THEnext evening Wratislaw drove in a hired dogcart up Glenavelin from Gledsmuir just as a stormy autumn twilight was setting in over the bare fields. A wild back-end had followed on the tracks of a marvellous summer. Though it was still October the leaves lay heaped beneath the hedgerows, the bracken had yellowed to a dismal hue of decay, and the heather had turned from the purple of its flower to the grey-blue of its passing. Rain had fallen, and the long road-side pools were fired by the westering sun. Glenavelin looked crooked and fantastic in the falling shadows, and two miles farther the high lights of Etterick rose like a star in the bosom of the hills. Seen after many weeks’ work in the bustle and confinement of town, the solitary, shadow-haunted world soothed and comforted.
He found Lewis in his room alone. The place was quite dark for no lamp was lit, and only a merry fire showed the occupant. He welcomed his friend with crazy vehemence, pushing him into a great armchair, offering a dozen varieties of refreshment, and leaving the butler aghast with contradictory messages about dinner.
“Oh, Tommy, upon my soul, it is good to see you here! I was getting as dull as an owl.”
“Are you alone?” Wratislaw asked.
“George is staying here, but he has gone over to Glenaller to a big shoot. I didn’t care much about it, so I stayed at home. He will be back to-morrow.”
Lewis’s face in the firelight seemed cheerful and wholesome enough, but his words belied it. Wratislaw wondered why this man, who had been wont to travel to the ends of the earth for good shooting, should deny himself the famous Glenaller coverts.
At dinner the lamplight showed him more clearly, and the worried look in his eyes could not be hidden. He was listless, too, his kindly, boisterous manner seemed to have forsaken him, and he had acquired a great habit of abstracted silence. He asked about recent events in the House, commenting shrewdly enough, but without interest. When Wratislaw in turn questioned him on his doings, he had none of the ready enthusiasm which had been used to accompany his talk on sport. He gave bare figures and was silent.
Afterwards in his own sanctum, with drawn curtains and a leaping fire, he became more cheerful. It was hard to be moody in that pleasant room, with the light glancing from silver and vellum and dark oak, and a thousand memories about it of the clean, outdoor life. Wratislaw stretched his legs to the blaze and watched the coils of blue smoke mounting from his pipe with a feeling of keen pleasure. His errand was out of the focus of his thoughts.
It was Lewis himself who recalled him to the business.
“I thought of coming down to town,” he said. “I have been getting out of spirits up here, and I wanted to be near you.”
“Then it was an excellent chance which brought me up to-night. But why are you dull? I thought you were the sort of man who is sufficient unto himself, you know.”
“I am not,” he said sharply. “I never realized my gross insufficiency so bitterly.”
“Ah!” said Wratislaw, sitting up, “love?”
“Did you happen to see Miss Wishart’s engagement in the papers?”
“I never read the papers. But I have heard about this: in fact, I believe I have congratulated Stocks.”
“Do you know that she ought to have married me?” Lewis cried almost shrilly. “I swear she loved me. It was only my hideous folly that drove her from me.”
“Folly?” said Wratislaw, smiling. “Folly? Well you might call it that. I have come up ‘ane’s errand,’ as your people hereabouts say, to talk to you like a schoolmaster, Lewie. Do you mind a good talking-to?”
“I need it,” he said. “Only it won’t do any good, because I have been talking to myself for a month without effect. Do you know what I am, Tommy?”
“I am prepared to hear,” said the other.
“A coward! It sounds nice, doesn’t it? I am a shirker, a man who would be drummed out of any regiment.”
“Rot!” said Wratislaw. “In that sort of thing you have the courage of your kind. You are the wrong sort of breed for common shirking cowards. Why, man, you might get the Victoria Cross ten times over with ease, as far as that goes. Only you wouldn’t, for you are something much more subtle and recondite than a coward.”
It was Lewis’s turn for the request. “I am prepared to hear,” he said.
“A fool! An arrant, extraordinary fool! A fool of quality and parts, a fool who is the best fellow in the world and who has every virtue a man can wish, but at the same time a conspicuous monument of folly. And it is this that I have come to speak about.”
Lewis sat back in his chair with his eyes fixed on the glowing coal.
