"Now be reasonable, my little one," he concluded. "Say good-bye to me here, and I'll see you started off all comfortably."

But Melian set her lips, and those very pretty lips of hers could set very firmly indeed on occasion.

"I shall do no such thing," she answered. "I'm going with you. We came here together, and I'm not going to leave you."

She was clinging to him now, firmly, and kissing him.

"You won't go to Coates' then?" he said helplessly.

"No. I'm going with you. So now, let's go out and tell them so."

The chief might have been excused if he had grown impatient, but he had not. With true Oriental impa.s.siveness he and his wild followers sat their horses, waiting--incidentally the camp servants crouching in their tent, went through the bitterness of death many times over during that period of waiting. Then Mervyn came out and announced that they would have to take two with them instead of one. But Allah-din Khan received the statement without great demur; it may have been that he scented advantage to himself in this addition to his own programme.

In not much longer s.p.a.ce of time than it took them to bring in the two horses, and hurriedly put together a few necessaries, were they ready to start. The syce, who was ordered out on the first errand, showed no great concern. He was a Pathan and a believer, and stood in no fear of the scowling hors.e.m.e.n. But the bearer, who had perforce been convened for purposes of the latter, had wilted and cowered before the lowering glances darted at him from under fierce s.h.a.ggy brows, as a Hindu dog and an idolater. But it did not suit their purpose to shed more blood on that occasion, else would he and the others have felt the tulwar's edge there and then. The two already slain had been victims to a sudden, unthinking blood l.u.s.t.

Again we must glance back.

Since the last visit of Helston Varne to Heath Hover, and the boding manifestation that same evening, of the opening door, an unaccountable and evil influence seemed to pervade the place. There was no gripping it, but it was there, and on Melian especially, it seemed to take a firm hold. All her bright sunny spirits, her joyousness in life, seemed to leave her, and that with a suddenness and rapidity that was little short of alarming. She grew pallid, and lost her appet.i.te. She grew nervous, too, and would start at any and every sound; and when night time came, and with it solitude, she shrank from it with a very horror of shrinking. Nothing had happened, according to the tradition of that boding presage, but the fit grew upon her, and it affected Mervyn too, though differently. At last he took her to task about it, and she owned up to the whole thing.

"This'll never do, little one," he had said, looking at her with very grave concern. "We must go away for a change."

The relief which sprang into her face confirmed her former revelation.

Still she made protest.

"Why should I break up your peace and quiet, Uncle Seward?" trying to smile, but the smile was a wan one. "You have given me a home, when I had none--such a happy home, too--but somehow now, I don't know what it is that has come over me. I seem to be always frightened--of something--or nothing."

Yes, he had noticed that, but had hoped it would pa.s.s. But it had not.

"Where shall we go then? Where would you like?" he said.

"Anywhere _you_ like, dear. It's all the same to me."

"H'm! How should you like to go to--India?"

"To--India? Oh, Uncle Seward, I should just love it," and all the old animation returned, as if by magic.

"Very well. Pack up to-morrow and we'll start the day after," he had answered, with characteristic prompt.i.tude.

And so--here they were.

CHAPTER TWENTY SIX.

THE DIM, MYSTERIOUS EAST.

The way in which the two accepted the situation was characteristic of both. Mervyn took it apparently as all in the day's work, though he had reason to believe that his days were surely numbered. He conversed equably with his captors--or escort, as though he were accompanying them of his own free will, to pay a visit to their village for instance, for any other pacific purpose. Yet he knew that in coming to this country again he had deliberately--as Hussein Khan had put it--placed his head between the tiger's jaws.

Even this, strange to say, did not perturb him, perhaps he had imbibed a large proportion of Oriental fatalism during his lifelong acquaintance with the strange peoples of the East. If his time had come--it had, and there was no more to be said. It had nearly come, he knew full well, when the cry through the winter midnight had led him to drag the perishing man forth from the icy death. Now, if it really had come, why--"it was written;" and in that case that he had returned to this land at all, and of his own free will--was part of the scheme. Thus he looked at it.

