summed her up to the tall thin lady); yet she could talk with some slight knowledge about the Silchesters—her mother had been maid to Lord Silchester's mother, and her father was Lord Silchester's tenant. Colonel Grayburn was—or tried to be—a gentleman farmer within a mile of Lucy's home; she had seen Sibyl occasionally during the three years in which the Grayburns had lived in Aldermaston parish. Lucy had never been so far afield as Farleigh Wallop, but she knew Reading, Mortimer, Silchester, Tadley, and even Basingstoke. Merely to mention names like these consoled them both as the steamer ploughed her twelve knots an hour through the "roaring forties."

And when the Jeddah turned into the Mediterranean, with a passing view of the Rock of Gibraltar, and entered upon calm seas, blue and dazzling, their camaraderie increased under Mrs. Bazzard's baleful gaze and interchange of eyebrow-raisings with the thin bony-nosed lady of Lucy's cabin.

The Jeddah anchored off Algiers. The thin lady, who here passes out of the story—-I think she was the wife of a British Chaplain—had invited Mrs. Bazzard to lunch with her on shore. Mrs. Bazzard had hastened to accept the invitation, the more willingly since Captain Brentham seemed to have forgotten her existence; except at meal times, when he was obliged to pass the mustard and the sugar. Brentham and Lucy went off together into the picturesque white city, rising high into the half-circle of the hills. They lunched at the Café des Anglais and dined at an hotel near the quay. They climbed the ladder-like streets of the Arab quarter, bought useless trifles, and had a drive out into the country which was gay with genista in full bloom, with red-purple irises and roses, and dignified by its hoary olives, sombre cypresses and rigid palms.

If Lucy had never been so miserable as she was nine days previously, she had probably never felt so happy as now. Certainly she had never looked so pretty. Her violet eyes had a depth of colour new to them; her brown hair a lustre and a tendency to curl in the little strands and wisps that escaped control about her forehead. Her cheeks, ordinarily pale, and her milk-white complexion generally were suffused with a wild rose flush and a warmth of tint caused by the quickened circulation. The sea air and the sunshine chased away the languor that had accompanied a sedentary life. She had not been unobservant, and had taken several hints in costume from Mrs. Bazzard's dress. She had tightened this, expanded that, cut short skirts that might have flopped, diminished a bustle, inserted a frill, and adapted herself to the warmth of the tropics without losing grace of outline or donning headgear of repellent aspect.

At Port Said he already called her "Lucy," and she saw nothing in it that she mightn't accept, a permissible brotherliness due to country associations and the position of guardian, protector that he had assumed. He showed her those sights of Port Said that need not shock a modest girl. They sat side by side to enjoy the thrill with which the unsophisticated then passed through the Suez Canal. One woman passenger had left the ship at Port Said; another at Suez. There only remained the third one—the mother of many babies—changing at Aden into a Bombay boat—besides Mrs. Bazzard and herself in the Ladies' Saloon. The two missionary priests told their breviaries, gave at times a pleasant smile to her pretty face, and concerned themselves no more with her affairs than if she had been an uncriticizable member of the crew. They were Belgians going out for a life's work to Tanganyika, and to them the Protestant English and their ways were unaccountable by ordinary human standards. The captain of the ship had known Captain Brentham in the Persian Gulf and had the utmost confidence in his uprightness. What more reasonable to suppose than that this girl had been placed under his charge, inasmuch as it was he who would be the official to register her marriage when she met her missionary betrothed at Unguja?

Nor had Brentham any but the most honourable intentions. He felt tenderly and pitifully towards Lucy, carrying her country prettiness and innocency into savage Africa, embarking on a life of unexpected frightfulness, unspeakable weariness, of monotony, varied by shocks of terror, by sights of bloodshed and obscenity that might thrill or titillate a strong man, but must inevitably take the bloom off a woman's mind. He even thought, once or twice, of dissuading her from completing the contract, yet shrank from the upset this would entail. Perhaps she really liked this missionary chap? From the description she gave he didn't seem so bad—he was tall and strong and seemingly a man of his hands, with a turn for carpentry, and was the Agent of a very practical Mission. If she recoiled from this marriage, what was she going to do? It was impossible to think of her remaining at Unguja "on her own," and if he sent her back to England at his own expense her parents might resent very strongly his interference. There was his own career to be thought of ... and Sibyl.... To a woman like Lucy a marriage with most men of her class, or below it, or immediately above it, would come with rather a shock. She was so marriageable, so marked out as a man's prey that she was bound to go through it some day. Then, when she was married, she would live more or less in his Consular district, and he could keep an eye on her without being unduly attentive. Perhaps Mrs. Ewart Stott was still settled in the Zigula country of the German sphere ... she might help her. Very likely she would be able to stick her three years of residence which the Mission generally stipulated for and then return to England.—What a lark if they both went home together and compared experiences?

He might have revolutionized East African affairs in that space of time...

He was quite unconscious that in the two-to-three weeks of their close association on board he had won Lucy's love to such an extent that she was growing slowly to look upon the end of the voyage and the meeting with John as a point of blackness, the entrance to a dark tunnel....

