M. E. Braddon

“ Geoffrey asked himself in a gloomy wonder. Not Patrington. He had come to the stage at which the traveller bears a charmed life. It is seldom the experienced wanderer, the man of many journeys, who falls by the wayside. Hot-headed youth, bold in its ignorance of danger, perishes like a bird caught in a trap. The strong frame of the trained athlete shrivels like a leaf in the hot blast of fever. The careless boatman tempts the perils of a difficult passage, and is swept over the stony bed of the torrent, and vanishes in the fathomless pool. ”

“ And now she will believe no more in my love. The man who could leave her, who could try to cure himself of his passion for her—such a man is unworthy to be remembered. Some one else will appear upon the scene—that unknown rival whom no man fears or foresees till the hour sounds and he is there—some arrogant lover, utterly unlike Allan or me—who will not adore her as we have adored—who will approach her not as a slave, but as a master, who will win her in a month, in a week, with fierce swift wooing, startle and scare her into loving him, win her by a coup de main. ”

“ He woke one night, turning wearily on his Arab bed—the mat spread on the ground, which use had taught him almost to like. He woke, and saw Geoffrey sitting up on his mat on the other side of the hut, his back against the wall, his eyes looking straight at Allan with an inscrutable expression. Was it dislike or was it fear that looked out of those widely opened eyes? Why fear?
"What's the matter?" Allan asked quickly. "Have you just awakened from a bad dream?"
"No. Life is my bad dream; and there is no awakening from that. There is only the change to dreamless sleep." ”

“ Haven't you kept me on the rack of uncertainty long enough to satisfy your love of power? You are like all women; you think of a lover as a surgeon thinks of a rabbit, too low in the scale for his feelings to be considered—just good enough for vivisection."
"Can't we be happy, Geoffrey? We have everything in the world that we care for."
"I can never be happy till I am sure of you. I am always dreading the moment in which you will tell me you have changed your mind."
"I have given you my promise. Isn't that enough?"
"No, it is not enough. You gave Allan your promise—and broke it." ”

“ Before he passed into that dim under-world of the private lunatic asylum, he had, in more than one wild torrent of self-accusation, confessed his treacherous desertion of Allan in Africa, his savage assault upon Allan in the wood. They had met, and Allan had upbraided him for that treacherous desertion, and for stealing his sweetheart. Suzette's name had been like a lighted fuse to an infernal machine; and then the latent savage which is in every man had leapt into life, and there had been a deadly struggle, a fight for existence on Allan's part, a murderous onslaught from Geoffrey. ”

“ Suzette put on her hat and wished Mrs. Wornock good-bye. She would have left with only a little bend of the head to Lady Emily; but that kindly matron had repented herself of her harshness, and held out her hand with a pathetic look which went straight to the girl's heart.
"Forgive me for what I said just now," she pleaded. "I am almost beside myself with anxiety. You were not to blame. Truth is always the best. But my poor Allan was so fond of you, and you and he might have been so happy—if you had only loved him."
"I did love him—once," faltered Suzette. ”

“ She had chosen her prey in him who had dared the worst she could do—not in one pilgrimage, but in long years of travel—who had looked her full in the face and laughed at her dangers, and had wooed her with a masterful spirit, telling her that she was fair, stepping with light, careless foot over her traps and pitfalls, lying down within sound of her lions, drenched with her torrential rains, tossed on her chopping seas, blinded with the fierce glare of her lightnings—always her lover, her master, her champion.
"There is no land like Africa. ”

“ This is what the forsaken lover told himself as he roamed about the autumn fields, the fertile levels, where all the soil he trod on was his own, and had belonged to his ancestors when the clank of armed feet was still a common thing in the land, and a stout Suffolk pad was your swiftest mode of travel. The shooting had begun, and the houses of Suffolk were full of guests, and the squires of Suffolk had mustered their guns, and were doing their best to beat the record of last year and all the years that were gone. But Allan had no heart for so much as a morning tramp across the stubble. ”

