The Sign of the Spider Part 22

Having gained his point Laurence returned within the village, and, calling Mgara, suggested that some of the people should carry forth food to their unwelcome visitors.

"I fear it may leave scarcity in your midst," he added; "but well-fed men are in better mood than hungry ones, Mgara, and are you not spared the slave-yoke and the spear?"

The head man, with many deferential expressions of grat.i.tude, agreed, and soon a file of women and boys were told off, bringing goats and millet and rice for the slave-hunters. As they pa.s.sed tremblingly among the ranks of the w.a.n.goni the latter handled their great spears meaningly, and with much the same expression of countenance as a cat might wear when contemplating an inaccessible bird cage.

"Ho, dog!" cried Mashumbwe, as a youth pa.s.sed before him without making obeisance. "Do you dare stand before me--before me! thou sp.a.w.n of these man-eating jackals? Lo! lie prostrate forever." And with the words he half threw, half thrust his great spear into the unfortunate lad's body.

The blood spurted forth in a great jet, and, staggering, the boy fell.

"_Au!_ And am I to be defiled with the blood of such as this," growled the chief, upon whom several red drops had squirted. "Let that carrion be removed."

Several of the w.a.n.goni sprang forward, and, as the quivering body was dragged away, these savages gave vent to their pent-up ferocity by stabbing it again and again. Having tasted blood they rolled their eyes around in search of further victims. But the remaining Wajalu had withdrawn in terror: and well for all concerned that it was so, otherwise the w.a.n.goni, inspired by the example of their chief, would certainly have commenced a ma.s.sacre which even the prestige and authority of Hazon and Laurence combined would have been powerless to quell. But there was no one outside to begin upon, and, though a truculent, unruly crowd, their interests in the long run lay in submitting to the authority of the white chiefs.

So the Wajalu rejoiced much, if tremblingly, as the last of the dreaded host disappeared. For good or for ill their village was spared--spared to continue its most revolting forms of savagery and cannibalism and parricide--spared for good or for ill in that it had entertained an angel unawares in the person of that hard, pitiless, determined slave-hunter, Laurence Stanninghame.

CHAPTER XVII.

DISSENSIONS.

"Well, I'm uncommonly glad I was out of that affair yesterday, Stanninghame. But it isn't like you, letting those poor devils off, eh?"

Thus Holmes, as the two were leisurely pursuing their way, somewhat on the rear flank of the slave-party.

"I don't know. You see they let me off, and I didn't want to be outdone in civility even by a lot of scurvy dogs who eat each other. There was no feeling about the matter."

Before the other could pursue the subject, the sound of faint groans, and pleading in an unknown tongue, was heard just ahead. With it, too, the sound of blows.

"Some devilish work going forward again," muttered Holmes, with savage disgust.

"You can't make omelettes without breaking eggs," was the indifferent reply. And then they came upon a not entirely unfamiliar scene.

On the ground crouched three human figures, wretched-looking and emaciated to the last degree. Disease and exhaustion had overpowered them, and they were begging to be left to die. Standing over them in threatening att.i.tude was Lutali, with some half-dozen of the slavers.

"They are too far gone to feel the whip," Lutali was saying. "Clearly they are of no further use. You, Murad, shorten me the shadow of yonder dog. We shall see."

The man named, a savage-looking ruffian, stepped forward, grinning with delight. Just as he was swinging up his scimitar, Holmes burst forth:

"Hold on, Lutali! Give the poor devil another show."

Half turning his head at this interruption, there was that look upon the hawk-like features of the Arab which at times so strangely resembled Hazon. His keen eyes darted haughty reproof at Holmes, for he was a sort of supercargo of the slave department, and relished not this interference. Then, turning back, he once more gave the signal. Down flashed the great blade. There was a dull swoos.h.i.+ng thud, and the headless trunk was deluging the earth.

The effect, however, upon the other two exhausted wretches was magical.

With a despairing effort they raised themselves up and staggered on, to the accompaniment of not a few blows by way of recognition of their malingering. Lutali, who had uttered no word, and whose impa.s.sive countenance had not moved a feature, stalked gravely on.

"Why could we not have prevented this?" burst forth Holmes, whom a sort of morbid fascination seemed to root to the spot.

"Because it would have been the very acme of insanity to attempt such a thing. Lutali, in common with the rest, is in far too ugly a mood, after yesterday, to be fooled with needlessly. Besides, all that sentiment is simply thrown away. These people, remember, are atrocious brutes, who eat their own fathers and mothers. It is positively a work of charity to enslave them. Once they are off the march they are fairly well treated,--better, in fact, than they treat each other--and, of course, no more cannibalism."

"That may be. But I wish to Heaven I could blot out these two years as though they had never been. The recollection of the horrors one has been through will haunt me for life. I feel like blowing my brains out in sheer disgust. Why did I ever come?"

It was not the first time Holmes had burst forth in this fas.h.i.+on, as we have shown. Laurence looked keenly at him.

"There is a worse thing to haunt one's life than recollection," he said, "and that is antic.i.p.ation."

"Of what?" asked Holmes shortly.

The other touched the muzzle of his rifle, then his own forehead.

"It's that--or this," he said, pointing to the ghastly trunk and the severed head which lay before them. "You don't suppose I should have adopted this sweet trade from choice, I suppose? No. Hard necessity, my dear chap. If anybody has to go under--and somebody always has to--I prefer that it shall not be me."