“I want you to make it all plain,” he said slowly. “I know it all already; I have got the dull, dead consciousness of it in my heart, but I want to hear it put into words.” And he set his lips like a man in pain.
“It is hard,” said Wratislaw, “devilish hard, but I’ve got to try.” He knocked out the ashes from his pipe and leaned forward.
“What would you call the highest happiness, Lewie?” he asked.
“The sense of competence,” was the answer, given without hesitation.
“Right. And what do we mean by competence? Not success! God knows it is something very different from success! Any fool may be successful, if the gods wish to hurt him. Competence means that splendid joy in your own powers and the approval of your own heart, which great men feel always and lesser men now and again at favoured intervals. There are a certain number of things in the world to be done, and we have got to do them. We may fail—it doesn’t in the least matter. We may get killed in the attempt—it matters still less. The things may not altogether be worth doing—it is of very little importance. It is ourselves we have got to judge by. If we are playing our part well, and know it, then we can thank God and go on. That is what I call happiness.”
“And I,” said Lewis.
“And how are you to get happiness? Not by thinking about it. The great things of the world have all been done by men who didn’t stop to reflect on them. If a man comes to a halt and analyses his motives and distrusts the value of the thing he strives for, then the odds are that his halt is final. You strive to strive and not to attain. A man must have that direct practical virtue which forgets itself and sees only its work. Parsons will tell you that all virtue is self-sacrifice, and they are right, though not in the way they mean. It may all seem a tissue of contradictions. You must not pitch on too fanciful a goal, nor, on the other hand, must you think on yourself. And it is a contradiction which only resolves itself in practice, one of those anomalies on which the world is built up.”
Lewis nodded his head.
“And the moral of it all is that there are two sorts of people who will never do any good on this planet. One is the class which makes formulas and shallow little ideals its gods and has no glimpse of human needs and the plain issues of life. The other is the egotist whose eye is always filled with his own figure, who investigates his motives, and hesitates and finicks, till Death knocks him on the head and there is an end of him. Of the two give me the second, for even a narrow little egotistical self is better than a formula. But I pray to be delivered from both.”
“‘Then who shall stand if Thou, O Lord, dost mark iniquity?’” Lewis quoted.
“There are two men only who will not be ashamed to look their work in the face in the end—the brazen opportunist and the rigid Puritan. Suppose you had some desperate frontier work to get through with and a body of men to pick for it, whom would you take? Not the ordinary, colourless, respectable being, and still less academic nonentities! If I had my pick, my companions should either be the narrowest religionists or frank, unashamed blackguards. I should go to the Calvinists and the fanatics for choice, but if I could not get them then I should have the rankers. For, don’t you see, the first would have the fear of God in them, and that somehow keeps a man from fearing anything else. They would do their work because they believed it to be their duty. And the second would have the love of the sport in them, and they should also be made to dwell in the fear of me. They would do their work because they liked it, and liked me, and I told them to do it.”
“I agree with you absolutely,” said Lewis. “I never thought otherwise.”
“Good,” said Wratislaw. “Now for my application. You’ve had the misfortune to fall between the two stools, Lewie. You’re too clever for a Puritan and too good for a ranker. You’re too finicking and high-strung and fanciful for a prosaic world. You think yourself the laughing philosopher with an infinite appreciation of everything, and yet you have not the humour to stand aside and laugh at yourself.”
“I am a coward, as I have told you,” said the other dourly.
“No, you are not. But you can’t bring yourself down to the world of compromises, which is the world of action. You have lost the practical touch. You muddled your fight with Stocks because you couldn’t get out of touch with your own little world in practice, however you might manage it in theory. You can’t be single-hearted. Twenty impulses are always pulling different ways with you, and the result is that you become an unhappy, self-conscious waverer.”
Lewis was staring into the fire, and the older man leaned forward and put his hand very tenderly on his shoulder.
“I don’t want to speak about the thing which gives you most pain, old chap; but I think you have spoiled your chances in the same way in another matter—the most important matter a man can have to do with, though it ill becomes a cynical bachelor like myself to say it.”
“I know,” said Lewis dismally.