Meantime, without assuming a forwardness of demeanour which her upbringing discountenanced and the watchfulness of Mrs. Bazzard forbade, she accepted all he gave her voluntarily of his society. The Red Sea was kind to them at the end of April: clear cobalt skies, purple waves, a cool breeze against them, no steamy mist in the atmosphere, and occasional views of gaunt mountains or bird-whitened rocks and islands. They sat in their chairs and talked: talked of everything that came into Lucy's mind. She put to his superior wisdom a hundred enigmas to answer, which her mind was now able to formulate with an aroused imagination.

"You say you approve of missionaries, yet you seem to dislike religion; you tried to get out of attending the Sunday service in the Saloon, and you looked very angry when the Captain asked you to read the Lessons. Don't you believe in anything then?"

"You'll find, Lucy"—Brentham would reply—"that the word 'believe' is very much abused. You may 'think' of such and such a thing as probable, as possible, as desirable—often, indeed, the wish is father to the thought. But to imagine it, is not to believe in it; in the same way in which we are compelled by irresistible conviction to believe in some fact or consequence or event, whether we like it or not. We can only 'believe' what can be tested by the evidence of our senses, by some incontestable piling up of evidence or record of historical facts.... Beyond that there are probabilities and possibilities and suppositions. I can believe the fire would burn my finger if I put it in the flame; or that the earth goes round the sun and that the moon is more or less 240,000 miles away from the earth: because my senses or my reason convince me of the truth of these facts. I can believe that you're a very dear little girl seated next me in a deck-chair on a steamer going out to East Africa: because I can put such a belief to some conclusive test of the senses. But I can't in the same way 'believe' in most of what are called 'religious truths,' because they are only suppositions, guesses, tentative explanations which have lost their value ... indeed, have lost their interest. I can't therefore waste my time on such——"

"But," Lucy stammered, "the Bible?"

"Just so: the Bible. How many of you stop to think what the Bible is? A collection of comparatively ancient writings in Hebrew and in Greek, very beautifully translated into Shakespeare's English, with lots of gaps filled up by suggested words and even—as we now think—lots of words and phrases wrongly translated. The Hebrew books may have first been written down at any time between six hundred and one hundred years B.C.; and the New Testament between fifty and a hundred-and-fifty years after Christ—at any rate in the form in which we know them. The original texts were uttered or written by men who only knew a small part of the Mediterranean world, who thought the earth was flat and the rest of the Universe only an arched dome over the earth. Job may have had grander conceptions, but the early Christian writers were ignorance embodied. They were ready to believe anything and everything to be a miracle, and to invent the most preposterous fairy stories to account for commonplace facts. At the same time they often overlooked the beauty and simplicity and practical value of Christ's teaching and also the fact that a good many of his..."

"What an abstruse conversation," said Mrs. Bazzard, breaking in out of the star-lit darkness on Roger's disquisitions. She hung about them in the Red Sea, especially after dark, and had a tiresome way of suddenly making her presence known. Perhaps, however, it was just as well, and, indeed, though Roger was annoyed at the moment at having his eloquent thinking aloud interrupted—because in such monologues we are generally trying to convince ourselves as well as our auditory—he also felt some relief at the excuse for dropping the argument. Why on earth should he undermine Lucy's stereotyped beliefs? What could he give her—in the life she was going to lead, too—in place of them?

But the discussion was revived ever and again by Lucy's persistent questions. She elicited from him in general that although he approved of the material results of missionary work and the ethics generally of Christianity, he mocked at creeds, thought prayer futile—especially the fossilized prayers of Judaism, Protestant and Catholic Christianity, because they were inapposite to our present age, bore little relation to our complicated sorrows and needs, our new crimes, difficulties, agonies, and temptations. He found the Psalms, all but two or three, utterly wearisome in their tedious woes and waitings, aches and pains probably due to too carnivorous a dietary; untempting in their ideals—"more bullocks for the altar ... and the fat of rams...." Then our hymns—all but three or four—were gross or childish in their imagery, abject in their attitude to a Cæsar or a Sultan of a God, who all the time watched inflexibly the Martyrdom of Man and the ruthless processes of Nature without lifting a finger to stay the cyclone or the epidemic ... and so on.... His views were very much modelled on those of Winwood Reade and on Burton's gibes at "Provvy" (Lucy shuddered at the irreverence and expected a meteor to cleave the ship in two), and he had brought out with him from England Cotter Morrison's "Service of Man."

Lucy sometimes felt so shocked at his negations that she resolved to speak with him no more, but to apply herself to the study of the Swahili Grammar he had lent her. Then at the sight of him and at his morning greeting and the kindly companionship at meals, she could not remain aloof. At any rate, he had said that you ought to act as a Christian even if you could not swallow Christian theology. That was a great admission. And he seemed to have numerous friends among the missionaries at Unguja and in the interior, which would hardly be the case if he were a bad man.... Besides, his father was a clergyman.

