"Say Miss Maurice, then, by all means," Lenox answered coldly. "She is welcome to call herself what she pleases so far as I am concerned. Go on."

"I want to know when that letter reached you."

"On the afternoon of the day--I was married."

"Good Lord!" the other e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed blankly. "And all that I wrote of,--was it news to you?"

Lenox nodded without looking up.

"My dear fellow, for G.o.d's sake don't tell me that a thoughtless letter of mine was responsible----"

Lenox rose and went over to the mantelpiece. The full light on his face was more than he cared about just then.

"You asked for the truth," he said, in a hard, even voice, "and--you have made a clean shot at it. We separated that day. I have neither seen nor heard of her since."

A long silence followed this bald statement of the case. Max Richardson had no words in which to express the pain he felt. Brutus arose, and rubbed himself against his master's legs, as if dimly aware that sympathy of some sort was required of him, and the regular beat of the sentry's footsteps a.s.serted itself in the stillness.

At last Richardson spoke. "Wonder you cared about shaking hands with me again after that."

Lenox came nearer, and took him by the shoulder.

"My dear good d.i.c.k," he said quietly, "don't talk rubbish; and oblige me by putting the whole affair out of your head. It's as dead as a door-nail. Has been these five years. After all, you were simply an instrument--a providential instrument," he added grimly--"in the general scheme of things." He paused for a moment; then returned to his station on the hearth-rug.

"You say she has been painting under her own name. Has she been doing much in that line lately?"

"Yes. She has made great strides. Her Academy pictures fetched high prices last year."

"I am glad of that."

The words were spoken with such grave politeness that Richardson looked up as if suspecting sarcasm. But the other's face was inscrutable.

"Do you happen to know where she is at present?" he asked, after a pause.

"No. I believe she and her brother travel about Europe. They never came back to England. That's what made my cousins feel sure there was something behind."

"Yes, naturally." Then, with an abrupt return to his usual manner, he added, "Now, old chap, I'm going to send you packing, and get to work.

Deuced glad to have you back again. Hodson's a slacker of the slackest. We shan't keep _him_ up here much longer, I fancy. Border notions of work don't agree with his delicate digestion! See you again at early parade:--sharp up to time."

And as Richardson's footsteps died into silence, Eldred Lenox went slowly back to the writing-table.

The past five years had not dealt tenderly with this man of surface hardness and repressed sensibilities. The black hair at his temples was too freely powdered with silver, the lines between his brows, and about his well-formed mouth and jaw, were too deeply indented for a man of five-and-thirty. The whole rugged face of him was only saved from harshness by a humorous kindliness in the keen blue eyes, that had measured distance and faced death with an equal deliberation; and by a forehead whose breadth made the whole face vivid with intellect and power. He looked ten years older than the inwardly exultant bridegroom who had stood upon that sunlit road outside Zermatt, waiting to take possession of the woman he had won.

The attempt to relieve bitterness of spirit with the stimulant of incessant work, and the questionable sedative of tobacco strongly tinctured with opium, was already producing its insidious, inevitable result--was, in truth, threatening to undermine an iron const.i.tution while failing conspicuously to achieve the end in view.

After sitting for twenty minutes before a blank sheet of foolscap, Lenox gave up all further effort at mental concentration. A nostalgia of vast untenanted s.p.a.ces was upon him,--of those great glacier regions where a man could stand alone with G.o.d and the universe, could shake himself free from the fret of personal desire. And he had agreed to forgo this--the one real rest and refreshment life afforded him,--to "suffer gladly" the insistent trivialities of hill-station life, merely, forsooth, because a woman had asked it of him. He anathematised himself for an inconsistent weak-minded fool. But he had no intention of breaking his promise to Mrs Desmond.

Since work was out of the question, he pushed his chair back impatiently, left the table, and flung out both arms with a gesture of desperate weariness. Yet sleep was far from him, and he knew it; unless he chose to induce it by the only means ready to his hand.

And to-night he did so choose. In general he had steeled himself to resist the temptation to smoke no more than was needed to quicken and clarify thought. But the short talk with Richardson had set all his over-strained nerves on edge. His sum of sleep in the past week did not amount to twenty-four hours, and for once in a way oblivion must be purchased at any cost.

Going over to the tall tobacco-jar that supported his library, he refilled his pouch with cool deliberation, stretched himself out upon the deck-lounge, and smoked pipe after pipe, till the portion of the drug contained in each acc.u.mulated to a perceptible dose. Then the great Dream Compeller took pity upon him, deadening thought, feeling, consciousness itself, till the pipe fell from between his fingers,--and he slept.

CHAPTER II.

"And, at each turn, it seemed as though Fate some huge net round both did throw To stay their feet, and dim their sight."

--W. Morris.

Three weeks later, on a diamond-bright morning of early May, Eldred Lenox was in the saddle, riding at a foot's pace along a strip of a path that links the Strawberry Bank Hotel with Dalhousie's central hill. Brutus trotted soberly to heel, while Shaitan--a black Galloway, half Biluch, half Arab--tossed an impatient head, sneezed several times in succession, and generally declared his intention of taking matters into his own hands, so soon as he should reach the broader expanse of Terah Mall. But Lenox, impelled by an inbred desire to climb, was minded to push on to the higher, emptier levels of Bakrota--the great hill that towered, formidable, directly ahead of him. For the chalet-like dwellings of Dalhousie are scattered spa.r.s.ely over three hills, Bakrota, Terah, Potrain; and the summit of the last and lowest is crowned by Strawberry Bank Hotel, mainly the resort of captains and subalterns from the four plains stations of the district, doing their two months of signalling, Garrison Cla.s.s, or of unadulterated loafing, as the case may be.

