To this the chief made no reply. He was looking straight in front of him as he rode, and his dark, clear-cut face was as impa.s.sive as a mask.

He might, indeed, not have heard for all the sign he gave.

In the light of what he had overheard it was significant to Mervyn that a glance at the sun showed that they were travelling due west. What curious dash of wild hope was it that caused him to recall that this had brought them a great deal nearer to Mazaran than they were when at the point of their start? And yet, even if chance offered, there were ranges of craggy, tooth-like crests between them and the garrison station, and he himself was totally unacquainted with this part of the country. But what chance could offer? None. Absolutely none.

An hour before sundown they halted at a small, squalid looking village-- and then the regulation performances of prayer were gone through. He did notice that several strangers had joined with Allah-din Khan's band in this--presumably people from the squalid, mud-walled village. That one of them was a man of extra fine stature and presence, he also noticed, but barely so. For instance he overlooked the fact that this one was bowing down, and repeating the prescribed words with extra fervour, and a fanatical ecstasy in his dark eyes and swarthy countenance, and that the others were stealing at him glances of furtive veneration.

As they resumed their march he ranged his horse alongside that of Melian. No restriction was put upon such movements as this. The band was riding anyhow and in open order now--straggling order would be the better term for it, for some were quite far behind. In the first place their captives were mounted on inferior steeds, in the next the Gularzai were perfectly well aware that in such country as they now were in, any attempt at escape would meet with not the ghost of a chance.

"My child, I have brought you into a dreadful corner," he said, and the dead note of hopelessness in his tone struck a chill into his hearer.

"I ought never to have consented to your accompanying me, but now it's too late. Listen. If anything should happen to me, you will still be set free on a ransom. The Government will pay it, I have very little in the world, but such as it is I have left it to you--and now but for me being such a fool as to bring you here we might have gone on in our old quiet, happy life; not necessarily at Heath Hover. Well, what I wanted to say, and I must say it quickly, is this, If anything should happen to me, ask to be taken to the Nawab Shere Dil Khan. He is the head chief of the Gularzai, and this one is under him. I'll write the words down for you in Hindustani, and you can learn them by heart--and keep on asking--keep on asking." He felt in his pocket, and even wrote in his pocket, on an envelope he found there. "And don't show any fear, keep on steadfastly requiring the Nawab Shere Dil Khan--have you got the name, well, I've put it down here, only it's not very distinct. Well now, take the bit of paper--That was well done. And--there's another thing."

Melian looked at the speaker and her eyes filled. Her nerves had begun to go, and she was feeling utterly helpless and overwrought. Now this strong foreboding of danger aggravated this.

"Darling Uncle Seward, what should be going to happen to you?" she urged. "There now, you have been trying to keep me up; now I must try and keep you up. Surely they won't harm you--us--if they expect to be paid for letting us go?"

"Yes. That's right, little one. They won't harm--us," he answered.

"Still, it's best to be on the safe side. Once you get to the Nawab you're safe. He's a straight and square man, but unfortunately, these sub-tribal chiefs are virtually almost independent of the head, or it's certain we should not be here."

"I'll remember," she answered. "But,"--as though a sudden and illuminating idea had struck her. "Why don't _you_ appeal to him--now, before we go any further. Why leave it to what--isn't going to happen-- and me?"

Here was a question which it was impossible for him to answer, though to all appearances, nothing could have been more pertinent. He could not tell her that in his case the head sirdar of the Gularzai would be every whit as merciless as would Allah-din Khan and his followers. But her case was different. And that ghastly plan which he had overheard had resolved him to an even more hazardous course on her behalf--hazardous because one of sheer sink or swim.

"'Why?'" he repeated. "'Why?' Always a woman's query--Why?" And he looked at her with a very loving but very sad smile. "I can only tell you this, child, that you must leave that part of it to me, and do exactly as I tell you I _know_--and you don't. That must be sufficient.

This is the dim, mysterious East, remember, and I've spent the best years of my life in it."

The sun was drooping now to the craggy, serrated ridge beyond the valley, flaming in red gold upon the cliffs beneath which they were riding. The figures of the wild, turbaned hors.e.m.e.n were picked out in the clear glow--the strange, fierce East indeed. Melian thought it was a picture that would remain stamped in her memory until her dying day.

There were signs too, that the said figures showed an inclination to abandon their straggling order and to close up. Mervyn saw this--and at the same time came the thought that this was the last sun whose setting he would ever see.

