Читать книгу Renshaw Fanning's Quest: A Tale of the High Veldt - Mitford Bertram - Страница 11

The stranger’s wants had been attended to by the old Koranna woman already described; which may be taken to mean that he had found time to snatch a hurried meal during one of the sick man’s quiet intervals. Then he had returned to his post.

His inhospitable, not to say dangerous, reception stood now accounted for, and with a vivid recollection of the same he took an early opportunity of carefully hiding all the firearms he could lay hands on. Old Dirk and his wife kept coming in on tiptoe to see how their master was getting on, and, in fact, betrayed an amount of concern for his well-being hardly to be looked for in the scions of a wild and degraded race. But Renshaw Fanning was a man to command attachment, from untutored and degraded savages no less than from a dog.

The night wore on, and these humble and faithful retainers, seeing that their master was in better hands than theirs, had retired to roost. The stranger, having dragged a capacious armchair into the bedroom, sat and watched. Who could this man be, he wondered, dwelling alone in this desert place, stricken with mortal sickness, and no one to tend him save a couple of miserable specimens of a miserable race, were it not that providentially he himself, in the character of a lost and starving wayfarer, had chanced upon the scene? His gaze wandered round the room. Its white-washed walls were bare and cracked, and devoid of ornament, save for a small but massive silver crucifix hanging above the bed, and an artistically carved statuette of the Blessed Virgin on a bracket. These objects, at any rate, pointed to their owner’s creed, a heritage received with his Irish descent, and the plainness, or roughness rather, of the domicile in general seemed to point to a hard and struggling existence.

The night brought with it but little respite from the broiling heat of the day. Not a breath stirred the air. Even with the house door and all the windows wide open the oppressive stuffiness of the room seemed wellnigh unbearable. Winged insects, attracted by the light, found their way in by swarms, and a huge tarantula, leaving his lair in the thatch, began to walk leisurely down the wall. With something like a shudder of disgust, the stranger picked up a slipper and shied it at the hairy monster, with the effect of making him scuttle back to the shelter of the friendly thatch as fast as his legs could carry him.

The sick man tossed restlessly from side to side, now moaning, now talking to himself. Listening intently, the watcher noted that the patient’s wildly spoken thoughts seemed to run strongly in two grooves—diamond seeking, and a member of the other sex. As to the latter, his voice would assume a thrilling tenderness as he passionately and oft seemed to be abjuring somebody of the name of Violet. As to the former, he was alternately despondent and fiercely sanguine, as he alluded again and again to a certain “Valley of the Eye.”

“The Valley of the Eye, by Jove!” muttered the watcher to himself. “Why, that’s the very thing he began about directly I came in. Said it was going to make our fortunes. There must be something in it—and—I’ll bet a guinea that thing he wears round his neck holds the secret, or the clue, to it,” he added, starting up in excitement over the idea.

He went softly over to the patient. The latter’s left hand was clutching a flat pouch or bag of buckskin which lay upon his chest. It was suspended from his neck by a stout lanyard of raw hide.

The watcher stood for a few minutes, his eyes glittering with a strange excitement. A temptation, which was well-nigh irresistible, had come upon him. Why should he not obtain possession of the pouch, and thus share in the secret which might lead to boundless wealth? He need not retain it long, only long enough to master its contents. He could easily return it.

Then his instincts of good seemed to get the upper hand. He was not a blackguard, he told himself, and surely to take advantage of this man’s helplessness to steal his secrets would be a blackguardly and dishonest act. But, alas and alas! When the possibility opens of acquiring wealth, a man’s best instincts are sure to be heavily handicapped, and so it was here.

He took a cup of milk which stood by the bedside, and, raising the patient’s head, put it to his lips. It was only goat’s milk, and thin stuff at that, thanks to the parched state of the veldt; but poor Renshaw drank eagerly, then fell back quiet and composed. It seemed as though the delirium had departed.

Watching him thus for a moment the stranger left him and sought the house door. He seemed to feel an irresistible longing for the open air. But so close, so stifling was the night that, as he stood outside, he hardly realised the change into the outer air. Not a living thing was moving, not a sound was heard, save now and then the trumpet-like sneeze of a goat in the kraals. Overhead, the dark vault of heaven seemed literally to flash and grow with constellations. Shooting stars darted, rocket-like, across the zenith in numbers unknown to our colder skies; and, as he looked, a bright meteor shot athwart the velvety space, leaving a red sinuous trail. But in the dead still solitude a voice seemed to whisper to his now heated imagination, “The Valley of the Eye! The Valley of the Eye!”