Holmes made no reply for a while, so they left the spot, walking in silence. Then Laurence went on:

"Now we are on the subject, I don't know that you would have come out any the better had we left you behind at Johannesburg. For you were going the wrong way. You were a precious sight too fond of hanging around bars, and that sort of thing grows. In fact, you were more than once a trifle--shall we say 'muddled.' Not to put too fine a point upon it, you were on your way to the deuce. I know it, for I've seen it so often before, and you know it too."

"I believe you're right there," a.s.sented Holmes.

"Well, then, we owe our first duty to ourselves; wherefore, my soft-hearted young friend, it is better to spend a year or two raking in a fortune and ameliorating the lot of humanity, than to die in a state of soak, and a disused shaft, on or around the Rand, even as did Pulman the day before we left."

"I don't believe that same fortune will do us any good," urged Holmes gloomily. "There is the curse of blood upon it."

"The curse of my grandmother," laughed the other.

There was no affectation about Laurence Stanninghame's indifference. It was perfectly genuine. Strong-nerved const.i.tutionally, callous, hard-hearted through stress of circ.u.mstances, such sights as that just witnessed told not one atom upon him. In the sufferings of the miserable wretches he saw only a lurid alternative--his own. In them, toiling along, wearily, dejectedly, beneath the chain or yoke, he saw himself, toiling, grinding, at some sordid and utterly repellent form of labour, for a miserable pittance; no ray of light, no redeeming rest or enjoyment to sweeten life until that life should end. In them, cowering, writhing, beneath the driver's brutal lash, he saw himself, ever lashed and stung by the torturing consciousness of what might have been, by the recollection of what had been. Or did they fall exhausted, fainting, to die, or to undergo decapitation to insure that such exhaustion should not open even a feeble possibility of escape, there too, he saw himself sinking, borne down by the sheer blank hopelessness of fate, taking refuge in the Dark Unknown, his end the grave of the suicide. It was himself or them, and he preferred that it should be them. Preyer or preyed upon--such was the iron immutable law of life, from man in his highest development to the minutest of insects; and with this law he was but complying, not in wanton cruelty, but in cold, pa.s.sive ruthlessness.

Further, the sufferings of these people were only transitory. They would be much better off when the journey was ended and they were disposed of--better off indeed than many a free person in civilized and Christian lands. Besides, such races as these, low down as they were in the scale of humanity, suffered but little. It needs imagination, refinement, to accentuate suffering. To anything approaching such attributes, these were utter strangers. They were mere animals. Men dealt in sheep and cattle, in order to live, in horses and other beasts of burden, why not in these, who were even lower than the higher animals?

This theory of their sinister occupation Hazon thoroughly indorsed.

"Depend upon it, Stanninghame," he said, "ours is the right view to take of it--the only view. This is 'a world of plunder and prey,' as Tennyson puts it, and we have got to prey or be preyed upon. You, for instance, seem to have fulfilled the latter role, hitherto, and it seems only right you should have your turn now. To cite the latest instance, all this rotten scrip and market-rigging finished you off, and what was that but rascality?"

"Of course, I've been plundered, swindled, all along the line, ever since I can remember. I'm tired of that d----d respectability, Hazon. It doesn't pay. It never has paid. This, however, does."

The other smiled significantly at the word.

"Respectability--yes," he said. "Look at your type of success, your self-made man, swelling out of his white waistcoat in snug self-complacency, your pattern British merchant, your millionaire financier, what is he but a slave-dealer, a slave-driver, a blood-sucker. What has become of your little all, swamped in those precious Rand companies, Stanninghame? Gone to bloat more unimpeachable white waistcoats; gone to add yet more pillars to the temple of pattern respectability."

"That's so," a.s.sented Laurence, with something between a sneer and a laugh, knocking the ashes out of his pipe. "Yet that same crowd of respectable swindlers would yelp in horror at us and our enterprise.

'Piratical,' they'd call it, eh? A hanging matter!"

"Swindlers--no. Swindler is English for a convicted person. Yet the percentage of the props and pillars of financial success and mercantile respectability who, in the self-candour and secrecy of their sleepless hours, are honestly unable to recall to mind one or more occasions when Portland, or Dartmoor, or Simonstown, or the Kowie loomed more than near, cannot be a vast one; which, for present purposes, may be taken to mean that if you have got to make money you must make it anyhow, or not at all--'anyhow' covering such methods as are involved in the conventional term 'rascality.' If you have got it you can run as straight as you like. We haven't got it--at least not enough of it yet--and so we are making it, and, like the rest of the world, making it anyhow. There's the whole case in a nutsh.e.l.l, Stanninghame."

"Why, of course. But, if only we could bring Holmes round to that pre-eminently sensible standpoint! I never could have believed the fellow would turn out such an a.s.s. I am more than sorry, Hazon, that I should have influenced you to bring him along."

"Oh, Holmes is young, and hardly knows the meaning of the term 'hard experience,' as we know it. Still, in his way, he's useful enough, and first-rate in a fight; and when he comes to bank his share he'll forget to feel over particular as to how he acquired it. That's mere ordinary human nature, and Holmes is far from being an abnormal unit."

"No, but he still affects a conscience. What if he goes back and takes on that blue-eyed girl he was smitten with, and, turning soft, incontinently gives us away?"