"Quick, now, Melian," he said. "Take this, but carefully. Watch your chance. No one must see. When you have it, hide it upon you. Don't even look at it again. If you do, it must be at the very last extremity. You are more than ordinarily quick witted, and will be able to follow. If anything happens to me--no, don't interrupt--and after a reasonable time has gone, say a month, and you are not restored, and especially if Allah-din Khan should attempt to pa.s.s you on to strangers--then produce it. Do you follow?"

"Yes--but--what--where--is _it_?" said the girl, her wide open, serious eyes upon his face.

"Take my pouch and pipe, and fill it, as they have often seen you do,"

and he handed it to her. Wondering, she obeyed. Then as he reached forth his hand to take it, he slipped something into hers. One look at this, and she almost let it fall, but refrained, just in time.

For what she held in her hand was a tiny facsimile of the strange, star-shaped disc, which she had picked up on the sluice path at Heath Hover that lovely cloudless June morning, and the sight of which, in her grasp, had struck her uncle with such a terror of trepidation.

And he knew that she was possessed of that which upon production would entail upon her two alternatives--restoration, to liberty or death--the latter, swift, painless, unconscious. But the other ghastly fate, to which he had overheard allusion made, could now never be hers.

"Only in the very last extremity," he reminded her, in an earnest undertone, for the band was now closing up around them. And she bent her head in grave, silent comprehension, and a.s.sent.

CHAPTER TWENTY SEVEN.

THE VAULT OF DOOM.

The red fires shot up against shining rock reflection, throwing out exaggerations or silhouettes of the s.h.a.ggy figures moving about. Wild, fantastic, as the surrounding crags were, thus thrown out into fitful light, yet the place was an ideal one for a snug and sheltered camp, where the keen mountain air struck chill at night, for it was sheltered on three sides by rock and cliff, while the fourth gave out on a steep drop into the valley beneath. To one, at any rate, the topographical situation did not fail in significance. Not by sheer accident, not for mere purposes of shelter had the situation been chosen.

In hanging cl.u.s.ters the stars shone brightly in the clear sky, but there was no moon. The two Europeans, seated in their own camp a little apart, had finished their evening meal--Mervyn incidentally, had been allowed to go out, under escort, and shoot a few _chikor_ [the large red-legged hill partridge], early that morning, so they had fared better than heretofore. Now he had lighted a pipe, and was striving to conjure up all the stoicism of the dim mysterious East to his aid, the while keeping up the conversation with Melian, and doing so in such wise as to convey no apprehension to her mind. And the keeping up of ordinary conversation within an hour or so of one's own death is not an easy undertaking; but then, John Seward Mervyn was not quite an ordinary man.

A few months ago, he would not greatly have concerned himself over this situation. But within that time, life had changed and brightened for him. It was more valuable up to date than it had been then. He turned the talk on to Heath Hover and their time together there, and for a little, the girl forgot their precarious and now depressing situation and surroundings, and was responsive, brightening up with this and that homely touch.

"Why, the heather must be flaming out in perfectly gorgeous crimson up above the Plane woods," she said, "and we are not getting the benefit of it this time. And that bit, down below Chiltingford, where we took Violet the day before she left--that must be too ripping for anything.

And the jolly old battered mill, standing out on the open--I wish we were there again, don't you, dear? Say you do."

The eager, retrospective tone had lapsed into seriousness. There was no difficulty in replying as she wanted, and that with perfect truth and candour. Mervyn, looking back on those fair scenes, spent with this child; marking and treasuring all her golden joyousness and appreciation of every sound and sight around her; thought that for a repet.i.tion of just that time alone he would have faced the fate in front of him a hundred times over. It was little enough of such sweet wholesome happiness he had known in the course of a hard, rugged, bizarre life, and that time about comprised it all.

Two wolves howled at responsive intervals away down in the valley beneath, and the red glow of the camp fires played upon the bronzed, hook-nosed faces, and fierce eyes, of the wild marauders of the desert, squatted around, smoking their hookahs, and conversing in a deep rumbling undertone. The owls would be softly hooting in the woods which dipped their edges into Plane Pond at this moment, and the bell-like plash of rising fish ring out on its starlit surface. Contrast indeed!

Here in this savage wilderness death was to be his at any hour, at any moment. And now and thus, for the first time in his life, death seemed hard to face.

"You have--what I gave you--safe, child?" he broke in, as though moved by a sudden impulse. "Recollect, it is only to be produced in the very last extremity, if the appeal to Shere Dil Khan should fail."

"Don't," she answered, startled by the solemnly spoken irrelevance of the remark, and thrusting a hand into his. "You must really shake off these dismal forebodings, dear--and yet, how can I undertake to lecture you--_you_--on things that this weird country may hold out?"

And then, as if to give point to her words, a tall figure seemed to grow out of the earth beside them. A murmured sentence or two, and as in response to it he rose.

