Men of Men - Smith Wilbur (книги бесплатно без txt) 📗

However, their perennial favourite was the one they called "The Devil Book", for there was an illustration on each facing page vivid, lifelike and explicit, of souls in torment and the devils who attended them. The artist who had interpreted this edition of Dante's Inferno had dwelt ghoulishly on decapitation and disembowelment, on red-hot irons and hooks, lolling tongues and bulging eyes. Even the briefest stolen perusal of this masterpiece was enough to ensure that the twins would spend most of the following night clinging together in their bed, shivering with delicious terror.

However, this particular visit to the forbidden cupboard was in the interest of scientific research, otherwise they would never have taken the risk while Robyn Ballantyne was actually at Khami mission.

They chose the time of morning xwhen Mama would certainly be in the church clinic attending her patients, when Daddy would be mucking out the sties, and Salina and Cathy at their chores.

The raid went with the precision of repeated rehearsal.

They left their open readers on the dining-room table, and were down the verandah and had the key within the time it takes to draw a long breath.

Lizzie took guard at the window from where she could cover kitchen, the church and the pigsties, while Vicky got the cupboard open and the "Devil Book" out and open at the correct page.

"See!" she whispered. "I told you so."

There he was, Satan, Lucifer, King of the Underworld and Vicky had been right. He did not have horns. All the lesser demons had horns, but not the Devil, not the very Devil himself. What he did have was a tail, a magnificent tail with a point like the blade of a Matabele assegai upon the end of it.

"He's got a beard in this picture," Lizzie pointed out, reluctant to abandon her position.

"He probably shaved it off, to fool us," Vicky told her.

"Now look!" She took a pin out of her hair and used the black round tip to cover one of Lucifer's eyes. Immediately the resemblance was undeniable, the thick dark curls, the broad forehead, the beaked nose and the piercing eye under arched brow, and the smile, the same satanically mocking smile.

Lizzie shuddered luxuriously. Vicky was right, it was him all right.

"Kitty Cat!" Vicky hissed a warning. Salina was coming out of the kitchen, and they had the book back on its shelf, the cupboard locked, the key back in its hidingplace, and were once more seated at the table poring over their readers by the time that Salina had crossed the yard and looked in upon them.

"Good." She smiled at them tenderly, they were such an angelic pair, sometimes. "Good girls," she said, and went back towards the kitchen.

"Where does he put it?" Lizzie asked softly, without looking up from her reader.

"What?"

"His tail., "Watch!" Vicky ordered. "And I'll show you."

Napoleon, the aged yellow mongrel, was sleeping in the patch of sunlight on the verandah. He had a ridge down his back, and grey hair around his muzzle. Every few minutes a dream of rabbits and guineafowl made his back legs gallop spasmodically and he would puff off an evil-smelling fart of excitement.

"Bad dog!" Vicky said loudly. "Napoleon, you are a bad, bad dog!"

Napoleon sprang to his feet, appalled by this unjust accusation, and wriggled his entire body ingratiatingly, while his upper lip lifted in a simpering sycophantic grin.

At the same time his long whippy tail disappeared between his legs and curled up under his belly.

"That's how he tucks it away. just like Napoleon," Vicky announced.

"How do you know?

"If you look carefully, you can see the bulge where it comes out in front of him."

They worked on distractedly for a few seconds, then Lizzie could not restrain herself further.

"Do you think we could see his tail?"

"How?"

"What if we -" Halfway through propounding her scheme, Lizzie faltered. Even she realized that it would be impossible to modify the latrine, drilling a peephole through the back wall, without being apprehended; and their motives could never be convincingly explained, especially not to Mama.

"Anyway," Vicky quashed the plan effectively, "Devils are probably like fairies, they just don't go."

Silence fell again. Obviously relieved that nobody had followed up the original accusation, Napoleon re-composed himself to his dreams, and it seemed the project was abandoned, until Vicky looked up with a determined gleam in her eyes.

"We are going to ask him."

"But," stammered Lizzie, "but Mama forbade us to talk to him -" She knew her protest to be unavailing, that gleam in Vicky's eye was familiar.

Ten days after she had removed the pistol ball, Robyn came down to the guest-house with a crutch carved from mopani wood.

"My husband made it for you," she told Mungo Sint John.

"And you are going to use it every day from now on."

The first day Mungo managed one halting circuit of the yard, and at the end of it he was pale and sweating.

Robyn checked the leg and the stitches had all held, but the muscles of the thigh had withered and contracted, pulling the leg an inch shorter than the other. The next morning she was there to watch him at exercise. He moved more easily.

After fifteen days she removed the last catgut stitches, and though the scar was raised and thickened, a livid purplish red, yet there was no indication of mortification. It looked as though it had healed by first intention, the drastic use of strong antiseptic on living tissue seemed to have been justified.

After five weeks, Mungo abandoned the crutch in favour of a stout stick, and took the footpath that girded the kopje behind the Khami Mission.

Each day he walked farther and stayed out longer. It was a relief to be away from the bitter arguments with Louise which punctuated the long periods of her icy withdrawal.

He had found a viewpoint beyond the sharp northern ridge of the kopje, a natural platform and bench of dark serpentine rock under the spreading branches of a lovely old leadwood tree, where he could sit and brood out over the gently undulating grassland to the far blue silhouette of hills that marked the site of Lobengula's kraal.

His instinct warned him that there was an opportunity there. It was the instinct and the awareness of the cruising shark which could detect the presence of prey at distances and depths beyond the range of other senses. His instinct had seldom failed him, and there had been a time when he had seized every opportunity with boldness, with the ruthless application of all his skills and all his strength.

Sitting under the leadwood, his hands upon the head of the cane and his chin upon his hands, he cast his mind back to his triumphs: to the great ships that he had won and sailed to the ends of the oceans and brought back laden with treasures, with tea and coffee and spices or holds filled with black slaves. He remembered the rich fertile lands to which he had held title, and the sweet smell of sugar-cane fields when the harvest was being cut. He remembered piles of gold coins, carriages and beautiful horses, and women.

So many women, too many women perhaps; for they were the cause of his present low condition.

He let himself think of Louise at. last. She had been a fire in his blood, which grew fiercer the more often he tried to slake it, and she had weakened him, distracted him, diverted him from his ruthless purpose of old.

She had been the daughter of one of his overseers on Fairfields, his vast Louisiana estate. When she was sixteen years of age he had allowed her to exercise his wife's Palarnino horses; when she was seventeen he arranged for her to move into the big house as companion and maid to his wife and when she was eighteen he had raped her.