by M. M. Kaye
“Then why?” began Clayton, and was interrupted by his stepfather who said harshly: “I guess we’re none of us interested in why you’re here or how you got here or who you want to see. But unless you get out here fast I’m sending for the guard.”
“What guard?” enquired Rory blandly. “I don’t think there is one any more.”
“I wouldn’t count on that! There’re still enough white men in the city who’d be happy to form one, so I’d advise you to leave.”
“Certainly, sir. Are you coming with me. Hero?”
Clay’s fist shot out, and Rory ducked with equal swiftness, avoiding the blow, and the next instant the Consul had gripped his step-son’s arm and jerked him back: “That’s enough. Clay!” He turned his head and spoke a curt word of dismissal to the saucer-eyed servants who had remained gaping at the back of the hall, and when the door had closed behind them said tersely: “I’m not having any brawling before the servants—or anyone else! Now get out of here, Frost.”
“Well, Hero?” enquired Rory.
“Can I take the children?”
“Why not? there’s plenty of room.”
“Hero!” cried Clay: “You couldn’t Don’t you dare! I forbid you!
I—” his voiced cracked.
The Consul said sharply: “Be quiet, Clay! There’s no question of her going.”
“Yes, there is,” said Hero. “I’m sorry, Uncle Nat. I’m so very sorry. I wish—” She broke off and shook her head in helplessness and regret, and saw her uncle’s harassed face harden into deep harsh lines.
Mr Hollis was a tolerant man, but he had endured much of late and now suddenly he reached the end of his patience. “Very well,” said Uncle Nat quietly and coldly. “You are of age; and as you have been at some pains to demonstrate, your own mistress. But I’m telling you, Hero, if you go with that slaver you don’t come back to this house. I shall wash my hands of you and have nothing further to do with you. Is that clear?”
“Yes, Uncle Nat. I—I’m sorry.”
“So am I. I’ll see you get your things. Goodbye.”
“Goodbye, Uncle Nat.”
“Hero!” Clay flung off his stepfather’s restraining hand and lunged at her, and Rory put out a foot, tripping him, and hit him as he fell.
The blow was not all it might have been, for Rory was hampered by the baby. But he had a score to settle, and it made up in viciousness what it lacked in the way of science. It seemed to lift Clayton off his feet, and sent him spinning sideways to trip and fall on his face, spread-eagled and inert across the threshold of the drawing-room door.
“I owed you that,” observed Rory dispassionately. “Come on. Hero. Time we were going.”
He bent and picked up a weeping toddler, and they turned together and went out into the rain, the bewildered children following docilely at their heels.
38
“History seems to be repeating itself again,” observed Captain Frost, regarding his soaking guest critically. “You’d better get out of those things as soon as possible. Dahili will have to lend you something dry until your own gear arrives.”
They were back once more in The Dolphins’ House, and although the majority of the household had shown little enthusiasm at the prospect of taking in a batch of starving waifs who might well be tainted with the cholera, the Captain’s orders, backed by several texts from the Koran extolling the merits of charity, had overcome their reluctance.
“All things are with Allah,” agreed Hajji Ralub. “It is good to feed the hungry and fatherless: and if the hour and the manner of our death be already written, why should we trouble ourselves over what is ordained? God is great!”
The children had been removed to be fed, a message dispatched to Dr Kealey and Jumah sent out to see about laying in further supplies of milk; and Hero and Captain Frost were alone in the long upper room where the white cockatoo still paraded on its silver perch and the Persian kitten, now grown into a large and stately cat, slept curled up on a cushion.
Hero had been barely conscious of her wet clothing for the past hour, but now she looked down at it, grimacing at the sight of the spreading pool that darkened the carpet about her feet, and glancing at Rory’s own drenched clothes, said: “Yours are just as wet.”
“So they are. When did you last have something to eat?”
“I don’t know,” said Hero, startled. “Noon, I guess. Why?”
