Chapter V: Part 5

For one moment, as he stood there, choking down his physical sickness, he may have known the agony of helplessness and isolation. But only for a moment. He looked round, noting the gradual relaxation of the fear-drawn faces about him.

"It's a pretty bad go," he said cheerfully, "and what your headman was doing not to let us know before I can't think. However, we'll make the best of it. Two of you go and pile up that fire I saw as I came in. And I want at least five who aren't stiff with funk to carry these poor devils out. There's not got to be a body left in this village by daybreak. We'll get the rest out into the air where they can breathe, and I'll soak you and the place in carbolic." They still hesitated, and deliberately he turned the light on to his own face.

"Bless you, I'm not Siva. I'm the Dakktar Sahib--sent by the great English Raj to put you all straight. But, by the Lord, if you don't do what I tell you in a brace of shakes, Siva will be a joke by comparison."

The panic broke. The old headman crept out and cringed before him, offering excuses. Tristram waved him on one side.

"Get on with it!" he said, between his teeth.

He went from hut to hut, directing, ordering, disinfecting, patient and imperturbable, infinitely gentle. And all night soft-footed processions with their grim burdens made their way out to the monstrous funeral pyre which grew higher and higher. All that night and all through the burning, blinding day to another night, and beyond that again, Tristram drove Death back step by step from his mauled and helpless victims, bringing peace into a hell of suffering. Three nights and three days. And on the fourth night he reeled back to the encampment beneath the trees and dropped down with his face in the long grass, and lay there inert as death itself.

And for three days and nights again Ayeshi sat beside him, tending him and listening to the muttered reiteration of a woman's name.

*CHAPTER XII*

*IN WHICH FORTUNE PLEASES TO JEST*

The Rajah Rasaldu was in his element. By sheer force of merit, he occupied the stage to the almost complete exclusion of every other player. Gaya hung on his movements, gasped--as much as Gaya ever gasped--over the reckless twists and turns of his wonderful ponies, and applauded the grace and apparent ease with which he broke the defence and sent the ball spinning between the posts. For, strange to relate, Rasaldu could play polo. Flabby and unheroic as he was on all other occasions, once in the saddle, he developed into an iron-wristed, cool-headed strategist. What was more, he played for his side and not for himself. Men who went into the game disparaging his fatuous conceit and equally fatuous humility, loved him after the first ten minutes of brilliant, unselfish play, and the glow of affection usually lasted for twenty-four hours after he had won for his side. Then they tolerated him again until the next challenge came along.

Rasaldu revelled like a child in Gaya's good graces. There was something almost winning in his wide smile of pleasure, as after the first _chukka_ he came over to the select group under the awning and received feminine Gaya's congratulations. Had he not played such a daring game he would have cut rather a comic figure. His riding-clothes, taken in juxtaposition with his dark chubby face, were wonderfully and terribly English, and his brown boots, very new and very brown, shone almost too beautifully. Between him and the turbaned soldiery crowded against the ropes there was a gulf of false Europeanism of which the latter seemed curiously conscious. They alone had not applauded, him in his bold assault on the enemy, and they stared at him now with an expressionlessness which, translated, equalled distrust and contempt.

Meantime, Rasaldu chatted with the volubility of success and self-confidence. He chose to address himself chiefly to Mary Compton, but from time to time his moist brown eyes shot an eager glance at Sigrid Fersen, seeking her smile, a meed of well-earned admiration. He was a little afraid of her. She was not in the least beautiful, and she undoubtedly owed her position in Gaya to his generous patronage, facts which of themselves should have sustained him in her presence. But the quiet, imperious self-belief with which she had silenced alike criticism and opposition and compelled rigid Gaya to accept her and her standards, shook Rasaldu's self-complacency. It was for that very reason, and also because Gaya had mysteriously collapsed before her, that Rasaldu hovered about her with the helpless and protesting infatuation of a moth for a naked light.

And now today there was added to this emotion the heat and intoxication of his own prowess, and the consciousness that, if she was not beautiful, she possessed something much more vital than beauty--the mysterious force of temperament which through all time has made plain women more dangerous, more powerful in the destiny of nations than women endowed with all physical perfection. Rasaldu had no talent for analysing temperaments, but he could analyse certain obvious factors in her charm--the pale gold hair, the perfect skin, unprotected by powder, the svelte, tiger-like grace and strength of her reposing body. Above all, he could analyse clothes. Gaya's women-folk, none too well blessed with money, lived in London's last year's creations and the clumsy imitations of the native tailors. But this simple white dress of some clinging, shimmering material, unknown to Gaya, and this simple straw hat almost unadorned, came from Paris. Rasaldu, who knew his Paris, knew that much. And, as a man worships a token from his native soil, so he worshipped Sigrid Fersen.

And presently he ventured to address her directly.

"Now you have seen what is best in India!" he said.

"The Rajah Rasaldu playing polo?" she asked, smilingly.

"You are unkind, Mademoiselle," he answered, with the hurt sensitiveness of a snubbed child.

"I did not mean to be unkind. There are so many wonderful things in India, Rajah, that I hesitated a moment to endorse your opinion. Still--yes, it was a fine sight. You should always play polo, Rajah. It suits you better than feting prima ballerinas in London restaurants."

He looked at her and saw that she was serious, and her seriousness mitigated the dubiousness of her compliment. He would have preferred it in the reversed sense, but he had to take what was offered him.

"I was not really alluding to myself at all," he said, naively, "but to the game. The game's the thing."