Aden came as a welcome surcease to these discussions. It was concrete and indisputable, and of remarkable interest when interpreted by a Brentham.... Steamer Point with its crowds of Indian and British soldiers, Jews with ringlets and tall caps selling ostrich plumes, Somalis like Greek gods in ebony offering strange skins, skulls, and horns for sale, and ostrich eggs; the drive—in a jingling carriage over sandy roads, past red-black crags on one side, with an intensely ultramarine sea on the other—to the Arab town; the vast cisterns, the rich vegetation at the cisterns; and then, after an interval of absolutely sterile rock-gorges (vaguely suggestive of the approach to Aladdin's cave in the Arabian Nights), a sea-side ravine with an unexpected flora of aloes, euphorbias, mesembryanths, and acacias.... Even Mrs. Bazzard, with her Bayswater mind, was momentarily impressed by Brentham's pleasantly imparted knowledge of all these things. You never noticed how extraordinary they were until he pointed it out. She was for the time being conciliated by his having invited her to accompany Lucy on the day's excursion and by the generous way in which he stood treat and presented her, as well as Lucy, with ostrich feather fans and amusing gewgaws made from sea-shells.

After Aden the sky clouded; metaphorically, with the coming end of this wonderful episode in Lucy's life, materially with some tiresome manifestations of the monsoon. I forget whether it blew behind and left the Jeddah wallowing in the trough of great indigo waves and rolling drearily; or blew against her progress, causing her to progress like a rocking-horse. But it imparted a storminess, a sense of exasperated emotion to this pair of lovers—as they were, unadmittedly. Fortunately, it also made the footing of Mrs. Bazzard's high-heeled Bayswater shoes uncertain on the unstable deck, so she relaxed her watchful spying on their conversations. Lucy was alternately silent and wistful and almost noisily vivacious, with hands that shook as they passed a tea-cup. She had begun to realize that in five or six more days the voyage would end in her meeting John as an ardent bridegroom; that she would never belong to Roger, she would pass out of his life as swiftly as she had entered it, be at most a pleasant and amusing memory of a half-ignorant little person with whom he had spent good-naturedly much of his time on a long sea voyage.

Roger on his part, in smoking-room reflections would feel he had gone much too far—compromised her, perhaps played a rather foolish part himself, for a man with high ambitions. There was that bitch of a woman, that quintessence of a Bayswater boarding-house, Mrs. Bazzard, wife of a—rotter, probably—whose nose he had put out of joint. She was capable—and and to conciliate her and win her over would be degrading—of putting any construction on his flirtation. How, at such times, before turning in, or even while playing whist in the Captain's cabin and thinking of anything but the game, he would curse these long steamer voyages and these episodes of love! There was that voyage out in 1880—he had narrowly missed a breach of promise action then, and he would be hanged if he'd set out to be more than sociable. And the last time he had returned to England ... Mrs. Traquhair, the wife of the chief electrician at Unguja.... Only the fact that in the Mediterranean she had developed one of those Rose Boils which were a legacy of Unguja's mosquitoes, and which confined her to her cabin till the Bay of Biscay (when they were all sea-sick), had prevented the irrevocable. And all the time he believed himself engaged to Sibyl! And afterwards, when he had met Mrs. Traquhair and her sister—and the sister! Oh my God,—in London and had dined them at the "Cri." and taken them to see Arthur Roberts from a box, and had scanned Mrs. T.'s profile as he had never done before and watched her laugh at the comedian, showing all the gold in her teeth ... he asked himself how on earth he could have kissed her so passionately as they were passing through the Suez Canal. Yet she couldn't have been a bad sort because she had never attempted to bother him or follow it up.... But he couldn't class Lucy with Mrs. Traquhair or the siren of the 1880 voyage. She was utterly good and innocent of schemes to entrap him. A sweet little thing...

As they passed into the Indian Ocean between Guardafui and Sokotra, there was a temporary lull in the wind. It was a moonlight night; they were sitting side by side under the open sky, for the deck-awning had been removed on account of the monsoon. A sudden fierce longing—there was no one on deck that he could see—seized him to take her in his arms and kiss her. And there came a telepathic message that she was aching to be so taken and kissed. But he resisted the impetus, with clenched hands on the arms of his chair. Silence had set in between them. A catch of Lucy's breath was faintly audible, and—dare I say it? A snivel, a tiny snivel.

"Lucy? Crying? My dear child! Why ... cheer up. We shall soon be there.. You're not cold?"

"You don't understand.... I ... I ... don't want to get there.... I don't want to marry him; I hate the very idea...."

"Oh, but this will never do.... This is foolishness, believe me. Lucy! Pull yourself together."

Lucy now sobbed frantically.

Mrs. Bazzard was heard saying from quite close by, "Which is Gyuardifwee and which is what-you-may-call-'em—Ras Hafoon? I mean, the cape where some of the steamers run ashore in the mist, and then you have to walk through Somaliland and get sunstroke?"

Brentham exclaimed under his breath: "Damn that woman!" and audibly, even a little insolently replied: "I'm blessed if I know. You'd better ask the Captain. He's on the bridge and dying for a gossip, and he'll probably give you a cup of cocoa."

Mrs. Bazzard walked away—or pretended to do so.