“You see it is the Nemesis of your race which has overtaken you. The rich, strong blood of you Haystouns must be given room or it sours into moodiness. It is either a spoon or a spoiled horn with you. You are capable of the big virtues, and just because of it you are extraordinarily apt to go to the devil. Not the ordinary devil, of course, but to a very effective substitute. You want to be braced and pulled together. A war might do it, if you were a soldier. A religious enthusiasm would do it, if that were possible for you. As it is, I have something else, which I came up to propose to you.”
Lewis faced round in an attitude of polite attention. But his eyes had no interest in them.
“You know Bardur and the country about there pretty well?”
Lewis nodded.
“Also I once talked to you about a man called Marka. Do you remember?”
“Yes, of course I do. The man who went north from Bardur the week before I turned up there?”
“Well, there’s trouble brewing thereabouts. You know the Taghati country up beyond the Russian line. Things are in a ferment there, great military preparations and all the rest of it, and the reason, they say, is that the hill-tribes in the intervening No-man’s-land are at their old games. Things look very ugly abroad just now, and we can’t afford to neglect anything when a crisis may be at the door. So we want a man to go out there and find out the truth.”
Lewis had straightened himself and was on his feet before Wratislaw had done. “Upon my word,” he cried, “if it isn’t what I expected! We have been far too sure of the safety of that Kashmir frontier. You mean, of course, that there may be a chance of an invasion?”
“I mean nothing. But things look ugly enough in Europe just now, and Asia would naturally be the starting-point.”
Lewis made some rapid calculations in his head which he jotted on the wood of the fireplace. “It would take a week to get from Bardur to Taghati by the ordinary Kashmir rate of travelling, but of course the place is unknown and it might take months. One would have to try it?”
“I can only give you the bare facts. If you decide to go, Beauregard will give you particulars in town.”
“When would he want to know?”
“At once. I go back to-morrow morning, and I must have your answer within three days. You would be required to start within a week. You can take time and quiet to make up your mind.”
“It’s a great chance,” said Lewis. “Does Beauregard think it important?”
“Of the highest importance. Also, of course it is dangerous. The travelling is hard, and you may be knocked on the head at any moment as a spy.”
“I don’t mind that,” said the other, flushing. “I’ve been through the same thing before.”
“I need not say the work will be very difficult. Remember that your errand will not be official, so in case of failure or trouble we could not support you. We might even have to disclaim all responsibility. In the event of success, on the other hand, your fortune is something more than made.”
“Would you go?” came the question.
“No,” said Wratislaw, “I shouldn’t.”
“But if you were in my place?”
“I should hope that I would, but then I might not have the courage. I am giving you the brave man’s choice, Lewie. You will be going out to uncertainty and difficulty and extreme danger. On the other hand, I believe in my soul it will harden you into the man you ought to be. Lord knows I would rather have you stay at home!”
The younger man looked up for a second and saw something in Wratislaw’s face which made him turn away his eyes. The look of honest regret cut him to the heart. Those friends of his, of whom he was in nowise worthy, made the burden of his self-distrust doubly heavy.
“I will tell you within three days,” he said hoarsely. “God bless you, Tommy. I don’t deserve to have a man like you troubling himself about me.”
It was his one spoken tribute to their friendship; and both, with the nervousness of honest men in the presence of emotion, hastened to change the subject.
WRATISLAWleft betimes the next morning, and a long day faced Lewis with every hour clamouring for a decision. George would be back by noon, and before his return he must seek quiet and the chances of reflection. He was happy with a miserable fluctuating happiness. Of a sudden his horizon was enlarged, but as he gazed it seemed to narrow again. His mind was still unplumbed; somewhere in its depths might lie the shrinking and unwillingness which would bind him to the dreary present.
He went out to the autumn hills and sought the ridge which runs for miles on the lip of the glen. It was a grey day, with snow waiting in cloud-banks in the north sky and a thin wind whistling through the pines. The scene matched his humour. He was in love for the moment with the stony and stormy in life. He hungered morbidly for ill-fortune, something to stamp out the ease in his soul, and weld him into the form of a man.
He had got his chance and the rest lay with himself. It was a chance of high adventure, a great mission, a limitless future. At the thought the old fever began to rise in his blood. The hot, clear smell of rock and sand, the brown depths of the waters, the far white peaks running up among the stars, all spoke to him with the long-remembered call. Once more he should taste life, and, alert in mind and body, hold up his chin among his fellows. It would be a contest of wits, and for all his cowardice this was not the contest he shrank from.
