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Jane
led him toward the cabin, and the Frenchmen turned toward the beach from
which several of their fellows were advancing to meet them.
Clayton,
wishing to leave father and daughter alone, joined the sailors and
remained talking with the officers until their boat pulled away toward the
cruiser whither Lieutenant Charpentier was bound to report the unhappy
outcome of his adventure.
Then
Clayton turned back slowly toward the cabin.
His heart was filled with happiness.
The woman he loved was safe.
He
wondered by what manner of miracle she had been spared.
To see her alive seemed almost unbelievable.
As
he approached the cabin he saw Jane coming out. When she saw him she
hurried forward to meet him.
"Jane!"
he cried, "God has been good to us, indeed.
Tell me how you escaped--what form Providence took to save you
for--us."
He
had never before called her by her given name.
Forty-eight hours before it would have suffused Jane with a soft
glow of pleasure to have heard that name from Clayton's lips--now it
frightened her.
"Mr.
Clayton," she said quietly, extending her hand, "first let me
thank you for your chivalrous loyalty to my dear father. He has told me
how noble and self-sacrificing you have been.
How can we repay you!"
Clayton
noticed that she did not return his familiar salutation, but he felt no
misgivings on that score. She
had been through so much. This
was no time to force his love upon her, he quickly realized.
"I
am already repaid," he said. "Just
to see you and Professor Porter both safe, well, and together again. I do not think that I could much longer have endured the
pathos of his quiet and uncomplaining grief.
"It
was the saddest experience of my life, Miss Porter; and then, added to it,
there was my own grief--the greatest I have ever known.
But his was so hopeless--his was pitiful.
It taught me that no love, not even that of a man for his wife may
be so deep and terrible and self-sacrificing as the love of a father for
his daughter."
The
girl bowed her head. There
was a question she wanted to ask, but it seemed almost sacrilegious in the
face of the love of these two men and the terrible suffering they had
endured while she sat laughing and happy beside a godlike creature of the
forest, eating delicious fruits and looking with eyes of love into
answering eyes.
But
love is a strange master, and human nature is still stranger, so she asked
her question.
"Where
is the forest man who went to rescue you?
Why did he not return?"
"I
do not understand," said Clayton.
"Whom do you mean?"
"He
who has saved each of us--who saved me from the gorilla."
"Oh,"
cried Clayton, in surprise. "It
was he who rescued you? You have not told me anything of your adventure,
you know."
"But
the wood man," she urged. "Have
you not seen him? When we heard the shots in the jungle, very faint and
far away, he left me. We had
just reached the clearing, and he hurried off in the direction of the
fighting. I know he went to aid you."
Her
tone was almost pleading--her manner tense with suppressed emotion.
Clayton could not but notice it, and he wondered, vaguely, why she
was so deeply moved--so anxious to know the whereabouts of this strange
creature.
Yet
a feeling of apprehension of some impending sorrow haunted him, and in his
breast, unknown to himself, was implanted the first germ of jealousy and
suspicion of the ape-man, to whom he owed his life.
"We
did not see him," he replied quietly.
"He did not join us."
And then after a moment of thoughtful pause:
"Possibly he joined his own tribe--the men who attacked
us." He did not know why he had said it, for he did not believe
it.
The
girl looked at him wide eyed for a moment.
"No!"
she exclaimed vehemently, much too vehemently he thought.
"It could not be. They
were savages."
Clayton
looked puzzled.
"He
is a strange, half-savage creature of the jungle, Miss Porter.
We know nothing of him. He
neither speaks nor understands any European tongue--and his ornaments and
weapons are those of the West Coast savages."
Clayton
was speaking rapidly.
"There
are no other human beings than savages within hundreds of miles, Miss
Porter. He must belong to the
tribes which attacked us, or to some other equally savage--he may even be
a cannibal."
Jane
blanched.
"I
will not believe it," she half whispered.
"It is not true. You shall see," she said, addressing
Clayton, "that he will come back and that he will prove that you are
wrong. You do not know him as
I do. I tell you that he is a
gentleman."
Clayton
was a generous and chivalrous man, but something in the girl's breathless
defense of the forest man stirred him to unreasoning jealousy, so that for
the instant he forgot all that they owed to this wild demi-god, and he
answered her with a half sneer upon his lip.
"Possibly
you are right, Miss Porter," he said, "but I do not think that
any of us need worry about our carrion-eating acquaintance.
The chances are that he is some half-demented castaway who will
forget us more quickly, but no more surely, than we shall forget him.
He is only a beast of the jungle, Miss Porter."
The
girl did not answer, but she felt her heart shrivel within her.
She
knew that Clayton spoke merely what he thought, and for the first time she
began to analyze the structure which supported her newfound love, and to
subject its object to a critical examination.
Slowly
she turned and walked back to the cabin.
She tried to imagine her wood-god by her side in the saloon of an
ocean liner. She saw him eating with his hands, tearing his food like a
beast of prey, and wiping his greasy fingers upon his thighs.