"Lucy dear. I want to speak to you while that cat has gone out of ear-shot. Calm yourself and listen, because I must speak in a low tone. If you feel you would sooner die than go through with this marriage, you shan't be forced into it. I will speak to Archdeacon Gravening ... or the Bishop ... and they will know of some nice women of the Anglican Mission who would take you in for a few weeks ... till there is a return steamer.... Then on the plea of 'health' you can go back to England. I could easily advance the money for the steamer passage ... some day your parents could repay me. But even if they didn't, it doesn't matter. I do so want you to be happy.... I blame myself awfully for the silly things I've said to you ... about religion ... it may have made you dislike mission work...."

But Lucy sobbed out "It hadn't ... that she was a little fool and he mustn't take any notice ... she'd never, never behave like this again ... after his extraordinary kindness too, which she would always be grateful for. He mustn't think any more about it or ever refer to it again...."

And before he could say anything more, or that cat, Mrs. Bazzard, return, she slipped down to her cabin, where fortunately she was alone and could cry her fill without attracting attention. But as she lay on the bunk, she set her teeth and resolved, come what may, she would not put thousands of miles between her and ... "Roger" ... she mentally uttered the name. Better to live within a few hundred miles of where he was and sometimes see and hear him. Why ... Why ... did he not ask her to marry him? Yes, and ruin his career. What would they all say at Unguja ... and John? ... Poor John! what a shock it would be to him. There was the note he had sent to greet her at Aden, to the address of the steamer agent. She had opened it, but not read it through, so infatuated was she with Brentham just then.... The next morning Lucy breakfasted in the Ladies' Saloon, pleading sea-sickness. Later on, she went to the upper-deck, but armed herself with the Swahili Grammar, a defence against a Brentham who purposely stayed away, talking with the Captain, and none against Mrs. Bazzard, who pestered her with inquiries as to her "headache," expressing the quotation marks in her tone.

Relations however became more normal all round the day after that. In two more days they had anchored off Lamu. Lucy saw two low islands, with hazy forest country on the distant mainland. Lamu island had low sandhills projecting into the sea, and on one of them was an obelisk or pillar which Captain Brentham said was an important historical monument erected by the Portuguese nearly four hundred years before. The two women were eager to land and see East Africa for the first time. They went ashore with him in the Vice-Consul's boat; for there was a Vice-Consul here who had been expecting Brentham's visit and was delighted to find two English ladies invading his solitude. They saw, when they landed, masses of vague masonry, the remains of Portuguese or Arab forts, and a litter of human skulls and bones on the beach at which they both shrieked in simulated horror. These might have been the results of the last Somali raid, or of slaves who had died on the shore unshipped, owing to the vigilance of British cruisers, or even have dated back to the expulsion of the Portuguese by the Arabs two hundred years before. The town of Lamu was a two miles' walk along the sandy shore from the point, where they had landed, but the sight of the extraordinary coloured, blue, red, and green crabs that scuttled and yet threatened with uplifted claws, and of the natives who accompanied them in a laughing rabble, some clothed to the heels, others practically naked, relieved the tedium of the journey. The smells from the precincts and the heart of Lamu town were so awful as to be interesting. The strongest—from rancid shark's liver oil—was said to be quite wholesome, but that from the sewage and the refuse on the shore-mud caused them to hold handkerchiefs to noses. However, the town was very picturesque with its Arab and Persian houses of white stone, its Saracenic doorways, in the angles of which Persian pottery was embedded, and its heavy doors of carved wood. The Consulate stood a little beyond the town, in a walled garden of palms, fig trees, and trees of gorgeous scarlet blossoms. Here they had a cup of tea, and the Consular boat, which had been following them along the shore, took them back to the Jeddah, thankful in the blazing sunshine for their pith helmets and white umbrellas.

This excursion somehow, with its introduction to the realities and romance of tropical Africa, braced up Lucy for the next day but one, when in the very early morning the Jeddah anchored in the roadstead of Unguja. She was dressed by eight o'clock and sat awaiting in the stuffy Ladies' Saloon the arrival of John, or whoever was coming to meet her. Sat with trembling, perspiring hands in open-work cotton gloves, wishing the suspense over. There were sounds of loud voices on deck.... Mrs. Bazzard, exploding in connubial raptures over her husband; Bazzard, in between her embraces, striving to assume a partly respectful, partly comrade-like attitude with Captain Brentham, to combine a recognition that he was greeting his official superior for the moment with the assured standing of one who had had longer experience of official cares. She heard him saying: "Your boat is waiting for you, Sir. I will arrange to send a lighter for your baggage as soon as it is up out of the hold...."

Then blundering steps down some stairway and along the passage, and John stood before her, sun-helmet in hand, eyes blazing with hungry love, saying, stammering rather—"My Lucy! C—Come at last! Oh, how I've looked forward.... How..." But he crushed her to him in a rough embrace, unmindful of her delicate cotton dress and of the fact that his red face was covered with perspiration.... But there was something so appealing and yet so masterful in his love, and also something so reminiscent of the park seat at Englefield and that Sunday walk, that Lucy in yielding to his embrace said within herself, "How could I have thought of throwing him over?"

Together they went on shore. Brentham had not even stayed to say good-bye. Somebody saw after her luggage. She had so lost interest in it that she did not care if anything was missing.... Then John said: "I hope you've brought out the Harmonium that your uncle gave us," and she replied a little listlessly: "Oh yes! it was such a bother getting it across London, but I think it's on board."