And then there came back on him, like a flood, the dumb misery of incompetence which had weighed on heart and brain. The hatred of the whole struggling, sordid crew, all the cant and ugliness and ignorance of a mad world, his weakness in the face of it, his fall from common virtue, his nerveless indolence—all stung him like needle points, till he cried out in agony. Anything to deliver his soul from such a bondage, and in his extreme bitterness his mind closed with Wratislaw’s offer.
He felt—and it is a proof of his weakness—a certain nameless feeling of content when he had once forced himself into the resolution. Now at least he had found a helm and a port to strain to. As his fancy dwelt upon the mission and drew airy pictures of the land, he found to his delight a boyish enthusiasm arising. Old simple pleasures seemed for the moment dear. There was a zest for toils and discomforts, a tolerance of failure, which had been aforetime his chief traveller’s heritage.
And then as he came to the ridge where the road passes from Glenavelin to Glen Adler, he stopped as in duty bound to look at the famous prospect. You stand at the shedding of two streams; behind, the green and woodland spaces of the pastoral Avelin; at the feet, a land of stones and dwarf junipers and naked rifts in the hills, with white-falling waters and dark shadows even at midday. And then, beyond and afar, the lines of hill-land crowd upon each other till the eye is lost in a mystery of grey rock and brown heather and single bald peaks rising sentinel-like in the waste. The grey heavens lent a chill eeriness to the dim grey distances; the sharp winds, the forerunners of snow, blew over the moors like blasts from a primeval night.
By an odd vagary of temper the love of these bleak hills blazed up fiercely in his heart. Never before had he felt so keenly the nameless glamour of his own heritage. He had not been back six months and yet he had come to accept all things as matters of course, the beauty of the place, its sport, its memories. Rarely had he felt that intimate joy in it which lies at the bottom of all true souls. There is a sentiment which old poets have made into songs and called the “Lilt of the Heather,” and which is knit closer to man’s heart than love of wife or kin or his own fair fortune. It had not come to him in the time of the hills’ glory, but now on the brink of winter the far-off melancholy of the place and its infinite fascination seemed to clutch at his heart-strings. It was his own land, the place of his fathers; and now he must sever himself from it and carry only a barren memory.
And yet he felt no melancholy. Rather it was the immortal gaiety of the wanderer, to whom the homeland is dearest as a memory, who pitches his camp by waters of Babylon and yet as ever the old word on his lip, the old song in his ear, and the kindly picture in his heart. Strange that it is the little races who wander farthest and yet have the eternal home-sickness! And yet not strange, for to the little peoples, their land, bare and uncouth and unfriendly for the needs of life, must be more the ideal, the dream, than the satisfaction. The lush countries give corn and wine for their folks, the little bare places afford no more than a spiritual heritage. Yet spiritual it is, and for two men who in the moment of their extremity will think on meadow, woodland, or placid village, a score will figure the windy hill, the grey lochan, and the mournful sea.
For the moment he felt a self-pity which he cast from him. To this degradation at least he should never come. But as the thought of Alice came up ever and again, his longing for her seemed to be changed from hot pain to a chastened regret. The red hearth-fire was no more in his fancy. The hunger for domesticity had gone, and the girl was now less the wife he had desired than the dream of love he had vainly followed. As he came back across the moors, for the first time for weeks his jealous love left him at peace. His had been a fanciful Sylvia, “holy, fair, and wise”; and what if mortal Sylvia were unkind, there was yet comfort in this elusive lady of his memories.
He found George at the end of a second breakfast, a very ruddy, happy young man hunting high and low for a lost tobacco-jar.
“Oh, first-class,” he said in answer to Lewis’s question. “Out and out the best day’s shooting I’ve had in my life. You were an ass not to come, you know. A lot of your friends there, tremendously disappointed too, and entrusted me with a lot of messages for you which I have forgotten.”
His companion’s high spirits infected Lewis and he fell into cheery gossip. Then he could contain the news no more.
“I had Tommy up last night on a flying visit. He says that Beauregard wants me to go out to Kashmir again. There has been some threatening of a row up there, and he thinks that as I know the place I might be able to get good information.”
“Official?” asked George.
