With Edged Tools Part 16

"But I never expected you so soon; you were not due till--look!" Jack whispered suddenly.

Oscard turned on his heel, and the next instant their two rifles rang out through the forest stillness in one sharp crack. Across the stream, ten yards behind the spot where Oscard had emerged from the bush, a leopard sprang into the air, five feet from the ground, with head thrown back, and paws clawing at the thinness of s.p.a.ce with grand free sweeps.

The beast fell with a thud, and lay still--dead.

The two men clambered across the rocks again, side by side. While they stood over the prostrate form of the leopard--beautiful, incomparably graceful and sleek even in death--Guy Oscard stole a sidelong glance at his companion. He was a modest man, and yet he knew that he was reckoned among the big-game hunters of the age. This man had fired as quickly as himself, and there were two small trickling holes in the animal's head.

While he was being quietly scrutinised Jack Meredith stooped down, and, taking the leopard beneath the shoulders, lifted it bodily back from the pool of blood.

"Pity to spoil the skin," he explained, as he put a fresh cartridge into his rifle.

Oscard nodded in an approving way. He knew the weight of a full-grown male leopard, all muscle and bone, and he was one of those old-fas.h.i.+oned persons mentioned in the Scriptures as taking a delight in a man's legs--or his arms, so long as they were strong.

"I suppose," he said quietly, "we had better skin him here."

As he spoke he drew a long hunting-knife, and, slas.h.i.+ng down a bunch of the maidenhair fern that grew like nettles around them, he wiped the blood gently, almost affectionately, from the leopard's cat-like face.

There was about these two men a strict attention to the matter in hand, a mutual and common respect for all things pertaining to sport, a quiet sense of settling down without delay to the regulation of necessary detail that promised well for any future interest they might have in common.

So these highly-educated young gentlemen turned up their sleeves and steeped themselves to the elbow in gore. Moreover, they did it with a certain technical skill and a distinct sense of enjoyment. Truly, the modern English gentleman is a strange being. There is nothing his soul takes so much delight in as the process of getting hot and very dirty, and, if convenient, somewhat sanguinary. You cannot educate the manliness out of him, try as you will; and for such blessings let us in all humbleness give thanks to Heaven.

This was the bringing together of Jack Meredith and Guy Oscard--two men who loved the same woman. They knelt side by side, and Jack Meredith--the older man, the accomplished, gifted gentleman of the world, who stood second to none in that varied knowledge required nowadays of the successful societarian--Jack Meredith, be it noted, humbly dragged the skin away from the body while Guy Oscard cut the clinging integuments with a delicate touch and finished skill.

They laid the skin out on the trampled maidenhair, and contemplated it with silent satisfaction. In the course of their inspection they both arrived at the head at the same moment. The two holes in the hide, just above the eyes, came under their notice at the same moment, and they turned and smiled gravely at each other, thinking the same thought--the sort of thought that Englishmen rarely put into intelligible English.

"I'm glad we did that," said Guy Oscard at length, suddenly. "Whatever comes of this expedition of ours--if we fight like h.e.l.l, as we probably shall, before it is finished--if we hate each other ever afterwards, that skin ought to remind us that we are much of a muchness."

It might have been put into better English; it might almost have sounded like poetry had Guy Oscard been possessed of the poetic soul. But this, fortunately, was not his; and all that might have been said was left to the imagination of Meredith. What he really felt was that there need be no rivalry, and that he for one had no thought of such; that in the quest which they were about to undertake there need be no question of first and last; that they were merely two men, good or bad, competent or incompetent, but through all equal.

Neither of them suspected that the friends.h.i.+p thus strangely inaugurated at the rifle's mouth was to run through a longer period than the few months required to reach the plateau--that it was, in fact, to extend through that long expedition over a strange country that we call Life, and that it was to stand the greatest test that friends.h.i.+p has to meet with here on earth.

It was almost dark when at last they turned to go, Jack Meredith carrying the skin over his shoulder and leading the way. There was no opportunity for conversation, as their progress was necessarily very difficult. Only by the prattle of the stream were they able to make sure of keeping in the right direction. Each had a thousand questions to ask the other. They were total strangers; but it is not, one finds, by conversation that men get to know each other. A common danger, a common pleasure, a common pursuit--these are the touches of Nature by which men are drawn together into the kins.h.i.+p of mutual esteem.