Lenox himself came under none of these headings. The man had a trick of refusing to be cla.s.sed collectively, soldier though he was; a trick of isolation, inbred, unconscious, the outcome, perhaps, of much solitary wandering, of intimate a.s.sociation with the uttermost hills.

It was as if they had imparted to him something of their own ruggedness, their aloofness, their stoical power of endurance.

A cheery little breeze stirred the branches of horse-chestnuts and rhododendrons, tossed the silver-backed foliage of the ilex, and set the cedar boughs swaying with slow, dignified indolence. Hidden within their depths of shadow, birds and monkeys twittered and chattered; and at intervals there came to Lenox the peculiar long-drawn note with which the hill villagers call to one another across the valleys. An infectious spirit of jubilation pervaded the air. The sun himself, in these cheerful lat.i.tudes, is transformed from an instrument of torture to the golden-locked hero of Norse and Greek legend; and with every step of the ascent Lenox felt the blood course more swiftly through his veins.

Ilex and rhododendrons, cl.u.s.tering close to the road's edge, shut off the vast prospect on his left; till, at an abrupt turn of the road, they gave place to a watercourse, descending in a cataract of boulders to the valley below. Then the glorious company of the mountains sprang suddenly into view, lifting scarred heads to heaven, and greeting the new day with a Te Deum audible to the spirit, if not to the ear itself.

To the spirit of Eldred Lenox these outward symbols of the eternal verities, fit emblems of the stern faith in which he had been reared, spoke with no uncertain voice; and their message was a message of aspiration, of conquest, of the iron self-mastery and self-restraint indispensable to both. They reminded him, also, that life held many good gifts in atonement for the one gift denied; that a man might do worse than live and work unhindered by the volcanic forces of pa.s.sion.

The past five years had, after all, been years of fruitful service to the great country he loved; the three letters after his name a.s.sured him of that. And there remained much more to be done in the same direction; work that would make unstinted demands upon his energy and fort.i.tude; work that must, in due time, force him to forget.

Arrived on the Mall, with its far-reaching view of valley and hill, and its outcrop of glittering granite, a word of encouragement set Shaitan into a smart canter that brought them speedily to the half-way corner, whence a densely shadowed road climbs upward to the great forest of Kalatope. The glimpse of sun-splashed path and red pine-stems drew Lenox aside from the open Mall; and horse and rider pa.s.sed into the stretch of scented coolness at a brisk trot. The path, little more than six feet wide, was innocent of railing. But much riding in the Himalayas hardens the nerves to these tight-rope performances, which are part and parcel of life in the hills.

For a while they went steadily forward, well content; till, on rounding a sharp corner, Shaitan stopped dead, his forefeet firmly planted on the roadway, his sensitive ears thrust forward; and Lenox, who had fallen into an absorbing train of thought, found himself confronted by a sufficiently startling reality.

The path ahead of him was blocked by the unwieldy forms of five buffaloes, in charge of a naked brown wisp of humanity four feet high, armed with a no more formidable weapon than a pine branch stripped of its needles. But the crux of the situation lay in the fact that, between the fourth and fifth buffaloes an Englishwoman, in a brown habit, mounted on a restive chestnut pony, was in imminent danger of slipping off the road to certain death among the rocks and boulders below. For the chestnut had succeeded in wrenching his hindquarters outward, his heels were already over the edge, and his rider, leaning well forward, was applying whip and spur with a coolness and vigour that could not fail to excite the man's admiration.

It was a matter of seconds: Lenox could not stop to calculate possible risks. Buffaloes and herd-boy scattered right and left before his furious onset. A swinging blow from his hunting-crop sent two of the bulky beasts scrambling up the inner slope, while Brutus, who found the situation all that heart of dog could desire, sent a third crashing over the khud to the accompaniment of shrill lamentations from the terrified child in charge.

The whole thing pa.s.sed in a flash; the pony, by a frantic but futile effort to right himself, had just sent a shower of loose stones rattling from under his hind feet, when Lenox, dismounting, gripped the cheek-strap with one hand, the other being occupied with his own reins.

A vigorous forward pull landed the chestnut, panting and quivering, with all four feet on terra firma. But the rider's right arm had fallen limply to her side, and Lenox, looking up, for the first time, into a face deeply shadowed by a wide-brimmed helmet, recognised . . .

his wife.

Her breath was still coming In small, quick gasps; but there was no shadow of fear in her eyes; no lightest tremor about her close-set lips.

"Great G.o.d! _You_!" he e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed under his breath, and involuntarily took a backward step away from her.

At the shock of their encountering glances her cheeks flamed, and she lowered her lids.

"I suppose I may say thank you for that," she said, and her voice shook ever so little. "A minute later, I should have gone over."

He nodded, keeping his teeth close, his eyes down; and a deadweight of silence fell between them.

Small sounds became suddenly self-a.s.sertive. The rustle of squirrels along the pine-stems, the monotonous music of the cuckoo, varied by a charge of toy pistol-shots when an inexperienced monkey alighted on a dead twig. Brutus, standing squarely between them, eyed each in turn with critical speculation, his ugly head c.o.c.ked very much to one side.

He instinctively mistrusted all wearers of petticoats, and had found the buffalo incident very much more to his taste.

At length, in desperation, Quita made a movement as if to pa.s.s on. But Lenox laid a peremptory hand upon her bridle.