“Practically, yes; but in theory it’s quite off my own bat, and they are good enough to tell me that they will not acknowledge responsibility. However, it’s a great chance and I am going.”
“Good,” said the other, and his face and voice had settled into gravity. “Pretty fair sport up in those parts, isn’t there?”
“Pretty fair? it’s about the best in the world. Your ordinary man who goes the grand tour comes home raving about the sport in the Himalayan foothills, and it’s not to be named with this.”
“Good chance too of a first-rate row, isn’t there? Natives troublesome, and Russia near, and that sort of thing?” George’s manner showed a growing enthusiasm.
“A rather good chance. It is about that I’m going, you know.”
“Then if you don’t mind, I am coming with you.”
Lewis stared, incredulous.
“It’s quite true. I am serious enough. I am doing nothing at the Bar, and I want to travel, proper travelling, where you are not coddled with railways and hotels.”
“But it’s hideously risky, and probably very arduous and thankless. You will tire of it in a week.”
“I won’t,” said George, “and in any case I’ll make my book for that. You must let me come, Lewie. I simply couldn’t stand your going off alone.”
“But I may have to leave you. There are places where one can go when two can’t.”
“When you come to that sort of place I’ll stay behind. I’ll be quite under your orders.”
“Well, at any rate take some time to think over it.”
“Bless you, I don’t want time to think over it,” cried George. “I know my own mind. It’s the chance I’ve been waiting on for years.”
“Thanks tremendously then, my dear chap,” said Lewis, very ill at ease. “It’s very good of you. I must wire at once to Tommy.”
“I’ll take it down, if you like. I want to try that new mare of yours in the dog-cart.”
When his host had left the room George forgot to light his pipe, but walked instead to the window and whistled solemnly. “Poor old man,” he said softly to himself, “it had to come to this, but I’m hanged if he doesn’t take it like a Trojan.” And he added certain striking comments on the ways of womankind and the afflictions of life, which, being expressed in Mr. Winterham’s curious phraseology, need not be set down.
Alice had gone out after lunch to walk to Gledsmuir, seeking in the bitter cold and the dawning storm the freshness which comes from conflict. All the way down the glen the north wind had stung her cheeks to crimson and blown stray curls about her ears; but when she left the little market-place to return she found a fine snow powdering the earth, and a haze creeping over the hills which threatened storm. A mile of the weather delighted her, but after that she grew weary. When the fall thickened she sought the shelter of a way-side cottage, with the purpose of either sending to Glenavelin for a carriage or waiting for the off-chance of a farmer’s gig.
By four o’clock the snow showed no sign of clearing, but fell in the same steady, noiseless drift. The mistress of the place made the girl tea and dispatched her son to Glenavelin. But the errand would take time, for the boy was small, and Alice, ever impatient, stood drumming on the panes, watching the dreary weather with a dreary heart. The goodwife was standing at the door on the look-out for a passing gig, and her cry brought the girl to attention.
“I see a machine comin’! I think it’s the Etterick dowg-cairt. Ye’ll get a drive in it.”
Alice had gone to the door, and lo! through the thick fall a dog-cart came into view driven by a tall young man. He recognized her at once, and drew up.
“Hullo, Miss Wishart! Storm-stayed? Can I help you?”
The girl looked distrustfully at the very restless horse and he caught her diffidence.
“Don’t be afraid. ‘What I don’t know about ‘oases ain’t worth knowin’,’” he quoted with a laugh; and leaning forward he prepared to assist her to mount.
There was nothing for it but to accept, and the next minute she found herself in the high seat beside him. Her wraps, sufficient for walking, were scarcely sufficient for a snowy drive, and this, to his credit, the young man saw. He unbuttoned his tweed shooting-cape, and gravely put it round her. A curious dainty figure she made with her face all bright with wind, framed in the great grey cloak.
The horse jibbed for a second and then swung along the wild road with the vigorous ease of good blood skilfully handled. George was puzzling his brain all the while as to how he should tell his companion something which she ought to know. The strong drift and the turns of the road claimed much of his attention, so it is possible that he blurted out his news somewhat baldly.
“Do you know, Miss Wishart, that Lewis Haystoun and I are going off next week? Abroad, you know.”