“ Ah, love, we have never been parted. Your image has never left me."
"Africa has done you no good. You are as full of wild nonsense as ever," she said, trying to take the situation lightly, yet trembling with emotion, her heart beating loud and fast, her eyes hardly daring to meet the eyes that dwelt upon her face so fondly. "Tell me about your mother. Was she not surprised—happy?"
"I hope she will be a little glad. I haven't seen her yet."
"Not seen—your mother?"
"No, child. A man can't have two lode-stars. I came straight from Zanzibar to this house. I came home to you, Suzette." ”

“ But if there had been weak yearnings for the comfortable, as opposed to the adventurous, not one of the three travellers had ever given any indication of such backsliding. Each in his turn stricken down—not once, but often—by the deadly mukunguru, or African fever, had rallied and girded his loins for the journey without an hour's needless delay; and then, on recovery, there had followed a fervent joy in life and nature; a rapture in the atmosphere; a keener eye for every changeful light and colour in earth and sky; the blissful sensations of a newly created being, basking in a new world. ”

“ If you have no one else to think about—if there is no other attraction?"
"You know there is no one else," Allan answered with a sigh.
The Amati was not silent in those dreary evenings, amidst the smoke of the fire that rose up towards the rough roof of the hut, where the lizards disported themselves among the rafters and rejoiced in the warmth. The voice of the fiddle was as lugubrious as the wailings of the native women for their dead. Funeral marches; Beethoven, Chopin, Berlioz, all that music knows of sadness and lamentation, were Geoffrey's themes in that solitude of two. ”

“ The travellers were no longer kept awake at night by the ceaseless roar of the rain. The lake lay stretched before them, sapphire dark under the milky blueness of the tropical sky. Kingfisher and fish-eagle, and all the birds that haunt those waters, hovered, or perched on the trees or along the bank, or skimmed the shining surface of the great fresh-water sea. And now the canoes were manned, and the three white men and their followers were setting their faces towards Manyema, the cannibal country, dreaded by Wangana and Wanyamwesis, and even by the bolder Makololos. ”

“ The caravan road from the coast to Ujiji, with all its varieties of hardship, was too beaten a track for this fiery spirit. At every halting-place he went off at a tangent; and if his comrades threatened not to wait for his return, he would pledge himself to rejoin them further on, laughing to scorn every suggestion that he and his little company of Makololos and Wanyamwesis could lose themselves in the wilderness.
He was more in touch with the men than Allan—as familiar with their ways and ideas as Patrington after many years of travel. ”

“ I went into the house by the old door in the lobby, and walked up to my dressing-room without meeting a mortal. One never does meet any one at Discombe. The house is like the tomb of the Pharaohs—long passages, emptiness, silence."
He had risen from his knees at Suzette's entreaty, and was walking by her side, walking fast, speaking with breathless rapidity, eager, self-absorbed, holding her, lightly now, by the arm, as they paced the gravel walk.
"Higson was always a fool. I could see what he was thinking when I made him put out my frock-coat. ”

“ As the General was also in favour of a week in town, Suzette consented, and bored herself to death in the family circle of an aunt who was almost a stranger, but who had been offering her hospitality ever since she could remember. At this lady's house in Bryanstone Square, she spent a weary week of shopping, and trying on, always under the commanding eye of Aunt Mornington, who delighted in tramping about London out of the season, a London in which one could do just what one liked, without fear or favour of society. ”

“ Allan's day came—long and late, after years of patient waiting, when Suzette had attained the sober age of six and twenty; but it was a day of cloudless happiness, which promised to last to the end of life. No fear of the future marred the joy of the present. The later love that had grown up in Suzette's heart for her first lover, was too strongly based upon knowledge and esteem to suffer the shadow of change. ”

“ The disappearance of his rival would make no difference in her feelings for Allan; for no doubt her affection for Geoffrey would only be strengthened by their tragical separation and her lover's miserable fate.
"If she should ever care for any one else, it will be a stranger," Allan told himself in those long reveries which the mere sight of a well-known garden wall, or the chimneys of Marsh House seen above the leafless elms as he rode past, could evoke. "She will never waste a thought upon me." ”