"Yes--and the man who plays it," she answered. She was smiling faintly, and he indulged in a flattered self-consciousness until he realized that the smile was a reminiscent one, and that she was looking through him to some invisible picture of her thoughts. Whereupon, Rasaldu hastily reverted to Mrs. Compton, whom also he feared, but in a lesser degree. Her tongue was sharp, but at least she did not attract him, and consequently her powers of offence were of a less painful order.

Sigrid Fersen did not notice his dejection. She was looking at Meredith, who at that moment had entered the awning. He still wore his clerical clothes, having come straight from the little chapel, where every afternoon he held his service. It was rare that more than one person should represent the congregation. Sometimes he managed to collect a few convert school-children, but always Anne Boucicault was there, devout and trembling, her brown eyes following his every movement with the reverence of a passionate believer in the initiated and anointed priest. That hour in the day was very dear to Owen Meredith. He believed that it was a religious ecstasy which flooded him as he listened to her low voice give the responses--or at least a pure joy in their fellowship in the one faith. He had not realized how lifeless and empty his own prayers could be without the inspiration of her presence. Now a kind of fear oppressed him--a fear of himself, a doubt in his own spiritual integrity. For this afternoon, she had failed him and he had failed himself. He had held the service, according to the law which he had made for himself, sparing no detail, but his heart had been dead. Now, as he saw her, it started to life again, to the knowledge of pain. She sat beside Colonel Boucicault, and there was that in her attitude which reminded Meredith of a frightened animal cowering under the threat of the lash. All the charm of youth had been twisted out of her by some invisible, iron-handed suffering. And without that charm, she was a drab, colourless little soul, almost ugly. But Meredith did not see that she was ugly, only that she was ill and unhappy. He thought he understood. As he came and sat beside her, she shot a quick, frightened glance at him.

"Father did not wish me to come," she said, in a hurried whisper. "He was fearfully angry about some letter----"

More she could not say. And even that much would have been dangerous, had not the man beside her been sunk in a sullen, inattentive brooding. She dared say nothing of the appalling scene which had followed on the receipt of that ominous official document, and which had left them stupefied and bruised and sick. In the final phase, Boucicault had forbidden her chapel attendance, not because he disapproved, or cared, but because he knew that she wanted to escape him. And all the afternoon he kept at her side, taking an ugly delight in her wincing, broken subservience, and in the knowledge that he held her with him in his self-created atmosphere of fear and hatred.

But Meredith believed he knew more of her pallor than she even hinted at.

"I met Ayeshi on the way here," he said. "He gave me the news. Tristram is on his way back."

"Yes--?" she queried, dully.

"He has been very ill. Ayeshi has come on ahead to prepare quarters for him."

She was looking down at her hands. He could see how she fought to control their trembling.

"If only we could have put him up--but we can't--father wouldn't--oh, it is terrible to be so helpless."

"I told Ayeshi to bring him to my bungalow. I will let you know how he is--and perhaps, later on, you could help. I know what a fine little nurse you are----"

"You are very, very good, Owen----"

"I would be glad to do anything for him," he answered, without significance. Then chancing to look up, he found that Sigrid Fersen's eyes were fixed on him, and guessed that she had heard, or had wanted to hear badly. For an instant, on behalf of Anne, he hated her again, and the next he warmed towards her. She met his half-resentful stare as frankly.

"I am so thankful he is safe," she said.

Mrs. Compton thereupon chimed in.

"If anything happened to Major Tristram, I should die of a broken heart," she said, "--even if Archie divorced me for it."

She paid no attention to the laugh in which even Anne joined timidly. She was looking at Colonel Boucicault, who had shifted his position like a sleeper unpleasantly disturbed, but the remark which seemed on the edge of her compressed lips was not destined to be uttered.

At that moment a bell announced the next _chukka_; a stir passed round the enclosure and Mrs. Compton, who, in spirit, played a magnificent game for Gaya, forgot Boucicault and Tristram in her stern concentration on the field.

Rasaldu braced himself and turned with a smile to Sigrid. He felt more confident. In a minute she would be forced to look at him, to admire him, to acknowledge that he also "played the game."

"Wish me luck!" he begged cheerily.

"Return victorious!" she returned, in mock heroics. "For the victors, Mrs. Compton and I have prepared a mighty feast in the gardens of the dak-bungalow, and the vanquished shall sit afar off and partake only of the crumbs of our graciousness. Be not among the vanquished, O Rajah!"

"To win the place of honour, I will make a goal every five minutes, or perish," he boasted elatedly.

He swung himself on to the back of the pony which his groom held ready for him, and with a flourish trotted to his place on the field.

Boucicault awoke then completely from his black brooding. He bent forward, staring straight into Sigrid Fersen's face, his clenched teeth shown in a smile that had in its mirthless, contained fury the elements of insanity.

"You are a very great friend of Rajah Rasaldu, Miss Fersen," he said.

She looked at him steadily, measuring the quality of the challenge which he had thrown down.

"Does friendship follow on acquaintance?" she questioned back. "In that case, you and I should be friends, Colonel Boucicault, for I have met you more often than the Rajah."

"Then he has marked his joy in your acquaintanceship with remarkable generosity," he retorted.

"Is generosity your translation for hospitality, Colonel Boucicault?"

"The Rajah's hospitality is well known. He gives liberally. He expects a return. And he is impressionable. There is such a thing as love at first sight, Miss Fersen."

