"_Parbleu, cherie, qu'y-a-t'il a maintenant_?" he demanded, with an odd mingling of irritation and concern.

"Cholera at Dera Ishmael--Eldred's gone down this morning. . . ." Then tears overwhelmed her, and he turned sharply away. "Oh go, . . . go, and have your breakfast, Michel; and let me be. I want nothing, nothing, but to be left alone."

And vanishing into her room, she bolted the door behind her.

Maurice frowned, and sighed. In all his knowledge of her, Quita had never so completely lost her self-control. It was quite upsetting: and he disliked being upset the first thing in the morning. It put him out of tune for the rest of the day. But after all . . one must eat. And he retraced his steps to the dining-room.

"I wish to heaven she had never discovered this uncomfortable husband of hers!" he reflected as he went "Since he will neither marry her, nor leave her alone; and it is we who have to suffer for his heroics!"

For all that, he found speedy consolation in the thought that at ten o'clock a new 'subject' was coming to sit to him:--a wrinkled hag, whom he had met on his way back from Jundraghat, bent half double under a towering load of gra.s.s, her neutral-tinted tunic and draped trousers relieved by the scarlet of betel-nut on her lips and gums, and by a goat's-hair necklet strung with raw lumps of amber and turquoise, interset with three plaques of beaten silver;--the only form of savings bank known to these simple children of the hills.

While hastily demolishing his breakfast, Maurice visualised his picture in every detail: and with the arrival of his model all thought of Quita and her woes was crowded out of his mind. Yet the man was not heartless, by any means. He was simply an artist of the extreme type, endowed by temperament with the capacity for subordinating all things,--his own griefs no less than the griefs of others,--to one dominant, insatiable purpose. And according to his lights he must be judged.

Quita remained invisible till lunch-time, lying inert, where she had flung herself, upon her unmade bed.

The first tempest of misery, and rebellion, and self-castigation had given place to sheer exhaustion. For even suffering has its limitations; which is perhaps the reason why grief rarely kills. All the springs of life seemed suddenly to have run down. Her spirit felt crushed and broken by the obstructiveness of all about her. The strain of the past three weeks, following upon a severe shock, had told upon her more than she knew; and this morning's sharp revulsion of feeling brought her near to purely physical collapse.

And while she lay alone through two endless hours, tracing designs from the cracks in the whitewashed wall, one conviction haunted her with morbid persistence. Because she had not valued him in the beginning, because she had repudiated him in a moment of wounded pride, he would be taken from her, now that heart and soul were set upon him, and she would never see him again. It was useless to argue that the idea was childish; a mere nightmare of overwrought nerves. It persisted and prevailed, till she felt herself crushed in the grip of a relentless, impersonal Force, against which neither penitence nor tears would avail.

Finally, worn out with pain and rebellion, she fell asleep.

BOOK III.-THE TENTS OF ISHMAEL.

CHAPTER XVIII.

"Leave the what at the what's-its-name, Leave the sheep without shelter; Leave the corpse uninterred, Leave the bride at the altar."

--Kipling.

Even in a land where danger and discomfort flourish like the unG.o.dly, that journey from the cedar-crowned Himalayas to the white hot flats of the Derajat, with the Punjab furnace in full swing, was an experience not readily forgotten by the three who set out upon it in the dripping grey dawn of a July morning. Before them stretched two nights and three days of pure martyrdom, aggravated by that prince of evils--a troubled mind: for the Desmonds a haunting anxiety, and for Lenox the hara.s.sing realisation that his own strength or weakness during the next few months stood for no less than the happiness or misery of the only woman on earth. It is this irrevocable fusion of two lives, and the network of responsibilities arising from an act less simple than it seems, that const.i.tute the strength, the charm, the tragedy of marriage: and a dim foreknowledge of its complexity dawned upon Lenox during his penitential progress into a land of fire and death.

