Within forty-eight hours, some of the questions I had asked myself on Mrs. Lavater's verandah were answered.
I had finished breakfast and with the help of my fishing fundi was putting a patch on the elder of my canoes, when I heard a voice. Even if the Sinclairs had not been on my mind, I would have recognised Norah's deep tones. I rose from my work, feeling after some passable excuse for having failed to visit their camp half a dozen miles away. My true reason had been an instinctive shrinking from other people's troubles.
But my first sight of Norah told me that forms might be forgotten. Her eyes, that the lamp of romance had once lit, now were dark with pain. Was it possible, you wondered, that they had ever laughed? Had even cried? Without suffering the decay of age, she had lost her youth. The wing of death, you guessed, was between her and the sun. Infinitely remote from her seemed the life that the rains set pulsing through each leaf, each blade of grass. She noticed nothing of the beauty that surrounded her, the shouts of green that the trees set up, the blue eye of the lake looking along the glade my carriers had cut. Her eyes were turned inwards on some private hell whose key lay in her bosom.
Her first words were banal enough. Some apology for intrusion that I waved away. My reply, inevitably trivial, sounded flippant in the face of her manifest grief and I subsided into an awkward silence.
Archie was ill, went on the low voice, and their quinine was finished: she had wondered...
By the time I returned with the bottle, I fancy she had decided to consult me.
The words came jostling each other—Archie was delirious; the doctor was away from Abercorn; the Kasama man would take a week to get here; and anyhow ... She did not complete the sentence. He had never been so bad as this; but the strain of the last week—was it blackwater, did I think? And ... and they had come from the sleeping sickness belt, could it be...?
She refused food, and when I had given my medicine chest to my fundi to carry, we set out along a native path in the direction she had come. Her obvious gratitude to me for coming was surprising. So pretty a woman is rarely grateful. Men are too ready to help without.
To cut short her thanks, I inquired about Archie's symptoms and was able to assure her that the fever was not blackwater. And certainly not a forerunner of sleeping sickness. I was prepared to notice that my words brought little relief. A husband delirious in the bush might send a woman wild with anxiety, might drive her to the brink of panic, it would not explain the hopelessness in Norah's eyes and mouth.
I felt a wave of pity. She was too slim a little thing for this burden, whatever it was. In violence to my principles I asked if I could help.
'I don't think anything can help now,' she whispered, and so low that I had to read her lips. 'Archie has killed ... some one.'"
"I was not particularly shocked," said Ross. "All this feeling against straightforward assassination is quite modern.
You must discriminate, of course, between honest killing and surreptitious murder. There has always been a prejudice against that. The Borgias, for instance, have found critics in every century, and until recent, sentimental years we burnt wives who poisoned their husbands. But an honourable assassination, under guises which varied from the ceremonial of mediæval tournament to the violence of renaissance vendetta, and on to the more polished formulæ of the duel, has lasted almost to our day.
With the duel passed the power to punish certain private injuries for which the law furnishes no redress. And in fault of any regular outlet, the man with strong feelings and a literal mind has to fall back on murder."
Ross spoke with vehemence. Did his earnestness, I wondered, throw any light on his own mysterious past? As if he read some shadow of the suspicion on my face, he came back abruptly to the Sinclairs.
"That was how I came to hear Norah's story," he said. "Not in the detail I have given you, nor in the order. But by the time we were half-way to Archie's camp she had given me a clear enough outline.
I suggested that she had exaggerated the danger. We would have to nurse Archie ourselves and keep outsiders away till he was clear of delirium. And the natives, even if they suspected anything, would keep quiet. They do not like Bomas, I said and enlarged on the discretion of Africa.
She signed to me to stop.
'It's past that now,' she said. 'I haven't told you the end.'
Archie's visit to Abercorn had been paid with the object of reporting Dick's death to the Boma. So much information he had given Norah before he started up the hill, repeating the story he had told the natives on the night of the crime.
Her heart had ached to help him. If only he would let her be of some use, go with him and perjure herself for his sake. Fiercely she longed to save him, to avert the ultimate consequences of the havoc she had loosed. But with conventional words of leave-taking, Archie, followed by his gun-bearer, went up the road.
She took what comfort she could, remembering the efficiency he had shown throughout. If, thought she, her husband could cope with Lake Tanganyika, she need not doubt his dealings with the Boma. In which conclusion, she allowed him a woman's strength. When, at the beginning of this story, I tried to show you Norah, I spoke of the small cat house. Now cats, and women, do not herd. The hand they play is a lone one whether in Malay or Mayfair, and the war they wage with law, rules of conduct, codes of honour, is age old.
