Читать книгу Joan and Peter - H. G. Wells - Страница 46

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It was just a quarter of a year after the death of Dolly and Arthur before Oswald Sydenham heard of the event and of Arthur’s will and of the disputes of his three fellow guardians in England. For when the stonemason boatman staggered and fell and the boat turned over beneath the Arco Naturale, Oswald was already marching with a long string of porters and armed men beyond the reach of letters and telegrams into the wilderness.

He was in pursuit of a detachment of the Sudanese mutineers who, with a following of wives, children and captives, were making their way round through the wet forest country north of Lake Kioga towards the Nile province. With Sydenham was an able young subaltern, Muir, the only other white man of the party. In that net of rivers, marsh and forest they were destined to spend some feverish months. They pushed too far eastward and went too fast, and they found themselves presently not the pursuers but the pursued, cut off from their supports to the south. They built a stockade near Lake Salisbury, and were loosely besieged. For a time both sides in the conflict were regarded with an impartial unfriendliness by the naked blacks who then cultivated that primitive region, and it was only the looting and violence of the Sudanese that finally turned the scale in favour of Sydenham’s little force. Sydenham was able to attack in his turn with the help of a local levy; he took the Sudanese camp, killed twenty or thirty of the mutineers, captured most of their women and gear, and made five prisoners with very little loss to his own party. He led the attack, a tall, lean, dreadful figure with half a face that stared fiercely and half a red, tight-skinned, blind mask. Two Sudanese upon whom his one-sided visage came suddenly, yelled with dismay, dropped their rifles and started a stampede. Black men they knew and white men, but this was a horrible red and white man. A remnant of the enemy got away to the north and eluded his pursuit until it became dangerous to push on further. They were getting towards the district in which was the rebel chief Kabarega, and a union of his forces with the Sudanese fugitives would have been more than Sydenham and Muir could have tackled.

The government force turned southward again. Oswald had been suffering from fatigue and a recurrence of blackwater fever, a short, sharp spell that passed off as suddenly as it came; but it left him weak and nervously shaken; for some painful days before he gave in he ruled his force with an iron discipline that was at once irrational and terrifying, and afterwards he was carried in a litter, and Muir took over the details of command. It was only when Oswald was within two days’ journey of Luba Fort upon Lake Victoria Nyanza that his letters reached him.