With Edged Tools Part 63

Oscard told him, rather incoherently, between the puffs. He did not attempt to make a story of it, but merely related the facts as they had happened to him. It is probable that to him the act was veiled which Jack saw quite distinctly.

"That is the sort of thing," was Meredith's comment when the story was finished, "that takes the conceit out of a fellow. I suppose I have more than my share. I suppose it is good for me to find that I am not so clever as I thought I was--that there are plenty of cleverer fellows about, and that one of them is an old man of seventy-nine. The worst of it is that he was right all along. He saw clearly where you and I were--d.a.m.nably blind."

He rubbed his slim brown hands together, and looked across at his companion with a smile wherein the youthful self-confidence was less discernible than of yore. The smile faded as he looked at Oscard. He was thinking that he looked older and graver--more of a middle-aged man who has left something behind him in life--and the sight reminded him of the few grey hairs that were above his own temples.

"Come," he said more cheerfully, "tell me your news. Let us change the subject. Let us throw aside light dalliance and return to questions of money. More important--much more satisfactory. I suppose you have left Durnovo in charge? Has Joseph come home with you?"

"Yes, Joseph has come home with me. Durnovo is dead."

"Dead!"

Guy Oscard took his pipe from his lips.

"He died at Msala of the sleeping sickness. He was a bigger blackguard than we thought. He was a slave-dealer and a slave-owner. Those forty men we picked up at Msala were slaves belonging to him."

"Ach!" It was a strange exclamation, as if he had burnt his fingers.

"Who knows of this?" he asked immediately. The expediency of the moment had presented itself to his mind again.

"Only ourselves," returned Oscard. "You, Joseph, and I."

"That is all right, and the sooner we forget that the better. It would be a dangerous story to tell."

"So I concluded," said Oscard, in his slow, thoughtful way. "Joseph swears he won't breathe a word of it."

Jack Meredith nodded. He looked rather pale beneath the light of the gas.

"Joseph is all right," he said. "Go on."

"It was Joseph who found it out," continued Oscard, "up at the Plateau.

I paraded the whole crowd, told them what I had found out, and chucked up the whole concern in your name and mine. Next morning I abandoned the Plateau with such men as cared to come. Nearly half of them stayed with Durnovo. I thought it was in order that they might share in the Simiacine--I told them they could have the whole confounded lot of the stuff. But it was not that; they tricked Durnovo there. They wanted to get him to themselves. In going down the river we had an accident with two of the boats, which necessitated staying at Msala. While we were waiting there, one night after ten o'clock the poor devil came, alone, in a canoe. They had simply cut him in slices--a most beastly sight. I wake up sometimes even now dreaming of it, and I am not a fanciful sort of fellow. Joseph went into his room and was simply sick; I didn't know that you could be made sick by anything you saw. The sleeping sickness was on Durnovo then; he had brought it with him from the Plateau. He died before morning."

Oscard ceased speaking and returned to his pipe. Jack Meredith, looking haggard and worn, was leaning back in his chair.

"Poor devil!" he exclaimed. "There was always something tragic about Durnovo. I did hate that man, Oscard. I hated him and all his works."

"Well, he's gone to his account now."

"Yes, but that does not make him any better a man while he was alive. Don't let us cant about him now. The man was an unmitigated scoundrel--perhaps he deserved all he got."

"Perhaps he did. He was Marie's husband."

"The devil he was!"

Meredith fell into a long reverie. He was thinking of Jocelyn and her dislike for Durnovo, of the scene in the drawing-room of the bungalow at Loango; of a thousand incidents all connected with Jocelyn.

"How I hate that man!" he exclaimed at length. "Thank G.o.d--he is dead--because I should have killed him."

Guy Oscard looked at him with a slow pensive wonder. Perhaps he knew more than Jack Meredith knew himself of the thoughts that conceived those words--so out of place in that quiet room, from those suave and courtly lips.

All the emotions of his life seemed to be concentrated into this one day of Jack Meredith's existence. Oscard's presence was a comfort to him--the presence of a calm, strong man is better than many words.

"So this," he said, "is the end of the Simiacine. It did not look like a tragedy when we went into it."

"So far as I am concerned," replied Oscard, with quiet determination, "it certainly is the end of the Simiacine! I have had enough of it. I, for one, am not going to look for that Plateau again."

"Nor I. I suppose it will be started as a limited liability company by a German in six months. Some of the natives will leave landmarks as they come down so as to find their way back."

"I don't think so!"

"Why?"

Oscard took his pipe from his lips.

"When Durnovo came down to Msala," he explained, "he had the sleeping sickness on him. Where did he get it from?"

"By G.o.d!" e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed Jack Meredith, "I never thought of that. He got it up at the Plateau. He left it behind him. They have got it up there now."

"Not now--"

"What do you mean, Oscard?"

"Merely that all those fellows up there are dead. There is ninety thousand pounds worth of Simiacine packed ready for carrying to the coast, standing in a pile on the Plateau, and there are thirty-four dead men keeping watch over it."

"Is it as infectious as that?"

"When it first shows itself, infectious is not the word. It is nothing but a plague. Not one of those fellows can have escaped."

Jack Meredith sat forward and rubbed his two hands pensively over his knees.

"So," he said, "only you and I and Joseph know where the Simiacine Plateau is."

"That is so," answered Oscard.

"And Joseph won't go back?"

"Not if you were to give him that ninety thousand pounds worth of stuff."

"And you will not go back?"

"Not for nine hundred thousand pounds. There is a curse on that place."

"I believe there is," said Meredith.

And such was the end of the great Simiacine Scheme--the wonder of a few seasons. Some day, when the great Sahara is turned into an inland sea, when steamers shall ply where sand now flies before the desert wind, the Plateau may be found again. Some day, when Africa is cut from east to west by a railway line, some adventurous soul will scale the height of one of many mountains, one that seems no different from the rest and yet is held in awe by the phantom-haunted denizens of the gloomy forest, and there he will find a pyramid of wooden cases surrounded by bleached and scattered bones where vultures have fed.

In the meantime the precious drug will grow scarcer day by day, and the human race will be poorer by the loss of one of those half-matured discoveries which have more than once in the world's history been on the point of raising the animal called man to a higher, stronger, finer development of brain and muscle than we can conceive of under existing circ.u.mstances. Who can tell? Perhaps the strange solitary bush may be found growing elsewhere--in some other continent across the ocean. The ways of Nature are past comprehension, and no man can say who sows the seed that crops up in strange places. The wind bloweth where it listeth, and none can tell what germs it bears. It seems hardly credible that the Plateau, no bigger than a cricket field, far away in the waste land of Central Africa, can be the only spot on this planet where the magic leaf grows in sufficient profusion to supply suffering humanity with an alleviating drug, unrivalled--a strength-giving herb, unapproached in power. But as yet no other Simiacine has been found and the Plateau is lost.

And the end of it was two men who had gone to look for it two years before--young and hearty--returning from the search successful beyond their highest hopes, with a shadow in their eyes and grey upon their heads.