A VISION OF THE NIGHT.
All is not lost even when things look blackest on the surface. About those same days — while Psyche was mourning her lost love in Algeria — away to the south of the African desert, a belated caravan was struggling along on its way northward, bringing with it two weary and footsore Englishmen, refugees from Gordon’s conquered force at Khartoum. Both of them were clad from head to foot with scrupulous nicety in Arab costume, and both were to the outer eye of Islam devout Mohammedans of the purest orthodoxy.
After the final assault of the 26th of January, when those two stray Englishmen had been wounded and left for dead among the slaughtered in the great square, their bodies were taken up by the Mahdi’s people, and carried some time later into the rough hospital which Gordon had built, with the rest of the sufferers. There they revived against all hope. One of them, a tall dark man with a somewhat sad Oriental face, spoke Arabic with the perfect fluency of a native; by his aid, the other, of more European-looking and whiter type, had been recognised by the Mahdi’s troops as a good Moslem in the Egyptian service, and spared accordingly from the doom of slavery which was the universal fate of the remaining handful of Europeans left alive in conquered Khartoum.
After a month or two of convalescence in the captured city, the two refugees had started with a caravan going westward toward Darfur and the Central Soudan. Considine was right: his companions had escaped with their lives indeed from that carmagnole of slaughter. But to get away to Europe was a very different and much more difficult matter. Linnell knew, indeed, how impossible it would have been to force his road northward by the direct route to Dongola and Cairo, or even to seek the Red Sea coast at uncertain Suakin. To do either would be to proclaim themselves at once as Christians, or at least well-wishers to the Egyptian cause. Their sole chance of escape lay, therefore, in accepting both Islam and the Mahdi with perfect resignation, and trying to retreat upon the further interior, where the Khalifa reigned supreme, rather than in attempting to open communications northward with Egypt and the infidel.
The painter’s plan, accordingly, was to cross the desert by Ideles and Ouargla, and to come out with the caravans that abut at last on the Mediterranean in Algerian territory.
It was a bold design. The notion was indeed both a difficult and a dangerous one. In order to accomplish it, they had to pass through the midst of a fanatical population, lately excited to the highest pitch of religious frenzy by the Mahdi’s revolt, and ready to kill at a moment’s notice, without trial or appeal, any man even suspected of being not merely a Christian, but even an orthodox anti-Mahdist Mussulman. The slightest departure from the intricate rules of Moslem ceremonial, the faintest indication of ignorance or unfamiliarity as to the endless details of Moslem ritual, the tiniest slip in speech or manners, would have entailed upon them both instant destruction.
Linnell, however, was an old hand at the devices and shifts of Oriental travel: he taught his companion all he knew himself: and by sedulously giving out that they were Asiatic Mussulmans, retiring from Khartoum after having lost their all during the protracted siege, he succeeded in drawing off suspicion from his too dangerous neighbour, who had thus no need to communicate directly with the Arabs at all. To the other members of the various caravans they joined on their way — for they shifted often of set purpose — they were merely Mohammed Ali of Sind, and Seyyid Ben Marabet of Upper India. Mohammed Ali could speak Arabic well; the Seyyid, as was natural, though skilled in the Koran, knew no language at all save his own local Urdu tongue.
On such terms the fugitives had managed to make their way by long, slow stages as far as Tintellust, whence they were endeavouring now to cross the main desert by the accustomed track to Ideles and Ouargla.
Ghastly as all their experiences of Eastern travel had been, this particular march was the ghastliest and most dangerous of any. Suspicion closed in upon them, they knew not why. The nearer they came to Christian rule the more did their companions appear to distrust them. On one particular night, during that terrible march, the camels had all been arranged for the evening, the Arabs were all resting in their places in the tents, and the two Europeans in a remote corner sat chatting together wearily and in doubt about their further progress.