He was watching her with a hungry anticipation, but she neither winced nor turned from him. Her calm gaze met his, and there was no change in its rather sleepy placidity. But the enigmatic smile which he remembered quivered at the corners of her mouth.

"And there is also such a thing as contempt at first sight," she remarked casually, "and that is much what I felt for you, Colonel Boucicault."

"You are an outspoken enemy," he answered, with a quick drawing in of his breath. She looked down for an instant and saw that his big, brutal-looking hands shook.

"You have remarked on my outspokenness before."

"Yes, and I even admire it. But my admiration, Miss Fersen, cannot influence my sense of duty. I am chief in command in Gaya. The social as well as the military authority rests in me. And where I see that a certain individual is lessening our prestige, corrupting our morals, or even upsetting the routine of our social life, then I have the power to expel that individual--to make Gaya and India impossible----"

"If, to speak clearly, you refer to me, Colonel Boucicault," she interrupted, "then perhaps I shall have the pleasure of travelling in the same boat with you to England."

His bloodshot eyes remained blank and stupid-looking for an instant, then lit up with an insensate fury of understanding. He stumbled to his feet.

"You--you----!" he muttered. She saw his clenched fists, and knew that, for all his position and the crowd of witnesses, he had come within an ace of striking her. She looked up at him over her shoulder and laughed.

"Keep that sort of thing for your family, Colonel Boucicault," she advised lightly.

Boucicault turned and pushed through the knot of spectators behind him. He made his way across the paddock where the ponies were being rubbed down, and out on to the high road. His orderly, seeing him, ran after him, and he turned on the man with a curse.

"Take the buggy back to the stables. I shall walk."

"And the Mem-Sahib----?"

"The Mem-Sahib can walk, too," he answered, grinning.

The man saluted, his face hard-set, his eyes meeting Boucicault's with military steadfastness. But for an instant the muscles about his mouth had quivered, betraying that there was that beneath the surface which even his native stoicism could not wholly master. And Boucicault saw and understood.

He strode on down the centre of the dusty, sun-baked road. He had drunk heavily that day, but there was more than drink fomenting in his inflamed brain. There was that letter with its bold, humbugging politeness--after so many years of service--an inquiry--certain charges--what charges?--by whom brought? He muttered aloud, dwelling on a name with a sneering hatred. Well--they should inquire--he could answer the lot. But then there was Anne cowering before him--why had God cursed him with a cowardly girl----? and that man---- There had been a time when, as a mere captain, his regiment would have followed him through the gates of hell--and now--now--if he went into action tomorrow--what then? He saw the soldier's face again and re-read its significance. Strong men made enemies, and he had always had enemies, but he had also had friends in the past. They had gone. The men who had believed in him--adored him--gone. He felt himself haunted by spectres of what was and what had been. They came out of the black abyss of his soul, whirled up by ugly, incoherent passions--regret and remorse, self-loathing and self-pity twisted out of recognition and melted down to one vast, corroding hatred. Every other emotion came too late. Only hatred remained to him--the last link between him and his fellow-creatures--that and the power to hurt, to inflict suffering--as he suffered.

Thus carried forward and half-blinded by the glare which emanated more from his brain than from the blazing roadway, he left Gaya behind him. He came to a bend in the roadway where a thin belt of trees curved down towards the plain, and there stood still, arrested by an unclear recognition. At first he scarcely knew what had attracted his attention; then little by little the red haze cleared, and something within him started awake, some dormant desire as yet unnameable.

Wickie lay on the fringe of shadow, his black snout between his paws, his ears pricked, his brown eyes, showing the whites, expressive of alert curiosity. A piece of broken cord attached to his collar testified dumbly to a determined and skilful evasion of Mrs. Smithers's coercive methods of adoption.

For a moment or two the man and the would-be Aberdeen considered each other. Probably in a spirit of good-natured triumph in his own prowess, Wickie had greeted Boucicault's appearance by a tattoo executed by his tail on the dusty road, and his eyes had twinkled an invitation to participate in the joke. Now he lay motionless, watchful, distrustful.

Boucicault called him. He did not know why he called him nor as yet what he wanted with the dog. The tumult within his brain had died down. He had become calm and deliberate. The letter, the menacing future, the jumbled vision of failure which had been vouchsafed him in Anne's cringing body and in the eyes of his orderly, had given place to a sense of purpose, controlled, extraordinarily calculated, but as yet veiled even to himself. He called the dog again, and showed no signs of impatience when Wickie remained unresponsive. Underneath his own calm he felt the stirring of a curious pleasure, of a fierce thirsty joy which must be gratified only with an Epicurean restraint. And for that he held it back, curbing it, spurring it to the limit of his control, tasting its anguished appeal for freedom with a cruel delight in his own mortification. Then, without hurry, without show of passion, he came forward, and, catching hold of the trailing rope, dragged Wickie to his feet. The dog struggled and growled ominously, and Boucicault smiled, showing his set teeth. There was a broken stick of bamboo lying at the roadside, and he picked it up and tested its suppleness leisurely against his boot. The animal snapped at him, recognizing the enemy, and perhaps the impending danger; but Boucicault continued calmly resolved. He was like a morphia-maniac who, with the passionately desired drug in his hand, prolongs the delicious agony of desire. He tied the end of the cord round the stem of a young palm and stood back a moment looking down at his captive. Wickie sprang at him, and then, suddenly, terribly, he struck with his improvised weapon, bringing it down with a sickening thud on the animal's long back. The scream that answered him was half human. Boucicault drew in his breath. Like lava under a thin crust of restraining earth, his murderous hatred welled up in him, choking him. This cringing brute, its brown eyes turned on him in dumb horror--was Anne, Anne who always cringed, always truckled to him, whom he had so often wanted to strike down. And then Anne vanished from the whirling circles of his thoughts, and it was Tristram and that pale-haired woman--these two who, in their different ways, had thwarted and defied him, brought him face to face with himself. It was his wife, the officers of the regiment, the men--all with that smouldering, unspoken loathing in their eyes. And he struck like a madman, blow after blow, slaking his thirst for vengeance, making with each stroke a fresh breach in the wall behind which men imprison their infamous insanities. And sometimes the dog whined and sometimes, like a human being, set its teeth in stoic fortitude, and sometimes, as the pliant stick fell across its body, screamed uncontrollably.

