Still less could he forget the significance of the shock she had dealt him on their day of parting. Patently she loved him, in her pa.s.sionate, egotistical fashion--as he had never loved her; patently she had combated her shrinking in defiance of her mother: and yet...!

Rage as he might, his Rajput pride, and pride in his Rajput heritage, were wounded to the quick. If all English girls felt that way, he would see them further, before he would propose to another one, or 'confess'

to his adored Mother, as if she were a family skeleton or a secret vice.

Instantly there sprang the thought of Aruna--her adoration, her exalted pa.s.sion; Aruna, whom he might have loved, yet was constrained to put aside because of his English heritage; only to find himself put aside by an English girl on account of his Indian blood. A pleasant predicament for a man who must needs marry in common duty to his father and himself.

And what of Tara? Was it possible...? Could that be the meaning of her final desperate, 'I _can't_ do it, Roy--even for you'! Was it conceivable--she who loved his mother to the point of worship? Still smarting from his recent rebuff, he simply could not tell. Thea and Lance loved her too; yet, in Lance especially, he had been aware of a tacit tendency to ignore the Indian connection.

The whole complication touched him too nearly, hurt and bewildered him too bitterly, for cool consideration. He only saw that which had been his pride converted into a reproach, a two-edged sword barring the way to marriage: and in the bitterness of his heart he found it hard to forgive his parents--mainly his father--for putting him in so cruel a position, with no word of warning to soften the blow.

Perhaps people felt differently in England. If so, India was no place for him. How blatantly juvenile--to his clouded, tormented brain--seemed his arrogant dreams of Oxford days! What could such as he do for her, in this time of tragic upheaval. And how could all the Indias he had seen--not to mention the many he had not seen--be jumbled together under that one misleading name? That was the root fallacy of dreamers and 'reformers.' They spoke of her as one, when in truth she was many--bewilderingly many. The semblance of unity sprang mainly from England's unparalleled achievement--her Pax Britannica, that held the scales even between rival chiefs and races and creeds; that had wrought, in miniature, the very inter-racial stability which Europe had vainly fought and striven to achieve. Yet now, some malign power seemed constraining her, in the name of progress, to undo the work of her own hands....

All his thronging thoughts were tinged with the gloom of his unhopeful mood; and his body sagged with his sagging spirit. Before he had walked four miles, his legs refused to carry him any farther.

He had emerged into the open, into full view of the vastness beyond.

Naked rock and stone, jewelled with moss and young green, fell straight from the path's edge; and one ragged pine, springing from a group of boulders, was roughly stencilled on blue distances empurpled with shadows of thunderous cloud.

A flattened boulder proved irresistible; and Roy sat down, leaning his head against the trunk, sniffing luxuriously--whiffs of resin and sun-warmed pine-needles. Oh, to be at home, in his own beech-wood! But the journey in this weather would be purgatorial. Meantime, there was his walk; and he decided, prosaically, to fortify himself with a slab of chocolate. Instead--still more prosaically, he fell sound asleep....

But sleep, in an unnatural position, begets dreams. And Roy dreamed of Lance; of that last awful day when he raved incessantly of Rose. But in the dream he was conscious; and before his distracted gaze Roy held Rose in his arms; craving her, yet hating her; because she clung to him, heedless of entreaties from Lance, and would not be shaken off....

In a frantic effort to free himself, he woke--with the anguish of his loss fresh upon him--to find the sky heavily overcast, the breathlessness of imminent storm in the air. Away to the North there were blue s.p.a.ces, sun-splashed leagues of snow. But from the South and West rolled up the big battalions--heralds of the monsoon.

He concluded apathetically that Baghi was 'off.' He was in for a drenching. Lucky he had brought his burberry....

Yet he did not stir. A ton weight seemed to hang on his limbs, his spirit, his heart. He simply sat there, in a carven stillness, staring down, down, into abysmal depths....

And startlingly, sharply, the temptation a.s.sailed him. The tug of it was almost physical.... How simple to yield--to cut his many tangles at one stroke!

In that jaundiced moment he saw himself a failure foreordained; debarred from marriage by evils supposed to spring from the dual strain in him; his cherished hopes of closer union between the two countries he loved threatened with shipwreck by an England complacently experimental, an India at war with the British connection and with her many selves. He seemed fated to bring unhappiness on those he cared for--Aruna, Lance, even Rose. And what of his father--if he failed to marry? He hadn't even the grit to finish his wretched novel....

He rose at last, mechanically, and moved forward to the unrailed edge of all things. The magnetism of the depths drew him. The fatalistic strain in his blood drew him....

