Part 10

The two men stared at each other. At that moment either of them could have passed easily for the villain of the little drama, Barclay's quivering, passion-distorted features being balanced by the Englishman's general appearance, which was ragamuffinly, not to say ruffianly. His white clothes had been washed since Sigrid had seen him last, but had not been ironed, an unfortunate omission, since the result was one of soiled inelegance. The stubble on his unusual chin had become a reddish beard, in itself an unlovely object, and lent his countenance a look of aggression and truculence.

Barclay laughed. He was beside himself, less with anger than with panic before the inevitable debacle, and he groped round for any weapon which might deliver him with a semblance of dignity.

"I appreciate my blunder, Miss Fersen," he jerked out. "I had no idea that I interrupted an—an appointment. I can quite understand your annoyance—and I apologize. I wish you both good-night."

Tristram blocked his way.

"Your name's Barclay?" he asked quietly.

"It is."

"I've heard of you."

"I daresay." The Eurasian's eyes narrowed. He looked into his opponent's face with a sudden curiosity. "I daresay we have met before, Major Tristram."

"I don't think so."

"Perhaps in a third person."

"I don't understand," Tristram returned simply. "But I have heard of you. Some time I'd like to have a little talk—about various things, which concern us both—notably about some friends of mine who have been hard pressed.—"

"I shall be delighted to meet you any time, Major Tristram," Barclay retorted. "I, too, may have matters of interest to discuss with you."

Tristram stood on one side.

"Shall we go together now?" he suggested. "Since we are both intruding—"

"Not you, Major Tristram," Sigrid interposed quietly.

There was a moment's silence. The way was now open to Barclay, and the three implacable watchers gave him no choice. He tried to insinuate into his bearing, into his exaggerated bow, a mocking ease, a cynical suggestiveness which might give him even a semblance of advantage. But he failed, and knew it. He stumbled out, blind and sick with the consciousness of defeat, of a hideous, self-inflicted humiliation.

Mrs. Smithers saw him to the verandah steps as a policeman sees a doubtful intruder off premises specially recommended to his care. She adjusted her neat wig with dignity and a touch of wrathful defiance.

"In a brace of shakes, I'd have boxed his ears," she muttered ferociously. "Not but what my heart was beating about inside me like a fly in a bottle. The impudent blackguard! Called himself an acquaintance! What next! We shall have the sweep dropping in for tea and the butcher leaving his card—" She caught herself up. "There, in another minute, I'd have forgotten I was a lady and said things. Shall I see about coffee for you, Sigrid?"

"Please, Smithy."

Sigrid Fersen stood near the middle of the room, looking out on to the dark garden, her hand raised to her small face in the familiar attitude of half-whimsical, half-sad reflection. Tristram glanced at her and then hurriedly away.

"I was dancing," she said suddenly, with a catch in her breath. "I don't think I'd ever danced like that before. And then he came. It was as though something vital in me had been snapped—a bird brought down in full flight—"

"Ayeshi came out and told me you were in difficulties," he said. "I was eavesdropping. I suppose I behaved like a cad, too."

She shook her head.

"I was playing to you—and dancing. I knew you would see me dancing."

"Then you knew—?"

"Ayeshi told me you were coming. I knew if I played you would come into the garden and listen. I wanted you to come. And you came."

He tried to laugh, and the laugh failed him.

"I am almost afraid of you," he said.

She considered him quaintly.

"Smithy would say you were quite right to be afraid. And Smithy would be right, too. I am dangerous."

"And I am a believer in the theory which bids us 'live dangerously,'" he retorted more lightly.

"But with you the theory would work out as self-sacrifice—with me it would mean the sacrifice of others." She drew a lounge chair out on to the verandah and sat down with a little sigh of relief. "How tired I am! The D minor valse always tired me—not my body—that doesn't matter—but the invisible spirit which makes a single step a divine thing. Mr. Meredith would call it the soul, if he could connect his speciality with anything so vulgar and mundane." She laughed and snuggled herself back among the cushions. "Anyhow, my soul has danced and my soul is tired," she announced contentedly.

Tristram remained standing. He was looking down at her profile with a puzzled intentness.

"Yes," he admitted, "very tired."

"That means—I'm looking ugly?" she suggested.

"No," he answered, abruptly.