It was one such scream that Tristram heard as he rode up from the plain towards Gaya. He hung in the saddle like a man whose backbone has been snapped, and the reins trailed from Arabella's weary neck. It was fortunate that the road was familiar to her, for Tristram neither knew his destination nor cared about it. Some one had helped him into the saddle, and there he had remained instinctively; but his mind was empty of all purpose, even of knowledge of himself. The scream roused him a little, but only for a second. There were so many strange sounds and scenes in his brain that he trusted none of them. It was only when Arabella jerked to a standstill and stood trembling with pricked ears, that he began to believe in the substantiality of what was before him. Even then he sat hunched together in the saddle, gaping stupidly. He had begun to realize, but there seemed to be a hiatus in his mind--a gulf between thought and action which he could not cross. Then Wickie screamed again, and he rolled off Arabella's back and stood there rocking like a drunken man.

"Colonel Boucicault!" His own voice sounded like a shout in his own ears, though in reality it was little more than a whisper, but it reached Boucicault, who turned round. Tristram knew then that what he saw was not a distortion of his fancy. "Colonel Boucicault!" he repeated heavily. He found nothing more to say. His inability to think coherently had become an acute suffering. He saw Wickie make a desperate effort to reach him, and the sight roused him to another effort. "Let my dog go!" he muttered.

Boucicault passed his hand over his forehead and laughed.

"You've just come back in time, Major Tristram," he said. "If you really lay claim to this cur, you can stay here and see it thrashed within an inch of its life. A dangerous brute----!" He kicked it, yelping, back against the tree. He had made an excuse and was ashamed of it. It spoilt his pleasure in his own untrammelled, inexcusable cruelty.

Tristram reeled forward, intercepting himself between Wickie and his assailant in time to receive a blow across the arm. The sting of it was like a tonic, driving the blood faster to his brain.

"You've no right--let my dog go!"

"Your dog--my dear Major! Stand out of the way. I am master in Gaya. If I may offer advice, I should suggest a bath and a change of clothes. You look--if I may say so--not quite worthy of your position. I doubt if even your admirers would care to recognize you."

"It would take more than a bath and a change to put me right," Tristram managed to return, and then, with the dull obstinacy of a sick man: "Let Wickie go!"

Boucicault's momentary self-restraint broke down. He lashed out savagely:

"Take it yourself then, you sneaking cur----!"

Tristram flung up his arm. Instinctively, for his sight failed him, he warded off the blows which rained about him, but no more than that. His mind was working now, very simply, in the two fundamentals of its make-up--two vast forces fighting for supremacy, the one long dormant, suppressed, scarcely recognized, at the throat of his soul---his faith. So long as the blows fell on him, the latter remained triumphant. He shielded Wickie--that was what he had meant to do. He felt as yet no animosity towards the man whose discoloured face seemed to fill his vision. He felt very little pain--only a queer, alarming tightening of his muscles. Vague fragments of memory came to him--his passionate love of all things living--even to this man, his simple conception of duty--of life itself. They upheld him; they kept the vital part of him quiet and peaceful in the face of a gathering force of sheer physical revolt. His smarting body cried out for vengeance, but it had no power to move him. He stood there, taking the punishment patiently, almost listlessly.

Boucicault drew back from him a moment. He was breathing noisily between his teeth. In him the fundamentals had gone to pieces, and he was being carried forward on a flood-tide of ungoverned, monstrous passions. His mind, in the midst of its disruption, reasoned with the swiftness of insanity. This hulking, stupid giant who had set out to ruin him--who bore insult and pain with less spirit than his dog--he could be ruined, too. An inquiry? Good--let there be one--a court-martial--cashiered, both of them. But first this block had to be roused.

Possibly he was mad, but he had a madman's instinct and deep knowledge of the secret madness in others. He stepped suddenly on one side. The end of his stick was sharp and jagged. With the steel-wristed strength practised on many a day's pig-sticking, he lunged forward, driving the spike straight into Wickie's body.

Tristram had seen too late. He heard the yelp, broken and ending piteously in a child's whimper. Then it was done. Something in him snapped. Mind and body, instinct and reason leapt together. He struck out with all the terrible strength of his great shoulders, with all the force of his outraged love of life, with all his pity--struck to kill.

It grew very quiet. He had been battling in the midst of a titanic natural eruption, and now suddenly the violently aroused elements had dropped exhausted, leaving him standing in the midst of ruin. The tide which had flowed through his veins receded, and he became oddly tired and weak and helpless. The old blindness was creeping over him. Yet some things he saw in a kind of vague bigness. He did not bend down, but the man lying stretched in the dust seemed quite near to him--an austere, sinister shadow floating on a grey mist which rose higher--close to his face.

