Chapter VI: Part 6

"Will it hurt?" she asked, and when he did not answer her, "There! I am not afraid."

Her voice was stronger than he had ever heard it, and sweeter; but the strength and the sweetness of it, were like crushing weights upon his heart and brain. She could speak so—when the waters were growing deeper! Moisture not of the mist or the sea sprang to his face and bathed it. And then the agony her words had caused—lifted. She did love him then; loved him with a deathless courage. Let the waters cover them, and the mist draw the folds of its mantle over the level sea!

Suddenly he stopped and lifted his head, breathing quickly.

"The ground’s higher," he cried. "We’ve reached it—the mainland!"

She did not call back to him, but she placed her free hand over his that held hers, and he could feel the added pressure of thanksgiving.

Little by little they could feel the waters receding. Now they were down to his knees again; now they were at his feet—conquered.

He drew her into his arms and he called her by name. She did not answer.

"Aren’t you going to speak to me?" he asked, bending over her.

She stroked the shoulder of his coat slowly with her cold, wet hand.

"I—I—what must I say?"

"What I have been waiting all these years to hear—what you said a little while ago—that you love me," he answered, looking into her face.

She bent her head and laid her cheek against her hand on his shoulder.

"I do," she said. "I love you—" her voice broke.

He waited.

"I love you," she repeated, clinging to him. "I have loved you for months. I have been foolish for you! I have been frightened to have you out of my sight; to have you do anything when I was not along for fear you would get hurt in some way! I’ve imagined all kinds of things that could happen to you—I am so foolish—I love—"

The words came up to him, choked, and he had to lean closer over her to hear.

She faltered, lifting her face from her hands.

"_Yes?_"

"I dreamed last night you were at the Dargai Hill—that you were killed, and I awoke sobbing in the darkness. I am—so foolish. I knew it wasn’t true—" she turned her face away and wiped her eyes.

"And you love me—like that?" he asked slowly.

Behind them the tide crept in, covering portions of the peninsula and all of the narrow neck. Around them the mist lay heavy.

"But you were not frightened a little while ago and you were in danger then."

She shook her head.

"No; I was with you—we were together," she answered him simply.

He stroked her damp hair, unconscious alike of the tide and the mist, drinking in her words thirstily.

"Then it isn’t Robert!" he said more to himself than to her.

"No," she said again. "I think it has been you always—and I didn’t know it. I think I have been waiting for you always. Robert showed me that it was you!"

He was silent, waiting for her to go on.

"If it hadn’t been for your danger when you were ill from the wound, I mightn’t have ever known. And if you’d been at the Dargai Hill—" she stopped and stretched out her arms, and put them around his neck, and looked into his eyes. "Oh! I couldn’t have borne that! I’m selfish, but I couldn’t have spared you even for the Service!"

The vision of the desolate years he had planned and thought of—the years devoid of service—and the memory of the useless uniforms, hidden away, and the sabres, useless too, crossed on the wall at home, faded, and he laid the dead memories at her feet.

"This compensates—" he broke off, kissing her in silence.

After awhile he drew her arm through his and started to walk slowly.

"You must get home and get on dry clothes," he said.

And he helped her up the steep embankment and into the road that led home.

The tide reached its flood and turned. The sea’s low song came to them muffled by distance, and was lost in the darkness behind them. The heavy mist lifted slowly, and through the rifts, one by one, the stars appeared, peeping down at them like little children peeping from the coverings of their cribs; and by and by the moon stole from behind a cloud and moved slowly between the twinkling stars, as a nurse steals from behind a shadowy curtain and moves softly from bed to bed, to see if the children sleep.

He led her in silence through the great wrought-iron gates and up the drive, toward the lighted house, looking down into her uplifted face with his grave eyes.

And he kept looking at her all during dinner. Once she looked across at him—and smiled.

Later she complained of being tired, and she rose to go to bed. Stewart lighted her candle and waited for her at the foot of the stairs, after the fine old custom of his people. Not even Malcolm Stewart, as the elder host, ever thought of lighting Cary’s candle.

Stewart handed it to her as she came up to the great stairway and stopped. To-night he did not offer to shake hands.

She took the candle and then slipped by him quickly. He called her back.

"Aren’t you going to say ’good-night’ to me?" he asked, a smile creeping around his mouth.

"Why—yes. Good-night."

He leaned over her and kissed her.

"Good-night," he said, and his voice was suddenly grave. "I hope your dreams will be sweet."

She sighed—a sigh of happiness, and she looked down at the burning taper in her hand.

"Then they will have to be of you."

She did not speak for a moment; afterwards she lifted her eyes from the burning taper and looked into his.

"I love you," she said again, and she repeated the words over and over as a master plays over and over a bar of sweetest music, and she put out her hand and pressed her fingers against his cheek. They rested there—closely—for a minute. "I love you so!"

Then she gathered up her long silk skirts and began slowly to mount the stairs, the taper lifted carefully before her. She did not look back, but he could see her face, even in the shadow of the grim armor, by its light. And on her white face there rested a perfect peace. Once a draught caught the flickering taper and nearly extinguished it. She stopped and, dropping her long skirts that fell back upon the oaken stairs with a silken rustle, she shielded the taper with her hand. So would she shield the light of her pure life and her wifehood from the world’s breath, he thought.