But men, and the animals that chew the cud, have the herd instinct. They see the value of solidarity and are glad to submit their wills to the herd. Until suffragettes were vouchsafed us, no Englishman had ever guessed that it was unnecessary to obey the law. Occasionally life, or the workings of his own heart, drive a man or a bull or a ram away from the herd. Once isolated he acts with more enterprise and vigour than any of the feline family, however used to solitude.
Sighted again, the herd reclaims him.
So Archie came back that night from Abercorn a changed man. The hard outline which had seemed to bound his thinking, like the lead round a figure in stained glass, had melted. He was weaker, more human: something of his old indecision had returned. Uneasily he paced the camp.
In silence Norah wondered. The senior officials, he had said, were away from the Boma and he had returned, his story untold. But relief or suspense, she knew, could not explain this change. Under her eyelashes all evening she watched him and sought in vain for some word that might allay his trouble. Throughout the night she heard the camp bed creak under his restless body.
Was it then that he was first aware of his fellowship with the men whose names shame alone preserves when quicklime has consumed their bodies? Did Dick's eyes again look pitifully into the muzzle of his .420? Did he strive once more to straighten the stiffened limbs and push the contorted body sideways into the wet grave? There can, I suppose, be little sleep on the first night you see yourself a murderer.
In the morning a glance told Norah that the fever, which had fantastically vanished after the rains had drenched him to the skin, was back. He sat huddled over the camp fire, only moving to call for logs. She urged him to return to bed, but he shook his head. He refused luncheon, and sat with pen and paper before him. Then he began to write. His hand shook with fever, but he wrote fairly quickly. He covered three sheets and addressed an envelope for each.
Still crouching over the fire, 'Norah,' he said, 'I think I ought to give it you to read.'
His tone told her she must brace herself for a shock.
'They won't bother you, I hope,' he went on, 'I've tried to make it all right for you.' He kept his eyes turned away from her, but his voice was more kind. His hand, which trembled a little, played with the letters on the table.
'This,' he continued, 'is to the solicitors. About the farm, the sale of the stock and so on. This,' he touched the second letter, 'is my will. Of course everything goes to you.'
He paused and, drawing the last document from its envelope, he handed it to Norah.
She forced herself to read, though her mind was too busy with his words to take in the symbols before her eyes. Suddenly, as if a blade of ice had been driven between her shoulders, she understood.
The letter was addressed to the District Commissioner, Abercorn, and began and ended officially enough, 'Sir, I have the honour to report ... I have the honour to be, Sir, your obedient servant, A. L. Sinclair.'
Between the formulæ, ran a story designed to shield her and convict himself. He wrote that Ward, at his request, had been escorting Norah to Kigoma. They were all to meet there. The Mimi broke down, but chance united them in the bay of the deserted mission. On the evening of the 25th he had gone out shooting with Ward. Their tempers had suffered from the heat. He had complained of Ward's over-liberal expenditure of ammunition, which was then short. A quarrel had ensued and he had shot Ward through the heart. With legal forethought he gave the exact position of the grave that the body might be identified and death established.
She read the bald story word by word to its end.
'For God's sake, Archie,' she asked him, although she knew his answer only too well, 'what are you going to do with this?'
He said that Matao must take it to Abercorn. His fever would not let him walk so far. He muttered something about feeling clean again.
'Don't, Archie, don't! Give it back to me!' Her voice made the natives break off their occupations and stare at the eccentricities of the white man. He looked in her face as if her eyes could show him her soul. Then he turned away shaking his head.
'But you've got fever,' she urged, 'you don't know what you're doing. Write what you were going to say yesterday.'
For answer he called Matao.
'One can pay too much, just to live,' he murmured.
'At least wait. Think it over in cold blood. Wait a day, one day.'
Lavater, he replied, came back that afternoon. The death would have to be reported at once, one version or the other. He now knew which version it must be.
A fog seemed to spring up from below, over her eyes. She would have thrown herself at his feet if Matao had not stood gravely waiting.
'For my sake then, Archie!'
'How should I know,' he said looking away from her. 'How should I know that this time too...?'
He felt the harshness of his words and let them die away.
'Matao,' he said quickly, his voice rough in his throat. 'Take this to Bwana Lavater at his office. The sun will have set before you arrive. Sleep at M'pala and return in the morning.'
Norah saw Matao salute and swing round. She did not see him disappear into the trees, for she had fainted.”