A faint sound reached him--a dull, soft thudding. He found himself on his knees, muttering incoherently.

Wickie lay full length, his short, crooked paws stretched out, seeking relief. There was blood on his brindle side. One brown eye looked out of its corner, half-puzzled, half-reassuring, a little glint of the old solemn humour showing through, as though the joke at Mrs. Smithers's expense still lingered in the fading brain. The tail beat the dust softly, and into that feeble movement there was compressed a love and understanding, almost a pity which defied death and rose above all language.

Tristram took the head on his arm. He saw that his hand was wet and knew that he was crying. Wickie turned a little, licking his hand feebly.

"Old fellow--dear old fellow--if I hadn't cared so much--if I'd been able to drown a kitten--it wouldn't have happened----" He bent lower, kissing the black snout. "My best pal!"

He went on talking under his breath. He did not know that he talked. Some one quite close whispered the words into his ear. He was not conscious of thinking. It began to grow very dark.

Presently Wickie sighed and stretched himself wearily, contentedly, as though it were no more than sleep that were coming--sleep by the camp-fire after a long day's march. Then lay still.

Tristram dragged himself to his feet. Out of the deepening blackness of things, an instinct asserted itself dimly.

"Help--we've got to get help--somehow----"

He said it aloud. It seemed to him that it had been shouted by the invisible monitor at his side. He stumbled over the prostrate figure lying so simple and still in the dust, reeling back from it, his face turned from Gaya. Then he began to walk. He walked long after the blackness had become impenetrable. He was no more than the one instinct, tragically dominant over the body which had betrayed him. His body was dead. He could not feel it. It was a machine that he willed to go straight forward to some dim, vast punishment.

He walked through hours and nights of darkness. At last there were lights in front of him--great yellow balls of haloed flame, which danced in ecstasy to a passionate rhythm. He heard voices--a sea of whisperings which surged towards him on a great wave, breaking over him in one hushed sound. He tried to cling to it through his fading consciousness. It became a face, gazing down at him, serene, triumphant, pitying--it became a hand which touched him, held him in its iron gentleness. He could feel it holding to him surely, as all else broke from him, flinging him down into a bottomless silence.

*CHAPTER XIII*

*CROSSED SWORDS*

In reality, he had not gone more than half a mile. But things had happened to him of which he had had no knowledge--twice he had retraced his steps and once fallen to his knees and groped his way through the dust in a blind circle. The eternities had been less than an hour, the darkness no more than the clear nightfall, the lights a dozen lanterns twinkling from the trees of the dak-bungalow. His consciousness had been a dull, distorted thing, presenting the reality to him in shapeless exaggerations. He had heard music. It had sounded to him like a huge, throbbing symphony in which these nights and days in Bjura, the passions which had swept him out of his path, were mercilessly reiterated motives. In reality, it was just Carreno's unsophisticated little waltz which Sigrid Fersen drew out lightly from a Steinway already much the worse for its Indian sojourn. He heard voices. It was young Radcliffe lounging in the shadow of the trees, making a gloomy assault on the susceptibilities of the latest sweetest thing from England, the while his real deeply embittered self was in the drawing-room scowling at Rasaldu, who, still crowned with laurels, leant against the piano staring at Sigrid unrestrainedly and with a very naked passion.

The last voice that Tristram heard, the first and last face that he had seen, had been Sigrid's, but that was because she had swamped all other realization. It was Mrs. Smithers, roaming like a dutiful policeman through the compound, who found him lying huddled together just inside the gates. She made no sort of outcry. Having ascertained that he was alive, she did not even hurry herself. She went and stood primly at Sigrid's side, her mittened hands folded in front of her, her back to Rasaldu, whom she openly detested.

"He's there," she said, jerking her head towards the compound; "lying in a dead faint, poor dear. I guess it's your fault--you'd better do something, hadn't you?"

After one swift glance at the grim face, and without a word either to Smithers or Rasaldu, Sigrid had got up and gone down the steps into the darkness where Tristram lay. She knelt down beside him and touched him on his dry, burning forehead, on his throat, gliding down to his powerless hand. She spoke to him, calling him by name, and she knew that he heard, and recognized her. For a long minute she remained thus motionless, tasting her power to probe beneath his physical consciousness to the self in which he kept his dreams, his quaint beliefs, his simple, world-embracing love of things. And she knew that if he saw her, it was because her face lived in his inner vision, and that if he felt her hand it was because the memory of her touch was seared into his very flesh.

She granted him and herself that moment, and then she called for help. It came quickly, noisily. But though others intervened, she remained at Tristram's side. Her instinct told her that he knew she was there, and that she held him back from the abyss towards which he was drifting. They laid him between the faintly scented sheets of her bed. It was her order. The shaded lamp threw a subdued glow on the room's costly loveliness, on the scattered, cunningly grouped treasures of five continents, on fragmentary, priceless testimonies to a rare and varied taste. They exercised a curious influence on the grieved and troubled helpers. It was like a subtle intoxication, as though all that these things represented crept into their blood and fought there for mastery. And in silent, austere contrast was the man lying dimly outlined beneath the white sheet, the rugged, unkempt head tilted slightly back against the pillow, the thin, suffering features composed in a passing phase of grave serenity.