At that moment, seated there with her back to the light, she looked elfish, something aerial and inhuman. Her fair hair, smoothed down with a delicious primness on either side of her small head, made an aureole in which her face gleamed white and transparent. Beauty and ugliness were terms inapplicable to her. As well have measured air and fire by the standards of a Venus de Milo. "Still, you're not well tonight," Tristram persisted obstinately.

"Feel that, then, Dakktar Sahib!"

He took her outstretched hand. For a second it lay in his, small, cool, amazingly soft and supple, then clasped itself round his fingers like a steel band made living by electric forces, and he looked up wincing and laughing, and their eyes met. She was smiling at him with a childlike satisfaction.

"You see, I am stronger than you, Dakktar Sahib!" she said gaily.

"That wouldn't be saying much tonight," he answered.

She still held his hand, but her hold had changed its character.

"I had forgotten—Ayeshi told us—you are ill—"

"It is nothing," he muttered.

She became thoughtful in her silence. Wickie made a scrambling rush up the verandah steps and flung himself, with an hysterical yell of triumph, against Tristram's legs. By what cunning he had eluded Mrs. Smithers's methodical but unpractised search cannot be told—but he was there, a wriggling, writhing, panting mass of delirious happiness. Tristram caught him up and hugged him.

"And how in the name of the Creator of Mongrel Puppies did you get here?" he asked.

"I commandeered him," Sigrid Fersen answered.

"I left him with Miss Boucicault."

"And Colonel Boucicault threatened to knock his brains out, so I commandeered him."

Tristram glanced down at her wonderingly.

"You bearded the Colonel? That was plucky of you. Anne must have been frightened, poor little soul."

A faint, malicious smile quivered at the corner of Sigrid's lips.

"A little, I think. But she had no time to interfere. I was nearest to the scene of action."

"I am awfully grateful. Wickie and I are old pals."

"I know. If I deserve reward, let him stay with me. What will you do with small dogs out there?"

"I don't know—would he stay with you?"

"Try him!"

He set Wickie on his short bandy legs and she called the dog by name. He came and sat in front of her, beating the ground with his lengthy tail, his ears flat in an ingratiating humility. She bent and patted him. "You see!"

Tristram nodded. His silence became tense and painful, as though he laboured under a physical weakness, kept only at bay by a sheer effort of will. She looked at him critically, and saw that he was trembling.

"You are ill, Major Tristram. Sit down and rest. Smithy will bring us coffee—it will do you good to sit with me here in the darkness and quiet."

"I ought to be on my way," he answered unevenly.

"Well, then, if not for yourself—for me. I will admit that I am ill and that I need the Dakktar Sahib's ministrations. It comforts me to have you here. It is your duty, therefore, to remain."

"You are stronger than I," he answered, with an unsteady laugh. But he sat down opposite her, his body bent forward, his hands clasped between his knees. She could see nothing of his face, but the outline of his fine head, distorted a little by its mass of thick hair, trimmed by an amateur hand, lent his shadow a look of way-worn distress and physical disintegration. Yet it remained an indomitable shadow. She remembered him as she had seen him once before. Since then the Quixote had had his tussle with the windmill and now, bruised and broken, prepared himself for a fresh onslaught.

"Why do you do it?" she flung at him, almost angrily.

He looked up at her, as though waking from a dream.

"Do what?" he asked.

She shrugged her shoulders.

"Oh, I know. Ayeshi has told me. You're going into that hell single-handed and crippled. Boucicault has refused to get you help. Why do you let him trample on you? He is not in your service. Are you afraid of him, too?"

He met her taunt with a grave simplicity.

"No, I am not afraid. Up till now, Colonel Boucicault has blocked my line of communication with the authorities. That's over. There's going to be a tussle to the death between us, and he knows it. That's why I didn't come myself tonight."

"Then why need you go? Any one would exonerate you. Ayeshi said it might mean—" She recoiled from her own thought. "It's almost your duty not to go," she exclaimed.

"Do you want me to remain?" he asked.

She beat her clenched fist irritably on the arm of her chair.

"No—because it wouldn't be you then—because you are a fool, Major Tristram—a sublime fool whom one wouldn't have changed even to save him from destruction. Go, by all means, and sacrifice yourself to your duty. For that you were born."

He sank back in his chair, his face lifted to where the jungle of the neglected compound thinned before the night's luminous sapphire.

"I don't believe in duty and sacrifices," he said, "but in happiness."

"And isn't your happiness here?" she demanded, imperiously; "isn't this happiness—the thing you dreamed of?"

