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"Just so," said De Wiart, agreeing to this very evident axiom, and more than ever convinced that the story was a lie. Meeus was dead and the men had come to report. They had delayed on the road to hold some jamboree of their own, and this lie about the white men was to account for their delay. "Did anyone else come with you as well as the white men?" asked De Wiart.
He worked the post at M'Bina with the assistance of a subordinate named Van Laer. De Wiart was a man eminently fitted for his post. He had a genius for organization and overseeing.
Lespinasse, which divided her salon and left her quite alone with her faithful secretary, Wiart. With the exception of her correspondence with the Duchesse de Choiseul, she bequeathed all her letters to Horace Walpole. She was seventy and Walpole fifty when they met and their famous attachment and correspondence began.
He did not know that he was here on probation; that the good-natured and seemingly lazy de Wiart was studying him and finding him satisfactory, that very soon his desires would be fulfilled, and that he would be let loose like a beast on the land of his longing, a living whip, an animated thumb-screw, a knife with a brain in its haft.
There has not been such a tragedy since the fierce barbarian tribes swept over Europe; none would have believed two years ago that it could be enacted. Such expressions as 'Huns, 'Attila, 'Hohenzollern slave trade, and others of a similar nature are the order of the day, and the excitement is further fanned by reports from London and Le Havre, which no one here can verify, and provocative interviews, among which special mention must be made of that of Herr Carton de Wiart with the World correspondent.
Three days later at noon De Wiart, drawn from his house by shouts from the sentinels on duty saw, coming toward him in the blazing sunshine, a great man who stumbled and seemed half-blinded by the sunlight, and who was bearing in his arms another man who seemed dead. Both were filthy, ragged, torn and bleeding. The man erect had, tied to his waistbelt by a piece of liana, a skull.
"Spare me three things," she said to her confessor in her last moments; "let me have no questions, no reasons, and no sermons." Seeing Wiart, her faithful servitor, in tears, she remarks pathetically, as if surprised, "You love me then?" "Divert yourself as much as you can," was her final message to Walpole. "You will regret me, because one is very glad to know that one is loved."
The leopards escaped, but the soldiers could not find the white men again. De Wiart listened to this very fishy tale without believing a word of it, except in so far as it related to Meeus. "Where did you lose the white men?" asked de Wiart. The soldiers did not know. One does not know where one loses a thing; if one did, then the thing would not be lost.
That evening he called Van Laer into the office. "Chef de Poste Meeus of Fort M'Bassa is dead," said De Wiart; "you will go there and take command. You will start to-morrow." Van Laer flushed. "It is a difficult post," said De Wiart, "wild country, and the natives are the laziest to be found in the whole of the state.
"Yes, there was a porter, a Yandjali man. He had run away." De Wiart pulled his blond beard meditatively, and looked at the river. From the office where he was sitting the river, great with the rains and lit by the sun which had broken through the clouds, looked like a moving flood of gold.
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