They knew whence he came and what he had accomplished, and the rarefied atmosphere of exquisite Paganism jarred on them. It was a challenge, a kind of sneer at his whole life. They did not reason about it, they could scarcely define it. But it made Meredith's manner cold to the point of antagonism as he turned presently to where Sigrid stood in the shadow, her eyes fixed on the old Italian vase which she had picked up casually. He hated her again--she was so calm, almost indifferent. He came and stood beside her, hushing his full voice.

"I think we've done all we can. He's pretty bad, I'm afraid. I'll have a wire sent to the next best station for a doctor and a nurse. Of course, he can't stay here--we'll try and move him tomorrow."

"I prefer him to stay here," she said, without looking up.

He frowned, wishing that Rasaldu had not been one of those to help carry Tristram and to share in the unconventional intimacy of the scene. It revolted him that he should stand there, watching and listening. The old ugly suspicions which he had sternly repressed in himself awoke again. They were not justly roused--it was only that he was human and incensed.

"I don't think Tristram would wish it," he said, and unconsciously his voice took on its heaviest Anglicanism. "He would not wish you to be put to any trouble. After all, he is almost a stranger to you."

"I know him very well," she returned. "I think he has known me all his life. He would leave the decision to me."

"At least, he would not wish you to be burdened with the--unconventionally----" He stammered, half expecting the vivid contempt with which she turned to him, and conscious of deserving it.

"Oh, you priest! You would rather your friend died than that your fetish of Other People's Respectability should be insulted." She waved him aside and flashed past him to the doorway, pulling the curtains noiselessly aside. In the second room, half-boudoir, half-dressing-room, she found Mary Compton and Anne. The rest of the guests had discreetly evaporated, or at most hovered afar off waiting news of the man whom, oddly enough, they loved without intimacy. He had lived so much his own life, they had so often laughed at his oddities, and it was something of a revelation to them that, now the inevitable disaster had overtaken him, they were sick and afraid and dumbly remorse-stricken.

Captain Compton stood at the compound gates under the dying lights of the lanterns with a couple of his brother officers, and smoked fiercely.

"Poor old Tristram--good old Hermit. It was bound to happen. No human being could go on like that and not crock up. Damn it, we oughtn't to have allowed it. We took him too much for granted. It's always the way. Good Lord, why doesn't some one come? What's Rasaldu doing in that _galere_, I should like to know? And what the devil is that tearing down the road----?"

Rasaldu meantime, delightfully conscious of his utility, had followed Sigrid and Meredith into the room where the two women waited. Mary Compton had remained boldly. She sat upright in her chair under the lamp with a rather bleak look of authority and ready-for-anything alertness, which had made her an adored terror in the grim days at Chitral. Her evening dress, an antiquity cunningly revised, fitted her badly, as though it knew she hated it and meant to pay her out. She jerked her shoulders as Sigrid entered, seemingly exasperated by the garment's stiff, restraining influence.

"Well?" she demanded. "How is he?"

"I don't know yet," was the low answer. "But I think he is very ill. I have only seen one person die--it was like that." She turned her fair, smooth head towards Owen, but did not look at him. "Mr. Meredith wishes him to be moved. He is afraid my reputation might suffer--or that there might be a scandal in his parish."

Mrs. Compton considered the young missionary with a cold curiosity, giving him an almost ludicrous consciousness of the oft-denied but very profound sex solidarity of women.

"How idiotic! Men are just like babies in a crisis--always fussing about the unessentials. Of course, Major Tristram must stay--at any rate, until he is out of danger. And, Sigrid, as a sop to a hopeless passion, let me help nurse him."

"We'll pull him through together," Sigrid answered.

"Mr. Meredith, don't you think with Mrs. Compton and Mrs. Smithers on guard, the situation should pass muster?"

He shrugged his broad shoulders. He was looking at Anne--Anne whose white, tear-stained face peered out of the shadow like a pitiful, frightened ghost's, and somehow the sight filled him with a cold anger.

"My suggestion was well meant," he said. "I made it for Major Tristram's sake as well as for yours. I thought he would prefer to find himself among old friends."

"He could have come to us," Anne said, in her thin, broken voice. "I have nursed so much--and mother understands sickness, too----"

Sigrid Fersen glanced at her.

"I suppose Colonel Boucicault is an old friend," she said. "Colonel Boucicault, who has helped to kill him----"

There was a second of strained silence. Anne's face had changed from white to red, and then to a deeper pallor. She dropped forward with a little moan, her face hidden in her hands, crying helplessly. Meredith took a step forward, as though to protect her. The veins on his low, broad forehead were swollen.

"Surely----" he began hoarsely.

Sigrid made an imperative gesture.

"I cannot be bothered with your loves and hates," she said. "I'm going to save Major Tristram--that's all that matters to me. You can stay here if you want to--both of you--but on my terms."

It was like the cut of a whip across the face. Meredith found no answer for a moment. He was sick with horror at the tide of anger which swept over him. His primitive instinct was to strike back physically. He knew now that all Anne's distrust was justified. The woman was dangerous--dangerous, above all, to Anne's happiness. He had the right now to combat her--to set himself squarely against her power in Gaya. He wanted to assume the authority now, but it was too late. Moreover, at the bottom, he knew he could not touch this enemy. She was of another world, impervious to the penalties which his could inflict.

And Compton stood on the threshold--Compton, whose face was a sufficient warning--and behind him Ayeshi. Both men had reached the verandah steps at the run, and now Compton had pulled up, meeting his wife's stare of reproof with a hurried apology.

