Victor Durnovo lingered on at Loango. He elaborated and detailed to all interested, and to some whom it did not concern, many excuses for his delay in returning to his expedition, lying supine and attendant at Msala. It was by now an open secret on the coast that a great trading expedition was about to ascend the Ogowe river, with, it was whispered, a fortune awaiting it in the dim perspective of Central Africa.
Durnovo had already built up for himself a reputation. He was known as one of the foremost ivory traders on the coast—a man capable of standing against those enormous climatic risks before which his competitors surely fell sooner or later. His knowledge of the interior was unrivalled, his power over the natives a household word. Great things were therefore expected, and Durnovo found himself looked up to and respected in Loango with that friendly worship which is only to be acquired by the possession or prospective possession of vast wealth.
It is possible even in Loango to have a fling, but the carouser must be prepared to face, even in the midst of his revelry, the haunting thought that the exercise of the strictest economy in any other part of the world might be a preferable pastime.
During the three days following his arrival Victor Durnovo indulged, according to his lights, in the doubtful pleasure mentioned. He purchased at the best factory the best clothes obtainable; he lived like a fighting cock in the one so-called hotel—a house chiefly affected and supported by ship-captains. He spent freely of money that was not his, and imagined himself to be leading the life of a gentleman. He rode round on a hired horse to call on his friends, and on the afternoon of the sixth day he alighted from this quadruped at the gate of the Gordons' bungalow.
He knew that Maurice Gordon had left that morning on one of his frequent visits to a neighbouring sub-factory. Nevertheless, he expressed surprise when the servant gave him the information.
“Miss Gordon,” he said, tapping his boot with a riding-whip: “is she in?”
“Yes, sir.”
A few minutes later Jocelyn came into the drawing-room, where he was waiting with a brazen face and a sinking heart. Somehow the very room had power to bring him down towards his own level. When he set eyes on Jocelyn, in her fair Saxon beauty, he regained aplomb.
She appeared to be rather glad to see him.
“I thought,” she said, “that you had gone back to the expedition?”
And Victor Durnovo's boundless conceit substituted “feared” for “thought.”
“Not without coming to say good-bye,” he answered. “It is not likely.”
Just to demonstrate how fully he felt at ease, he took a chair without waiting for an invitation, and sat tapping his boot with his whip, looking her furtively up and down all the while with an appraising eye.
“And when do you go?” she asked, with a subtle change in her tone which did not penetrate his mental epidermis.
“I suppose in a few days now; but I'll let you know all right, never fear.”
Victor Durnovo stretched out his legs and made himself quite at home; but Jocelyn did not sit down. On the contrary, she remained standing, persistently and significantly.
“Maurice gone away?” he inquired.
“Yes.”
“And left you all alone,” in a tone of light badinage, which fell rather flat, on stony ground.
“I am accustomed to being left,” she answered gravely.
“I don't quite like it, you know.”
“YOU?”
She looked at him with a steady surprise which made him feel a trifle uncomfortable.
“Well, you know,” he was forced to explain, shuffling the while uneasily in his chair and dropping his whip, “one naturally takes an interest in one's friends' welfare. You and Maurice are the best friends I have in Loango. I often speak to Maurice about it. It isn't as if there was an English garrison, or anything like that. I don't trust these niggers a bit.”
“Perhaps you do not understand them?” suggested she gently.
She moved away from him as far as she could get. Every moment increased her repugnance for his presence.
“I don't think Maurice would endorse that,” he said, with a conceited laugh.
She winced at the familiar mention of her brother's name, which was probably intentional, and her old fear of this man came back with renewed force.
“I don't think,” he went on, “that Maurice's estimation of my humble self is quite so low as yours.”
She gave a nervous little laugh.
“Maurice has always spoken of you with gratitude,” she said.
“To deaf ears, eh? Yes, he has reason to be grateful, though perhaps I ought not to say it. I have put him into several very good things on the coast, and it is in my power to get him into this new scheme. It is a big thing; he would be a rich man in no time.”
He rose from his seat and deliberately crossed the room to the sofa where she had sat down, where he reclined, with one arm stretched out along the back of it towards her. In his other hand he held his riding-whip, with which he began to stroke the skirt of her dress, which reached along the floor almost to his feet.
“Would you like him to be in it?” he asked, with a meaning glance beneath his lashes. “It is a pity to throw away a good chance; his position is not so very secure, you know.”
She gave a strange little hunted glance round the room. She was wedged into a corner, and could not rise without incurring the risk of his saying something she did not wish to hear. Then she leant forward and deliberately withdrew her dress from the touch of his whip, which was in its way a subtle caress.