She shuddered.
She
saw him as she introduced him to her friends--uncouth, illiterate--a boor;
and the girl winced.
She
had reached her room now, and as she sat upon the edge of her bed of ferns
and grasses, with one hand resting upon her rising and falling bosom, she
felt the hard outlines of the man's locket.
She
drew it out, holding it in the palm of her hand for a moment with
tear-blurred eyes bent upon it. Then
she raised it to her lips, and crushing it there buried her face in the
soft ferns, sobbing.
"Beast?"
she murmured. "Then God
make me a beast; for, man or beast, I am yours."
She
did not see Clayton again that day. Esmeralda
brought her supper to her, and she sent word to her father that she was
suffering from the reaction following her adventure.
The
next morning Clayton left early with the relief expedition in search of
Lieutenant D'Arnot. There
were two hundred armed men this time, with ten officers and two surgeons,
and provisions for a week.
They
carried bedding and hammocks, the latter for transporting their sick and
wounded.
It
was a determined and angry company--a punitive expedition as well as one
of relief. They reached the
sight of the skirmish of the previous expedition shortly after noon, for
they were now traveling a known trail and no time was lost in exploring.
From
there on the elephant-track led straight to Mbonga's village.
It was but two o'clock when the head of the column halted upon the
edge of the clearing.
Lieutenant
Charpentier, who was in command, immediately sent a portion of his force
through the jungle to the opposite side of the village.
Another detachment was dispatched to a point before the village
gate, while he remained with the balance upon the south side of the
clearing.
It
was arranged that the party which was to take its position to the north,
and which would be the last to gain its station should commence the
assault, and that their opening volley should be the signal for a
concerted rush from all sides in an attempt to carry the village by storm
at the first charge.
For
half an hour the men with Lieutenant Charpentier crouched in the dense
foliage of the jungle, waiting the signal.
To them it seemed like hours.
They could see natives in the fields, and others moving in and out
of the village gate.
At
length the signal came--a sharp rattle of musketry, and like one man, an
answering volley tore from the jungle to the west and to the south.
The
natives in the field dropped their implements and broke madly for the
palisade. The French bullets
mowed them down, and the French sailors bounded over their prostrate
bodies straight for the village gate.
So
sudden and unexpected the assault had been that the whites reached the
gates before the frightened natives could bar them, and in another minute
the village street was filled with armed men fighting hand to hand in an
inextricable tangle.
For
a few moments the blacks held their ground within the entrance to the
street, but the revolvers, rifles and cutlasses of the Frenchmen crumpled
the native spearmen and struck down the black archers with their bows
halfdrawn.
Soon
the battle turned to a wild rout, and then to a grim massacre; for the
French sailors had seen bits of D'Arnot's uniform upon several of the
black warriors who opposed them.
They
spared the children and those of the women whom they were not forced to
kill in self-defense, but when at length they stopped, parting, blood
covered and sweating, it was because there lived to oppose them no single
warrior of all the savage village of Mbonga.
Carefully
they ransacked every hut and corner of the village, but no sign of D'Arnot
could they find. They
questioned the prisoners by signs, and finally one of the sailors who had
served in the French Congo found that he could make them understand the
bastard tongue that passes for language between the whites and the more
degraded tribes of the coast, but even then they could learn nothing
definite regarding the fate of D'Arnot.
Only
excited gestures and expressions of fear could they obtain in response to
their inquiries concerning their fellow; and at last they became convinced
that these were but evidences of the guilt of these demons who had
slaughtered and eaten their comrade two nights before.
At
length all hope left them, and they prepared to camp for the night within
the village. The prisoners were herded into three huts where they were
heavily guarded. Sentries
were posted at the barred gates, and finally the village was wrapped in
the silence of slumber, except for the wailing of the native women for
their dead.
The next morning they set out upon the return march. Their
original intention had been to burn the village, but this idea was
abandoned and the prisoners were left behind, weeping and moaning, but
with roofs to cover them and a palisade for refuge from the beasts of the
jungle.
Slowly
the expedition retraced its steps of the preceding day.
Ten loaded hammocks retarded its pace.
In eight of them lay the more seriously wounded, while two swung
beneath the weight of the dead.
Clayton
and Lieutenant Charpentier brought up the rear of the column; the
Englishman silent in respect for the other's grief, for D'Arnot and
Charpentier had been inseparable friends since boyhood.
Clayton
could not but realize that the Frenchman felt his grief the more keenly
because D'Arnot's sacrifice had been so futile, since Jane had been
rescued before D'Arnot had fallen into the hands of the savages, and again
because the service in which he had lost his life had been outside his
duty and for strangers and aliens; but when he spoke of it to Lieutenant
Charpentier, the latter shook his head.
"No,
Monsieur," he said, "D'Arnot would have chosen to die thus.
I only grieve that I could not have died for him, or at least with
him. I wish that you could
have known him better, Monsieur. He
was indeed an officer and a gentleman--a title conferred on many, but
deserved by so few.