He stood leaning against the bannister, watching her until she vanished, and he stood there after the soft silken rustle of her skirts and her faint footfall were lost, staring at the last turn in the stairs.

And in western Scotland, Trevelyan sat, his head bowed upon the letter he had just finished to Cary.

*XII.*

It was spring before Trevelyan could push forward into the lowland section, and on to the interior and Mackenzie. The reports of a threatened cholera scare had reached down as far as Patna. There were Britons coming every day from farther inland to Patna, grateful enough for the privilege of having passed the government line of precaution, and being allowed to stay there; but a British subject, who was neither ordered there by command of the War or Colonial Offices, was another matter, and Trevelyan was regarded with a blank curiosity by those who knew his proposed destination.

There were a good many technicalities and difficulties to be surmounted, too, in the question of getting inward as far as the precaution lines, that would have discouraged anyone less determined than Trevelyan. It had seemed simple enough—to get there—after the journey had once been begun, but the actual reaching Mackenzie was another matter.

The delay, under which he fretted inexpressibly, only brought more serious accounts of the spread of the disease. A score of natives had sickened and died—traced directly to the foulness of the water used—and later there were contradictory reports as to the appearance of the scourge within the barracks. The waiting days became a torture to Trevelyan, and it was not until he had scaled the wall of obstacles, and was well on the other side, pressing onward to Mackenzie, that the torture lifted. The fear—half formed and never acknowledged—of possibly not getting to Mackenzie, fell from him as mile after mile took him further from Patna and nearer to the garrison, and once or twice he laughed a little as he kept picturing to himself Mackenzie’s surprise at this personal answering of his letter.

There were other pictures that would force themselves on him at this time, but he fought them from him with a strength grown with much usage. There were pictures of Cary’s face—white with the whiteness of the moon upon it and sweeter than the fairest flower—there were pictures of home and old Mactier, mourning for him, and visions of the sea beating against the high, gray crags. It seemed to him he could hear and see it even then, inland as he was, until he would force himself back to present things and the desolate waste land through which he was journeying; the stricken section to which he was going; the cholera and Mackenzie. And he would hold his wandering thoughts sternly in check, as years ago he had held in check the stallion he had conquered and was wont to ride. And so the day would pass in a desperate struggle against self, or his desire to press onward to Mackenzie.

It had needed all his powers of eloquence; all his strategy; all the hard discipline of repression taught by the Woolwich years, to get him so far on his journey, and he had thought with a certain grim satisfaction that all the Woolwich years were paying back their debt to him, at last.

It was early in the morning when he reached the small inland Station. His presence caused a good deal of comment among the troopers he passed on his way to Mackenzie and the improvised hospital that had been erected a long distance from the barracks. The whole thing was strange; the new faces that he met; the awful sense of a growing horror that brooded like a bird of prey over the Station with its handful of men—placed out here by order of government officials far away and safe enough in London—struggling against the threatened devastation to the ranks.

He found Mackenzie in the small ill-constructed apothecary shop and he stood still a minute, studying his friend’s haggard face and heavy eyes, before the surgeon was aware of his presence. Mackenzie was weighing morphia, and three times Trevelyan saw his hand shake and spill the white powder before he was able to divide it in correct proportions.

"Mackenzie," he said evenly, not wishing to startle him.

The surgeon turned sharply and looked at him. Then he leaned against the table, his back to it, his hands gripping its edge. He leaned forward a little, frowning. He had had a hard night of it, but—

"Mackenzie—it’s I—Trevelyan. Don’t you remember me?"

Trevelyan went forward.

Mackenzie’s long, lean fingers suddenly relaxed their grip on the edge, and he sat back against the table.

"Good heavens!" he said, slowly.

Trevelyan went up and slapped him on the shoulder.

"I got your letter and it just stirred up my fighting blood. I packed my grip—and, presto! here I am."

Mackenzie was silent.

"Come; haven’t you anything to say to a chap who has been traveling thousands of miles to get here? Aren’t you glad to see me?"

"_Glad to see you?_" Mackenzie lifted his haggard eyes from the floor to Trevelyan’s face, "_Glad to see you_—in this pest house? You’re the maddest fool God ever made!"

Trevelyan drew down the corners of his mouth.

"Perhaps I am," he said, "but I’ve come; and I’ve come to stay."

Mackenzie laid a heavy hand on his shoulder and Trevelyan could feel the pressure of the long thin fingers through his coat.

"You are not going to stay one hour," he said, in a low voice, "not—one—hour; do you hear? There’re new cases breaking out every day; it’s going to play the devil! If you’re thinking of suicide, go back to London and blow your brains out, or throw yourself into the Thames—that’s more romantic, still. There’s nothing romantic about dying of cholera. It isn’t a pretty way to die!" Mackenzie laughed, harshly.

Trevelyan put his hand up to his shoulder and forced away Mackenzie’s grip.

"I’m not hunting suicide or death either," he said briefly, "and I’m not mad. I know perfectly why I’m here—and what I’m here for, and I’m going to stay." He paused a moment and then went on hurriedly, forcing back the tension in his voice. "Do you think I’ve been traveling and squandering money for weeks, and ’pulling strings’ to get here, and being delayed at Patna, to be turned back now like a whipped boy turned out of school?"