Once they gained the banks of the Ogowe their progress was quicker, and by nine o'clock they reached the camp at Msala. Victor Durnovo was still at work superintending the discharge of the baggage and stores from the large trading-canoes. They heard the shouting and chattering before coming in sight of the camp, and one voice raised angrily above the others.

"Is that Durnovo's voice?" asked Meredith.

"Yes," answered his companion curtly.

It was a new voice which Meredith had not heard before. When they shouted to announce their arrival it was suddenly hushed, and presently Durnovo came forward to greet them.

Meredith hardly knew him, he was so much stronger and healthier in appearance. Durnovo shook hands heartily.

"No need to introduce you two," he said, looking from one to the other.

"No; after one mistake we discovered each other's ident.i.ty in the forest," answered Meredith.

Durnovo smiled; but there was something behind the smile. He did not seem to approve of their meeting without his intervention.

CHAPTER XIII. IN BLACK AND WHITE

A little lurking secret of the blood, A little serpent secret rankling keen.

The three men walked up towards the house together. It was a fair-sized house, with a heavy thatched roof that overhung the walls like the crown of a mushroom. The walls were only mud, and the thatching was nothing else than banana leaves; but there was evidence of European taste in the garden surrounding the structure, and in the glazed windows and wooden door.

As they approached the open doorway three little children, clad in very little more than their native modesty, ran gleefully out, and proceeded to engage seats on Jack Meredith's boots, looking upon him as a mere public conveyance. They took hardly any notice of him, but chattered and quarrelled among themselves, sometimes in baby English, sometimes in a dialect unknown to Oscard and Meredith.

"These," said the latter, when they were seated, and clinging with their little dusky arms round his legs, "are the very rummest little kids I ever came across."

Durnovo gave an impatient laugh, and went on towards the house. But Guy Oscard stopped, and walked more slowly beside Meredith as he laboured along heavy footed.

"They are the jolliest little souls imaginable," continued Jack Meredith. "There," he said to them when they had reached the doorstep, "run away to your mother--very fine ride--no! no more to-night! I'm aweary--you understand--aweary!"

"Aweary--awe-e-e-ary!" repeated the little things, standing before him in infantile nude rotundity, looking up with bright eyes.

"Aweary--that is it. Good night, Epaminondas--good night, Xantippe! Give ye good hap, most stout Nestorius!"

He stooped and gravely shook hands with each one in turn, and, after forcing a like ceremonial upon Guy Oscard, they reluctantly withdrew.

"They have not joined us, I suppose?" said Oscard, as he followed his companion into the house.

"Not yet. They live in this place. Nestorius, I understand, takes care of his mother, who, in her turn, takes care of this house. He is one and a half."

Guy Oscard seemed to have inherited the mind inquisitive from his learned father. He asked another question later on.

"Who is that woman?" he said during dinner, with a little nod towards the doorway, through which the object of his curiosity had pa.s.sed with some plates.

"That is the mother of the stout Nestorius," answered Jack--"Durnovo's housekeeper."

He spoke quietly, looking straight in front of him; and Joseph, who was drawing a cork at the back of the room, was watching his face.

There was a little pause, during which Durnovo drank slowly. Then Guy Oscard spoke again.

"If she cooked the dinner," he said, "she knows her business."

"Yes," answered Durnovo, "she is a good cook--if she is nothing else."

It did not sound as if further inquiries would be welcome, and so the subject was dropped with a silent tribute to the culinary powers of Durnovo's housekeeper at the Msala Station.

The woman had only appeared for a moment, bringing in some dishes for Joseph--a tall, stately woman, with great dark eyes, in which the patience of motherhood had succeeded to the soft fire of West Indian love and youth. She had the graceful, slow carriage of the Creole, although her skin was darker than that of those dangerous sirens. That Spanish blood ran in her veins could be seen by the intelligence of her eyes; for there is an intelligence in Spanish eyes which stand apart.

In the men it seems to refer to the past or the future, for their incorrigible leisureliness prevents the present rendering of a full justice to their powers. In the women it belongs essentially to the present; for there is no time like the present for love and other things.

"They call me," she had said to Jack Meredith, in her soft, mumbled English, a fortnight earlier, "they call me Marie."

The children he had named after his own phantasy, and when she had once seen him with them there was a notable change in her manner. Her eyes rested on him with a sort of wondering attention, and when she cooked his meals or touched anything that was his there was something in her att.i.tude that denoted a special care.