Kitabı oku: «Black Ivory», sayfa 20
Chapter Twenty Five.
The Last
“How comes it,” said Lieutenant Lindsay to Harold, on the first favourable opportunity that occurred after the meeting described in the last chapter; “how comes it that you and Kambira know each other so well?”
“I might reply by asking,” said Harold, with a smile, “how comes it that you are so well acquainted with Azinté? but, before putting that question, I will give a satisfactory answer to your own.”
Hereupon he gave a brief outline of those events, already narrated in full to the reader, which bore on his first meeting with the slave-girl, and his subsequent sojourn with her husband.
“After leaving the interior,” continued our hero, “and returning to the coast, I visited various towns in order to observe the state of the slaves in the Portuguese settlements, and, truly, what I saw was most deplorable—demoralisation and cruelty, and the obstruction of lawful trade, prevailed everywhere. The settlements are to my mind a very pandemonium on earth. Every one seemed to me more or less affected by the accursed atmosphere that prevails. Of course there must be some exceptions. I met with one, at the last town I visited, in the person of Governor Letotti.”
“Letotti!” exclaimed Lindsay, stopping abruptly.
“Yes!” said Harold, in some surprise at the lieutenant’s manner, “and a most amiable man he was—”
“Was!—was! What do you mean? Is—is he dead?” exclaimed Lindsay, turning pale.
“He died suddenly just before I left,” said Harold.
“And Maraquita—I mean his daughter—what of her?” asked the lieutenant, turning as red as he had previously turned pale.
Harold noted the change, and a gleam of light seemed to break upon him as he replied:—
“Poor girl, she was overwhelmed at first by the heavy blow. I had to quit the place almost immediately after the event.”
“Did you know her well?” asked Lindsay, with an uneasy glance at his companion’s handsome face.
“No; I had just been introduced to her shortly before her father’s death, and have scarcely exchanged a dozen sentences with her. It is said that her father died in debt, but of course in regard to that I know nothing certainly. At parting, she told me that she meant to leave the coast and go to stay with a relative at the Cape.”
The poor lieutenant’s look on hearing this was so peculiar, not to say alarming, that Harold could not help referring to it, and Lindsay was so much overwhelmed by such unexpected news, and, withal, so strongly attracted by Harold’s sympathetic manner, that he straightway made a confidant of him, told him of his love for Maraquita, of Maraquita’s love for Azinté, of the utter impossibility of his being able to take Azinté back to her old mistress, now that she had found her husband and child, even if it had been admissible for a lieutenant in the British navy to return freed negroes again into slavery, and wound up with bitter lamentations as to his unhappy fate, and expressions of poignant regret that fighting and other desperate means, congenial and easy to his disposition, were not available in the circumstances. After which explosion he subsided, felt ashamed of having thus committed himself, and looked rather foolish.
But Harold quickly put him at his ease. He entered on the subject with earnest gravity.
“It strikes me, Lindsay,” he said thoughtfully, after the lieutenant had finished, “that I can aid you in this affair; but you must not ask me how at present. Give me a few hours to think over it, and then I shall have matured my plans.”
Of course the lieutenant hailed with heartfelt gratitude the gleam of hope held out to him, and thus the friends parted for a time.
That same afternoon Harold sat under a palm-tree in company with Disco, Jumbo, Kambira, Azinté, and Obo.
“How would you like to go with me to the Cape of Good Hope, Kambira?” asked Harold abruptly.
“Whar dat?” asked the chief through Jumbo.
“Far away to the south of Africa,” answered Harold. “You know that you can never go back to your own land now, unless you want to be again enslaved.”
“Him say him no’ want to go back,” interpreted Jumbo; “got all him care for now—Azinté and Obo.”
“Then do you agree to go with me?” said Harold.
To this Kambira replied heartily that he did.
“W’y, wot do ’ee mean for to do with ’em?” asked Disco, in some surprise.
“I will get them comfortably settled there,” replied Harold. “My father has a business friend in Cape Town who will easily manage to put me in the way of doing it. Besides, I have a particular reason for wishing to take Azinté there.—Ask her, Jumbo, if she remembers a young lady named Senhorina Maraquita Letotti.”