"But you don’t know what it’s like—"

"I guess I’ll find out quick enough. Look at you—ready to drop, and then refusing help!"

Mackenzie put his hand up wearily to his forehead and pressed it there tightly. The lines cut by lack of sleep on his haggard face relaxed a little.

"It’s nothing. I’ll be all right when I’ve gotten some sleep. You’re not needed. There’s Clarke, and the orderlies—" he broke off.

"Yes?"

Mackenzie bit his cheek and brought down his hand heavily on the table.

"I don’t need you. Will you go?"

"No."

Mackenzie turned and went back to the morphia scales. Something in the work he was doing and the way he was doing it struck Trevelyan.

"Where’s the apothecary?" he asked briefly.

Mackenzie balanced the scales carefully.

"Sick," he said.

"Where’s Clarke?"

Mackenzie added a fraction of morphia to the scales.

"Sick," he said.

"And the helpers—the orderlies?"

Mackenzie put down the scales, suddenly, and stared at them.

"Half sick," he said.

*XIII.*

The long days crept slowly by at the Station and through the infected district. as horses driven by Death, mercilessly, tired by their task, and yet urged on continually to break through the breastwork of care and precaution raised by Mackenzie and Trevelyan, so that the course of their charioteer might sweep onward to the outlying districts and turn the scourge, local as yet, into a devastating epidemic.

"Anything to keep the barracks clear of it," Trevelyan had thought and said, and Mackenzie, grown silent with the effort of the fight, nodded without speaking, forcing away from him the remembrance of the epidemic he himself had been through, and the stories once told him by his father, who had helped beat back the scourge on the Ganges in ’63.

Each hour was freighted with unspeakable horrors, and Trevelyan learned to know the course of the disease almost as well as Mackenzie himself. He knew the first symptoms; he knew with an instinct that rarely failed, just the cases that were liable to pull through, and those that were liable not to; he could foretell the signs of the _collapse_, when the face would become cold and gray, the finger tips and lips and nose livid; the eyes deeply sunk and bloodshot with the dark rings beneath; the breath without any sensible warmth when caught on the hand; the scarcely audible beating of the heart;—the apathy that was itself a death.

The haunting shadow of his crime was driven back and back by the absorbing matter of the hour, and even Cary’s face—moon-kissed—seemed indistinct and far away, as he went about his tasks. It seemed developed on a plate, hidden in the dark room—the innermost recesses of his soul—to be produced and worshipped now and then when courage weakened and the heart languished and grew sick.

He would recall it, at night sometimes, when he had flung himself down for a few hours of rest, and he would press his fingers over his eyes as though to hide from sight the memories of the day’s horrors and the day’s deaths, and the face would come to him then, and his soul would look upon it as on some dream of heaven.

And then the memory of her face would fade, and he would let it slip away from him, as though knowing it had no place here—midst the cholera scourge, and he would fall off to sleep and sleep exhaustedly.

The days held but one purpose, but one thought—his service to the men, and he sometimes wondered how even the service of the hour had a power to hold him, stronger than the memory of her face.

In those days, when each morning saw another man added to the inmates of the hospital, it was all reality—grim, terrible and as strong as the death he fought; and he and Death kept on the fight, and even when Death won, his triumph seemed petty and incomplete because of this man’s courage, which he could neither break nor bend.

It was when Death had seemingly withdrawn his presence a little way that Mackenzie, one morning motioned to Trevelyan to come outside to the entrance of the hospital. He spoke to the point—a necessity taught him long ago when he had first joined the army and helped fight the Asiatic scourge for the men.

"Five cases have broken out ten miles in-country. You know what that means—a general mowing down and spread of the disease unless it is strangled right away! I can’t leave the men here, or go any distance from the barracks for fear—"

Trevelyan looked at him squarely and nodded.

"Of course not, and you want me to go?"

"Clarke isn’t fit yet, and I couldn’t let him go anyway. Could you go?"

"Sure."

"And take charge of things? I’ll send you some helpers, and perhaps run over for an afternoon later to see how you’re getting on."

"All right. When am I to start?"

"Could you go to-day—now?"

Trevelyan brought his hand up to his forehead suddenly in the old salute, a shadow of a smile in his eyes.

"Yes, sir."

Mackenzie looked away and stood silent a moment.

"It hardly seems as though I could spare you," and then quickly, "You understand about the calomel and how to use it?"

"Yes."

"And Trevelyan—"

Trevelyan stopped suddenly as he was walking away, and turned.

"Well?"

"And just when the morphia’s needed, and when it’s judicious to give the opium, calomel and white sugar—and about the salt injections in the veins?"

"Yes."

"And Trevelyan—"

Trevelyan wheeled around, stopping short again. Mackenzie was still looking away.

"Well?"

"And, for God’s sake, be careful!"

*XIV.*

It was one thing to help fight the scourge with Mackenzie in the military hospital, crude as it was, where things were carried on with a certain nicety and regard to military discipline that was stronger than even the demoralizing dread of the hour; but it was another matter to fight it, and crush it, and stamp it out, alone, in the midst of half a hundred panic stricken natives, who knew neither military discipline nor paid proper attention to the precautionary measures of the disease.

Trevelyan had never possessed the quality of conciliation; it had been either one side of the line or the other. He had always reduced things to their smallest denomination at once, with no intermediate measures. And the quality became now a practical and living thing, as he forced the natives to bow before him in obedience, and brought order out of chaos.

