Which apparently commonplace remark conveyed to these experienced listeners, three distinct meanings—first, that their position was exceedingly dangerous; secondly, that Lo Bengula was aware that even his authority might be insufficient to protect them from the fanatical hate of his warriors, but did not choose to say so in so many words; and lastly, the tone in which it was uttered conveyed a royal command. But to the recipients of the latter, it was exceedingly distasteful. An order of a more startling nature was, however, to follow.
“You, Isipau,” addressing Blachland. “Turn your waggon wheels homeward, before the going down of the sun.”
“Isipau,” signifying “mushroom,” was Blachland’s native name, and as such he had been known among the natives on his first arrival in the country, years before, owing to his inordinate partiality for that delectable vegetable wherever it could be obtained.
“When white people come into my country I welcome them as my friends,” went on the King. “When I give them leave to hunt and to trade, it is well. It is not well when they seek to look into things for which I have given them no permission. Now I have given an order, and I give not my orders twice. Fare ye well. Hambani-gahle.”
And without another word, Lo Bengula rose from his seat, and stalked within the stockade.
Blachland was the first to speak. “Damn!” he ejaculated.
“Be careful, man, for Heaven’s sake,” warned Sybrandt. “If they got wind you were cursing the King, then—good-night!” Then, turning to the old induna, who had quelled the outcry against them, “Who has poisoned the heart of the Great Great One against us, Faku? Have we not always been his friends, and even now we have done no wrong.”
The old induna shrugged his shoulders, as he answered—
“Who am I that I should pry into the King’s mind, Klistiaan? But his ‘word’ has been spoken in no uncertain voice,” he added significantly.
This there was no denying, and they took their leave. As they passed out of the kraal, the lines of warriors glowered at them like wolves, for though the conversation had been inaudible to them, they divined that these whites had incurred the King’s displeasure.
“You’ve got us into a pretty kettle of fish, Blachland,” said Young, rather curtly, as they rode in the direction of their camp.
“Don’t see it,” was the reply. “Now, my belief is, Lo Ben is shirty about our gold-prospecting. My scheme had nothing to do with it.”
“Blachland’s right, Young,” cut in Pemberton. “If it had been the other thing, we wouldn’t have got off so cheaply. Eh, Sybrandt?”
“Rather not. We may thank our stars it wasn’t the other. That rip Hlangulu must have been strung upon us as a spy. The old man is dead off any gold-prospecting. Afraid it’ll bring a swarm of whites into the country, and he’s right. Why, what’s this?”
All looked back, and the same idea was in the mind of each. Had Lo Bengula thought better of it, and yielded to the bloodthirsty clamour of his warriors? For the gates of Bulawayo were pouring forth a dense black swarm, which could be none other than the impi gathered there at the time of their visit,—and this, clear of the entrance, was advancing at a run, heading straight for the four equestrians.
These looked somewhat anxious. Their servants, the two Bechuana boys, went grey with fear.
“Is it a case of leg-bail?” said Blachland, surveying the on-coming horde.
“No, we must face it anyhow,” answered Pemberton, puffing at his pipe tranquilly. “Besides, we can’t leave these poor devils of boys to be murdered. Eh, Sybrandt?”
“Never run away, except in a losing fight and there’s no help for it,” was the reply.
Accordingly they kept their horses at a walk. But the moment was a thrilling one. On swept the impi; but now it had drawn up into a walk, and from its ranks arose a song—
“Uti mayihlome, mayihlome katese njebo!
Ise nompako wayo namanyatelo ayo!
Utaho njalo. Uti mayihlome katese njebo!”
This strophe—which may be rendered roughly to mean, “He says (i.e. the King), ‘Let it (the impi) arm. Let it arm at once. Come with its food, with its sandals.’ He says always. He says, ‘Let it arm at once!’”—was boomed forth from nearly two thousand throats, deafening, terrifying. But the impi swept by, and, passing within a hundred yards, singing in mighty volume its imposing war-song, shields waving, and assegais brandished menacingly towards the white men, it poured up the opposite slope, taking a straight line, significantly symbolical of the unswerving purpose it had been sent to fulfil.
An involuntary feeling of relief was upon the party, upon all but one, that is. For Hilary Blachland, noting the direction taken by this army of destroyers, could not but admit a qualm of very real and soul-stirring misgiving. That he had good grounds for the same we shall see anon.
Chapter Four.
Hermia.
“I don’t care. I’ll say it again. It’s a beastly shame him leaving you alone like this.”
“But you are not to say it again, or to say it at all. Remember of whom you are speaking.”
“Oh, no fear of my forgetting that—of being able to forget it. All the same, he ought to be ashamed of himself.”
And the speaker tapped his foot impatiently upon the virgin soil of Mashunaland, looking very hot, and very tall, and very handsome. The remonstrant, however, received the repetition of the offence in silence, but for a half inaudible sigh, which might or might not have been meant to convey that she was not nearly so angry with the other as her words seemed to imply or their occasion to demand. Then there was silence.
An oblong house, of the type known as “wattle and daub,” with high-pitched thatch roof, partitioned within so as to form three rooms—a house rough and ready in construction and aspect, but far more comfortable than appearances seemed to warrant. Half a dozen circular huts with conical roofs, clustered around, serving the purpose of kitchen and storehouse and quarters for native servants; beyond these, again, a smaller oblong structure, constituting a stable, the whole walled round by a stockade of mopani poles;—and there you have a far more imposing establishment than that usually affected by the pioneer settler. Around, the country is undulating and open, save for a not very thick growth of mimosa; but on one hand a series of great granite kopjes rise abruptly from the plain, the gigantic boulders piled one upon the other in the fantastic and arbitrary fashion which forms such a characteristic feature in the landscape of a large portion of Rhodesia.
“Well?”
The woman was the first to break the silence—equally a characteristic feature, a cynic might declare.
“Well?”
The answer was staccato, and not a little pettish. The first speaker smiled softly to herself. She revelled in her power, and was positively enjoying the cat and mouse game, though it might have been thought that long custom would have rendered even that insidious pastime stale and insipid.
“So sorry you have to go,” she murmured sweetly. “But it’s getting late, and you’ll hardly reach home before dark.”
The start—the blank look which overspread his features—all this, too, she thoroughly enjoyed.
“Have to go,” he echoed. “Oh, well—yes, of course, if you want to get rid of me—”
“I generally do want to