The girl, who had been enjoying the ecstasy of swift motion through the bitter weather, glanced up at him with pain in her eyes.
“Where?” she asked.
“To the Indian frontier. We are going to be special unpaid unofficial members of the Intelligence Department.”
She asked the old, timid woman’s question about danger.
“It’s where Lewis was before. Only, you see, things have got into a mess thereabouts, and the Foreign Office has asked him to go out again. By the by, you mustn’t tell any one about this, for it’s in strict confidence.”
The words were meaningless, and yet they sent a pang through her heart. Had he no guess at her inmost feelings? Could he think that she would talk to Mr. Stocks of a thing which was bound up for her with all the sorrow and ecstasy of life?
He looked down and saw that her face had paled and that her mouth was drawn with some emotion. A sudden gleam of light seemed to break in upon him.
“Are you sorry?” he asked half-unwittingly.
For answer the girl turned her tragic eyes upon him, tried to speak, and faltered. He cursed himself for a fool and a brute, and whipped up an already over-active horse, till it was all but unmanageable. It was a wise move, for it absorbed his attention and gave the poor child at his side a chance to recover her composure.
They came to Glenavelin gates and George turned in. “I had better drive you to the door, in this charming weather,” he said. The sight of the pale little face had moved him to deep pity. He cursed his blindness, the blindness of a whole world of fools, and at the same time, with the impotence of the honest man, he could only wait and be silent.
At the door he stopped to unbutton his cape from her neck, and even in his nervousness he felt the trembling of her body. She spoke rapidly and painfully.
“I want you to take a message from me to—to—Lewis. Tell him I must see him. Tell him to come to the Midburn foot, to-morrow in the afternoon. Oh, I am ashamed to ask you, but you must tell him.” And then without thanks or good-bye she fled into the house.
LISTLESSleaves were tossing in the light wind or borne downward in the swirl of the flooded Midburn, to the weary shallows where they lay, beached high and sodden, till the frost nipped and shrivelled their rottenness into dust. A bleak, thin wind it was, like a fine sour wine, searching the marrow and bringing no bloom to the cheek. A light snow powdered the earth, the grey forerunner of storms.
Alice stood back in the shelter of the broken parapet. The highway with its modern crossing-place was some hundreds of yards up stream, but here, at the burn mouth, where the turbid current joined with the cold, glittering Avelin, there was a grass-grown track, and an ancient, broken-backed bridge. There were few passers on the high-road, none on this deserted way; but the girl in all her loneliness shrank back into the shadow. In these minutes she endured the bitter mistrust, the sore hesitancy, of awaiting on a certain but unknown grief.
She had not long to wait, for Lewis came down the Avelin side by a bypath from Etterick village. His alert gait covered his very real confusion, but to the girl he seemed one who belonged to an alien world of cheerfulness. He could not know her grief, and she regretted her coming.
His manners were the same courteous formalities. The man was torn with emotion, and yet he greeted her with a conventional ease.
“It was so good of you, Miss Wishart, to give me a chance to come and say good-bye. My going is such a sudden affair, that I might have had no time to come to Glenavelin, but I could not have left without seeing you.”
The girl murmured some indistinct words. “I hope you will have a good time and come back safely,” she said, and then she was tongue-tied.
The two stood before each other, awkward and silent—two between whom no word of love had ever been spoken, but whose hearts were clamouring at the iron gates of speech.
Alice’s face and neck were dyed crimson, as the impossible position dawned on her mind. No word could break down the palisade, of form. Lewis, his soul a volcano, struggled for the most calm and inept words. He spoke of the weather, of her father, of his aunt’s messages.
Then the girl held out her hand.
“Good-bye,” she said, looking away from him.
He held it for a second. “Good-bye, Miss Wishart,” he said hoarsely. Was this the consummation of his brief ecstasy, the end of months of longing? The steel hand of fate was on him and he turned to leave.
He turned when he had gone three paces and came back. The girl was still standing by the parapet, but she had averted her face towards the wintry waters. His step seemed to fall on deaf ears, and he stood beside her before she looked towards him.
Passion had broken down his awkwardness. He asked the old question with a shaking voice. “Alice,” he said, “have I vexed you?”
She turned to him a pale, distraught face, her eyes brimming over with the sorrow of love, the passionate adventurous longing which claims true hearts for ever.