It was not altogether the exact application of the military organization learned at Woolwich, or the inspiration of the rally he had dreamed of, that would fire his men, he told himself grimly, as he worked among these people, but it answered for it, and it brought them into subjection to his will.

He held them in control, as the pilot holds in control the ship he steers, guiding it through the madness of the gale, and they never dreamed of mutiny, because they feared him more than they feared the cholera.

And by and by when they saw that he held the scourge in check, his hand upon its throat, they fell down before him in all the pitifulness of ignorance and superstition, as before a being mightier than they had ever conceived of, worshiping him. But they were at his feet always.

Mackenzie, shrewd and silent-tongued, took in the situation at a glance, when he rode over for an afternoon, a fortnight later, to see how Trevelyan was getting on.

"He’s the biggest man I ever knew," he said to himself as he followed the orderly who was leading him to Trevelyan.

He found Trevelyan stooping over the small rigid figure of a native baby, his hand still resting on the tiny wrist where the pulse had just stopped its slow beating.

Mackenzie came in and stood on the other side of the child, and Trevelyan raised his head. He showed no surprise at Mackenzie being there. In his face was all the unutterableness of the horror; in his voice was all the passionate protest, all the crushing dread, all the grief, that he had never shown before.

"_It—is—awful!_"

Mackenzie nodded.

"Yes," he said.

*XV.*

Three weeks later, when it seemed as though the battle had been won, Trevelyan got a hasty scrawl from Mackenzie.

It had been carried by a man of the regiment, who had ridden the ten miles on a dead run, and now stood exhausted before Trevelyan, his face twitching with the fright born of the tidings he had brought.

Trevelyan took the note in silence and he looked hard at the man’s face before he opened the message. Then he bent his head and forced the paper open, still without comment.

"Eight cases broken out in barracks. If you can leave—come. Mackenzie."

He crushed the note in his hand.

"My respects to Dr. Mackenzie," he said quietly, raising his head and meeting the eyes of the trooper, "and I will be with him to-night."

He spent the morning in arranging matters and leaving orders with his chief helper, who was to remain for a time, more as a precautionary measure than for anything else, and then made his own scant preparations in haste to get to Mackenzie before nightfall.

He had thought first of slipping away, fearful of what the knowledge of his going might bring, but the more he thought of it the more he put the idea from him. After all the truth was the wisest.

He called all those of the half hundred natives together who had been spared of the scourge—most of whom he had fought death for, and he addressed them in Hindostanee. He spoke to them simply and briefly; he told them what they must do—not why they must do it, but simply because he ordered them to, and expected their obedience—relying on the worshipful fear with which they regarded him.

"If I hear of your disobeying me—and I shall hear it, for my ears are long and sharp—I shall come back and I will kill the dog who dared to disobey my commands, and you are to obey and do just what the _Sahib_ I leave here tells you to do—do you understand?"

A low murmuring of assent greeted him, and one or two of the women held their babies up that they might look upon the great _Sahib_ who was leaving them for a time; who was wise enough to know ten miles off if anyone disobeyed him; who was strong enough to kill the dog who tried to disobey his great commands.

And the murmuring of their voices followed him as he rode away from them later, and the echo of their "_Sahib! Sahib! Sahib!_" haunted him, not knowing that in the years that lay ahead, the native mothers would tell their babies of the greatness of the Sahib who once had come to them.

The shadows, the children of the sunset, lay thick upon the road, over which he journeyed back to Mackenzie, and in the silence he began to think of England and of Scotland, and of Cary.

He thought of them all then, in the pause that came between the struggle he had just passed through and the struggle that lay ahead, as he had not had the time or peace to think of them since he had left Patna. Nor did he try to force the thoughts from him as he had done on leaving Patna, but he went in search of them as a father goes in search of little truant children hiding in the dark, and brings them back and holds them close with caresses.

He brought the vision of Mactier forth so, and he went over every familiar gesture, every tone of Mactier’s voice he knew; he called up the mother-face of his aunt, the soft pressure of her hand; and he thought of his uncle and Maggie and Kenneth, and of Stewart—lingeringly—and of his father.

And then he brought forth the picture plate, buried in the dark room of his soul, and he thought of her; and he thought, and thought of her! He held the dream picture up between him and the light of the dying day, and once he put out his hand slowly and it rested lightly in the air, but in his dream it rested on Cary’s head. Once he raised his head suddenly and sharply, and he breathed quicker than his wont. The night shadows crept up and peered into his thin, lined face with the dark-circled eyes; and though he was alone with only the air touching him, in his dream his face was close to hers.

And back of the dreams was the echo of the ocean on the crags. But the dreams and the echo faded as he came within sight of the military hospital, and the thoughts receded back and back into the darkness before the new necessity of the hour; but the truant children were not lost, only hiding from him, and peering at him from the shadows and waiting for him to come and look for them and take them home.

He dismounted, hardly conscious of the greetings the men gave him as they crowded around him, and he went at once to Mackenzie, as an officer reporting for duty.

Mackenzie looked at him sharply as he entered. The full beard he had grown had changed him, and would have hidden the loss of flesh and the haggard lines to any other than Mackenzie.