“ At Ujiji there were boat-builders; and canoes and rowers were at hand for the exploration of the vast fresh-water sea. Indeed, there was only too much civilization and human life to please that son of the wilderness, Cecil Patrington.
"I love the unknown better than the known," he said. "We shall never see the lake again as Burton saw it—before ever the sound of engine and paddle-wheel had been heard on that broad blue expanse, when the monkeys chattered and screamed and slung themselves from tree to tree in a tumult of wonder at sight of the white wayfarer. ”

“ They had journeyed at a leisurely pace, loitering wherever nature invited to enjoyment, their camp of the simplest, their followers as few as the absolute necessities of the route demanded.
By these same forest paths, fighting his way through the same inexorable jungle, Burton had come on his famous voyage of discovery to the unknown lake; and by the same, or almost the same, paths Stanley had followed in his search for the great God-fearing traveller, brave and calm and patient, who made Africa his own. ”

“ He shrank appalled from the contemplation of the distance that he had put between himself and the woman he loved, the intolerable distance—thousands and thousands of miles—and the difficulties and vicissitudes of the journey; all the forces of tropical nature to contend with, dependent upon savages, subject to fevers that hinder and stop the eager feet, and lay the weary body low, a helpless log—to waste days and nights in burning agony—to awaken and find a caravan dwindled by desertion, luggage plundered, new impediments to progress. ”

“ She had always been friendly and kind and sweet, but the signs and tokens of passionate love had been wanting. If she would have been content to marry him upon those friendly terms, content to forego the glamour of romantic love, all might have been well. Love would have followed marriage in the quiet years of domestic life. The watchful kindnesses of an adoring husband must have won her heart.
Yes, but for Geoffrey Wornock's appearance on the scene, all might have been well. Suzette would have married Allan, and the years would have ripened friendship into love. ”

“ He hated himself for the restless impatience which had made him join fortunes with Allan. What had he to do with the rejected lover, he who knew that he was loved?
They crept slowly on. Allan was ailing, and unable to stand the fatigue of a long march through a close and difficult country. That week of watching beside Patrington's sick-bed, and the agony of losing that kindly comrade, had shattered his nerves and reduced his physical strength almost as much as an actual illness could have reduced him. ”

“ I have a devil to-night which only music will cast out."
"Yes, play, but don't be too lugubrious. My heart is one great ache."
Without moving from his mat, Geoffrey stretched a thin hand towards the fiddle-case that lay beside his pillow, opened it noiselessly and took out the Amati; then, with his haggard eyes still fixed on the reclining figure opposite him, he drew a long sobbing chord out of the strings, and began a nocturne of Chopin's, delicatest melody played with exquisite delicacy, the very music of sleep and dreams. ”

“ Geoffrey had taken upon himself the task of providing meat for the party, Patrington's lazy, happy-go-lucky temper readily ceding that post of distinction to the new-comer. A man who had shot every species of beast that inhabits the great continent could easily surrender the privilege of finding meat-dinners along the route; so he only used his gun when the quarry was worthy and his humour prompted; and for the most part smoked the pipe of peace and read Dickens in the repose of a day's halt, while Geoffrey roamed off with his Winchester rifle and his little band of obsequious dark-skins. ”

“ I cannot believe in a country where a cheque-book is useless. We shall be within touch of the mercantile world when we get to Stanley Pool."
"When!" echoed Patrington. "Hill and jungle, and desert and river, mutiny or desertion, pestilence and tempest, have to be accounted with before you see steamers and civilization. There's no use in glib talk of what can be done at Brazzaville or at Stanley Pool. Luckily we are going into a region where food is cheap—such as it is. But then, on the other hand, we may run out of quinine—and quinine sometimes means life." ”

“ They had left the poor village of bee-hive huts, near which their comrade lay at rest under the great sycamore. They had travelled slowly, ten miles in a day at most, uphill and downhill, by jungle and swamp, too depressed for any strenuous effort, Geoffrey still weak after his attack of fever, and harassed with rheumatic aches after his night of reckless wandering in marsh and wilderness, in peril of being devoured by the panthers that abound in that region. ”