"He
did not die futilely, for his death in the cause of a strange American
girl will make us, his comrades, face our ends the more bravely, however
they may come to us."
Clayton
did not reply, but within him rose a new respect for Frenchmen which
remained undimmed ever after.
It
was quite late when they reached the cabin by the beach. A single shot
before they emerged from the jungle had announced to those in camp as well
as on the ship that the expedition had been too late--for it had been
prearranged that when they came within a mile or two of camp one shot was
to be fired to denote failure, or three for success, while two would have
indicated that they had found no sign of either D'Arnot or his black
captors.
So
it was a solemn party that awaited their coming, and few words were spoken
as the dead and wounded men were tenderly placed in boats and rowed
silently toward the cruiser.
Clayton,
exhausted from his five days of laborious marching through the jungle and
from the effects of his two battles with the blacks, turned toward the
cabin to seek a mouthful of food and then the comparative ease of his bed
of grasses after two nights in the jungle.
By
the cabin door stood Jane.
"The
poor lieutenant?" she asked. "Did
you find no trace of him?"
"We
were too late, Miss Porter," he replied sadly.
"Tell
me. What had happened?" she asked.
"I
cannot, Miss Porter, it is too horrible."
"You
do not mean that they had tortured him?" she whispered.
"We
do not know what they did to him BEFORE they killed him," he
answered, his face drawn with fatigue and the sorrow he felt for poor
D'Arnot and he emphasized the word before.
"BEFORE
they killed him! What do you
mean? They are not--? They
are not--?"
She
was thinking of what Clayton had said of the forest man's probable
relationship to this tribe and she could not frame the awful word.
"Yes,
Miss Porter, they were--cannibals," he said, almost bitterly, for to
him too had suddenly come the thought of the forest man, and the strange,
unaccountable jealousy he had felt two days before swept over him once
more.
And
then in sudden brutality that was as unlike Clayton as courteous
consideration is unlike an ape, he blurted out:
"When
your forest god left you he was doubtless hurrying to the feast."
He
was sorry ere the words were spoken though he did not know how cruelly
they had cut the girl. His
regret was for his baseless disloyalty to one who had saved the lives of
every member of his party, and offered harm to none.
The
girl's head went high.
"There
could be but one suitable reply to your assertion, Mr. Clayton," she
said icily, "and I regret that I am not a man, that I might make
it." She turned quickly and entered the cabin.
Clayton
was an Englishman, so the girl had passed quite out of sight before he
deduced what reply a man would have made.
"Upon
my word," he said ruefully, "she called me a liar. And I fancy I
jolly well deserved it," he added thoughtfully. "Clayton, my
boy, I know you are tired out and unstrung, but that's no reason why you
should make an ass of yourself. You'd better go to bed."
But
before he did so he called gently to Jane upon the opposite side of the
sailcloth partition, for he wished to apologize, but he might as well have
addressed the Sphinx. Then he
wrote upon a piece of paper and shoved it beneath the partition.
Jane
saw the little note and ignored it, for she was very angry and hurt and
mortified, but--she was a woman, and so eventually she picked it up and
read it.
MY
DEAR MISS PORTER:
I
had no reason to insinuate what I did.
My only excuse is that my nerves must be unstrung--which is no
excuse at all.
Please
try and think that I did not say it.
I am very sorry. I
would not have hurt YOU, above all others in the world.
Say that you forgive me.
WM. CECIL CLAYTON.
"He did think it or he never would have said it,"
reasoned the girl, "but it cannot be true--oh, I know it is not
true!"
One
sentence in the letter frightened her:
"I would not have hurt YOU above all others in the
world."
A
week ago that sentence would have filled her with delight, now it
depressed her.
She
wished she had never met Clayton. She
was sorry that she had ever seen the forest god.
No, she was glad. And
there was that other note she had found in the grass before the cabin the
day after her return from the jungle, the love note signed by Tarzan of
the Apes.
Who
could be this new suitor? If
he were another of the wild denizens of this terrible forest what might he
not do to claim her?
"Esmeralda! Wake up," she cried.
"You
make me so irritable, sleeping there peacefully when you know perfectly
well that the world is filled with sorrow."
"Gaberelle!"
screamed Esmeralda, sitting up. "What
is it now? A hipponocerous? Where is he, Miss Jane?"
"Nonsense,
Esmeralda, there is nothing. Go
back to sleep. You are bad enough asleep, but you are infinitely worse
awake."
"Yes
honey, but what's the matter with you, precious?
You acts sort of disgranulated this evening."
"Oh,
Esmeralda, I'm just plain ugly to-night," said the girl. "Don't
pay any attention to me--that's a dear."
"Yes,
honey; now you go right to sleep. Your
nerves are all on edge. What
with all these ripotamuses and man eating geniuses that Mister Philander
been telling about--Lord, it ain't no wonder we all get nervous
prosecution."
Jane
crossed the little room, laughing, and kissing the faithful woman, bid
Esmeralda good night.
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