"You don’t look fit to go on with the job, boy," he said concisely.

Trevelyan laughed.

"That’s absurd, don’t you know? I’m all right."

"It’s more than you look—you’re all pulled down!"

"You’re dreaming! Tell me about the barracks!"

And Mackenzie told him—briefly.

All night he and Mackenzie and Clarke worked over the new cases, resting by turns, and in the morning two other men were brought in. One was the trooper who had borne the summons to Trevelyan.

The cases developed slowly, and with an effort that had in it something of the supernatural, they kept it from spreading into the mow down of an epidemic. But the men were sick—sicker than any had yet been, and out of the proportion stricken, the mortality was frightful, and Death’s twin brother, Fear, laid his heavy hand upon the district.

The men were good, on the whole, as to precautionary measures, for they held Mackenzie and even Clarke in wholesome awe, but they regarded Trevelyan with something greater still. They were ashamed before him—ashamed to mention their fear, or even think it, as he came and went among them, silent, commanding, and unmoved by fear.

Mackenzie or Clarke could not have spoken so to them—silently. They were at their own business. They were supposed and expected to meet disease and death, daily, hourly if necessary, and not be afraid. But Trevelyan was not a surgeon; he had come out to them to serve them in their extremity—voluntarily—without military command, and they grew to think of the scourge after a while as they would have looked upon a hostile tribe to be conquered—as an enemy to be vanquished for the Queen.

And as though the lessening of their panic was the sign for the dying out of the scourge, the cholera cases decreased as the days wore themselves away.

It was toward the end of the desperate fight that they had made that Mackenzie came in one day at dawn, to relieve Trevelyan’s watch over the half dozen cases in his wing of the hospital. He noticed that Trevelyan looked oddly white, and that there was a drawn expression about his mouth and face.

"What is it," he asked. "Aren’t you feeling well?"

"Why, yes; what made you ask?"

"You look——"

"It’s the daylight and the sickly candle," Trevelyan answered shortly as he rose to leave. "McHennessy, here, has put in a night of it. See you later."

Once outside in the narrow passage Trevelyan leaned up stupidly against the wall. His head was hurting him violently and was colder than the hand he pressed against it, and a sudden deadly nausea seized him. He stared hard at the wall opposite and made a movement as though to call Mackenzie. Then he drew back and waited. A numbness crept into his legs, and it seemed to him to deaden all his power. After awhile the seizure passed and he stumbled over to the apothecary’s room, and he began to measure out the old prescription of the morphia and calomel and white sugar. What was the good of calling Mackenzie when Mackenzie could do nothing more for him than he could do for himself? Then he went into an empty room kept for emergency cases at the end of the building, and flung himself down.

After awhile the deadly nausea returned and he sat up and crawled to his feet, and went back to the apothecary’s room and measured out the prescription again—three hours was the limit between doses, and his watch said that the three hours had passed. He believed the watch had lied, and that it was thirty hours instead.

Mackenzie opened the door and stood transfixed on the threshold. Trevelyan conscious of the movement turned and started violently.

"What are you doing?" Mackenzie’s voice was terrible in its hardness.

Trevelyan held up the scales with a trembling hand, and he made an odd sound in his throat that was intended for a laugh.

"Measuring morphia! What do you suppose?"

Mackenzie came up close to him, and his horror-stricken eyes looked straight into Trevelyan’s sunken ones.

"Who for?"

Trevelyan was silent.

"Answer me!"

Trevelyan shook his head piteously, and a ghastly pallor crept slowly up over his face and into the hollows of his temples and his cheeks.

"You’re ill, and you didn’t call me!"

"What was the good——"

Trevelyan swayed forward. When he spoke again there was an apology in his hoarse voice because he was ill.

"It’s the nausea," he said simply.

*XVI.*

Mackenzie went in search of Clarke.

"Drop everything and come with me," he said. "It’s Trevelyan—Trevelyan’s got the cholera."

Clarke took a long breath. Then he called to two passing orderlies.

Mackenzie led the three of them back to the apothecary’s shop, as a soldier would have led a squad of men forward to meet an enemy, his face hard with the control he had put upon it, but it changed suddenly as they reached Trevelyan and picked him up and bore him down the hall. He allowed them to do so unresistingly, falling back into their arms a dead weight. They staggered under it. He made no comment until they reached the door of the surgeons’ room. Then he shook his head.

"Not there," he said. "Take me in with the men."

"But you’ll be ever so much more comfortable here," said Clarke, still breathing quickly under the weight of his portion of the burden.

"You’d better let us take you in here, lad," said Mackenzie, bending over him. "You’ll get well twice as quick and it’s quieter, and the nausea will pass——"

"It’s the cholera," said Trevelyan, in a clear calm voice. "Take me in with the men."

*XVII.*

All day Mackenzie sat by Trevelyan, scarcely leaving him, except to make his rounds; Clarke and the orderlies taking charge of the two small wards and the needs of those there. And all day Mackenzie sat stoically looking off into space or turning to feel Trevelyan’s pulse or watch the change of his face. There was not a shadow of a change he did not watch and note. Trevelyan’s great form lay motionless—deadened by morphia, the occasional twitching of the limbs and the heavy breathing, the only signs of life. Now and then, as the effect of the morphia lifted, he would turn his head restlessly and murmur incoherent things, or call for water, and Mackenzie would force a teaspoonful at a time of the cool liquid between the rigid lips.

