We have had alarums and excursions, as Shakespeare says. You will see by this address that I am on the mainland with my husband. When Captain B. disappeared last September into the _ewigkeit_ the Agency at Unguja began receiving disquieting stories as to what was taking place in his absence. He had only left an Indian clerk in charge, and complaints arose from Indian merchants and English missionaries that no one could attend to their business. So Sir G. D. thought it best to send Spence over here to take charge, and, of course, I came with him to help him to interpret.
We found everything (a month ago) in a terrible muddle. The consulate is filthily dirty, the archives are just anyhow, and Spence fears a considerable sum is missing from the Consular receipts, or else that the clerk is muddled in his accounts. But all this you will hear officially.
Meantime, we are all uneasy about Captain B.'s disappearance. He left here last August with some idea of letting the missionaries know there was danger of ah Arab attack on all white people independent of their nationality, German or English. He seems to have translated Sir G.'s brief instructions into a permission to make a vast tour of the interior--a delightful thing to do, no doubt, but not when you have a Consulate to look after. He greatly alarmed all the missionaries, and, as it appears, somewhat needlessly. Those who have their stations in Usagara and farther south are very angry with him. He arrived at their stations early in September and ordered them to retire on the coast--or at any rate send their wives and children there, as the Arabs might attack at once. And after they had obeyed him the attacks never came off! One of the missionary ladies was in a certain condition, it appears, and the hurried journey so upset her that--how shall I phrase it?--her hopes were disappointed.
He next appeared at a place called Hangodi--according to native report--and was so anxious about the safety of a fair lady there (the missionary young woman who travelled out with him and me a year and a half ago)--that he took her away with him and has seemingly gone waltzing off to the unknown with this fair charge. Quite romantic, isn't it? In this case his warning as to an impending attack seems to have been only too well founded, if what has been reported to the Germans is true. Soon after he left this place--Hangodi--it was apparently attacked and destroyed and the missionaries all killed--except, of course, the lady who left with him. Ill-natured people will naturally ask why he did not stay and defend the station.
It is only two days off Christmas, and I can picture to myself the happy preparations going on at Spilsbury--the carols the village children are practising for Christmas Day, and the Christmas-tree which I am sure Mrs. Molyneux and your daughter are preparing for their reward.
These ridiculous sentimental Germans are, of course, getting up Christmas-trees, too, and are practising Carols to be sung round them, though the town is still more or less besieged on the landward side. _Who_ and _what_ was Good King Wenceslaus, and why should we sing about him at Christmastide? There is no library here, except the one they have at the French Mission, and that mentions nothing about Germany.
We are told here that a certain Captain Wissmann will soon arrive with a large force of Sudanese soldiers to take command and finish the Arabs.
Still no news of Stanley, except it be the wildest, most improbable rumours. If he really emerges from the heart of Africa it will only be--I fear--to fall into some ambush laid by the Arabs.
With our united kindest regards and best wishes for 1889,
Believe me, dear Mr. Molyneux, Yours sincerely, EMILIA BAZZARD.
Roger and Lucy reached Unguja in their Arab dau at the end of December, when the Europeans therefore were recovering from the surfeit of Christmas junketings and preparing for another round of New Year festivities, but a little bit peevish and liverish in the interval. The arrival of the British Consul for Zangia was not unexpected, because telegraphic news of his emergence from the interior had already reached the British Agency. In the afternoon of December 29th he walked into the office of the Agency and reported himself to Sir Godfrey Dewburn....
"Ah! my _dear_ Brentham, _how_ are you? _What_ a time you must have had, to be sure! We all gave you up for lost, or thought you had gone in search of Stanley or Emin, or were off to attack the Mahdi. Well: and how is the fair companion of your travels, Mrs.--Mrs. ... er ..."
_Brentham_: "Mrs. John Baines? She is, I believe, at Mr. Callaway's at the present moment. I advised her to go there as he is Agent here for their Mission, and would probably have definite news about--about--the attack on her husband's station ... and the results. Have you heard anything, Sir?"
_Sir Godfrey_: "Nothing more than the rumour that after you left it was attacked, and, I think, all the Whites were killed ..."
