Part 49

Ann, however, made her departure sensational. After handing over the keys of Mwada Station to the Catholic Mission she marched out to the centre of the market-place, on a hillock overlooking the lake; and in the presence of a large crowd of Masai and Wambugwe she solemnly cursed the Kaiser in Masai, Kimbugwe and English. It took more than nine years for the curse in full measure to take effect; but then the Kaiser was a much more important personage in the history of Africa than the occupant of the Red Crater, and the Devil no doubt fought far harder to save him.

In the spring of 1909 Lucy was again attacked by pernicious anaemia, and Dr. Wiese's remedies failed this time to arrest its encroachments. "There is only one thing," he said, melancholy with foreboding at the departure of his English friends--"only one thing to save Mrs. Brentham from dying, and that is to send her quickly out of Africa on to a home-going steamer. The sea air may stimulate the recovery of the blood and help her to regain strength."

Roger therefore hurried through his preparations for handing over his work to Hildebrandt. It was thought better that with them should go the two Australians, so that the staff might be entirely German. Maud superintended the packing of their personal effects. Roger decided, partly out of liking for the Hildebrandts, partly from a horror he had of stripping the home where he and Lucy and Maud had been so happy, to present the Hildebrandts with its furniture and garnishings, and to take away as little luggage as possible. He did this almost with a kind of foreseeing that he might some day return. Maud felt very much parting with the Crowned cranes. Together with pea-fowl they are the most intelligent, inquisitive, well-mannered pets that the bird-world can produce.

The journey to the coast port where the steamer would call was accomplished in a motor ride of three days. Even to the dying and little-regarding Lucy this was in striking contrast to the three-weeks to four-weeks' journey up-country in her novitiate; with its crushing fatigues, discomforts and frequent dangers. No more skulls and skeletons of recent raids, no more intrusive lions, no need to fall among soldier ants, no water famines and atrocious smells; no tedious waiting in hot sun or drenching rain, while an unstable tent was being fumblingly put up and a camp bed put together. When the motor halted for the night Lucy was transferred by kind hands, as in a dream to a clean, sweet, cool couch in a decent bedroom. When it was morning, after a breakfast she scarcely seemed to taste, she was placed in a flying-bed--as the motor seemed--and so the dream journey went on till she was aware of being in a boat and then hoisted up into the air in a bed, and finally put to rest in a cool cabin. Dream figures would pass through this half-real environment. John Baines seemed sometimes to stand by her bed or help her into the motor; Maud became confused with Ann, but surely a much gentler Ann? There was Brother Bayley, looking for her to read slowly through the Book of Exodus, so that he might translate it, phrase after phrase, into Kagulu....

Once on the great steamer of the Deutsch Ostafrikansche Linie there seemed a ray of hope. They had deck cabins allotted to them. Two German Staff officers pretended they were just as comfortable on the tier below, and it would be a pleasure to help in Mrs. Brentham's recovery. She was quite a personage in the history of East Africa.... The steamer's captain, himself a married man, was kindness embodied. He broke through any regulations there might be to the contrary and had a section of the deck screened off opposite their cabins, so that no other passengers might pass through this open-air, shaded parlour in which the sick woman lay on a couch in a half-dream, even in a happy dream. Her day-bed or couch was screwed to the deck so that it would not be jarred or dislodged by movements of the vessel. Here she could lie all day or all night; her husband and her sister-in-law--such a formal term should not have been applied to Maud, she said; "sister in very truth"--could take their meal alongside where she lay.

At Unguja there came on board the new British Agent, Sir Edward Walrond, of the Foreign Office, to take farewell of Brentham since the latter could not leave his wife. He seemed to pass in and out of Lucy's dream---a pleasantly cynical person who only expressed sympathy with Roger by a hand-grip and laughed away the idea of Mrs. Brentham not being able to land at Naples and see the sights there, "with Ted Parsons to take you round--he is becoming very Pompeian in manner, I'm told." ... Walrond sends on board all the fruit and delicacies he can think of, which might tempt Mrs. Brentham's appetite.

Archdeacon Gravening, who married her to John and then to Roger, comes off to see her. He is quite the old man now, the veteran of the Anglican Mission always there whatever Missionary Bishops come and go, always writing down Bantu languages, always trying to kill some secret sorrow of his own. He is alone with Lucy, kneels down for a few minutes by her day-bed, takes her hand, prays silently, says aloud: "My poor, poor child: I pray with all my heart you may surmount this weakness and live to be loved by your children. Think sometimes, when you are well and happy in England, of the lonely old man who married you to your good husband. I always said Brentham had done the right thing."

Then he lays some flowers between her hands that the Anglican Sisters have sent her. Lucy in her dream thinks they are marrying her again to Roger, and laughs at the absurdity of their not knowing she has been his faithful wife for--for--it is all so confusing--oh, ever so many years....

Out in the open sea, the fresh boisterous air of he monsoon gives a flickering stimulation to the enfeebled brain and body, even causes a certain irritability and impatience, rare to her gentleness. "Roger! Can't they take me quickly home? Can't they make the ship go faster?..."

