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"Rachel," he said, "come down, Rachel. Whatever I have done has been for your sake, come down and tell me that you forgive me." She laughed out loud, a wild, screaming laugh, for really he looked most ridiculous, sprawling there on the bend of the hut, and the lightning showed her all sorts of pictures in his eyes. "Did Richard Darrien forgive you?" she asked.
Richard Darrien remembered drinking a bowl of milk in the hut in which he was imprisoned at Mafooti, and instantly feeling a cold chill run to his heart and brain, after which he remembered no more for many a day. At length, however, by slow degrees, and with sundry slips back into unconsciousness, life and some share of his reason and memory returned to him.
"My name is Richard Darrien," he answered at the top of his voice, "and I don't know why I came. I suppose something sent me to save you." "Yes," she replied with conviction, "something sent you. If you had not come I should be dead, shouldn't I? In glory, as my father says."
They fell upon little people with faces of a dusky pallor, one of them crouched against the bole of a tree, a wizened monkey of a man who in all that vastness looked small. They fell upon another man, white-skinned, half-naked, with a yellow beard, who was lashed by hide ropes to a second tree. It was Richard Darrien grown older, and at his feet lay a broad-bladed spear!
When she was asked why, she replied vaguely that she had grown up there, and it was her home. But her mother, watching her, knew well enough that she had another reason, although no word of it every passed her lips. In Africa she had met Richard Darrien as a child, and in Africa and nowhere else she believed she would meet him again as a woman.
His eyes were shut, without doubt he was dead, this was but a vision of him who had drawn her hither to share his death. It was the spirit of Richard Darrien! She drew a little nearer, and the eyes opened, gazing at her. Also from that form of his was cast a long shadow there it lay upon the dead leaves.
If it were choice between yielding and the death of Darrien, then perhaps she might give way. But there came the rub. Dingaan had sworn to him that if he made Darrien's blood to flow, then he should be killed, and, like Rachel, Dingaan kept his oaths. Moreover, that Zulu who met the cattle herd had sworn it again in almost the same words.
Now tell me again what Richard Darrien was like while you remember, for perhaps I may never live to see his face, and I wish to get it into my mind." So Rachel told her, and when she had described every detail, asked suddenly: "Must we really go on, mother, into this awful wilderness? Would not father turn back if you asked him?" "Perhaps," she answered. "But I shall not ask.
Well, the man might die, or seem to die, and then who could hold him responsible? Or if they did, if any of his people remained faithful to him, an attack might be beaten off. Brave as they were, the Zulus could not storm those walls on which he had spent so much labour, though now he almost wished that he had left the walls alone and settled the affair of Rachel and of Darrien first.
In past days she had heard from Rachel of the lad, Richard Darrien, who had been her companion years before through that night of storm on the island in the river, and now she understood that her lady loved this Richard, and that it was because of his murder by the wild brute, Ibubesi, that she had become mad.
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