Once Trevelyan’s hand went up with a spasmodic motion to his throat, and the movement pulled and tore aside the covering across his chest, and exposed to view the white scar on his shoulder. Mackenzie leaning over him to replace the covering, was attracted by the sight of the old wound, and he hesitated and leaned a little nearer, examining it.

A sudden death-like quiet brooded over the ward, and the minutes lengthened and still Mackenzie leaned over the unconscious figure, his eyes fixed on the scar. By and by he looked at Trevelyan’s gray and sunken and unconscious face, and a swift change passed over his own impenetrable features, and he drew the covering quickly over the scar, as though he were ashamed.

Clarke came in and Mackenzie straightened himself and turned to meet him, his hand upon the covering that hid the scar. There was something defiant in the attitude.

Clarke came up and stood on the other side of the bed.

"What do you think of it?" he asked.

"I don’t want to think anything about it," Mackenzie answered shortly.

"But his chances?" asked Clarke after a little. "Has he got any show?"

"He’s got a damned bad case," said Mackenzie, "and no strength to fight it with. I knew it would be just this way if he ever got it—he’d have it _bad_! There’s nothing half way about him!"

Clarke tapped his foot against the floor and looked down at it..

"How he could have loved some woman," he said.

Mackenzie turned his head slowly and looked at Trevelyan. Once he had seen a look in Trevelyan’s eyes— When he spoke it was as if he were thinking aloud. "How he loved some woman!"

Trevelyan moved restlessly and opened his eyes, and looked at Mackenzie and Clarke and then back to Mackenzie. There was nothing in his face that led them to suppose he had heard.

Mackenzie leaned over him.

"How are you?"

"Deuced bad," Trevelyan said slowly, and then the nausea returned.

The man in the next bed began to moan a little. Trevelyan turned to Mackenzie, a frown upon his face, as though he was trying to place the sound.

"What is it?" he asked. "What’s that noise?"

"It’s McHennessy—you’d better let us move you into our room."

Trevelyan shook his head.

"I suppose it’s a blamed silly notion, but I’d rather be with the men." And then he stretched out his cold hands suddenly and grasped Mackenzie’s convulsively, "The pain," he said.

Mackenzie looked up at Clarke and nodded to the question in the other’s eyes.

Mackenzie took out his handkerchief and wiped the great beads off Trevelyan’s forehead. When Clarke returned with the morphia, the nausea had come again.

Trevelyan waved Clarke aside.

"I don’t want it," he whispered hoarsely. "I couldn’t keep it down anyway, and—I—don’t—want it!"

And when he was not to be persuaded Mackenzie let him back slowly on the pillow.

All night the nausea lasted, but in the early morning there came cessation for a time, and Mackenzie left Clarke with him, and went to snatch a bit of sleep.

Clarke watched by him in silence—dumb with the terribleness of it all; dumb with his own powerlessness to help—and Trevelyan was grateful for the cessation and the silence.

When the cessation came his thoughts went out to Cary, and they drew the memory of her face to him. It was in truth a dream of heaven—and real, untouched by the thralldom of the morphia.

He was growing weaker—he could feel the ebbing of his strength—and he did not care. In the morning he had fought against it, as he had fought everything all his life—passionately, but now with the cessation and the coming of the dream face, he did not care.

He clung to the vision of the dream though, fiercely, as though fearing it would escape him and be lost forever. He had loved her, and he loved her still!

His love for her had been as a mountain that has been stripped in a storm of its fairest foliage; that has been wrecked by a great fire which has swept it of all its rarest beauty, leaving only the bareness of the boulders, but withstanding the wreck of the storm and the fire. So his love had stood and endured as a sample of the Eternal Handiwork—a basis of his life, as is love the basis of the life of the Everlasting.

He was conscious of the clasp of Clarke’s fingers on his wrist, and the sudden appearance of a frightened orderly with the intelligence that Burns, in the next ward, was worse, and would he come at once; and he was dimly conscious of Clarke’s bending over him and of his telling him to go to Burns, but he still clung to the vision of the dream face. Desperately he clung to it, even when the blessed cessation suddenly ceased, and it seemed as though he was being engulfed in a great abyss of unspeakable agony, and he kept his thoughts upon it as a crusader would have kept his dying thoughts upon the unattainable quest.

And then he became dimly conscious of a low moaning sound and he lay still trying, to place it, because Mackenzie was not there to tell him what it was, and he had forgotten what Mackenzie had said it was, but he still tried to concentrate his thoughts on the dream face that was growing faint and fainter. The effort was a complete failure, and the low moaning increased. He fixed it slowly as coming from the next bed. He turned his head toward it weakly. The incoherent ravings became a piteous and conscious cry for water.

The gray dawn crept in slowly and up to the trooper’s bed, and by its light Trevelyan could see him turning his head restlessly from side to side. Still the cry for water reached him.

It did not seem to affect him much at first, or pierce the consciousness of pity, but it annoyed him, and it kept coming between him and the dream face he was struggling so desperately to hold. And then it struck on him suddenly like a blow and he awoke to the man’s anguish and the man’s need—how often he had answered to that need and cry before! He looked toward the farthest corner of the room where an orderly lay sleeping from exhaustion. The man was half sick anyway, from a recent attack of the scourge. He did not want to call him; but if he would only awaken—if he only would.

