Outside, brazen earth and brazen sky glared at one another with malignant intensity. Two bullocks lounged under the bananas by the mill wheel flicking lazy tails when the flies presumed too shamelessly upon their apathy; and crows, with beaks agape, hopped resignedly from one burning patch of shade to another. Among the verandah roof-beams, three grey squirrels argued, with subdued chitterings, over a kipper's head stolen from a breakfast plate; and at intervals a piteous wailing came from the servants' quarters, where, as all knew, Nizam Din, kitmutgar, was beating his pretty wife, Miriam Bibi, for the third time that week, because she had grown careless in the matter of covering her face, since the coming of Zyarulla, whose arrogant magnificence had created a flutter in more than one respectable household.

But Quita's letter, written in her 'garden' on a boulder, before breakfast, had transported Lenox many hundred miles away from it all.

The cluttering of squirrels, and the cries of poor Miriam Bibi entered his ears; but the spirit of him was back among the mountains; the scent of warm pine-needles was is his nostrils, the spell of his wife's face and voice upon his heart.

A sudden sense of suffocation dispelled the dream. He found himself breathless, in a bath of perspiration. The punkah had stopped dead.

And one must have endured this trifling inconvenience to gauge the significance of those five words.

Lenox straightened himself with an oath. "_Kencho_.[1] . . . you son of a jackal!" he thundered; at the same time jerking the punkah frill, an effective means of reanimating the long-suffering punkah coolie, who has a trick of twisting the rope round his arm, that he may jerk it the more easily in his dreams.

But Lenox's vigorous pull merely brought a great length of rope through the wall; and his command was answered by the groans of a man in torment. Springing up, he wrenched open the gla.s.s door; and a blast as from a furnace struck him across the face. The coolie, a brown, distorted ma.s.s, writhed upon the hot stones in mortal agony. At the Sahib's approach, he struggled to his knees with a rush of incoherent detail; while Lenox shouted for Zyarulla, and the dogcart; flung a word of encouragement to the stricken man, and went in again for his helmet.

Till the trap appeared Lenox paced the verandah; the punkah coolie groaned; and Zyarulla protested as openly as he dared against his Sahib being put to personal inconvenience for a base-born--mere dust of the earth. None the less, at the Sahib's order he gingerly helped the dust of the earth into the trap, where Lenox put his one available arm round the writhing body; and the _sais_, who showed small relish for the situation, was ordered to get up and drive from behind. The which he did; leaning over the back seat, and keeping ostentatiously clear of the misbegotten son of a pig who had broken his midday sleep.

In this fashion they journeyed, awkwardly enough, to the temporary cholera hospital; a handful of tents and gra.s.s huts on the outskirts of the station. Betwixt the clutches of cramp, and the abject humility of his kind, the coolie slithered from the seat on to the mat; and Lenox had some ado to prevent his falling headlong from the cart. But in due time he was handed over safely to a suave, coffee-coloured hospital a.s.sistant, and carried shrieking into a tent crammed with sights unfit to be told; whence he emerged, two hours later, without protest of voice or limb, to swell the intermittent stream of fellow-corpses that flowed from the hospital to the burning ghatt or the Mahommedal burial-ground outside the station.

When Lenox staggered back into the hall, dizzy with headache, and half-blinded with glare, he was met by Desmond, who, noticing a slight lurch as he entered, took hold of his arm.

"Zyarulla told me what happened," he said, a great gentleness in his voice. "Come on to your room, old man. Take a rousing dose of phenacetin, and lie down till tiffin. I'll bring you a lime-squash."

"Thanks. You are a d.a.m.ned good sort, Desmond. The sun's touched me up, I fancy. I shall be all right in a couple at hours."

But before two hours were out, Desmond's orderly was speeding through the dust to the Doctor Sahib's house; and Desmond himself had gone hurriedly to his wife's room, where she too was lying down after her morning's duties. She rose at his coming, holding out both hands. For she read disaster in his eyes.

"Darling, what has gone wrong?"

"It's Lenox. He's down with it. Not severe as yet. But there's no mistaking what it is."

Her faint colour--it had grown perceptibly fainter in the past week--left her face.

"Oh, his poor wife! We must send a wire at once."

"I've sent one already, by the orderly who went for Courtenay. Told her she should have news every day, for the present."

"Oh, bless you, Theo! You think of everything!"

"Steady, Honor, steady," he rebuked her gently. "We've got to do a fair share of thinking between us just now. Paul can safely stay on if one isolates that side of the house; and Zyarulla and I can do everything for Lenox between us. As for you, John must give you a bed till we're through."

"But, Theo . . ."

