Page:A Good Woman (1927).pdf/65

 He got down at once and set out to follow them, feeling weak and shaky, until Lady Millicent (whom Naomi watched with the expression of one observing the source of all evil) provided a drink from the flask which she carried on her hip.

They marched in silence, racing against the fire and the rising wind, in the knowledge that if they reached the river before dark they were safe; and Philip, his bandaged head filled with a sickening ache, managed slowly to reconstruct what had happened since he was wakened by the thunderous echo of tom-toms. It all returned to him slowly, bit by bit, with an increasing vividness which reached its climax in the image of a hideously painted black man kicking grotesquely as he lay on his face by the edge of the forest.

The image somehow cleared his head and he was conscious slowly of a new and thrilling sensation of freedom. Presently he understood what it was: he had killed the men he had come to turn to God and he was never going back to that inferno beside the brassy lake. It was all over now. He hadn't even any faith. He was free and fearless. He had killed a man—perhaps three or four men. (He would never know whether he or Lady Millicent was the better shot.) But it did not matter. He was free and he was alive. Even the ache in his sick body seemed to fade into silence.

The little column before him had halted suddenly and as he moved up he found them standing about the body of a black girl that lay on its face full in the middle of the path. Swanson, bending down, turned the naked body over and they saw that she was young, straight, and beautiful in her savage way. By the wire orna-