"My darling, she is going at a splendid rate; we shall be at Aden in four days. Aden! You remember Aden? Where we took Emilia Bazzard with us to spend that day, and saw the cisterns? I want you to get ever so much better in those four days, because I must leave you then...." Hastens to add, as her hold on his hand tightens: "Oh, only for a couple of hours whilst Maud takes my place, because I want to pay off our four Somalis on shore. If I gave them all their money on the ship they might gamble it away or have it stolen. You remember the Somalis? Our old faithfuls--been with us for--what is it? Eighteen years. Wonderful! They travelled down with us from Magara--often carried you out of the motor or into the boat. Every day they come for your news."

But she is not listening.... "Roger!"

"Yes, dear?"

"I don't want to get off at Naples, and I don't want you or Maud to leave me at Naples: I want to go on and on in this steamer till we reach England.... And, Roger! If I die before we get there, don't throw me into the sea as they generally do with people who die on ... board ... ship ... take me on with you to England ... take me home, won't you? Then I shan't mind dying. We've all got to die some day ... that's what makes it all so sad.... I can't believe there can come an end to love, not love like mine for you; but it's horrible to think of lying at the bottom of the sea, and you perhaps in a grave on shore...."

"You mustn't talk like this or you'll break my heart ... but if it eases your mind, I promise you that you shall be taken home."

Then comes Maud--with the ship's doctor--and a hospital nurse, always carried on board for such cases. There is going to be transfusion of blood, and Roger bares his arm....

A pause afterwards and she sleeps, sleeps and wakes, dreams she is with her children and they only call her "Aunt Sibyl," dreams she is once more at Mr. Callaway's, waiting to know if Roger is going to marry her.... Mr. Callaway? Didn't she overhear Roger asking after him from some one who came on board, and didn't they reply "Died of blackwater fever, years ago"? We must all die sooner or later, but oh, why might it not be later in her case? So much to live for!

She is awake again, looking at the brilliant sunlight on the dancing waves and the flying fish that rise in mechanical parabolas of flight that become monotonous. Some form is presently standing between her and this effulgence of sun on water.... It is the ship's captain, a big burly man with a close-clipped, russet beard and kind blue eyes. "Zo," he says, with a mixture of gravity and lightness, "that is bet-ter, moch bet-ter. A ... leetle ... colour ... now ... in ... the ... cheeks...." But his well-meant encouragement trails away into pitiful silence before her ethereal beauty and other-worldliness. Tired middle age has passed from her face with this infusion of Roger's blood. "What a pretty woman she must have been at one time!" he says to himself. His blue eyes fill with tears, and he turns away thanking his German God that his own Frau is not in the least likely to die of anaemia....

The heat and airlessness of the Red Sea bring back a lowering of vitality.... The poor sick brain, insufficiently supplied with red blood, even inspires a peevish tone in the dying woman. "Oh, Roger! I've spoilt your life! You only married me 'to do the right thing'! I ought to have refused.... I broke your career," she wailed.

"Lucy! How can you say such cruel things. Here, drink this. This'll put life and sense into you. Haven't I told you, over and over again--Aren't your children a testimony to our love? But there! It's cruel to argue with an invalid. I shall send Maud to talk sense to you."

"No, stay with me. I want to be with you every minute of the life that remains to me."

They pass through the Suez Canal, but she is insensible mostly now to changes of scenery or to noises, or to anything but the absence of Roger from her side. The fresh breezes of the Mediterranean cause a revival of mentality. "My poor Roger," she says one day when the snow peaks of Crete give hope of an approaching Europe, "how grey you have grown! I never noticed it before. Greyer than you ought to be at your age." And she caresses his hair with an emaciated hand....

"Tell Maud--I never see her now, you are with me always, but tell Maud I love her better than any one in the world, except you. Better than my children. They won't miss me. Africa has always come between us. Still, all the same I send my thanks to Sibyl ... and poor mother.... And tell Mrs. Baines I thought kindly of her ... I was to blame.... But something tells me John has long since understood and forgiven....

"And, Roger? Are you there?" ...

"Always here, darling." ...

"Do something for the Miss Calthorps--you know--where I was at school. Some one told me they were in poor circumstances. They must be quite old now."

"They shall be seen to."

The ship passed through the Straits of Messina. Etna behind them on the south-west, with its coronet of snow. Far away to the north-west was the chain of the Lipari Islands, blue pyramids with spectacular columns of yellow-purple smoke issuing from their craters against the approaching sunset. The Tyrrhenian Sea was incarnadine under the level rays of the sinking sun. To the east rose the green and furrowed heights of Aspromonte, green-gold and violet in the light of the sunset, dotted, especially along the sea-base, with pink-white houses and churches with their campanili-like pink fingers pointing upwards. Lucy's eyes gazed their last on this splendid spectacle of earthly beauty. Roger, still holding her hand, lay half across her bed, more haggard than she, unshaven, hollow-cheeked, emaciated with futile blood-letting, worn out with want of sleep and no appetite for eating, and the long vigil over his dying wife. He slept now, soundly. Her eyes gazed at his closed eyelids for one moment; then motion and life passed from them.

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