In a moment his arms were round her; and they clung together a long while, in the only complete form of nearness they had known....

For Roy, that last pa.s.sionate kiss was dead-sea fruit. For Rose, it was her moment of completest surrender to an elemental force she had deliberately played with only to find herself the sport of it at last....

When it was over--all was over. Words were impertinent. He held her hands close, a moment, looking into her tear-filled eyes. Then he took up hat and stick and stumbled blindly down the verandah steps....

Back in his bachelor room at the Club, he realised that fever was on him again: his eyeb.a.l.l.s burning; little hammers beating all over his head.

Mechanically, he picked up two letters that lay awaiting him: one from his father, one from Jeffers, congratulating him, in rather guarded phrases, on his engagement to Miss Arden.

It was the last straw.

END OF PHASE IV.

PHASE V.

A STAR IN DARKNESS

CHAPTER I.

"Thou art with life Too closely woven, nerve with nerve intwined; Service still craving service, love for love ...

Nor yet thy human task is done."

--R.L.S.

In the verandah of Narkhanda dak bungalow Roy lay alone, languidly at ease, a.s.sisted by rugs and pillows and a Madeira cane lounge at an invalid angle; walls and arches splashed with sunshine; and a table beside him littered with convalescent accessories. There were home papers; there were books; there was fruit and a syphon, cut lemons and crushed ice--everything thoughtfulness could suggest set within easy reach. But the nameless depression of convalescence hung heavy on his spirit and his limbs.

He was thirsty; he was lonely; he was mentally hungry in a negative kind of way. Yet it simply did not seem worth the trivial effort of will to decide whether he wanted to pick up a book or an orange or to press the syphon handle. So he lay there, inert, impa.s.sive, staring across the valley at the snows--peak beyond soaring peak, ethereal in the level light.

The beauty of them, the pellucid clearness and stillness of early evening, stirred no answering echo within him. His brain was travelling back over a timeless interval; wandering uncertainly among sensations, apparitions, and dreams, presumably of semi-delirium: for Lance was in them and his mother and Rose and Dyan, saying and doing impossible things....

And in clearer intervals, there hovered the bearded face of Azim Khan, pressing upon his refractory Sahib this infallible medicine, that 'chikken brath' or jelly. And occasionally there was another bearded face: vaguely familiar, though he could not put a name to it.

Between them the two had brought out a doctor from Simla. He remembered a sharp altercation over that. He wanted no confounded doctor messing round. But Azim Khan, for love of his master, had flatly defied orders: and the forbidden doctor had appeared--involving further exhausting argument. For on no account would Roy be moved back to Simla. Azim Khan understood his ways and his needs. He was d.a.m.ned if he would have any one else near him.

And this time he had prevailed. For the doctor, who happened to be a wise man, knew when acquiescence was medically sounder than insistence.

There had, however, been a brief intrusion of a strange woman, in cap and ap.r.o.n, who had made a nuisance of herself over food and washing, and was infernally in the way. When the fever abated, she melted into the landscape; and Roy had just enough of his old spirit left in him to murmur, '_Shahbash!_' in a husky voice: and Azim Khan, inflated with pride, became more autocratic than ever.

The other bearded face had resolved itself into the Delhi Sikh, Jiwan Singh. He had been on a tramp among the Hills, combating insidious Home-Rule fairy-tales among the villagers: and finding the Sahib very ill, had stayed on to help.

This morning they had told him it was the third of June:--barely three weeks since that strange, poignant parting with Rose. Not seven weeks since the infinitely more poignant and terrible parting with Lance. Yet, as his mind stirred unwillingly, picking up threads, he seemed to be looking back across a measureless gulf into another life....

"The Sahib has slept? His countenance has been more favourable since these few days?"

It was the voice of Jiwan Singh; and the man himself followed it--taut and wiry, instinct with a degree of energy and purpose almost irritating to one who was feeling emptied of both; aimless as a jelly-fish stranded by the tide.

"Not smoking, _Hazur_? Has that scoundrel Azim Khan forgotten the cigarettes?"

Roy unearthed his case, and held it up, smiling.

"The scoundrel forgets nothing," said he, knowing very well how the two of them had vied with one another in forestalling his needs. "Sit down, my friend--and tell me news. I am too lazy to read." He touched an unopened 'Civil and Military Gazette.' "Too lazy even to cast out the devil of laziness. But very ready to listen. Are things all quiet now?

Any more tamashas?"