"I am taking you," said John, inconsequently, in the boat, devouring her with his eyes all the time, "to stay with Mrs. Ewart Stott until we're married."

CHAPTER VII

UNGUJA—AND UP-COUNTRY

Every two or three years in those days you met either Mr. or Mrs. Ewart Stott at Unguja, usually at the ramshackle residence and place of business of Mr. Callaway, the Commercial Agent of the East African Mission. And when Mrs. Ewart Stott was there she took command, so that you instinctively greeted her as hostess. Mr. Callaway was quite willing it should be so, because she accomplished wonders in setting his untidy house in order; she gingered up his servants and routed the cockroaches, chased away some of the smells, and generally cured a feverish attack by quinine, chicken broth, and motherly care.

The Ewart Stotts as missionaries were independent because Mrs. Ewart Stott had begun as Church of England and Mr. E. S. as a Presbyterian, yet they could not quite agree with the discipline or the ideals of the different churches or sects and preferred evangelizing East Africa on a plan of their own. They had private means—at any rate at first; until they had run through them in founding mission stations, whereafter they were supported by anonymous benefactors. And as their tenets and modus operandi were nearest to those of the Methodists' East African Mission, they worked alongside them and made use of their Agent and depôt at Unguja.

Both were of Ulster parentage, with some admixture of a more genial stock; yet both were born in Australia. She as a Miss Ewart and he originally a Mr. Stott. At the same moment, so to speak, they had "found Christ," and it really seemed a logical sequel that Providence should bring them together at some Australian religious merry-making. They instantly fell in love, quickly married and fused their surnames. She was twenty, he twenty-two. She was distinctly personable and he quite good-looking. They had probably been born, both of them, perfectly good, unconsciously sinless, so that the getting of religion did not make them better or more likeable but only afflicted them with a mania for quoting hymns, psalms, and Bible texts à tout propos and seeing the Lord's hand, His Divine interference in every incident, every accident, any change for better or worse which affected themselves. They were constantly in receipt of Divine intimations generally after communing in prayer. And these they obeyed as promptly as possible.

For instance, only six months after they were married, and when their eldest child was already on its way, they were inspired to evangelize East Africa. Forthwith they sold up their home in South Australia, took ship with an immense outfit to Aden, and thence transferred themselves to Unguja and the Zangian mainland.

They wished to preach nothing but "Christ crucified" and the new life which black men and white men should lead after "accepting of" this sacrifice, this atonement for the presumed sinfulness of poor, martyred humanity. But despite this broad, if illogical, basis of their propaganda, they were afflicted with a bitter dislike of Science, which they concentrated on the theory of Evolution, or on any Biblical criticism which would weaken their faith in a very manlike God who apparently turned his back on his own universe to concern himself solely and very fussily, very ineffectively with one of its grains of dust, a tiny planet circling round a fifth-rate star among a billion other stars. For the rest, they had infinite courage, infinite love and charity, immense powers of work, but no sense of humour.

Consul after Consul warned them as to the risks they ran in plunging—Father, Mother and Babies—into unexplored Africa of the worst reputation. They smilingly ignored warnings and protests, ... wild beasts, wild peoples, wild climates, wild scenery—all seemed against them. Mr. Stott was once tossed by a rhinoceros into a river; but the water broke his fall and he emerged before the crocodiles woke up, and staggered back to camp, only slightly wounded. Shortly afterwards, hundreds of Masai warriors charged their camp, and their coast porters fled into the bush. The naked, fat-and-ochre-anointed warriors with their six-foot spears found Mrs. Stott sipping tea at her camp-table and sewing clothes for her baby, while Mr. Stott with bound-up wounds was lying on a camp-bed. Mrs. Stott, convinced that the Almighty was somewhere in the offing, smiled on the warriors and shared her plum cake among the foremost. They returned the smile, enlarging it into a roar of laughter. After executing a war dance they withdrew, and later on sent her a large gourd of fresh milk.

After some floundering, owing to the uncertain indications of the Divine will and purpose, they had settled on the old explorer and missionary route to the Victoria Nyanza, due west of Unguja in what was called the Ugogo country, partly because the Wa-gogo were thought to be quite recalcitrant to Christianity.

Lucy Josling, who had had much of this summary poured into her half-attentive hearing by her betrothed, as they walked through the narrow lanes between the tall stone houses of Unguja—she much more interested by the handsomely dressed Arabs, the veiled women, the wandering bulls and their owners, salaaming Indians—entered at last the Arab house rented by Mr. Callaway for his Agency.

Passing through a dark entry and corridor they emerged into a courtyard with an immense fig-tree in the middle. Round this square space there was a broad and shady verandah. Mrs. Stott rose from her sewing-machine and greeted Lucy with that simple cordiality which made her so many friends among the converted and the unconvertible.

"You must feel quite dazed being on shore after so many weeks at sea. You'd like to go to your room, I know, and perhaps be quiet there till our midday meal. We've done the best we could for you—at short notice—for your young man and I have only been at Unguja since Saturday. We travelled down together, he to get married, of course, and I to see to a large consignment of goods that has arrived for us here. I also expected a recruit for our Mission, but he does not seem to have caught this steamer."