He waited. There was no sound from the corner; there was no movement in the hall that would tell of Clarke’s return, and the low cry went on. Since the day he had joined Mackenzie he had followed and responded to that cry as the soldier follows and responds to the first low notes of the bugle. He pushed himself over to the edge of the bed and tried to sit up but the motion increased his agony and he lay still. He wondered blindly if he could do it. Then he let himself roll over the side of the bed and his big frame fell with a dull thud on the rough boards of the floor. He lay there a second, but there was no movement from the corner. He pulled himself up, took half a dozen steps toward the water bucket in the near corner, and then the cramp came back again in his legs, and he fell forward, and began to creep toward it on his hands and knees. The dream face was fading and being swallowed up in a breaking crest of white sea foam, and there seemed to be nothing in the world but the man’s cry and his own pain.

He reached the bucket and he dipped in the glass that stood near and filled it, and then began his slow journey to the man’s bed. By the deepening light in the east the man could see the great creeping figure approaching, and he drew back, afraid.

"It’s only I, McHennessy. I’ve got some water—" the voice trailed off, but the trooper caught the word "water" and he struggled to a reclining position and waited. The figure moved so slowly and his throat was a burning sheet of flame! Why didn’t he come faster—what was the matter that he didn’t come faster; and McHennessy’s blood-shot eyes were riveted on the slowly moving figure.

Trevelyan reached him at length and pulled himself up with a supreme effort, with the glass balanced very carefully in his hand. He was striving—striving too—after that elusive dream face.

He leaned over McHennessy with the water, and McHennessy with a sigh of ecstasy struggled up in his bed and leaned forward to touch his parched lips to the glass.

Trevelyan brought it up nearer and his hand wavered. He controlled it with a great effort of will for a moment, and then the glass trembled and its contents were spilt over McHennessy, and the glass crashed into shivers as it fell to the floor beside the bed. Trevelyan flung out his arms suddenly, groping for the dream face that had gone.

The orderly, awakened by the crash, started up and ran over to where Trevelyan lay on the floor by the side of McHennessy, who was swearing over the unexpected bath, and as he staggered beneath Trevelyan’s weight, Mackenzie came quickly forward from the threshold of the door. Together they carried Trevelyan back to bed and Mackenzie silently drew the coverings over his rigid body and stood looking down at the livid lips and listening to the slow, feeble breathing. Once he picked up the hand that lay on the outside of the covering and examined it, and then laid it back in its resting place.

Clarke who had heard the glass break, hurried in from the adjoining ward. Mackenzie looked up as he entered.

"_Collapse?_" asked Clarke briefly.

Mackenzie did not seem to hear him.

"Bring the salt—it’s just a chance," he said.

*XVIII.*

The light deepened in the east and the sunrise crept into the ward of the hospital and turned its search light curiously on the group in the furthest corner of the ward, and on the still figure on the bed. All morning the sunlight lingered around there as though it wanted to help Mackenzie in his fight, and impart into the chill of the rigid figure, some of its own warmth, and when the afternoon shadows came and drew it off, it retreated lingeringly, loath to say "good-night."

The shadows deepened and the quietness of midnight fell over the weary Station and the outlying cholera hospital. Mackenzie continued to sit by the bed.

The quietness outside crept in to meet the silence of the ward, and the night lamp cast strange shadows on the wall, at which Mackenzie stared. Once or twice he got up and visited the other beds and leaned over the men. Most were pulling through and were sleeping. McHennessy was drowsy with the morphia. Then Mackenzie would go back and sit down again by Trevelyan’s bed. At midnight, Clarke, with eyes heavy with sleep, came in. He did not speak but he looked down at Trevelyan and then up questionally to Mackenzie, and at the syringe and the salt lying near by.

"It didn’t work," said Mackenzie. "If you’ll listen to the lungs you’ll know why—pneumonia."

"You’d better go and rest a bit. I’ll stay—I won’t leave him," said Clarke, blinking at the light and wondering at the quietness of his own voice.

Mackenzie looked hard at the flickering night lamp.

"No," he said slowly. "I guess not."

After Clarke had gone back to their room, the surgeon riveted his eyes on Trevelyan’s sunken face, and once he put his hand out quickly and pressed it over the bloodshot eyes, but the lids opened again and would not remain closed. The slow labor of the feeble breathing went on. The almost imperceptible rise and fall of the great chest fascinated Mackenzie, and he found himself watching for it feverishly, hoping and yet dreading for it to cease.

While it was still dark he rose and went over to the window and looked out fixedly at the impenetrable pall of blackness that lay over the Station and the hospital. It seemed as though the heaviness of the blackness was over all the world.

By and by the night pall lifted a little, and a dull grayness crept into the heavens and rested on the station. He could dimly distinguish the outline of some of the military buildings. He turned away and went over to the lamp that was smoking and lowered it. From the trooper’s bed came a low moaning.

He paused to speak to him and then he went back to Trevelyan, and looked down at him, his eyes fixed on the great chest, watching for its slow rise and fall. Somehow he could not see the rise and fall—they did not seem to be there. He bent over him quickly.

"Trevelyan!" he called sharply.