To this Azinté replied that she did, and the way in which her eyes sparkled proved that she remembered her with intense pleasure.
“Well, tell her,” rejoined Harold, “that Maraquita has grieved very much at losing her, and is very anxious to get her back again—not as a slave, but as a friend, for no slavery is allowed in English settlements anywhere, and I am sure that Maraquita hates slavery as much as I do, though she is not English, so I intend to take her and Kambira and Obo to the Cape, where Maraquita is living—or will be living soon.”
“Ye don’t stick at trifles, sir,” said Disco, whose eyes, on hearing this, assumed a thoughtful, almost a troubled look.
“My plan does not seem to please you,” said Harold.
“Please me, sir, w’y shouldn’t it please me? In course you knows best; I was only a little puzzled, that’s all.”
Disco said no more, but he thought a good deal, for he had noted the beauty and sprightliness of Maraquita, and the admiration with which Harold had first beheld her; and it seemed to him that this rather powerful method of attempting to gratify the Portuguese girl was proof positive that Harold had lost his heart to her.
Harold guessed what was running in Disco’s mind, but did not care to undeceive him, as, in so doing, he might run some risk of betraying the trust reposed in him by Lindsay.
The captain of the schooner, being bound for the Cape after visiting Zanzibar, was willing to take these additional passengers, and the anxious lieutenant was induced to postpone total and irrevocable despair, although, Maraquita being poor, and he being poor, and promotion in the service being very slow, he had little reason to believe his prospects much brighter than they were before,—poor fellow!
Time passed on rapid wing—as time is notoriously prone to do—and the fortunes of our dramatis personae varied somewhat.
Captain Romer continued to roam the Eastern seas, along with brother captains, and spent his labour and strength in rescuing a few hundreds of captives from among the hundreds of thousands that were continually flowing out of unhappy Africa. Yoosoof and Moosa continued to throw a boat-load or two of damaged “cattle” in the way of the British cruisers, as a decoy, and succeeded on the whole pretty well in running full cargoes of valuable Black Ivory to the northern markets. The Sultan of Zanzibar continued to assure the British Consul that he heartily sympathised with England in her desire to abolish slavery, and to allow his officials, for a “consideration,” to prosecute the slave-trade to any extent they pleased! Portugal continued to assure England of her sympathy and co-operation in the good work of repression, and her subjects on the east coast of Africa continued to export thousands of slaves under the protection of the Portuguese and French flags, styling them free engagés. British-Indian subjects—the Banyans of Zanzibar,—continued to furnish the sinews of war which kept the gigantic trade in human flesh going on merrily. Murders, etcetera, continued to be perpetrated, tribes to be plundered, and hearts to be broken—of course “legally” and “domestically,” as well as piratically—during this rapid flight of time.
But nearly everything in this life has its bright lights and half-tints, as well as its deep shadows. During the same flight of time, humane individuals have continued to urge on the good cause of the total abolition of slavery, and Christian missionaries have continued, despite the difficulties of slave-trade, climate, and human apathy, to sow here and there on the coasts the precious seed of Gospel truth, which we trust shall yet be sown broad-cast by native hands, throughout the length and breadth of that mighty land.
To come more closely to the subjects of our tale:
Chimbolo, with his recovered wife and child, sought safety from the slavers in the far interior, and continued to think with pleasure and gratitude of the two Englishmen who hated slavery, and who had gone to Africa just in the nick of time to rescue that unhappy slave who had been almost flogged to death, and was on the point of being drowned in the Zambesi in a sack. Mokompa, also, continued to poetise, as in days gone by, having made a safe retreat with Chimbolo, and, among other things, enshrined all the deeds of the two white men in native verse. Yambo continued to extol play, admire, and propagate the life-sized jumping-jack to such an extent that, unless his career has been cut short by the slavers, we fully expect to find that creature a “domestic institution” when the slave-trade has been crushed, and Africa opened up—as in the end it is certain to be.