"Be quiet!" he broke in almost roughly; adding on a changed note: "For once in a way, my dearest, you will obey orders without question--or go altogether. Now give me the chlorodyne, and let me get back to poor Lenox. Seems brutal to give him any form of opium after all he's been through. Hullo, there's Richardson shouting outside. He'll be terribly cut up when he knows."

It transpired that Richardson had come over, post-haste, to report three cases among his men; and at sun-down the little mountain battery, with its three subalterns and full camp equipment, marched out into the open desert, scornfully overlooked by that Pisgah height of the Frontier, the Takti Suliman, whose square-cut crags were printed in sharp outline upon a stainless sky.

[1] Pull.

CHAPTER XX.

"Pa.s.sion has but one cry, one only;--Oh to touch thee, my beloved!"

--Olive Schreiner.

Asiatic cholera is as capricious as a woman; capricious both as to her choice of victims, and as to the grisly fashion of her wooing. In one mood she will kill at a stroke, like a poisoned arrow; in another she will play with a tortured body as a cat plays with a mouse. And it was thus that she dealt with Eldred Lenox.

For two days and nights Desmond and the Pathan wrestled against the evil thing, and against that deadly apathy as to the result, which kills more surely than the disease itself. And since the regiment claimed many hours of the Englishman's day, the brunt of the nursing devolved upon Zyarulla, who scorned suggestions of sleep, and appeared to live on pellets of opium, and a hookah, which inhabited the verandah outside his master's room.

There were moments when they were tempted to despair. But they fought on doggedly, and without comment; and as the second night wore towards morning, they knew that they had conquered. The gong at the police station down the road had just clanged three times. Every door and window-slit stood open at their widest; and through them entered in the familiar, unforgettable smell of the Indian Empire under her yearly baptism of fire; a smell of dust, and baked brick work, and stale native tobacco. A hand-lamp on the mantelpiece diffused a yellow twilight through the room; a twilight flavoured with kerosine: and across the twilight the shadow of the punkah flitted, like a whispering ghost.

Zyarulla, crouching at the bedside, slid a cautious knotted hand between the b.u.t.tons of the sleeping-coat, and laid it lightly on his master's heart. The flutter within was feeble, but regular; though the face, grey and shrunken almost past recognition, still bore the impress of death.

"G.o.d is great," the Pathan muttered into his beard. "The strength of the Heaven-born is as that of mine own hills; and my Sahib will live.

It is enough."

On the farther side of the bed, Desmond, in gauze vest, and belted trousers, mopped his forehead, and drew a long breath. Then, measuring out a tablespoonful of raw-meat soup, he slipped a hand under the dark head on the pillow.

"Lenox, dear chap, drink this, will you?" he said, speaking as persuasively as a mother to a child.

Lenox obeyed automatically. For a mere instant his lids lifted, and recognition gleamed in the eyes that seemed to have retreated half-way into his head. Then, with an incoherent murmur, he settled himself into a more natural att.i.tude of rest; and the two men watching him intently, exchanged a nod of satisfaction.

The Pathan, sitting back on his heels, fumbled at his belt for a pellet of opium.

"He will sleep now, Huzoor, like a day-old babe; and the Presence will sleep also. Since yesterday at this time your Honour hath taken no rest; and there be three hours yet to parade-time."

"Good. We have fought a tough fight, thou and I, and be sure Lenox Sahib will know of thy share in it. Wake me at half-past five."

"Huzoor."

Zyarulla salaamed profoundly; and Desmond, dropping with fatigue, flung himself, even as he was, on to a chair-bed in the adjoining dressing-room, and slept the dreamless sleep of exhaustion.

Before six he was over at Meredith's bungalow, sitting on the edge of his wife's bed, drinking tea with an egg in it,--her own prescription,--and enjoying her delight at his news.

"Good enough, isn't it?" he concluded heartily. "I'll take the telegraph office on my way back."

"And _I'll_ come over to breakfast, bag and baggage!"

"Capital. If John agrees."

"Of course he will. He's not such a fidget as you are!"

"Glad to hear it; if it means getting you back; and both rooms shall be disinfected to-day, Lord, but it's a weight off my mind!"

And he cantered down to the Lines in such a mood of exaltation as they know who have been privileged to fight for a human life, and win.

Honor got her own way, as she always did; and half-past nine found her back at her deserted post behind the teapot. Desmond fancied that she looked paler than usual; that her cheerfulness was veiled by a shadow of constraint. But as Paul was present, enjoying his first normal breakfast, he contented himself with scrutinising her, when her attention seemed to be taken up elsewhere. As a matter of fact, Honor knew precisely how often he looked at her; and, womanlike, hugged his solicitude to her heart. For there had been moments, in the past two days, when the traitorous thought would obtrude itself that perhaps the child needed her most after all.