But--what of Melian? Had he not drawn her into peril? No--for he did not believe they would harm her. For himself, if what he suspected should prove true--why then his hours were certainly numbered. Well, what then? Until she had come to Heath Hover he had not been in love with life. He was often, in fact, honestly and genuinely sick of it.

The brightening which her coming had shed upon it could not be other than temporary. In the due and ordinary course of things she was bound to leave him again sooner or later--and then, how could he return to the old solitude, the old depression of day in, night out? There was nothing to look forward to, and precious little to look back upon. So it mattered little enough now whatever happened to himself. All of which of course, he did not impart to Melian.

She for her part, seemed infected with his unconcern, and looked upon the whole affair as a decidedly interesting adventure. It had its inconvenient side--for instance the commissariat department was to her civilised tastes, abominable, and sleeping out among the rocks was chilly of a night. But she was allowed to come and go as she liked. No watch was set upon her, for in the first place she had volunteered to go with them rather than separate from her relative, and in the next where would she be in the midst of this craggy, and, to her, entirely unknown wilderness, even if she did change her mind, and take it into her head to try and escape. At night they would make her up a couch of mats in some cleft or hollow among the rocks and shelter off the entrance, and she would declare laughingly to her uncle that it was only an experience of camping out, after all.

Yet there were times when her efforts at keeping up her spirits would sorely fail her. Mervyn himself could not consistently find comfort in cold fatalism, and she would read in the gloom of his knitted brows that he was by no means so easy in his mind as he would have had her believe.

And as they journeyed on, through the awful wildness of this savage, rock built region; threading gloomy gorges where the very light of the sun would not penetrate, or traversing a drear waste of desert where the friable soil rose and gyrated in "dust devils" and the sun blazed down as from the reflection of an opened furnace; wending the while, whither they knew not--her spirits began to droop. In short the situation was getting upon her nerves--and that badly.

The s.h.a.ggy, turbaned hors.e.m.e.n, whom at first she had found fascinating in their picturesqueness, began to appear in her eyes more and more the predatory, merciless beings they really were. The wild savagery of the surroundings--which at first she had p.r.o.nounced absolutely faultless in their fantastic chaos of rock and crag and chasm, now took on a Dantesque and hope-chilling aspect. Where would it all end?

Either Hussein Khan's estimate of the distance to be travelled to arrive at the Gularzai chieftain's stronghold had been very much under-rated, or they were bound for some other destination, for two nights had pa.s.sed, and they seemed no nearer to any fixed ending of their journeyings. And then when her spirits had reached their lowest ebb, came a thought to Melian's mind like the breaking of sunlight through a thick mist.

Helston Varne was at Coates' camp, which had been their objective when their plans had been thus roughly and suddenly deflected. She would hardly own to herself how greatly she had been looking forward to meeting him again, and now it seemed to her that he, of all human agencies, would be the one to come to their aid and bring matters right.

How on earth he was going to do it she had not the ghost of an idea, but that he would contrive to do it somehow, she felt a.s.sured--almost.

For the very name of Helston Varne seemed to her now as before, a tower of refuge. And something of this she imparted to her uncle.

But he shook a gloomy head. A network was around him--around them both--which even Helston Varne's ac.u.men and infinite resource would be powerless to rend asunder. This he knew, but she did not, and--he could not tell her.

He had been very careful in his conversations with her, and had enjoined upon her like caution. It was highly probable, but still not absolutely safe to a.s.sume, that no one amid their captors understood English. She suggested French, but then Mervyn's education, though excellent for purposes of pa.s.sing through a crammer's hands in his salad days, comprised no working knowledge of that courtly and useful tongue, so that fell through, and unless now and again, and then by dark hints, they were compelled to avoid any reference to the motive of their capture, and the ultimate chances of its satisfactory termination. And then it befell that the merest chance--a piece of overheard conversation--sufficed to throw him into the last stage of gloomy, hopeless despair.