She saw his hands clench themselves.

"Yes—but a dream that can't be fulfilled—a secret corner of fancy—that isn't enough. In the end—if one lived on it, set it before one as the end-all—one would sicken and starve. The dream itself would die. I've figured it out—happiness is the consciousness of purpose—"

"What purpose can any one of us have?" she retorted scornfully, "we who are ourselves purposeless creations?"

He waited a moment. When he answered, his voice sounded clear and steady, though his words were faltering, groping efforts of expression.

"I don't know—I mean rather that I can't explain. I'm an inarticulate sort of fellow. It seems to me—ninety-nine days out of a hundred we don't worry as to where we're going or why. We do what we've got to do blindly. But the hundredth day is a day of reckoning. You were going to say just now that I might die if I went out there. Well, that doesn't seem to me so important. Death is the only visible goal we have. What matters, what is vital, what is happiness is that we should reach that goal splendidly—as splendidly as we can. Surely happiness is this, that in our moments of reckoning, when we have to face ourselves, or when we reach the goal, perhaps suddenly and unexpectedly, we can look back on our course with the knowledge that, whether punishment or reward or nothing awaits us, we ran straight according to our lights."

"And 'running straight' for you means plunging into the sickness and suffering of others?" she asked moodily.

She saw him throw back his tired shoulders.

"What other 'running straight' is there that matters?" he returned, ardently. "Those poor folk out in Bjura—I'm the only hope they've got. Supposing I fail them? No one would blame me—no one would say I hadn't run straight—but I should have broken the only law I recognize—I should have denied the only god I know. And more than that—I'm English. When I go out there, I carry my colours with me. It depends on me whether those colours signify to these people suffering or happiness, and whether, in the end, they signify happiness or suffering to us—" He paused, and then went on quietly. "And they must be held higher and steadier because others have forgotten."

"As Colonel Boucicault has forgotten," she put in.

"And is he happy?" he asked quickly. She was silent, and he made a little gesture of apology. "I'm sorry—I'm like all lonely men—I've grown preachy and prosy. I've tired you—"

But she turned to him, her head high, her eyes brilliant with a suddenly revealed feeling.

"Why should you apologize? I also have my theories of life and death. Yes—to die splendidly—on the mountain top, in a palace of gold and silver, in the full tide of youth and strength, of one's own free-will, not knowing decay or suffering—to look back on a life without ugliness, without poverty or meanness—that is the goal—that is happiness."

"That is your vision," he said, smiling at her wistfully. "But you are fire and air, and I am heavy earth."

She got up and went to the steps of the verandah, and stood there with her back turned to him.

"Oh, your vision of me, Major Tristram—beware of it. Why do you make an idol of me?"

But he did not answer.

Ayeshi came out of the shadow of the trees, leading the grotesque Arabella and his own sturdy pony. Tristram half rose.

"No!" she said imperatively. "You have made me tired and wretched and angry. You, a physician! You have got to cure me before you go."

"What shall I do?" he asked humbly.

She was quiet a moment, her finger to her lips. Her anger had gone, and she was once more the being of swift and joyous fancies.

"Look—the moon is showing between the trees. It has made a white pool at my feet, Tristram Sahib. Do you remember what you told me—how at night-time you sat by the village fire and listened to Ayeshi's stories of the great past? You promised that one day I should listen, too. Now I claim fulfilment. We will sit round the moonlight and warm our hands at it, and Ayeshi shall tell the story that his Sahib loves best. Shall it be so?"

"Yes," he answered.

Both Mrs. Smithers and the soft-footed native servant, whom she now marshalled in with a forbidding air of distrust, were waved imperiously aside.

"No—coffee and Smithy are civilized—and we are miles from civilization. We are on the borders of the jungle. If I listened, I should hear the howl of the jackals—so I shan't listen, for I detest jackals. There are monkeys overhead peeping at us and chattering soft insults—and birds pluming themselves for sleep. The moonlight will be on our faces, and it will be like the firelight. And the river shall make the music to Ayeshi's story."

She slipped down on to the stone floor and sat there, cross-legged, her chin cupped in her hand. The circle of pale silver reflected itself back on to her earnest face and painted faint, mocking shadows at the corners of her composed lips. Ayeshi crouched dreamingly on the lower step of the verandah. On the other side of the little circle, Tristram sat with Wickie drowsing at his feet, his hands outstretched as though, to please her fancy, he warmed them at the firelight. Once, as Ayeshi told his story, he looked across at her and his face was haunted with weariness and suffering and famished desire.