The trooper in the next bed ceased moaning and raised himself on his arm painfully, and looked over to where Mackenzie was standing.

Mackenzie knelt down suddenly on one knee, and his hand passed rapidly from Trevelyan’s forehead to his pulse. The trooper in the next bed began to moan again.

Mackenzie laid his ear down quickly to the heart, an expectant look upon his face. Then he raised it slowly and bit his lip and stared hard through the window to where the barracks were defined against the paling grayness of the sky.

*XIX.*

The sunshine of the early summer lay heavy like a cloth of gold across the rolling Scottish country, and Stewart turned away abruptly from its brightness and stared down at the floor of the railway carriage.

All night he had lain awake, grasping fiercely at the bit of paper that had summoned him to the office of the Secretary for India, while his brain with equal fierceness refused to accept the tidings which had met him there.

He was dumbly grateful, however, for the friendship and the kindly interest that had led the Secretary, for his father’s sake, to send for him, and for the time that busy man had taken, and the consideration that had shielded him from seeing the latest cholera reports pasted up at the Office or in the columns of the press.

Some day he would thank the Secretary as he should. Just now it seemed to him his brain had become a burning blank, and that the fire was as unquenchable as it was mighty, forbidding thought. Once, twice, a dozen times he tried to picture Trevelyan as he had known him, but Trevelyan’s face would not come. He could not recall one line of it—he could not recall his voice—his slightest gesture; and he vaguely wondered if he were going mad, and when the rumble of the iron wheels would cease.

He was conscious of being grateful for the stopping of the noise, when he descended from the carriage, in the early light of the new day, to make his last connection with the local.

The local was late some two hours—it seemed to him twenty—and a feverish impatience came upon him to reach home and have it over with. The new faces around him were strange and looked at him curiously. There was a lean Scotch collie that sniffed at his heels and tried to make friends with him, and a small Scotch laddie, rosy-cheeked and freckled, who regarded him wonderingly from a safe distance, his forefinger in his mouth. Stewart noticed it was clean; he supposed it was too early for it to be covered with the conventional coat of dirt. The boy looked a little sleepy too. He wondered why he felt so wide awake himself. The collie licked at his boot. He neither encouraged nor rejected the familiarity. He simply ignored it. The morning sun was growing warm, and a bright patch of it touched the dress of the child. * * *

The local came around the curve and he got into the carriage, mechanically picking out his usual seat near the window. Force of habit is strong. There was a bit of rolling hillside and an old kirk down by a little stream he always looked out for.

He was alone and he was glad. The train jerked and backed a little and then fairly started on its run. It passed the hillside and the old kirk at the foot of the slope, and the bit of water that for a moment flashed the brightness of its sunlit surface upon his vision, and was gone. For the first time the landscape failed to please. Beyond the old kirk was another slope—a slope of heather, just putting forth its early pink; and though he could not see it he knew that just where the old road curved up to the kirk, the bracken grew.

Then the reaction came and his inertia broke and the burning blank became a sheet of memory. Trevelyan had loved the bracken and the heather so. As a laddie he had played among them and hidden himself—short kilts and all—beneath their bloom. Once he had gotten lost, and they had vainly searched for him, but Stewart slipping away unnoticed, and led by unerring instinct, had found him fast asleep down there—his head pillowed on the bracken and a faded scrap of heather in his small moist hand. And now the bracken might bloom on, and the sun might shine upon it by day and the stars smile down upon the heather slope by night, and the mist rest upon it, turning it to a mystical sheet of grayness and of silver—but Trevelyan would never walk across the slope again, and Stewart leaned his head against the window and closed his eyes.

All night the train had moved so slowly and he had dumbly longed that the iron wheels would hasten that he might reach home soon; and now that the home station in Aberdeen was nearly in sight, a sudden sickness seized him and he prayed for a delay.

He had wired ahead for Sandy to meet him with the trap instead of the cart in which he usually came for the mail. He had sent the message to Sandy instead of the family, and had bidden the Scotchman be silent about his unexpected return from London.

It was a comfort, he reflected, that Sandy could be trusted to hold his tongue. He felt he could not bear to have them meet him at the station. He could not tell them there, neither could he play a part so long—until they should reach home. He was trusting to that seven mile drive to collect himself. He hoped Maggie would not come with Sandy—as she sometimes did—to get the mail, especially when Cameron was away. Well, he would trust to Cameron’s being there, and to Sandy now—

He remembered the mail and the papers would arrive with him—he was glad for that in a dull way—if he could only reach home before the papers, he had thought before leaving Waterloo Station.

His father was in Glasgow with Kenneth. He could not spare them. There would be the Little Madre to be told, and Maggie and Tom Cameron, and Mactier—poor old Mactier—and Cary—he wiped the moisture from his mouth—and Trevelyan’s father lately returned from the far East—God help him. God help them all!

The local stopped. Through the window he could see Sandy waiting for him with the trap on the other side of the track, quieting the restless horses; Maggie had not come.

He got out—how he never afterwards remembered—and he stored his Gladstone safely away beneath the back seat, waited for the mail bag to be put in, and then climbed up with a nod to the red headed Scotchman and a "how are they all?" mechanically asked.

The old Scotchman looked at him curiously, as the child and the collie had done, and he was distinctly annoyed at being stared at.