He caught her in his arms, his heart in a glory of joy.
“Oh, Alice, darling,” he cried. “What has happened to us? I love you, I love you, and you have never given me a chance to say it.”
She lay passive in his arms for one brief minute and then feebly drew back.
“Sweetheart,” he cried. “Sweetheart! For I will call you sweetheart, though we never meet again. You are mine, Alice. We cannot help ourselves.”
The girl stood as in a trance, her eyes caught and held by his face.
“Oh, the misery of things,” she said half-sobbing. “I have given my soul to another, and I knew it was not mine to give. Why, oh why, did you not speak to me sooner? I have been hungering for you and you never came.”
A sense of his folly choked him.
“And I have made you suffer, poor darling! And the whole world is out of joint for us!”
The hopeless feeling of loss, forgotten for a moment, came back to him. The girl was gone from him for ever, though a bridge of hearts should always cross the chasm of their severance.
“I am going away,” he said, “to make reparation. I have my repentance to work out, and it will be bitterer than yours, little woman. Ours must be an austere love.”
She looked at him till her pale face flushed and a sad exultation woke in her eyes.
“You will never forget?” she asked wistfully, confident of the answer.
“Forget!” he cried. “It is my only happiness to remember. I am going away to be knocked about, dear. Wild, rough work, but with a man’s chances!”
For a moment she let another thought find harbour in her mind. Was the past irretrievable, the future predetermined? A woman’s word had an old right to be broken. If she went to him, would not he welcome her gladly, and the future might yet be a heritage for both?
The thought endured but a moment, for she saw how little simple was the crux of her destiny. The two of them had been set apart by the fates; each had salvation to work out alone; no facile union would ever join them. For him there was the shaping of a man’s path; for her the illumination which only sorrows and parting can bring. And with the thought she thought kindly of the man to whom she had pledged her word. It was but a little corner of her heart he could ever possess; but doubtless in such matters he was not ambitious.
Lewis walked by her side down the by-path towards Glenavelin. Tragedy muffled in the garments of convention was there, not the old picturesque Tragic with sword and cloak and steel for the enemy, but the silent Tragic which pulls at the heart-strings.
“The summer is over,” she said. “It has been a cruel summer, but very bright.”
“Romance with the jarring modern note which haunts us all to-day,” he said. “This upland country is confused with bustling politics, and pastoral has been worried to death by sickness of heart. You cannot find the old peaceful life without.”
“And within?” she asked.
“That is for you and me to determine, dear. God grant it. I have found my princess, like the man in the fairy-tale, but I may not enter the kingdom.”
“And the poor princess must sit and mope in her high stone tower? It is a hard world for princesses.”
“Hard for the knights, too, for they cannot come back and carry off their ladies. In the old days it used to be so, but then simplicity has gone out of life.”
“And the princess waits and watches and cries herself to sleep?”
“And the knight goes off to the World’s End and never forgets.”
They were at Glenavelin gates now, and stood silent against the moment of parting. She flew to his arms, for a second his kisses were on her lips, and then came the sundering. A storm of tears was in her heart, but with dry eyes she said the words of good-bye. Meanwhile from the hills came a drift of snow, and a dreary wind sang in the pines the dirge of the dead summer, the plaint of long farewells.
IFyou travel abroad in certain seasons you will find that a type predominates among the travellers. From Dover to Calais, from Calais to Paris, there is an unnatural eagerness on faces, an unrest in gait, a disorder in dress which argues worry and haste. And if you inquire further, being of a speculative turn, you will find that there is something in the air. The papers, French and English, have ugly headlines and mystic leaders. Disquiet is in the atmosphere, each man has a solution or a secret, and far at the back sits some body of men who know that a crisis is near and square their backs for it. The journalist is sick with work and fancied importance; the diplomat’s hair whitens with the game which he cannot understand; the statesman, if he be wise, is in fear, knowing the meaning of such movements, while, if he be foolish, he chirps optimistically in his speeches and is applauded in the press. There are grey faces at the seats of the money-changers, for war, the scourge of small cords, seems preparing for the overturning of their tables, and the castigation of their persons.