‘Austen,’ Linnell began, in a very common-place and natural tone, dissembling his feelings, ‘don’t look at me as if I were saying anything the least out of the way, and don’t speak as if you were at all alarmed or suspicious; but there’s danger ahead. Things are coming to a crisis. I’ve been expecting it daily for some time past, and now I’m sure it’s actually upon us. You made one or two mistakes in the mid-day prayers, I observed, to-day: omitted to turn to Mecca after the last clause of the Litany of the Faithful — and the Sheikh, I’m sure, suspects you of being a Christian.’
‘You don’t really think so?’ Sir Austen answered, making his tone seem as simple and unconcerned as possible, in spite of the alarm this announcement inspired, for fear the Arabs should notice they were talking secrets together.
‘Yes, I do,’ Linnell replied, as jauntily as before. ‘The position’s critical: extremely critical. We must be very cautious how we proceed in future. A word, a look, a movement may lose us all. There’s another caravan gone on, you know, towards Ideles yesterday. If only we could slink away safely to that one, where we’re not known, we might avoid any further suspicion for the present. But here we shall be watched with a thousand eyes, and the tiniest new error will seal our death-warrant.’
Sir Austen pretended to look idly around.
‘What do you propose to do, then?’ he asked, with a careless expression. ‘Do you think it would be possible for us to give them the slip, and steal clear away to the party in front of us?’
‘If it’s done at all,’ Linnell answered promptly, pretending to be deeply engaged in discussing the arrangement of his native boots, which he turned over and inspected with minute care, ‘it must be done this very night, not a moment later: delay would be fatal. Just look at this hole here. Could I sew it up, do you think? Ah, yes, I thought so. The fastest camels have done comparatively little for their powers to-day. If we took them out by three in the morning they’d be fresh enough for our purpose, and we might get such a start that the caravan people could never overtake us with their lumbering beasts; and we could easily make the others believe we’d been forced to fly from robber Bedouins.’
‘Shall we risk it?’ Sir Austen asked, turning over the boot, and pretending to be engaged in discussing the ways and means of mending it.
‘We will,’ Linnell answered. ‘It’s agreed, then. Good. At three o’clock. We’ve had many close shaves of our lives together, Austen, and I’m almost beginning to get tired of them now; but for one person’s sake I’ll have a try once more. I want, if I can, to get back with a whole skin to England.’
Sir Austen gathered up his burnous and examined the hem.
‘Charlie,’ he said penitently, ‘this is all my fault. Why trouble yourself with me? There’d be no danger for you if I were left behind. Go on yourself alone, and leave me, if you will, to their tender mercies.’
‘No, no,’ Linnell answered, hardly repressing his natural horror at such a proposition. ‘We’ve risked it together so many months now, and we’ll risk it to the end, come what may of it.’
He spoke as carelessly and as lightly as he could; but his voice even so had a tinge of solemnity that roused the Sheikh’s unfavourable attention.
‘Mohammed Ali,’ he cried, gazing over at him curiously from under his eyebrows, ‘what are you talking about with your countryman so much? The servants of the Prophet should rest in peace. It is not well that a noise should be made in the tents at nightfall.’
‘I will rest, Sheikh, in Allah’s name,’ Linnell made answer piously, with an appropriate gesture. ‘Not another word, Austen,’ he added warningly. ‘He’s very suspicious.’
‘Mohammed Ali,’ the Sheikh said again, glaring most ominously at both the men ‘come away from your countryman and sit by my side. Let Seyyid Ben Marabet take his place at the far end in the corner by the baggage.’
Linnell knew better than to demur to this order. He rose at once, with a most submissive air, as becomes a Moslem, and took up his place where the Sheikh beckoned him. Sir Austen also stood up instinctively, and moved to the spot that Linnell’s hand pointed out in silence. In such a case, implicit obedience was their only chance of avoiding immediate murder.
Reduced for the moment to absolute quiet, Linnell curled himself up in his thick burnous and tried his best to snatch a little sleep, but found he could not. The terrors and dangers of their situation weighed too heavily on his mind to admit of rest. He waited anxiously for three o’clock to come. He dared not even turn where he lay, for fear of arousing fresh distrust. He held himself in a cramped position for hours at a stretch, rather than wake the Sheikh or the Arabs from their snoring slumber.