Mrs. Stott then led the way to Lucy's room, and John departed to the Customs House to clear her baggage and get it stored: a matter which would occupy him for the rest of the daylight.

Although the upstairs bedroom that Lucy was to occupy smelt, like all the rest of the premises, of copra, aniseed, cockroaches, dried fish, shark's liver oil, curry-powder, rats' and bats' manure, in one badly mingled essence, with this and that ingredient sometimes prevailing, it seemed clean and airy, and there was some grace and refinement in the clean bed linen, white mosquito curtain, and bunch of Frangipani flowers in a Persian pottery vase. Instinctively she turned to Mrs. Stott with tears in her eyes. "This is your doing, I am sure! Somehow you remind me of mother."

"Well," said Mrs. Stott, "that's just what I should like to do; though I suppose I'm not older than an elder sister; only this African life ages one very quickly."

The heat during the rest of the day seemed to Lucy in this low-ceilinged room, in a low-lying part of the town, almost unbearable. She spent much of the afternoon lying on her bed in déshabille, a constant prey to home-sickness. She tried at one time playing with the little Stott child on the landing, but it was much more interested in the large red-black cockroaches which it caught with surprising swiftness of aim and without any of Lucy's shuddering horror. It would hold these insects with their little flat heads, twirling antennae, scratchy legs and fat yellow bellies quite firmly (yet not unkindly) in its plump fingers for grave consideration; then let them go to run over the planks. Mrs. Stott was away to the Customs House; a pale, perspiring, half-clothed Indian clerk was passing in and out of the house on Mr. Callaway's business, too fever-stricken and listless to care one grain of damaged rice about this young woman fresh from England. The fleas on the ground-floor verandah and business premises were too numerous for any novice to endure. Lucy's only resource was to return to her room, rid herself of these persecutors by undressing and await with patience the after-sunset cooler air. A visit from Mrs. Stott at half-past six notified that the evening meal would be served at seven and that John Baines had seen to all Lucy's luggage. Such as she wanted for the next few days was ready to be brought up for her use; the rest would be put in the go-down to await the departure in the "dau"[#] that would convey them to the mainland. Lucy therefore had to rise and dress, come down and force herself to show some affection for her betrothed and some interest in her mass of luggage—all the while preoccupied by the mosquitoes which bit her ankles, the fleas that attacked her with renewed voracity, the cockroaches which scurried about her feet, and the smells which made her sick. She enjoyed the chicken broth flavoured with hot red chillies and the coco-nut milk served round for drinks at the evening meal; and picked a bit of fish, fresh and flaky. Also she appreciated the dessert of pineapples, mangoes and oranges. Instead of coffee afterwards they had tea, with goat's milk. This was thirst-quenching and helped to diminish the racking headache which had been steadily reaching a climax during the evening.

[#] Decked Arab sailing-ship.

At nine o'clock all vestiges of a meal were cleared away and John, Mr. Callaway and even Mrs. Stott assumed an air of portentousness as about twenty-four able-bodied Negroes filed in and the two or three Negro servants of the Stotts set out a number of hymn-books and a large Bible. John then read prayers and a portion of scripture in Swahili while the Christianized negroes dutifully knelt, sat, and stood to sing hymns in unison with their white employers. The hymns being likewise in the Swahili language, the whole ceremony—occupying about half an hour—was without meaning to Lucy, who was driven nearly frantic by the fleas and mosquitoes. At last, bed-time came; John unwillingly took his leave, promising to call round for Lucy at eight in the morning to take her on a round of visits. Lucy, in very low spirits, retired to her bedroom, but Mrs. Stott followed. Without being asked for any explanation she was allowed to cry for five minutes on Mrs. Stott's neck. Then the latter undressed her, rubbed the bites with some cooling lotion, administered five grains of quinine and put her to bed.

What with the squeaking and chattering of the fruit-bats eating the figs outside, the rats running over the floor of her room, and a tornado of thunder, lightning and drumming rain, the night was not a pleasant one. But when Mrs. Stott woke her with a cup of tea and she ventured outside her mosquito-curtain, things took a brighter aspect. She had from her window a glimpse of the sparkling blue bay in the level rays of the just-risen sun, a fringe of coco-nut palms, their fronds still wet with the rain, a tangle of brown shipping—Arab "daus" and Indian "baghalas"—hauled up for repairs; and the atmosphere was cleared and fresh after the tornado. She was almost cheerful by the time she had dressed and come downstairs. Mrs. Stott had advised her to put on high boots to save her ankles from mosquito bites, and to dust herself freely with Insecticide powder to discourage the fleas. As a special indulgence to a tired visitor she was let off morning prayers and only heard the nasal singing whilst completing her toilet in her room after a pleasant little breakfast in bed, over a book. John duly came with a carriage borrowed from the Sultan's stables, and Lucy—almost gay once more—set out with him to be introduced to Archdeacon Gravening—who in the absence of the Bishop (on tour) was to perform the religious marriage ceremony at the Cathedral.