"I'm sorry---I didn't mean to make a row or startle you. Ayeshi has just come with bad news. Miss Boucicault--I think you ought to go home at once. Your father has been badly hurt----"

"My father!" She sprang to her feet, her eyes wide with an incredulous fear. "My father--hurt----?" she echoed.

"He was found half-an-hour ago, unconscious. Some one must have attacked him. Of course, now Tristram's done there's no doctor. We'll telegraph at once. Radcliffe's got his gig--I thought you might go with him."

He was now honestly conscience-stricken. What happened was only terrible to him because of its significance. It was like a signal of the first break of the storm--the thing for which he had waited. That any one should care personally for the injured man--least of all the girl whose youth he had trodden underfoot--seemed incredible. Yet she stood there, white and shivering with shock. He tried to apologize again, but she did not seem to hear; only, as Meredith came to her side, she turned to him like a panic-stricken child.

"Please take me home to him, Owen--please take me home."

Compton made way for them both. He beckoned to Rasaldu, who obeyed the summons reluctantly.

"We'll clear out and leave you the field. Ayeshi can bring us the news to the club. Suppose I shan't see you again for a bit, old girl."

"Not till my job's done here. Get the ayah to bring round some reasonable clothes."

"Right-o! So long, old girl."

He came up to his wife and kissed her shyly. She patted him.

"So long. Not too many pegs."

The room emptied. Neither Meredith nor Anne had said good-bye nor looked at Sigrid. Rasaldu bowed over her hand, but even he realized that she was not conscious of him. As his broad, fat back vanished down the verandah, Mrs. Compton got up, shaking herself.

"Now we can get to business. God defend me in my last hour from sentimentalists of Anne's make. Can I borrow a dressing-gown, Sigrid?"

"Do. Smithy will give you one."

"Thanks. By the way, I expect Boucicault's not the last to go. It's the first bubble on the water, and soon we shall all be in it, and boiling nicely." She made her exit on this rather light-hearted prophecy; but Sigrid, who had made a movement to follow her, lingered for a moment. Her eyes were cast down as though in thought, but in reality they were fixed on Ayeshi's hand. When she raised them suddenly, she found that he too, was watching her. There was nothing insolent, nothing inquisitive in his scrutiny. His expression was grave and reticent. It made him seem much older. He was no longer the boy who had cried on her doorstep. He looked at her with a man's eyes, with a man's understanding and stern power of secrecy.

"Was it you who found the Colonel?" she asked.

"Yes, Mem-Sahib."

"He is badly hurt?"

"I think so. The blow was a terrible one. It seemed to me that he was conscious. Once he looked at me, but he could not move or speak."

"Do you think it was one of his men, Ayeshi?"

"I do not know, Mem-Sahib."

She turned away from him.

"There is blood on your hand, Ayeshi."

He salaamed imperturbably.

"I will wash it away. It is a cut--a little thing."

He followed her into the next room with the unobtrusive decision of one whose right to enter could never be challenged. Mrs. Smithers had moved the lamp behind a screen, but Ayeshi, standing at the foot of the bed, looked down through the veil of shadow as though the sleeper's face was an open book in which he read intently. Then he looked at Sigrid. She had taken her place close to Tristram's pillow, and one hand rested lightly on the coverlet. There was a caress in that touch. Her fair head was bent in grave, pitying contemplation that was yet touched with a curious detachment, as though she looked down from a great distance. In the half-light, she seemed unreal, fanciful, the very spirit of that beautiful aesthetic Paganism which the room breathed.

Ayeshi shivered a little, and his slender, dark hands resting on the carved wooden bed, tightened their grasp.

"Mem-Sahib!" he said, softly.

"Yes, Ayeshi?"

"Mem-Sahib--I have seen so many die of late. Death at its best is sleep. The Sahib sleeps deeply. Perhaps it is the will of his God that death should come to him now that he has given so much for those he loves. Is there not a saying in your Book, Mem-Sahib---'Greater love hath no man than this, that he layeth down his life for his friend'?"

Sigrid Fersen lifted her head.

"Yes," she answered steadily.

"Meredith Sahib taught it me. I have forgotten much, but not that. It was true of him. Others--those who come here to teach us--preach to us, but he lived. He did not believe--no, not as Sahib Meredith believed. He believed in the flowers and the birds and the wind and the mountains--he believed in us." He put his hands to his breast, and his eyes glowed in the darkness. "I was his brother--his younger brother," he said proudly.

"And he loved you, Ayeshi."

"He loved all men--even the worst." He came a step nearer to her. "Mem-Sahib--a woman died out in Bjura--died horribly. He stayed with her to the end. She was hideous, and he took her head on his knee and comforted her as though she had been his mother. There was a little child, and he took it and promised he would care for it. She died happy."

Her head was bent again.

"That was like him, Ayeshi."

"Mem-Sahib--if the end comes now it will trouble him that he cannot keep his promise."

"He shall keep his promise. I will keep it for him. And you, Ayeshi--stay with me."

But he drew back, and the light died out of his face.

"This is the end, Mem-Sahib. His and mine. I loved him--I, too, would have given my life--remember that of me, Mem-Sahib."

She looked up at him, and the naked agony in his eyes was something that she indeed remembered long afterwards.

"I think he knows," she said.

He salaamed deeply.

"I will go and guard the door, Mem-Sahib."

He was gone without a sound. A shadow seemed to have passed from the room. His very voice had been so low, that now the silence flowed over it as though it had never been. Yet what he had said lingered.