“Is he throwing away the chance?” she asked.
“No, but you are.”
Then she rose from her seat, and, standing in the middle of the room, faced him with a sudden gleam in her eyes.
“I do not see what it has to do with me,” she said; “I do not know anything about Maurice's business arrangements, and very little about his business friends.”
“Then let me tell you, Jocelyn—well, then, Miss Gordon, if you prefer it—that you will know more about one of his business friends before you have finished with him. I've got Maurice more or less in my power now, and it rests with you—”
At this moment a shadow darkened the floor of the verandah, and an instant later Jack Meredith walked quietly in by the window.
“Enter, young man,” he said dramatically, “by window—centre.”
“I am sorry,” he went on in a different tone to Jocelyn, “to come in this unceremonious way, but the servant told me that you were in the verandah with Durnovo and—”
He turned towards the half-breed, pausing.
“And Durnovo is the man I want,” weighing on each word.
Durnovo's right hand was in his jacket pocket. Seeing Meredith's proffered salutation, he slowly withdrew it and shook hands.
The flash of hatred was still in his eyes when Jack Meredith turned upon him with aggravating courtesy. The pleasant, half-cynical glance wandered from Durnovo's dark face very deliberately down to his jacket pocket, where the stock of a revolver was imperfectly concealed.
“We were getting anxious about you,” he explained, “seeing that you did not come back. Of course, we knew that you were capable of taking—care—of yourself.”
He was still looking innocently at the tell-tale jacket pocket, and Durnovo, following the direction of his glance, hastily thrust his hand into it.
“But one can never tell, with a treacherous climate like this, what a day may bring forth. However, I am glad to find you looking—so very fit.”
Victor Durnovo gave an awkward little laugh, extremely conscious of the factory clothes.
“Oh, yes; I'm all right,” he said. “I was going to start this evening.”
The girl stood behind them, with a flush slowly fading from her face. There are some women who become suddenly beautiful—not by the glory of a beautiful thought, not by the exaltation of a lofty virtue, but by the mere practical human flush. Jack Meredith, when he took his eyes from Durnovo's, glancing at Jocelyn, suddenly became aware of the presence of a beautiful woman.
The crisis was past; and if Jack knew it, so also did Jocelyn. She knew that the imperturbable gentlemanliness of the Englishman had conveyed to the more passionate West Indian the simple, downright fact that in a lady's drawing-room there was to be no raised voice, no itching fingers, no flash of fiery eyes.
“Yes,” he said, “that will suit me splendidly. We will travel together.”
He turned to Jocelyn.
“I hear your brother is away?”
“Yes, for a few days. He has gone up the coast.”
Then there was a silence. They both paused, helping each other as if by pre-arrangement, and Victor Durnovo suddenly felt that he must go. He rose, and picked up the whip which he had dropped on the matting. There was no help for it—the united wills of these two people were too strong for him.
Jack Meredith passed out of the verandah with him, murmuring something about giving him a leg up. While they were walking round the house, Victor Durnovo made one of those hideous mistakes which one remembers all through life with a sudden rush of warm shame and self-contempt. The very thing that was uppermost in his mind to be avoided suddenly bubbled to his lips, almost, it would seem, in defiance of his own will.
“What about the small—the small-pox?” he asked.
“We have got it under,” replied Jack quietly. “We had a very bad time for three days, but we got all the cases isolated and prevented it from spreading. Of course, we could do little or nothing to save them; they died.”
Durnovo had the air of a whipped dog. His mind was a blank. He simply had nothing to say; the humiliation of utter self-contempt was his.
“You need not be afraid to come back now,” Jack Meredith went on, with a strange refinement of cruelty.
And that was all he ever said about it.
“Will it be convenient for you to meet me on the beach at four o'clock this afternoon?” he asked, when Durnovo was in the saddle.
“Yes.”
“All right—four o'clock.”
He turned and deliberately went back to the bungalow.
There are some friendships where the intercourse is only the seed which absence duly germinates. Jocelyn Gordon and Jack had parted as acquaintances; they met as friends. There is no explaining these things, for there is no gauging the depths of the human mind. There is no getting down to the little bond that lies at the bottom of the well—the bond of sympathy. There is no knowing what it is that prompts us to say, “This man, or this woman, of all the millions, shall be my friend.”
“I am sorry,” he said, “that he should have had a chance of causing you uneasiness again.”
Jocelyn remembered that all her life. She remembers still—and Africa has slipped away from her existence for ever. It is one of the mental photographs of her memory, standing out clear and strong amidst a host of minor recollections.