Gravening was an austere-looking man but of kindly disposition. He made her feel at home, and as he knew the Reading district in old Oxford days of walking tours and reading-parties he could talk about that home-country which, as it receded in time from her contemplation, seemed a Paradise she had recklessly quitted.

The ladies of the Anglican Mission—a celibate Mission when at work in Africa, its members being supposed to leave its ranks when they married—received Lucy with some detachment of manner. They were good creatures, indeed, but they came from a social stratum one or even two degrees higher than hers, and inwardly they were less tolerant of Nonconformists, than were their men fellow-workers. Lucy, they had ascertained, was a "Church person," but she was about to marry into a Methodist Mission. However, her rather plaintive prettiness and the home-sick melancholy in her eyes enlisted their womanly sympathy. Two of them offered themselves in a bride's maid capacity, and the Sisterhood in general proposed that the honeymoon should be spent at their little country retreat of Mbweni. But John explained as to this, that he could not prolong his absence from the up-country station more than was just necessary for the prescribed residence at Unguja; and that their honeymoon must be spent on the return journey. He dilated, for Lucy's encouragement, on the picnic charms of the "Safari."[#]

[#] The accepted meaning of "Safari" is a journey with tents, and porters to carry the baggage.

* * * * *

During the ten days of her pre-nuptial stay at Unguja Lucy had no talk with Brentham. Presumably he was too busy over political and Consular matters. Once indeed when walking with John through the winding streets of the African-Oriental city she had seen him out riding with Bazzard, the Vice-Consul. John had accomplished all the preliminary formalities, and on her marriage morning—early on account of the heat—Lucy went in one of the Sultan's carriages, attended by Mrs. Stott and the two ladies of the Anglican Mission, to the British Agency. John met them at the entrance; they walked slowly up the stone steps to the office for the transaction of Consular business. Bazzard, with Mrs. Bazzard—the latter assuming the airs of a Vice-reine—met them there and ranged the wedding party in order. Brentham then entered, bowed to them both, but avoided meeting Lucy's eyes. He put to them in a level business-like voice the necessary interrogatory and declared them duly married. The party then passed into one of the Agency's drawing-rooms. Champagne—and lemonade for the teetotalers—was served, together with mixed biscuits and sweetmeats. The Acting Consul-General proposed the health of the Bride, and for the first time looked Lucy full in the face. He next withdrew on to a verandah and talked for some time with the bridegroom about his mission station and the journey thither and spoke earnestly on the subject of Lucy and her welfare, instancing his interest in her home-country as well as his position as "their" Consul to explain his anxiety as to her future. Then returning to the general company he handed Lucy a small case which he said contained a trifling wedding present and wished her all possible happiness, promising "some day or other" to visit her in her new home. He grasped her hand with a brief pressure and—pleading urgent business as an excuse for not following the party to the Cathedral—withdrew to his office. Mrs. Bazzard introduced her husband and bestowed a condescending patronage on Lucy and on the Mission ladies, who, never having met her before, found themselves almost audibly wondering who on earth she was, and where—with that slightly cockney accent—she had come from.

The religious ceremony at the Cathedral was one of considerable ecclesiastical pomp, secretly enjoyed by John Baines; who, however, thought on what mother would say when he told her he had nearly been married by a Bishop and quite so by an Archdeacon, and still more how she would have appreciated the black acolytes in their scarlet cassocks and white dalmatics, the incense-smell in the building, and the vestments of the clergy.

After they left the Cathedral they repaired to the Arab house of stone and rich Persian and Kurdish carpets in which Archdeacon Gravening lived. Here an unpretentious luncheon was given as a wedding breakfast. Gravening hardly ever spoke about religion, which was why Mrs. Stott despaired of his being saved, though she admitted he was compact of quiet kindness. His one enthusiasm was language study. He was deeply versed in the Bantu languages and translated for the Anglican Mission most of the works they required to use in their schools and churches. He had corresponded with John Baines, and the latter had written down for him samples of vocabularies of the different languages heard in his district.

Some insight into the conflict going on in the dazed mind of Lucy—who throughout these ceremonies looked as though she were a wound-up automaton—inspired Mrs. Stott to suggest to John that as they were due to start in the Arab dau early the next morning in order to reach the mainland port of Lingani before nightfall, Lucy should spend the rest of her marriage-day and night with Mrs. Stott, and their honeymoon should not commence till they reached the Mission house at Lingani. This they would have to themselves for three or four days whilst their caravan for up-country was being got ready. Accordingly poor John, when the wedding luncheon was over and the guests had dispersed, surrendered Lucy to Mrs. Stott and spent the rest of the day rather disconsolately making his preparations for departure. Lucy got through much of that hot afternoon in her nightdress—for coolness—inside the mosquito curtains of her bed, weeping at times hysterically; tortured with homesickness one minute and at another seized with a mad longing to call on Brentham at the Agency and see him once more. Sometimes she felt an actual dislike for John; at others a great pity for him, yet a shuddering at the idea of his embraces, of any physical contact with him.

Mrs. Stott prayed for her, apart in her own bedroom but the Divine direction of her thoughts seemed to take the line that the least said was the soonest mended, and that the young couple had better be left to their own society at Lingani to come to an understanding.