Throughout their fifty mile descent to the foot-hill terminus it rained perseveringly. But toward evening the clouds parted, and an hour of sunshine set the drenched earth steaming like a soup kettle when the lid is lifted off. Desmond had ordained that Lenox and his wife should be carried down in doolies; an indignity to which they submitted under protest: and Honor, scrambling out of her prison through an opening level with the ground, pa.s.sed quite gratefully from its stuffy twilight, redolent of sodden canvas and humanity, to the smell of hot wood and leather that pervaded the sun-saturate railway carriage awaiting them in Pathankot station.

With the unhurried deftness of an experienced pilgrim, she set about making the place cooler, and more habitable; drew up all the window-shutters; opened her bedding roll; and taking possession of Lenox, established him, with tender imperiousness, in the least stifling corner, a pillow set lengthways behind him. He leaned against it, and closed his eyes.

"Head bad?" she asked a little anxiously. For the concussion headache is no child's play, and ten hours in a doolie might breed neuralgia in a cannon-ball.

"Pretty average. Nothing to trouble about." The a.s.surance was not convincing: and she gleaned the truth from two deep lines in his forehead.

"I'm going to make you some tea in a minute," she announced cheerfully, opening her basket, and clamping a travelling spirit-lamp to the woodwork above the seat. "Real tea. Not the stewed leaves and water we should pay six annas for outside! There's half a dozen of soda, three pints of champagne, a fowl, and an aspic in the icebox under your seat. But tea would be best now. We'll keep the rest for your dinners."

He opened his eyes and smiled at her.

"You've a remarkable talent for spoiling a man!"

"It's one I'm very proud of," she answered simply: and leaning out of the open doorway, caught sight of her husband striding down the platform, closely followed by an army of coolies, two bearers, and two pessimistic-looking dogs on chains. "Theo," she called, "do leave that eternal luggage to Amar Singh, and come and be spoilt! We're going to have tea."

Before the train jolted out of the station, she had served it to them in large cups, an insubstantial biscuit in each saucer: for it is drink, not food, that a man wants when the thermometer stands at 110 degrees in the shade.

At Umritsur the train halted for half an hour. The thermometer had not fallen with the sun; and when the faint breeze of their going died down, there seemed to be no air left to breathe.

Lenox dined regally out of the ice-box: while Desmond and Honor, silencing his protests by flight, carried off iced soda and a whisky-flask to the frowsy, airless refreshment room, where they wrestled undismayed with curried kid, the ubiquitous chicken cutlet, and two plates of discoloured water,--flavoured with _jharron_,[1]--that masqueraded as clear soup. Two quarrelsome Eurasians shared their table.

A punkah that may once have been white waggled officiously overhead. But for all that the flies were lords of the meal; and enjoyed it far better than those who paid for it.

"Thank G.o.d for my good dinner!" Desmond muttered with a wry face as he put down his money. "_You_ must supplement it out of Lenox's rations, old lady. _Hukm hai . . . sumja_?" [2]

She laughed and shrugged her shoulders. Having won the victory that mattered, she could afford to be submissive over trifles.

An hour or so before midnight, they clanked into Lah.o.r.e station--a big-bastioned building, whose solid masonry breathed fire, as literally as any dragon of romance. Within was a great darkness, partially dispelled by hanging oil-lamps; and babel enough to wake the Seven Sleepers. The uninitiated arriving at an Indian railway station are apt to imagine that a riot of some sort must be in progress. But it is only the third-cla.s.s pa.s.senger, whose name is legion, fighting, tooth and nail, for the foot of s.p.a.ce due to every possessor of the precious morsel of cardboard tucked into the folds of his belt: because he knows, from harsh experience, that when the train moves on more than a few will be left disconsolate, to watch its unwinking eye vanish out of their ken:--bewildered adventurers, for many of whom the "fire-carriage" still remains a new-fangled G.o.d, who feeds on coal and water, and can only be propitiated by repeated offerings of that wonder-working hieroglyph--the tikkut.