During the progress and continuance of all these things, you may be sure our hero was not idle. He sailed, as proposed, with Kambira, Azinté, Obo, Disco, and Jumbo for Zanzibar, touched at the town over which poor Senhor Francisco Alfonso Toledo Bignoso Letotti had ruled, found that the Senhorina had taken her departure; followed, as Disco said, in her wake; reached the Cape, hunted her up, found her out and presented to her, with Lieutenant Lindsay’s compliments, the African chief Kambira, his wife Azinté, and his son Obo!
Poor Maraquita, being of a passionately affectionate and romantic disposition, went nearly mad with joy, and bestowed so many grateful glances and smiles on Harold that Disco’s suspicions were confirmed, and that bold mariner wished her, Maraquita, “at the bottom of the sea!” for Disco disliked foreigners, and could not bear the thought of his friend being caught by one of them.
Maraquita introduced Harold to her aunt, a middle-aged, leather-skinned, excessively dark-eyed daughter of Portugal. She also introduced him to a bosom friend, at that time on a visit to her aunt. The bosom friend was an auburn-haired, fair-skinned, cheerful-spirited English girl. Before her, Harold Seadrift at once, without an instant’s warning, fell flat down, figuratively speaking of course, and remained so—stricken through the heart!
The exigencies of our tale require, at this point, that we should draw our outline with a bold and rapid pencil.
Disco Lillihammer was stunned, and so was Jumbo, when Harold, some weeks after their arrival at the Cape, informed them that he was engaged to be married to Alice Gray, only daughter of the late Sir Eustace Gray, who had been M.P. for some county in England, which he had forgotten the name of, Alice not having been able to recall it, as her father had died when she was four years old, leaving her a fortune of next-to-nothing a year, and a sweet temper.
Being incapable of further stunning, Disco was rather revived than otherwise, and his dark shadow was resuscitated, when Harold added that Kambira had become Maraquita’s head-gardener, Azinté cook to the establishment, and Obo page-in-waiting—more probably page-in-mischief—to the young Senhorina. But both Disco and Jumbo had a relapse from which they were long of recovering, when Harold went on to say that he meant to sail for England by the next mail, take Jumbo with him as valet, make proposals to his father to establish a branch of their house at the Cape, come back to manage the branch, marry Alice, and reside in the neighbourhood of the Senhorina Maraquita Letotti’s dwelling.
“You means wot you say, I s’pose?” asked Disco.
“Of course I do,” said Harold.
“An’ yer goin’ to take Jumbo as yer walley?”
“Yes.”
“H’m; I’ll go too as yer keeper.”
“My what?”
“Yer keeper—yer strait-veskit buckler, for if you ain’t a loonatic ye ought to be.”
But Disco did not go to England in that capacity. He remained at the Cape to assist Kambira, at the express command of Maraquita; and continued there until Harold returned, bringing Lieutenant Lindsay with him as a partner in the business; until Harold was married and required a gardener for his own domain; until the Senhorina became Mrs Lindsay; until a large and thriving band of little Cape colonists found it necessary to have a general story-teller and adventure-recounter with a nautical turn of mind; until, in short, he found it convenient to go to England himself for the gal of his heart who had been photographed there years before, and could be rubbed off neither by sickness, sunstroke, nor adversity.
When Disco had returned to the colony with the original of the said photograph, and had fairly settled down on his own farm, then it was that he was wont at eventide to assemble the little colonists round him, light his pipe, and, through its hazy influence, recount his experiences, and deliver his opinions on the slave-trade of East Africa. Sometimes he was pathetic, sometimes humorous, but, however jocular he might be on other subjects, he invariably became very grave and very earnest when he touched on the latter theme.
“There’s only one way to cure it,” he was wont to say, “and that is, to bring the Portuguese and Arabs to their marrow-bones; put the fleet on the east coast in better workin’ order; have consuls everywhere, with orders to keep their weather-eyes open to the slave-dealers; start two or three British settlements—ports o’ refuge—on the mainland; hoist the Union Jack, and, last but not least, send ’em the Bible.”
We earnestly commend the substance of Disco’s opinions to the reader, for there is urgent need for action. There is death where life should be; ashes instead of beauty; desolation in place of fertility, and, even while we write, terrible activity in the horrible traffic in—“Black Ivory.”