The next morning, however, it was a composed though rather silent Lucy who was punctually ready to go away with John when he came to fetch her to embark in the dau. Mrs. Stott had risen early to make coffee for them and give them a send-off of embraces, and provisions for a nice cold lunch on board. "My dear," she said to Lucy, "you'll have a delightful water picnic. There's going to be just wind enough to blow you across. I wish I were coming with you, but I shan't get away for another fortnight. However, we shall meet in the interior, I dare say, before very long."

John had made for his bride a little nest among cushions and clean brightly-coloured grass mats in the deck cabin of the dau (a mere palm-thatch shelter), and for an hour or so a smile came back to Lucy's sad face as she appreciated the pleasant freshness of the morning breeze, the picturesqueness of the boat and the vivid blue or emerald green of the water according as it was deep or shallow. She had quite an appetite for the early lunch which Mrs. Stott had thoughtfully provided. But presently an anxious look came into her face and a restlessness of manner. "John! Can I be coming out in a rash? I feel an intolerable itching round my neck and wrists—Oh! Horror! What is this?" And she pointed to some flat, dark brown disks which were scurrying out of sight up her arms and into the folds of her linen bodice....

"Bugs!" said John, shocked and apologetic, "they are sometimes found in these Arab vessels.... I am so sorry.... Yet there was no other way of crossing to Lingani...."

Lucy went white with disgust. From the palm mid-ribs which arched over the cabin roof of thatch there came dropping hundreds of bugs on to the unhappy young woman, ignoring or avoiding him who would have willingly offered himself as sacrifice and substitute. Lucy in her dismay, knowing she could not undress before the boatmen and porters and yet not knowing how she could endure hours of this maddening irritation from half-venomous bites, broke out into weeping. "What was to be done?" questioned the poor distraught bridegroom. The gentle breeze had died away ... an intense heat prevailed; the dau scarcely moved across a glassy sea ... the Nakhodha or bwahih captain of the dau was standing up over the rudder and signalling with his sinewy hand, crying out in a melodious cadence: "Njôô! Kusi-Kusi, Njôô, Kusi-Kusi!"[#] afraid his vessel might be becalmed and prevented from reaching port in daylight. The boat-men and porters were looking at one another with round eyes as they heard the Bibi[#] crying convulsively in the deck cabin. John in his desperation had a bright idea. He knew that the ordinary, vaunted insecticides had no terror for, no deterrent effect on, either bugs or their unrelated mimics, the poisonous ticks of Central Africa; but that both alike fled before the smell of petroleum. There were tins of that mineral oil on board provision for his lamps up-country. Opening one of these cautiously, for petroleum was very precious, he filled an enamelled iron cup and then stoppered the tin. From his medicine chest he obtained cotton-wool. Then with wads of this, and with his handkerchief, he dabbed the swollen wrists and the weals on Lucy's neck and advised her to thrust the saturated wads and linen inside her clothing.

[#] "Come south wind, come!"

[#] Lady.

The strong odour of the oil in a few minutes caused the blood-sucking insects to withdraw and return to their lairs in the thatch and boards. The south wind came at last in puffs, which lessened the heat, but there set in a swell which caused the dau to roll. This movement disturbed the bilge water below the decks, and from this was disengaged a sulphuretted-hydrogen stench almost bad enough to drive the bugs from Lucy's mind. But the wind grew steadier and at last blew the rotten dau to the landing-place at the mouth of a river where they were to disembark.

Lingani was a smaller edition of Unguja Town: flat-roofed Arab houses of white-washed coral rock, thatched wattle-and-daub huts, groves of coco-nut palms, a few Casuarina trees and Frangipani shrubs, pariah dogs, wandering zebu cattle, and dwarf goats. The Mission Rest-house was a substantial stone building in the Arab style of East Africa. It was maintained jointly by four missionary societies for use by their members in transit. There was a Swahili couple in charge of it, husband and wife. The bed linen, table-cloths, napkins and cutlery were kept in cupboards fastened with cunning padlocks, which only opened when you set the letters of the lock to correspond with the word "open." This to thwart inquisitive natives, with a smattering of education, was written up for reminder in Greek letters. With this ruse John was fully acquainted, so that he lost no time in opening the cupboards and releasing the wherewithal for making up two beds and laying the table for an evening meal. The black housekeepers, proffering greetings and assurance of welcome while they worked, busied themselves in heating water for baths, in making the beds, laying the table, and killing chickens for soup and roast. John's activities were multifold. He had to see the dau unloaded and its precious cargo safely stowed away in the store below the Rest-house.

Lucy at first sat limply in the divan or main reception-room, sore all over, eyes blistered by the glare of sun on water, and with a headache which for crippling agony exceeded anything she had known. But she conquered her sullenness and made feeble attempts to help. John, however, seeing that bath and bath water were ready and that sheets, pillows and blankets had been placed on her Arab bedstead (a wooden frame with a lattice-work across it of ox-hide strips), advised her to undress, soothe her bites with spongings and ointment, and rest between the sheets. Her back ached unbearably; her head seemed half-severed at the neck, and she was seized with violent shiverings. The mosquitoes had given her a sharp attack of malarial fever.