"Sit still, darling, and wait for me," he said. "I have to go and talk with some of them, and it will be wearisome--especially as it interrupts our talk about good old times." He rested one hand lovingly upon the gold-crowned head, and then pa.s.sed out with the man who had come to summon him. He would not even take a real, long farewell of her, if only that it might prove the reverse of advantageous to her, for he must still keep up the pretence of ignorance, and yet it was the last time he should behold her in this world, and he had but a shadowy belief in any other. For John Seward Mervyn knew as well as did the man he was accompanying that he was going to his doom.

It was a strange place, that in which he found himself but two or three minutes later--a cavernous hall, yet walled around by solid rock, and of some vastness. And yet, it seemed somehow as though it were not entirely the work of Nature, even here, where Nature ran riot in the production of wild freaks of her own masonry. It bore a look as though ages and ages of gradual working had wrought it to such a pitch of symmetry. In the centre a fire burned, the smoke escaping upwards somehow and somewhere, for the atmosphere of the place was quite clear of it.

Seated about this were some half dozen figures. Only one did Mervyn recognise as that of Allah-din Khan. The others all looked strangers to him. Stay. Only one? No, there was another; for in the one seated on the right of the chief Mervyn recognised the tall, somewhat remarkable looking man who had joined the rest at prayer. This one sat eyeing him, an embodiment of Eastern stateliness, in snowy flowing garments, the folds of his turban arranged round the conical _kulla_ which just peeped above it, with an almost mathematical nicety. Mervyn took note of something else. Behind him, two tall, ferocious looking Gularzai had drawn up, standing so as to bar effectually the way by which he had been ushered in. So this was to be his death chamber, he thought? Well, the sooner it was over the better.

"Salaam, brothers," he began, but only by way of saying something.

"It is not 'salaam,'" ["salaam"--Peace] answered the distinguished looking stranger, speaking in a very deep chested tone. "You joined the Brethren of the Night whose sign is the Five Pointed Star--were made blood-brother with them, and--were false to them."

"Therein is not truth," answered Mervyn, who had expected this as an opening of the proceedings.

"Not truth?" went on the speaker. "In thine English home the Sign was delivered to thee; in thine English home--the long house with the cornering wings which shelter the centre, and which stands beneath the broad end of the water."

But that Mervyn had learned to be astonished at nothing, he might well have felt surprised. Here was an exact description of Heath Hover, and yet the only man who had seen it, and who bore the terrible and mysterious Sign, had died within its walls, and the method of his death he alone in all England knew. And now here in this far Eastern wilderness was another--were others--who knew.

"The Sign was not delivered to me," he answered.

"Not delivered?" repeated the other slowly, and fixing upon his face a glance that seemed to burn, so glowing was it with fell, vengeful intent. "Not delivered? It was delivered not once only, but twice."

Now, indeed, the listener's self possession all but betrayed the shock this announcement could not but cause him. How well he recalled that lovely summer morning when he had looked out to behold the two girls coming down the sluice path and Melian carrying the deadly shining thing in her white, unsuspecting fingers--and his own frost of horror at the sight. So all that time he had been shadowed, his every movement keenly watched from the recesses of those hanging woods--not as he had thought by honest English Nashby and his random, all-at-sea suspicions, but by this deadly Brotherhood, whose ranks, in an ill-starred moment, and moved chiefly by curiosity, he had joined. Yet how on earth could their emissary or emissaries have hung about the Plane woods all that time undetected by keepers, or unseen and uncommented on by the surrounding rustic population? Of a truth the problem was a record one for stiffness of solution. But he answered:

"It was not delivered once, nor yet twice. It was not delivered at all."

The fierce, copper-hued, s.h.a.ggy faces, the gleaming eyes reflected in the firelight, were bent still more threateningly upon the speaker. The latter, in sheer hopeless desperation, was probing behind his very brain to try and make out a case for himself, and at the same time realising its utter hopelessness; His remorseless indicter went on.

"The first who delivered thee the sign thou didst kill."

"That did I not. On the very contrary, I saved him--saved him from the icy death. Listen brothers." And then Mervyn went on to give the narrative of the events of that wild, sleet-tossed winter night, when we first saw him. He told it graphically and well, speaking in the Pushtu with, as had happened throughout all the dialogue, an odd word here and there of a coined language peculiar to the Brotherhood, thrown in.

"Now? Did I not save him from certain death?" he concluded, looking with an anxiety which he hoped did not appear, into the fierce faces that ringed him round. But his heart sank within him, as he realised that any hopes he might have entertained on that score were doomed; for no sign of softening could he trace. On the contrary, the set grimness on every countenance seemed to deepen.