At Lah.o.r.e pa.s.sengers to Dera change into the night mail for Mooltan: and almost before the train drew up Desmond was out on the platform, pushing his way, purposefully, through a ma.s.s of jostling, shouting, perspiring humanity:--Sikhs, Punjabi farmers, moneylenders, 'fat and scant of breath,' women of all ages, with apathetic babies, in round cap and necklet, astride upon their hips. In the station-master's office he found the fateful red envelope awaiting him; and broke the seal with a shaking hand.

"Crisis over. Condition more hopeful. Will wire Jhung."

"Thank G.o.d!" he muttered, choking down a lump that had risen in his throat. Then, elbowing his way back to where Honor and Lenox stood guard over a disordered pile of luggage, he thrust the paper into her hand.

"We'll bring him round between us, you and I," he said, as she looked up; and she nodded contentedly, her eyes deep in his. He could no longer regret having given way to her; and she knew it!

They were not the only English pa.s.sengers in the Mooltan train. Two Dera subalterns, who had fled posthaste from Simla, stood smoking outside their carriage:--Hodson, the 'slacker' of the Battery, a small sallow individual, with heavy-lidded eyes, and a disagreeable mouth; and Major Olliver's 'sub,' Bobby Nixon, who answered indiscriminately to half a dozen names, but was officially registered as The Chicken, a tribute to his cheerful lack of wisdom, worldly or otherworldly, and to the spa.r.s.e crop of 'down' that surmounted an extensive freckled face, and shadowed a mouth whose one beauty lay in its readiness to smile capaciously upon the world at large.

As Honor and Lenox came towards him, the said mouth screwed itself into a low whistle.

"Great Scott, Mrs Desmond, . . but this is flagrant heroism! Who'd have dreamt of meeting _you_ here?"

"A pleasant surprise, I hope," she asked, smiling, as they shook hands.

"Why, of course it's always good to see you," the boy answered, looking upon her with frank admiration. "And you bet we're proud to have our ladies facing the music with us. But still . . cholera's cholera; and it looks like a record year. They've got it hot and strong at Mian Mir.

Two of the Norfolks came down the hill with us, swearing like Billy O.

Been up less than a fortnight; and there's a masked ball on at the Club to-morrow. Oh Lord, it's a lively country! Poor old Hodson only got a week in Simla; and he has fever on him still."

Lenox glanced quizzically at the man he desired to weed out of his beloved Battery by the simple means of making him work.

"Hard luck," he remarked; a suspicion of irony in his tone. And Hodson, anathematising under his breath India in general, and the Frontier in particular, strolled off down the platform, head in air. There was little love lost between him and a commandant for whom work was the backbone of life.

Just then, through the open windows of the next carriage, there came forth a voice of thunder--articulate, unparliamentary thunder: and Lenox, with a touch of friendly authority, drew Honor farther away.

"That's old Buckstick," Bobby explained genially. "Giving it to his poor devil of a bearer, because he wants to hit out at some one. They say in the regiment that some fool of a palmist told him to beware of cholera; and I believe the old chap's in a blue funk. Queer thing, funk. Put that man on an unbroken horse, or in the thick of a hand-to-hand scrimmage, and he wouldn't know the meaning of fear. Yet now . . ."

His dissertation was interrupted by the appearance at the window of Colonel Stanham Buckley of the Punjab Infantry, who mopped a moist bald head, and inquired picturesquely of a pa.s.sing official when the blank this blankety blank train was supposed to start. Then catching sight of a woman's figure, he vanished, with a final incoherent explosion, slamming up the window-shutter behind him.

How the devil, he asked himself furiously, should a sane man expect to find an Englishwoman hanging about Lah.o.r.e station on a murderous night of July? The idea that she might be travelling to Dera never entered his head. His own wife, after five years of Frontier vicissitudes,--aggravated by debt, and the tyranny of 'little drinks at mess,'--had developed p.r.o.nounced views on the duties of motherhood.

These had led to a house in Surrey, which, for one reason or another, it had never yet seemed feasible to give up: and Buckley had consoled himself after the fashion of his kind, with hard drinking, hard riding, and hard swearing,--the only form of Trinity recognised by a certain type of man.