Sigrid Fersen drew her chair close up to the bedside, and sat there chin in hand watching. The dim light of the lamp threw the shadow of Tristram's profile on to the white-washed wall beyond. Ugly enough--the pointed beard thrust out under the broad, unshapely nose--the big forehead made grotesque by the outline of disordered hair. But even the shadow gave a hint of what the face itself revealed in its unconsciousness. The mouth, tender and strong as a woman's may be, passionate and austere, laughter and the joy and love of life in the corners of the closed eyes, and over all, like a veil, pain. Quixote with a grain of English humour--Quixote at the end, vanquished and conquering.

He stirred a little in the first uneasiness of coming delirium, and she laid her hand on his and he grew still again.

Mary Compton came in presently. With Mrs. Smithers, she had been preparing a special fever antidote of her own, and there was an air of resolve about her neat, kimono-clad figure which made death seem afar off. She came lightly up to the bedside, stirring the contents of a malicious-looking medicine glass.

"Now, if we can only get him to take a few drops, they will help to keep him quiet. Of course, we don't know what in the world's the matter with him. It may be the ghastly thing they had in Bjura; but I don't think so. He wouldn't have come back. Are you afraid?" She glanced down at her companion, and Sigrid met her close scrutiny deliberately.

"No."

"Well, you've been crying, anyhow."

"That's possible."

"What for?"

Sigrid's lips were twisted with a wry smile.

"I don't know--I was touched about something, I suppose. I think it was because I never thanked him for something he gave me--I never gave him anything to take with him when he went out there--I've just remembered."

"H'm! How many times have you two met?"

"Twice--no, three times, and the first time counted most of all."

"Are you in love with him, too?"

"I've been trying to decide--yes, I think so."

Mary Compton poured out the medicine into a tea-spoon.

"Do you mean to marry him? Because, if you do, you will."

"No, I'm not going to marry him."

"Why not?"

She made a gesture, brief, impatient.

"My dear, can't you see? We live at the opposite poles of things--he, the unbelieving Christian, I, the believing Pagan. Look at his life--look at mine. Look at this room--these things. You have a _flair_ for what is precious and beautiful--can't you see?"

Mary Compton continued to balance the spoon. Her bright hazel eyes were fixed thoughtfully on the other's face.

"Yes, I see. And I love you, Sigrid, as Gaya does, without caring who or what you are, or what you mean to do with us. But just sometimes I'm afraid--sometimes I think it would have been more merciful to have let us go on our own old, stodgy way."

"You mean--him? He sought me out. I believe he brought me here. There are more things in heaven and earth, Mary, than are dreamed of in your philosophy. And even if that weren't true--he knew as well as I did what I was--what I wanted---adventure, knowledge of the finest and the best in life and in men--a last splendid hour--he would not have denied it me."

The last words had sunk below the whisper of their brief conversation, and Mary Compton did not hear them. Very skilfully she forced the opiate between the unconscious man's lips.

"At any rate, we're a nice couple of nurses chattering over poor Tristram's head. Will you watch for a little? Mrs. Smithers and I will relieve you."

"If you want him to live leave us alone. I shall not sleep tonight."

"In those clothes?"

She glanced down at her quaint, gold-brocaded dress.

"Yes. He loves beautiful things."

"He may think he is in Paradise and you an angel," rather satirically.

"Or perhaps men so near death see clearer----"

Mary Compton sighed and bent and kissed her.

"Good night, then. If there is any change, send for us. Ayeshi is at the door."

"Goodnight."

Now the last sound was gone. Even the man's shallow, irregular breathing became for the moment quieter, as though peace had crept into his troubled oblivion. Sigrid sat motionless at his side. The light touched her with a dim brilliance; it dwelt on the smooth gold hair, on the gold of her dress, on the rich living whiteness of her arms and shoulders. She shone subduedly like an image on an altar-shrine--an image of life and of life's splendour faced with the shadow of death.

Presently Tristram stirred and muttered to himself. The words were at first thick, indistinguishable, but suddenly he roused himself. She caught sentences, rapid, fever-stricken--the incoherent risings from the depths of the man's soul. It was his credo--a fragment of that faith of which Ayeshi had spoken, perhaps never before formulated, now poured in a molten stream of delirious sincerity.

"I believe in all things living--I believe in beauty--I believe in the goodness of men and in their immortality. I believe in the immortality of the flowers, of the trees, of the grass in the wind--I believe in God who is all things, who is myself and her. I believe in the sacredness of all life----" An intolerable agony crept into his voice. He repeated the last phrase on a rising inflection. "Oh, God, I believe in the sacredness of life----"

She bent over him. She laid her hand on his forehead and suddenly his eyes opened. They rested full on her face, but she knew, for all their extraordinary brilliance, that they did not see her. It was not to her that he spoke, but to the vision of her. "You must go, you too--everything. A man who has broken faith--there is a curse on us--an awful curse. We kill what we love--we kill what is holy, unfathomable--every day of our lives--for pleasure, because we must. We're doomed to destroy. We try not to--we try to save--but the curse is on us--the curse of Cain----" His voice had dropped; it broke now with a groan and the brief glimpse of coherent thought was over. He began to mutter again--isolated words, a name, constantly a name. Still she remained bent over him. Her small face had lost colour, and something of its aloof pity. She was breathing quickly, through parted lips.

"Tristram!" she whispered.

He raised one burning hand and pushed her back.