At this moment a clerk comes in and says: "This is a note with an enclosure, Sir Godfrey, from Mr. Callaway." Sir Godfrey asks Brentham to be seated and hastily runs his eye over a very long communication. Five minutes elapse. Then whilst he is still reading, another door leading to the residential part of the Agency opens and there appears a handsome woman of middle age, with the stamp of elegance and fashion upon her, dressed in some agreeable adaptation of an Englishwoman's dress for the tropics. She says, "Godfrey, my dear, tea's ready and as you don't like it drawn or cold I thought if I came myself--but I see you have a visitor...."
"Oh! Ah! ... Yes.... To be sure.... Er.... Brentham, this is Lady Dewburn--" (They shake hands. Lady Dewburn looks him over approvingly.) "You'd better come in and have tea with us and then we can talk over this extraordinary communication of Callaway's. It couldn't have come more appropriately. Evidently it must have been brought by your dau. It's been sent down by some Arab and it is all about the attack on the station where these missionary friends of yours were living. It seems they were not all killed, two of 'em at any rate ... though I think the husband of your lady friend _was_.... But come along and we'll have a confab all about it. The Bazzards are over at your Consulate on the mainland, so whilst you're here you'd better take possession of their quarters. The golden-haired Emily says she left it in apple-pie order when she departed for Medina.... This way ... would you like to wash your hands first? You look quite the Wild Man of Borneo, and I don't wonder.... _Must_ have had a beastly time.... I should suggest a whisky and soda first and tea afterwards...."
Lucy meantime was reading Ann Anderson's letter, given in a previous chapter. She had been placed once more in the bedroom she had occupied in Mr. Callaway's house before her marriage, and shuddered at the memories it enshrined. Dear, kind Mrs. Stott was far away in the Happy Valley ... and she could never again hear John's voice calling to her from the courtyard under the great fig-trees that the Sultan's carriage was waiting hard-by to take them for a drive; or making some other proposition which she probably snubbed in fretfulness.
She was consumed with remorse. Ann's statement that in his last agonies, dying with poisoned blood, he had only thought and spoken of _her_, made her heart ache, almost literally--the aching of unshed tears over the irrevocable. She had not been unfaithful to him in body; but in mind, in desire, _yes_: from the day of the marriage onwards, and never more so than from the day of her departure from Hangodi. She knew she had hoped then that somehow this departure, this desertion of John when danger was approaching--might be the beginning of her severance from him, and lead to her union with Roger. To _him_ at any time during the long _safari_ she would have surrendered herself....
Yet though her upper consciousness--the "speaking to one's self" (which we almost do sometimes aloud, as if to an audience that may register our words and resolves)--asserted that the _only_ reparation she _could_ make was _never_ to see Roger again--(what a mercy he had behaved better than she had done!)--her innermost intention was to stay on in Unguja on some pretext or other, in the faint hope he might ... _might_ ... "do the right thing," as Ann had put it ... might marry her. If he would _only_ do that her whole remaining life should be _one long atonement_ to John. She would _never_ forget him and his unselfish love of a shallow, ungrateful woman.
Mr. Callaway had hinted she might like to take the next steamer home: there was one going in a week--back to England. But how could she go back ... and face Mrs. Baines ... and live on her parents? John had probably no money to leave her; the Mission, after so short a term of married life, would certainly give her no pension ... why should it? The post of National school-teacher at Aldermaston was long ago filled up. And could she even resume her life there? At no great distance was Engledene, with Lord and Lady Silchester. Lady Silchester she vaguely dreaded as a person who might mock at her.--She must have heard something about her from Captain Brentham. What--what--_what_ was she to do? Insist on remaining out in Africa and rejoin the Mission? And work under Ann? The thought of the altered circumstances repelled her. Who would care _now_ if she were ill? She had had several illnesses and many fits of malaise--and tears of self-pity now ran down her cheeks. And how _good_ and _uncomplaining_----here choking sobs, hiccups, almost a loud wailing intervened--dear John had been. The cups of broth he had brought to her bedside, the little meals to tempt her appetite.... And Roger? ... The equal solicitude--the interest _he_ had shown, even in her whims!