The Rhodesian

In the velvety darkness on the night in question there is a single bright light pouring through the open doorway of a dwelling-hut. Through the enfolding silence breaks the bizarre music of an indifferent gramophone, recklessly mocking the sublime grandeur of the age-old antiquities. Laughter and gay music and devil-may-care colonists awaking echoes that have been more or less silent to civilisation for how many thousand years?

But on this particular evening it is as though some shadow had fallen upon the little camp. Nothing tangible--nothing that changed the general habits or surroundings--but a vague regret and introspective sadness upon the faces of two young men, usually full of careless content. Cecil Stanley, the more refined, a gentleman by birth and education, lounged low in his chair, with his hands behind his head and his feet on the table, and ever and anon his eyes looked with pained regret into the surrounding depths of night. Patrick Moore, with a grave face, cleaned his gun in a deeper silence than usual, proceeding with an occupation that was his joy on many evenings, whether the gun needed cleaning or not, rather as if it eased his mind to have his hands busy.

"I wonder if the Major will come through to-night?" he remarked, as if the silence were growing over-oppressive.

"Sure to," laconically. "The moon will be up directly, and he can't be very far away."

"I suppose he won't have heard?"

"Not likely to have done. Gad! I feel as if I'd give anything to have had a chance to stand three hours in that queue. It will hit him hard. If it's bad for us, who have at least known all along, it will be worse for him, hearing it suddenly at this late hour. Those newspapers to-day have made me feel like a kid on his first day at boarding-school. I'd like to cry if I weren't ashamed to."

"I liked that professor," said Moore, changing the subject. "Decent old Johnny, wasn't he? Jolly nice of him to bring all those papers in case he came across anyone glad of them."

"Quite a good old bird. That's a rum theory of his about the corpses in the temple being buried deeper than anyone has yet dug, and hung with valuable ornaments. Wouldn't it be a jolly lark to dig down for one and have a look at it!..."

He gave a low, half-hearted chuckle over his gruesome suggestion, and lazily getting to his feet, selected another tune for his gramophone.

Moore, busy still with his gun, gave a corresponding chuckle, and remarked:

"Begorra, lad!... if we could get a few out one at a time on moonlight nights, and fill up the blooming holes again, we shouldn't want any blasted machinery for our gold mine, except a pickaxe and a shovel."

"We'd want a bit of pluck, though. The ghosts of the corpses might come dancing round to have their say in the matter."

"We'd chance the ghosties. Shure! if they've been hanging round for three or four thousand years, they'd maybe like a new sensation by this time."

Stanley put on "The Stars and Stripes," wound up the gramophone, and slid into his lounge chair again.

Moore glanced up as the music started.

"What!... that thing again!... I'm beginning to feel like those old ghosts about it. The same moth-eaten tune for three or four thousand years. I'd like a new sensation."

"It can't be much staler than cleaning that old gun."

"Shure, she's a daisy." The Irishman looked tenderly at his treasure. "An' she just loves me to be fondlin' her like."

"If it weren't for the Major I don't know what is to prevent us proving the old man's theory," said Stanley, evidently harping again on his corpses.

"Him, and the bloomin' Company! The old gentlemen sittin' on the Board in London suddenly find that the Yankees have been snaffling a lot of valuable trinkets and things from the ruins while they took forty winks, and then they up and says no one's to look for anything more at all; not even a boney fidey Rhodesian, sweating in the police camp outside the walls."

"Still, it would be a rare lark to find a corpse with gold ornaments on it, and say nothing at all."

"And what should you be doing with the old corpse when you've taken the gold?"

"Oh! put him in the soup!" And Stanley slid lower in his chair, with another chuckle.

The gramophone ran down with a horrible grind, but its owner only looked at it dully and took no notice.

"Shall I wind up again?" Moore asked.

"No, let it rip. It sounds all wrong to-night. Everything is all wrong. The whole world gone awry. It's like being on another planet to be out here in this wilderness at such a time. I don't believe I've ever felt exiled before, but, begad! I do to-night. Let's turn in. Probably he won't come now."

Moore carried his gun into one of the huts and stood it carefully beside his little stretcher-bed. Stanley took the gramophone into another hut, and planked it down somewhat roughly on a table, evidently made by an amateur. Without going outside again, he shouted "Good night," and after that no sound broke the silence, except sundry mutterings from the Irishman, who had discovered an enormous frog under his bed, and his beloved pointer pup inside the blankets serenely sleeping.

All the next morning Stanley hung about the camp as one who waited, but it was not until three o'clock that Major Carew rode slowly up to the huts. As he dismounted, briefly acknowledging Stanley's salute, there was a characteristic absence of all superfluous words. The latter waited until the soldier-servant had led away the mule and another boy relieved the officer of his water-bottle, which he always carried himself, and then he looked hard at the thin, brown, resolute face, with an expression in his eyes that made Carew ask shortly:

"Any news?"

"Bad news from England. I suppose you haven't heard?"

"I haven't heard anything."

For one pulsing second the two men stood and looked at each other; and to a looker-on it might have appeared that, however laconic and indifferent their attitude, their relationship was not solely that of officer and subordinate. The elder man, in his gruff way, was the friend of the man under him. The younger had acquired a respect that held something deeper than casual liking, and his face showed it now as he hesitated before breaking his news. Then he said, very simply:

"The King is dead."

A quick, incredulous expression filled Carew's eyes.

"The King?..." he repeated. "Not ... surely not ..." He paused, leaving his sentence unfinished.

"Yes. King Edward. After a few days' illness."

The man's mouth grew rigid. He stood like a figure of bronze, staring with unseeing eyes to the far horizon. Stanley drew in his breath a little sharply. Yes, he had been right, the news had hit Carew very hard.

"When?..." came at last, abruptly.

"A fortnight ago. Just after you left. The funeral took place yesterday."

Carew made no comment. Evidently it was true. Little else mattered. Nearly all through this trek of his round those distant kraals his King had been lying dead, and he had not known it. Such a man as he is not stunned by tidings; but he recedes still further into his shell, if possible. There is no comment, no discussion, just a grim silence sealing a deep pain that cannot express itself.