Re-entering, he stole a glance at his patient. The latter was now slumbering peacefully. His hand had relaxed its convulsive grasp of the buckskin pouch, and was resting beside him. Now was the time.

The stranger bent over him; then the deft “snick” of a sharp knife. The pouch was in his hand.

For the moment he felt like a common footpad. His heart beat violently as he regained his seat near the window and the light. For some minutes he sat watching the sick man. But the latter slept on peacefully. Now for the secret!

He ripped open one side of the pouch in such wise that it could easily be sewn up again. Then came a waterproof wrapper which, being unrolled, disclosed a large sheet of parchment-like paper covered with writing.

Down this he hurriedly ran his eye prior to a more careful perusal of its contents. But even this cursory glance was enough to make his face flush and his eye glisten. His hand shook so that it could scarcely hold the paper. Here was the key to wealth illimitable.

And then a strange and startling thing happened. The paper was suddenly snatched from his grasp.

So quickly was this done, so absolutely terrifying was his abrupt and wholly unlooked-for turn in the state of affairs, that his glance was hardly quick enough to mark the paper disappearing through the open window beside which he was seated, or the black, claw-like hand which had seized it. Yet he did only just see both.

He fell back in his chair in a cold sweat. Such a thing to happen in the dead midnight, with not a soul but himself astir. Small wonder that, unnerved by the dastardly act of robbery he had just committed, his thoughts should revert straight to Satan himself. The sick man was still slumbering peacefully.

Recovering his nerve to some extent, he rushed to the door and gained the outer air. All was still as death. As his sight became used to the modified gloom of the starlight he went round to the back of the house—made the complete circuit of it. Not a living thing was astir. He went even further afield, peering here, there, and everywhere. In vain. Then, with nerve and system shaken as they had never been before in his life, he returned indoors.

For long he sat motionless, pondering over this extraordinary occurrence. The first shock of surprise, the first involuntary access of superstition past, two considerations obtruded themselves. The prospect of possible wealth had been snatched from his grasp, literally strangled at its birth, for the paper looked genuine, and was certainly lucid enough, but it required studying, and that carefully. For the rest, how should he eventually account to its owner for its disappearance? And at this thought he began to feel exceedingly uncomfortable.

Not for long, however. The bag could easily be replaced, and the chances were that its owner would take for granted the security of its contents, and not go to the trouble of opening it to ascertain. Or he himself might be far enough away by that time, but that he was loth to abandon a fellow-countryman on a lonely sick-bed in that frightful wilderness; and we must, in justice to the man, record that this consideration was genuine and wholly untinged by his own reluctance to turn his back on the place until every effort to recover the precious document had been tried. Should, however, the worst come to the worst, and Renshaw be moved to assure himself of the safety of his secret, what could be easier than to persuade him that he had himself insisted on destroying it in his delirium?

He rose softly to hunt for a needle and some twine. Having found them he re-stitched the pouch, carefully copying the mode of stitching which had held it together before. Then he went over to the bedside to re-fasten it to the sick man’s neck.

This was no easy task. Poor Renshaw began to grow restless again, as though a glimmer of inspiration across his clouded and enfeebled brain warned him that his cherished secret had been tampered with. At last, however, through the exercise of consummate patience and care, the thing was done.

With a feeling of relief the stranger once more sought the outer air.

“What a fool the man must be!” he said to himself. “From the date of that paper he must have been in possession of the clue for at least two years, and yet he hasn’t turned it to account. The place should be easy to find, too; anyway, I’ll lay a guinea I’d have ferreted it out long before this. Rather! Long before!”

Thus he decided, overlooking the trifling probability that if Renshaw Fanning, with lifelong experience as a hunter, treasure-seeker, and adventurer in general, had failed to hit upon the mysterious locality, it was hardly to be supposed that he, Maurice Sellon, new arrival in South Africa, who, for instance, had been unable to travel across the Karroo plains without losing himself, would fare any better.

But then an under-estimate—either habitual or occasional—of his own merits or abilities did not rank among the failings of the said Maurice Sellon.