"Only a very little one across the frontier," said the Sikh with his grim smile: and proceeded to explain that the Indian Government had lately become entangled in a sort of a war with Afghanistan; a rather '_kutcha bandobast_'[37] in Jiwan Singh's estimation; and not quite up to time; but a war, for all that.

"You mean----" asked Roy, his numbed interest faintly astir, "that it was to have been part of the same game as the trouble down there?"

"G.o.d has given me ears--and wits, _Hazur_," was the cautious answer.

"_That_ would be _pukka bundobast_,[38] for war and trouble to come at one stroke in the hot season, when so many of the white soldier-_log_ are in the Hills. Does your Honour suppose that merely by _chance_ the Amir read in his paper of riots in India, and said in his heart, 'Wah!

Now is the time for lighting little fires along the Border'?"

"N-no--I don't suppose----"

"Does your Honour suppose Hindus and Moslems--outside a highly educated few--are truly falling on each other's necks, without one thought of political motive?"

"No, my friend--I do not suppose."

"Yet these things are said openly among our people: and too few, now, have courage to speak their thought. For it is the loyal who suffer--_shurrum ki bhat_![39] Is it surprising, _Hazur_, if we, who distrust this new madness, begin to ask ourselves, 'Has the British Raj lost the will--or the power--of former days to protect friends and smite enemies'? If the noisy few clamouring for _Swaraj_ make India once more a battlefield, _your_ people can go. We Sikhs must remain, with Pathans and Afghans--as of old--hammering at our doors----"

At sight of the young Englishman's pained frown, he checked his expansive mood. "To the Sahib I can freely speak the thoughts of my heart; but this is not talk to make a sick man well. G.o.d is merciful.

Before all is lost--the British Raj may yet arise with power, as in the great days...."

But his talk, if unpalatable, was more tonic than he knew; because Roy's love for India went deeper than he knew. The justice of Jiwan Singh's reproach; the hint at tragic severance of the two countries mingled within him, waked him effectually from semi-torpor; and the process was as painful as the tingling renewal of life in a frozen limb. By timely courage, on the spot, the threat to India had been staved off: but it was there still--sinister, unsleeping, virtually unchecked.

'Scotched--not killed.' The voice of Lance sounded too clearly in Roy's brain; and the more intimate pain, deadened a little by illness, struck at his heart like a sword....

Within a week, care and feeding and inimitable air, straight from the snowfields, had made him, physically, a new man. Mentally, it had brought him face to face with actualities, and the staggering question, 'What next'?

At the back of his mind he had been dreading it, evading it, because it would force him to look deep into his own heart; and to make decisions, when the effort of making them was anathema, beclouded as he was by the depression that still brooded over him like a fog. The doctor had prescribed a tonic and a whiff of Simla frivolity; but Roy paid no heed.

He knew his malady was mainly of the heart and the spirit. The true curative touch could only come from some arrowy shaft that would pierce to the core of one or the other.

This morning, by way of rea.s.serting his normal self, he had risen very early with intent to walk out and spend the day at Baghi dak bungalow, ten miles on. Taking things easily, he believed it could be done. He would look through his ma.n.u.script; try and pick up threads. Suraj could follow later; and he would ride home over the pa.s.s in the cool of the evening.

He set out under a clear heaven, misted with the promise of heat: the air rather ominously still. But the thread of a path winding through the dimness and vastness of Narkhanda Forest was ice-cool with the breath of night. Pines, ilex, and deodars clung miraculously to a hillside of ma.s.sive rock, that jutted above him at intervals--threatening, immense; and often, on the _khud_ side, dropped abruptly into nothingness. When the road curved outward, splashes of sunlight patterned it; and intermittent gaps revealed the flash of snow-peaks, incredibly serene and far.

Normally the scene--the desolate grandeur of it--would have intoxicated Roy. But the stranger he was carrying about with him, and called by his own name, reacted in quite another fashion to the shadowed majesty of looming rocks and forest aisles. The immensity of it dwarfed one mere suffering man to the dimensions of a pebble on the path. And the pebble had the advantage of insensibility. The stillness and chillness made him feel overwhelmingly alone. A sudden craving for Lance grew almost intolerable....

But Lance was gone. Paul, with his bride, had vanished from human ken; Rose, a shattered illusion, gone too. Better so--of course; though, intermittently, the man she had roused in him still ached for the sight and feel of her. She gave a distinct thrill to life: and, if he could not forgive her, neither could he instantly forget her.