“You look almost as thin as those children. It doesn’t suit you. You ought never to have stayed behind. Why on earth couldn’t you behave sensibly for once and go along with your aunt and cousin and all the rest of them?”
Hero raised her eyes from the damp stains on the carpet and looked at him briefly, and looked away again without answering; and Rory said brusquely and as though she had spoken: “I know. And I’m deeply grateful to you.”
“You don’t have to be,” said Hero bleakly. “It wasn’t any use.”
“Don’t say it like that. It may be a platitude, but it’s the trying that counts.”
“Who with?” asked Hero bitterly.
“Yourself, of course. Who else? You’re the one you’ve got to live with. If anyone had told you that all those children you’ve collected would die anyway inside a week, I don’t suppose you’d have left them there. Or would you?”
“No. And they won’t die!”
“They may. You’ve got to face that. And if they do—”
“They will not!” cried Hero passionately. “They will not! They’re not ill, they’re only hungry. And there must be hundreds more like them—thousands. If we could only—”
Rory laughed and flung up a protesting hand: “Don’t say it! I ought to have known that worse was to come. Go and get yourself into some dry clothes before you contract pneumonia. I warn you, if you go sick on me I shall throw your protegés into the street I don’t feel capable of running an orphan asylum single-handed.”
Hero stared at him for a long moment, her eyes wide and questioning. Then colour rushed up to her white face, making it young and glowing and alive again, and she gave a gasp of relief:
“Thank you!” breathed Hero, and smiled at him as though he had given her some fabulous present.
The curtain swung into place behind her, and listening to the sound of her footsteps running along the verandah, Rory’s own smile was twisted and more than a little wry.
It was disconcerting to find himself trapped at last by an emotion he had sedulously avoided for years and ended by fancying himself immune to. And by Hero Hollis, of all people! One of the last women in the world, he would have said, to hold any appeal for him—which was possibly why this had taken him unawares. He had not even seen it coming, for though he had thought about her a good deal during the past weeks, it was always as someone he would never see again, and he had accepted that: there was a finality about it that made her a part of the past and far out of reach, and he was not given to vain regrets and useless speculation. Besides, his own life was likely to terminate painfully in the near future, and he was confident that someone—Dan or her family—would have arranged to send her away to safety once the cholera took hold. She would be well on her way home, and that, as far as he was concerned, was the end of it. Which was just as well for both their sakes.
He had been wholly unprepared for Batty’s disclosure that Hero was still in Zanzibar. And even less prepared for the violence of his own reaction to it. It was as though someone had hit him across the face without provocation or warning, and after the first blinding moment of disbelief, shock had exploded into rage and he had been seized with a fury of anger against Batty, Dan, Clayton, the Hollises and Colonel Edwards for allowing her to stay—and with Hero herself for being so exasperatingly, idiotically obstinate as to insist upon staying.
Barely pausing to change out of the rags in which he had left the Fort, he had gone to die Consulate with no very clear idea in view beyond the satisfaction of telling them all exactly what he thought of them. And it was only when he wal
ked in through the open door and saw her standing there, wet and desperate and once again disastrously involved in benevolence, that he had realized what she meant to him. Perhaps because she could hardly have looked less physically alluring, yet it had made no difference at all to the way she looked to him; and he had known in that moment that it never would…
It had not been a pleasant discovery. And even less so was the belated realization that part of the blind rage that had driven him to abduct her had nothing whatever to do with Zorah, but had had its roots in jealousy. Jealousy of Clayton Mayo, who must at all costs be prevented from marrying her, and if that were not possible, should at least only take her at second hand.
I must be mad! thought Rory. He shrugged philosophically, and went off to change his own soaked garments for the second time that day, and to inform Ralub that a further influx of young visitors could be expected shortly and arrangements must be made to accommodate them.
He might have felt less philosophic about it had he known the full extent of what he had let himself in for.
