Three weeks later, two torn and tattered, half-starved Europeans sat under a burning South African sun by the dry bed of a shrunken summer torrent. It was in the depths of Namaqua land, among the stony Karoo; and the fugitives were straggling, helplessly and hopelessly, seaward, thirsty and weary, through a half-hostile country, making their marches as best they could at dead of night and resting by day where the natives would permit them.
Their commissariat had indeed been a lean and hungry one. Though they carried many thousand pounds’ worth of diamonds about their persons, they had nothing negotiable with which to buy food or shelter from the uncivilized Namaquas. Ivory, cloth, and beads were the currency of the country. No native thereabouts would look for a moment at their little round nobs of water-worn pebbles. The fame of the diamond fields hadn’t penetrated as yet so far west in the land as to have reached to the huts of the savage Namaquas.
And now their staying power was almost worn out Granville Kelmscott lay down on the sandy soil with a wild gesture of despair. All around were bare rocks and the dry sweltering veldts, covered only with round stones and red sand and low bushy vegetation.
“Waring,” he said feebly, in a very faint voice, “I wish you’d leave me and go on by yourself. I’m no good any more. I’m only a drag upon you. This fever’s too bad for me to stand much longer. I can never pull through to the coast alive. I’ve no energy left, were it even to try. I’d like to lie down here and die where I sit. Do go and leave me.”
“Never!” Guy answered resolutely. “I’ll never desert you, Kelmscott, while I’ve a drop of blood left. If I carry you on my back to the coast, I’ll get you there at last, or else we’ll both die on the veldt together.”
Granville held his friend’s hand in his own fevered fingers as he might have held a woman’s.
“Oh, Waring,” he cried once more, in a voice half choked with profound emotion, “I don’t know how to thank you enough for all you’ve done for me. You’ve behaved to me like a brother—like a brother indeed. It makes me ashamed to think, when I see how unselfish, and good, and kind you’ve been—ashamed to think I once distrusted you. You’ve been an angel to me all through. Without you, I don’t know how I could ever have lived on through this journey at all. And I can’t bear to feel now I may spoil your retreat—can’t bear to know I’m a drag and burden to you.”
“My dear fellow,” Guy said, holding the thin and fevered hand very tenderly in his, “don’t talk to me like that. I feel to you every bit as you feel to me in this matter. I was afraid of you at first, because I knew you misunderstood me. But the more I’ve seen of you, the better we’ve each of us learned to sympathize with the other. We’ve long been friends. I love you now, as you say, like a brother.”
Granville hesitated for a moment. Should he out with it or not? Then at last the whole long-suppressed truth came out with a burst. He seized his companion’s two hands at once in a convulsive grasp.
“That’s not surprising either,” he said, “after all—for Guy, do you know, we ARE really brothers!”
Guy gazed at him in astonishment. For a moment he thought his friend’s reason was giving way. Then slowly and gradually he took it all in.
“ARE really brothers!” he repeated, in a dazed sort of way. “Do you mean it, Kelmscott? Then my father and Cyril’s—”
“Was mine too, Waring. Yes; I couldn’t bear to die without telling you that. And I tell it now to you. You two are the heirs of the Tilgate estates. And the unknown person who paid six thousand pounds to Cyril, just before you left England, was your father and mine—Colonel Henry Kelmscott.”
Guy bent over him for a few seconds in speechless surprise. Words failed him at first. “How do you know all this, Kelmscott?” he said at last faintly.
Granville told hi............