It was during one of their noontide halts. The routine of prayer and prostration--which Melian had at first found so picturesque, even admirable, but now had wearied of--was over, and the men were scattered about in twos or threes, looking after the horses and other things. Two of them were chatting together in a drowsy undertone, and Mervyn, unnoticed by them, was just within earshot, and the substance of what they were saying was this. He himself must die, his time had come.

That night they would reach the place--_the place_. Well, this as a personal consideration troubled him not much, he had only expected it.

But the woman with the sun-tinged hair, they went on to say, she, unless the _Sirkar_ at Mazaran paid the lakh of rupees which would be asked for her restoration--or made any move against them because of what had been done--why there were those over the Persian border who would give nearly if not quite as much for such an addition to their _harim_.

In frozen horror he took in this, but it was essential to show no sign that he had heard. Would such a sum be paid, and if it were, would not official delay and official bungling be such as to render even compliance of none effect? Moreover, could the authorities responsible for the peace of the border allow so flagrant an act of dacoity to pa.s.s without retaliative measures? In either case--Good Heavens! He knew enough about the conditions of a vast tract of hardly penetrated country, and its inscrutable inhabitants, to realise that once Melian disappeared entirely she would be as completely swallowed up, as though the whole Indian army, and the official mechanism, from the Viceroy downwards, were not in existence. And this was the fate to which his own foolhardiness had consigned her. And she was as much to him as ever child of his own could have been!

He knew the two speakers as near kinsmen of Allah-din Khan, and that as such that they were not talking at random. He himself was to die that night, that was settled. That was nothing. "It was written." But how to save Melian from the unutterable ghastliness of the fate mapped out for her? That was everything. No amount of fatalism would come to his aid there. In the hot swelter of noontide--for with all the keen chill of the nights on these high lands, the sun at noonday threw off from the rocks and arid ground in waves of glowing heat--his brain seemed to bubble. One weltering thought seethed through it--that of taking her life and his own at the same time, but as against this he remembered that he was unarmed. They had insisted upon his giving up everything in the shape of a weapon at the time of his surrender. Then again, she had the one chance in her favour, what right had he to deprive her of it?

Well, there remained still some hours--_some hours only_--which he had left to him, and yet his reason told him that they could bring nothing.

Of his own death, or even the manner of it, he did not think--so wrapped up was he in the desperation of extremity as the situation affected her.

"Why, Uncle Seward, buck up. You are looking dreadfully down," she remarked, as they resumed their journey. "And you were the one who was always trying to hearten me."

"Yes darling, I was, but--perhaps I am not quite the thing. Got a touch of the sun, or something. But I'll be all right when it gets cooler. A tough old campaigner like me is never affected that way for long."

He noticed that she herself was far from cheerful, and that her spirits were forced. But--great G.o.d! if she only knew what he had learned. In sheer desperation he ranged his horse alongside that of Allah-din Khan, and began to talk, haply in hope that the other might let fall some hint which should give him an idea. It even seemed to him that he himself was talking wildly and at random, for he surprised the chief looking at him more than once in a restrained and curious manner. Yet they had often talked together during their enforced march.

"I should not have consented to the Miss Sahib accompanying me," he ventured. "I fear it has been too much for her. Could you not return her to her people, brother? It would be of great advantage to all concerned?"

He made the remark in sheer desperation, and emphasising the last words.

But nothing came of it.

"We have come far," replied Allah-din Khan, tranquilly, "but in time she will return. The teachings of the Prophet enjoin patience, but women-- Feringhi women especially--have none of it. Let this one learn to acquire it."

This was uncompromising, but Mervyn thought to see a loophole.

"In time she will return," he repeated. "That is the word of a Sirdar of the Gularzai?"