Thus Ayeshi told of the Rani Kurnavati and her Bracelet Brother.

The moonlight faded. With Ayeshi's last words a chill darkness crept over them, hiding them from one another and silencing them. It was as though they had indeed warmed themselves at a fire which had gone out, leaving them to the grey ash of their dreams.

Silently Ayeshi had risen and untethered the horses and led them towards the gates of the compound. But Tristram lingered, standing on the steps of the verandah, his face turned from the woman who looked down at him.

She laid her hands on his shoulders.

"And you who go out very gallantly, perhaps to meet the end which you fear so little—have you nothing to ask first of life, nothing you desire, no fulfilment of mad dreams dreamed by the river and by your fireside—nothing that I might not grant?"

He made no answer. She felt him tremble under her hands. Her laugh was subdued, pityingly triumphant.

"Oh, Tristram Sahib, do you think I don't know—do you think I haven't read your heart?" she said.

And bent and kissed him.

CHAPTER XI

INFERNO

He pitched his tent outside the village in a paradise of brilliantly painted flowers and high grass, whose bright emerald shone luminously where the dying sun touched it. A pool in the shadow of the trees wore a score of lotus-flowers on its still breast, and the ghosts of yellow blossoms from the overhanging mango shimmered tremulously beneath among the tangled undergrowth.

But there was no living thing. The sand at the water's edge was unbroken by the familiar pugs, and the trees and the long grasses were empty and silent. Death and over-abundant sensuous life lay side by side. The very soil, rich and moist, gave out an aroma of sickly sweetness tainted with corruption.

The native bearers shook their heads and crouched down near their sleeping quarters, awaiting the loathsome, invisible thing with the fatality of their race.

But Tristram shouldered his case of medicaments and sought the road leading to the village.

The road was ankle deep in a fine powdery dust, which rose at each step and hung in the dead air long after he had passed. There were treacherous ruts which the dust covered, zig-zagging through what had been slimy marsh-land and was now a crumbling, sun-baked bed of miasma. Here, too, the stillness was absolute. The village roofs rose out of the flatness like irregular ant-heaps, deserted by their once restless workers. The night which came striding over the plain was a stifling mantle, choking out the last breath of life under its smothering folds of darkness. The quiet itself was eerie, unnatural, the terrible quiet of a suffering which has passed protest.

Then at last there came a sound—a whimpering, inhuman cry—and the man stood still, peering through the darkness. A form lay by the roadside and held out thin arms of appeal towards him.

"Siva! Siva! Have mercy!"

He came nearer and knelt down. Once it had been a woman, but the mysterious spectre which had laid hold of Bjura had laid hold of her and twisted her out of human semblance. A child lay under her side, round-limbed, smooth-cheeked, as sweet as the lotus-flower growing out of the poisoned waters of the pool. The bloated, shapeless horror slobbered and whispered over it.

"Siva—my little son—have mercy!"

Perhaps some knowledge of another, gentler faith had reached her that she appealed for mercy to a power which knew none. Tristram bent over her and drew the child away from her clawing, swollen hands.

"I am not Siva. I am the Dakktar Sahib come to help you. Do not be afraid!"

"Have mercy, Sahib!" She lay on her back staring up at him through the gathering gloom with terrible eyes. "Have mercy!"

"Give me your child. I will take care of it. It shall come to no harm—I promise you. Trust me!"

She gaped at him with the chill non-comprehension of gathering insensibility. Only the piteous appeal hung perpetually on her lips like a maddening refrain. He took the child and freed it from its filthy rags, and gave it to Ayeshi standing near him, impassive and watchful.

"Take it back to the camp and do the best you can," he ordered.

"And you, Sahib?"

"I shall go on—presently."

He went back to the woman and knelt down beside her, taking the terrible head upon his knee, and forcing a sedative between her lips. A nauseating odour of disease rose up to him, but it did not nauseate him. He knelt there and waited for the first sign of relief. And presently the laboured, agonized breathing softened; she half turned, and her palsied, distorted hand fumbled over his coat, groping its way down the sleeve to his wrist. She took his hand and pressed it against her burning cheek, against her lips. And he bore with her, holding her closer as she neared the brink, whispering to her in her own tongue, a medley of all the words of comfort that he knew. And all at once she sighed deeply, and was quiet, with the quietness which was more than sleep.