He stood--though he did not know it--as his mother had once stood, hovering on the verge; his own life--that she bore within her--hanging in the balance. From the fatal tilt, she had been saved by the voice of her husband--the voice of the West. And now, at Roy's critical moment, it was the voice of the West--of Lance--that sounded in his brain: "Don't fret your heart out, Roy. Carry on."

Having carried on, somehow, through four years of war, he knew precisely how much of casual, dogged pluck was enshrined in that soldierly phrase.

It struck the note of courage and command. It was Lance incarnate. It steadied him, automatically, at a crisis when his shaken nerves might not have responded to any abstract ethical appeal. He closed his eyes a moment to collect himself; swayed, the merest fraction--then deliberately stepped back a pace....

The danger had pa.s.sed.

Through his lids he felt the glare of lightning: the first flash of the storm.

And as the heel of his retreating boot came firmly down on the path behind, there rose an injured yelp that jerked him very completely out of the clouds.

"Poor Terry--poor old man!" he murmured, caressing the faithful creature; always too close by, always getting trodden on--the common guerdon of the faithful. And the whimsical thought intruded, "If I'd gone over, the good little beggar would have jumped after me. Not fair play."

The fact that Terry had been saved from involuntary suicide seemed somehow the more important consideration of the two.

A rumbling growl overhead reminded him that there were other considerations--urgent ones.

"You're not hurt, you little hypocrite. Come on. We must leg it."

And they legged it to some purpose; Terry--idiotically vociferous--leaping on before....

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 37: Crude arrangement.]

[Footnote 38: Sound arrangement.]

[Footnote 39: Shameful talk.]

CHAPTER II.

"I seek what I cannot get; I get what I do not seek."

--RABINDRANATH TAGORE.

Then the storm broke in earnest....

Crash on flash, crash on flash--at ever-lessening intervals--the tearless heavens raged and clattered round his unprotected head. Thunder toppled about him like falling timber stacks. Fiery serpents darted all ways at once among black boughs that swayed and moaned funereally. The gloom of the forest enhanced the weird magnificence of it all: and Roy--who had just been within an ace of flinging away his life--felt irrationally anxious on account of thronging trees and the absence of rain.

He had recovered sufficiently to chuckle at the ignominious anti-climax.

But, as usual, it was the creepsomeness rather than the danger that got on his nerves and forced his legs to hurry of their own accord....

In the deep of a gloomy indent, the thought a.s.sailed him--"Why do I know it all so well? Where...? When...?"

An inner flash lit the dim recesses of memory. Of course--it was that other day of summer, in the far beginning of things; the day of the Golden Tusks and the gloom and the growling thunder; his legs, as now, in a fearful hurry of their own accord; and Tara waiting for him--his High-Tower Princess. With a pang he recalled how she had seemed the point of safety--because she was never afraid.

No Tara waiting now. No point of safety, except a very prosaic dak bungalow and good old Azim, who would fuss like the devil if rain came on and he got a wetting.

Ah--here it was, at last! Buckets of it. Lashing his face, running down his neck, saturating him below his flapping burberry. Buffeted mercilessly, he broke into a trot. Thunder and lightning were less virulent now; and he found himself actually enjoying it all.

Tired----? Not a bit. The miasma of depression seemed blown clean away by the horseplay of the elements. He had been within an ace of taking unwarranted liberties with Nature. Now she retaliated by taking liberties with him; and her buffeting proved a finer restorative than all the drugs in creation. Electricity, her 'fierce angel of the air,'

set every nerve tingling. A queer sensation: but it was _life_. And he had been feeling more than half dead....

Azim Khan, however--being innocent of 'nerves'--took quite another view of the matter.

Arrived at the point of safety, Roy found a log fire burning; and a brazier alight under a contrivance like a huge cane hen-coop, for drying his clothes. Vainly protesting, he was made to change every garment; was installed by the fire, with steaming brandy-and-water at his elbow, and lemons and sugar--and letters ... quite a little pile of them.

"_Belaiti dak, Hazur_,"[40] Azim Khan superfluously informed him, with an air of personal pride in the whole _bundobast_--including the timely arrival of the English mail.

There were parcels also--a biggish one, from his father; another from Jeffers, obviously a book. And suddenly it dawned on him--this must be the tenth of June. Yesterday was his twenty-sixth birthday; and he had never thought of it; never realised the date! But _they_ had thought of it weeks ahead: while he--graceless and ungrateful--had deemed himself half forgotten.

He ran the envelopes through his fingers--Tiny, Tara. (His heart jerked.

Was it congratulations? He had never felt he could write of it to her.) Aruna; a black-edged one from Thea; and--his heart jerked in quite another fashion--Rose!