Sir Austen was more fortunate. Wrapped up in his rugs, he dozed off for awhile in the corner where he lay, and refreshed himself against the toil they must necessarily endure before morning. But even he could hardly sleep for excitement and suspicion. His rest was very broken indeed. He turned and tossed with occasional low groans. About half-past two his head moved violently. Some strange and horrible vision was sweeping before his eyes, Linnell felt certain.
And so in truth it was. A strange and very unnatural nightmare. Sir Austen, as he lay on the bare ground, curled up in his burnous, and grasping his pistol, was dreaming a dream so terrible in its way that it might well have made Linnell’s blood run cold within him had he only known it.
A ghastly dream — cruel, wicked, horrible! On the sand of the desert, in the early dawn, Sir Austen seemed to his disordered fancy — what will not sleep suggest? — to be leaning over a body — a lifeless body — he knew not whose, or how it came there. A great silence brooded over the scene: a red-hot sun: a brown, hot desert: and full in its midst that mysterious body! It was a bleeding body, bleeding from the head. He looked at it close. Wounded: ah, wounded — a great round wound on the right temple. Shot; but by whom? Sir Austen, turning and groaning, knew not.
His dream paused. He slept. Then he dreamt again. The same dream as ever. An awful mystery seemed to surround that body. Sir Austen, gasping in his sleep for breath, was dimly conscious of some terrible remorse, some awful link that seemed to bind his own soul to that murdered corpse. Ah, heaven, what link? Whose it was, or why he had shot it, he had no idea. Face and form suggested nothing to him. All was vague and blank and terrible. But an appalling consciousness of guilt and crime seemed to swamp his senses. He knew only in some dim, half-uncertain way that the man was dead — and that he himself felt like a murderer.
He turned restlessly once more upon his outstretched rug. With the turn came a change. The light of the oil-lamp was flickering on his eyes. It brought a new chapter in his uncertain vision. His dream melted away to an English lawn. His wife was there — that dear young wife of his — and she read him a letter: an important letter. It was a lawyer’s letter about some inherited wealth. He hardly understood at first what it was all about; but in some dim fashion he fancied to himself he had come unexpectedly into a great property. Something about a lawsuit with somebody who claimed to inherit the estate. ‘Pooh, pooh,’ he heard his lawyer say idly in his dream; ‘the girl hasn’t got a leg to stand upon.’
He dozed for awhile in a quieter fashion. Then he found himself once more crawling on all-fours on the desert sand. The corpse was there, whiter and more horrible to behold than ever. It lay on its face, weltering in blood. A hideous curiosity possessed his soul. He must find out whose body it was. He turned it over and gazed on its features. Oh, horror, he could hardly believe his eyes! It was Charles Linnell who lay dead and stiff before him!
Then a hideous truth flashed over him like lightning. Murdered! And by him! For his money, his money!
With a start and a cry, Sir Austen awoke. He sat up in his horror and gazed wildly around. Thank heaven — thank heaven, it was all a dream! He wasn’t a criminal! He wasn’t a murderer! There stood Charles Linnell, gazing at him reproachfully, not dead, but alive, one finger on his lip, and one on the watch he held out before him. Sir Austen, remembering where he was and how, took it all in at a rapid glance. It was the stroke of three — and his terror-stricken cry had almost roused the slumbering Arabs. In a second he was awake and all himself again.
Noiselessly and silently they crept from the tent, and stole unperceived into the open desert. Sir Austen’s heart beat hard even yet with the horror and awe of that strange awakening; but he stilled it with an effort and stole on by his cousin. They cleared the tents, and reached the camels’ tether. Thank heaven, thank heaven! it was all a vision.
Yet what awful suggestion of Satan was this that had come to him all unconscious in his dreaming moments? If Charles Linnell were even now to die —— He shuddered to think he could even dream it.