One of the infants—the first that Hero had acquired—died on the following day, and another a day later. But since their deaths were due to starvation and neglect, and not to cholera, the household of the Dolphins were not unduly dismayed. And in any case, by that time there were at least a dozen other infants in the house in addition to the original number, as well as over twenty children ranging in age from two to six years old.
It was Batty who had carried the message to Dr Kealey, and the doctor had called at the earliest opportunity, and not only promised his help, but brought with him twin babies, barely a month old, whom he had found wailing in an abandoned house in which their parents lay dead.
“I’ve been wondering what on earth to do with them,” confessed Dr Kealey, “for Milly is in a sad way. What with boils and prickly-heat and a sore throat, she is in no condition to look after the little things, and my servants threatened to leave if I brought them into the house. I blessed you when I heard of this.”
“Uncle Nat didn’t,” said Hero ruefully. “I’m afraid he’s very angry with me.”
“I can’t say I’m surprised—all things considered. But then he’s not a medical man, and he is your uncle and responsible for you, which makes it difficult for him. He’ll come round.”
“I wish I thought so. But I don’t think he will. He doesn’t understand how I can come here. Because of Rory—I mean Captain Frost.”
“I’m not sure I understand that myself,” admitted Dr Kealey candidly. “But I’m profoundly grateful that you should have felt you could. If you can help to save even a small proportion of these unfortunate infants, it will be something. There’s nothing much that we can do about their elders, and one can only hope that they’ll learn a few elementary lessons in sanitation from this. Though I doubt it. They appear to look upon such visitations as a necessary evil: an affliction sent by Allah, or witchcraft And when it’s over they’ll forget about it until the next time, and do nothing towards preventing it from happening again. The only thing they are doing about it now is to say their prayers and let off firecrackers to scare away the evil spirits, or paint their faces white. But they still fling all their refuse into the open street and think nothing of allowing corpses to lie about unburied. I tell you, it’s hopeless!”
It did not seem so to Hero. Admittedly two of the babies had died, but the rest were responding well to food and care and already looked plumper, and within three days the original handful of children had swollen to more than fifty, with the numbers increasing hourly. Word had gone round that both food and shelter were obtainable at The Dolphins’ House, and the doors were besieged by a clamorous mob begging for admittance.
Left to herself, Hero might well have admitted them all. But she was not so left. Rory had been adamant in the matter. She could take in children who were too young to fend for themselves, but not their parents or any other adults.
“If we once start that, we’re lost,” said Rory. “You’ve got to draw the line somewhere. Anything over the age of eight will have to fend for itself. Well, ten then! But that’s the limit!”
“Couldn’t we just take in a few of the women?” pleaded Hero. “They could help with the children, and we need help so badly.”
Rory could see the sense of that, but he had not given way, and backed by Ralub and his crew had finally succeeded in persuading the crowd to disperse and to accept the fact that only young children would be admitted.
It was a measure of his authority and the esteem in which his crew and the household held him, that apart from a few murmurs not one of them had rebelled on discovering that Miss Hollis had been given permission to turn the house into a temporary orphanage. They had not forgotten Hero’s valiant fight to save the life of Zorah’s child; nor were they left long without outside assistance, for once again Mrs Platt’s carriage edged its painful way through the rain and the narrow streets, and stopping before the door of The Dolphins’ House, deposited Olivia Credwell and a large portmanteau.
“Your uncle told me where you’d gone,” explained Olivia, shaking the wet out of an absurd ribbon-trimmed bonnet.’ I’m afraid he is exceedingly angry with you, and it seems that Clay’s nose is broken, which is die greatest pity as it will quite ruin his looks. But though it was all right before (your being here I mean, dear, not Clay’s nose), now that Captain Frost is here too you really should have a chaperone, if only to make it look a little less…Well, anyway, I know that you were bound to need help, and I don’t mind in the least where I sleep. The floor will do. And you need not think that you can send me away, because I’m not going to go!”
Hero had not tried very hard to make her, for she was beginning to realize the full magnitude of the task she had so impetuously undertaken, and the extent of the disaster that might result if it failed.
“You can’t win, miss. Not nowise,” Batty had warned her. “If them nippers ups and dies, the ‘ole town’ll blame you, and like as not try and bum the ‘ouse down over our ‘eads. And if they lives you’ll get no word of thanks. That’s the way it goes, for they don’t know no better—the poor bleedin’ “eathens.”
Rory had merely laughed when she taxed him with this, and said that Batty was a croaking old pessimist and she should know better than to listen to him. But Hero could not rid herself of the conviction that Batty had told her the truth. If so, there were other reasons besides purely charitable ones why this venture must not be allowed to end in failure—as her others had done! For which reason she welcomed Olivia, who for all her feather-headedness could be trusted to see that the kitchens were kept clean, the windows open and the water boiled: matters which still seemed unimportant and quite unnecessary to the majority of the household, and that had to be constantly supervised.
Olivia had not been the only volunteer. Barely an hour after her arrival another visitor, also accompanied by luggage, knocked at the door of The Dolphins’ House, and being admitted by the porter, walked unannounced into a room where Hero was laying rows of makeshift mattresses on the floor.
“Tiens! It is true, then,” said Thérèse Tissot, looking about her with interest. “My servants informed me that you had established an orphanage here. Comment allez-vous, Hero? It is long since we last met, and I see that you have become too thin.”
Hero made no attempt to return either Thérèse’s greeting or her smile. She said flatly and without emotion: “What do you want?”
“Eh bien! To offer you my assistance; what else? If you should need it, which I see very plainly that you do! Me, I am not afraid of hard work or the cholera, and I speak the language of these people better than you. Tell me what you wish me to do, and I will do it.”
“I don’t wish you to do anything, thank you,” said Hero coldly. “We are managing very well and are in no need of assistance.”
“Ah, bah!” said Thérèse. “You mean you do not wish me to be here, which is a thing that I well understand. But will these children care
who it is who feeds them? Of course they will not! Be reasonable. Mademoiselle. Now that I am here I shall not go, because I can see for myself that what the doorkeeper tells me is true. There are already a great many little ones in the house, and it is plain that there will soon be more—many, many more! You cannot afford at such a time to turn away any who will help. Is that not so?”
“Yes,” said Hero slowly. “Yes, you are right…”
Thérèse had stayed. And before the day was out Hero had forgotten that she had ever disliked her, and forgiven her everything: the trickery over the rifles, the affair with Clayton, the wounds to her own pride. This was a new Thérèse; her airs and affectations forgotten, her Paris dresses laid aside and her fashionable coiffeur hidden under a cloth tied peasant-wise about her head: cheerful, tireless, indomitable. Thérèse took no interest in either children or good works; but she was a born organizer, and it was not in her character to stay idle in her own home during a time of crisis. Her command of the local languages enabled her to exert considerably more authority over the women of the household than Hero had been able to achieve, and both servants and children obeyed her in a way they did not obey the gentler and more soft-hearted Olivia. Thérèse scolded and cajoled in Arabic and Kiswahili and worked wonders in the way of procuring extra beds, mattresses, sheets and clothing from the various consulates, European fums, rich merchants and landowners in the Island.
The house of the Dolphins was one of the oldest houses in Zanzibar: a huge, rambling building of four stories and many rooms. But it was not long before every available foot of space was occupied; the verandahs turned into dormitories and the courtyard itself tented in to provide extra room. But Hero was still dissatisfied, for Dr Kealey had unwisely mentioned the terrible plight of the dwellers in the African Town across the creek: “From what I hear,” said Dr Kealey, “their situation is a great deal worse than it is over here, and I shudder to think how many infants and young children must be lying abandoned in empty huts or on the streets, because their parents and relatives are dead and there is no one left to feed or care for them. But there is nothing we can do about it.”