Lewis and George rang the bell in the Faubourg St. Honoré on a Monday afternoon, and asked for Lord Rideaux. His lordship was out, but, if they were the English gentlemen who had the appointment with M. Gribton, Monsieur would be with them speedily.
Lewis looked about the heavily furnished ante-room with its pale yellow walls and thick, green curtains, with the air of a man trying to recall a memory. “I came over here with John Lambert, when his father had the place. That was just after I left Oxford. Gad, I was a happy man then. I thought I could do anything. They put me next to Madame de Ravignet because of my French, and because old Ankerville declared that I ought to know the cleverest woman in Europe. Séry, the man who was Premier last year, came and wrung my hand afterwards, said my fortune was assured because I had impressed the Ravignet, and no one had ever done it before except Bismarck. Ugh, the place is full of ghosts. Poor old John died a year after, and here am I, far enough, God knows, from my good intentions.”
A servant announced “Monsieur Gribton,” and a little grizzled man hobbled in, leaning heavily on a stick. He wore a short beard, and in his tanned face two clever grey eyes twinkled sedately. He shook hands gravely when Lewis introduced George, but his eyes immediately returned to the former’s face.
“You look a fit pair,” he said. “I am instructed to give you all the help in my power, but I should like to know your game. It isn’t sport this time, is it, Haystoun? Logan is still talking about his week with you. Well, well, we can do things at our leisure. I have letters to write, and then it will be dinner-time, when we can talk. Come to the club at eight, ‘Cercle des Voyageurs,’ corner of Rue Neuve de St. Michel. I expect you belong, Haystoun; and anyway I’ll be there.”
He bowed them out with his staccato apologies, and the two returned to their hotel to dress. Two hours later they found Gribton warming his hands in the smoking-room of the Cercle, a fussy and garrulous gentleman, eager for his dinner. He pointed out such people as he knew, and was consumed with curiosity about the others. Lewis wandered about the room before he sat down, shaking hands with several and nodding to many.
“You seem to know the whole earth,” said Gribton.
“I suppose that a world of acquaintance is the only reward of slackness,” Lewis said, laughing. “It’s a trick I have. I never forget a face and I honestly like to see people again.”
George pulled his long moustache. “It’s simply hideous the way one is forgotten. It’s all right for the busy people, for they shift their sets with their fortune, but for drones like me it’s the saddest thing in life. Before we came away, Lewie, I went up for a day to Oxford to see about some things, and stopped a night there. I haven’t been down long, and yet I knew nobody at the club except the treasurer, and he had nothing to say to me except to ask after you. I went to dinner with the dons at the high table, and I nearly perished of the blues. Little Riddell chirped about my profession, and that bounder Jackson, who was of our year, pretended that he had been your bosom friend. I got so bored that I left early and wandered back to the club. Somebody was making a racket in our old rooms in the High, windows open, you know, and singing. I stopped to look at them, and then they started, ‘Willie brewed a peck o’ maut,’ and, ‘pon my soul, I had to come away. Couldn’t stand it. It reminded me so badly of you and Arthur and old John Lambert, and all the honest men that used to be there. It was infernally absurd that I should have got so sentimental, but that wasn’t the worst of it. For I met Tony and he made me come round to a dinner, and there I found people I didn’t know from Adam drinking the old toasts we started. Gad, they had them all. ‘Las Palmas,’ ‘The Old Guard,’ ‘The Wandering Scot,’ and all the others. It made me feel as low as an owl, and when I got back to the club and saw poor old John’s photograph on the wall, I tell you I went to bed in the most wretched melancholy.”
Lewis stared open-mouthed at George, the irrepressible, in this new attitude. He, as the hardened traveller, had had little more than a decent pang of home-sickness. His regret was far deeper and more real than the sentimental article of commerce, and he could afford to be almost gay while George sat in the depths.
“I’m coming home, and I’m not happy; you young men are going out, and you have got the blues. There’s no pleasing weak humanity. I say, Haystoun, who’s that old man?” Gribton’s jovial looks belied his words.
Lewis mentioned a name for his host’s benefit. The room was emptying rapidly, for the Cercle dined early.
“Now for business,” said Gribton, when a waiter had brought the game course, and they sat in the midst of a desert of linen and velvet. “I have given the thing up, but I spent twenty of my best years at Bardur. So, as I am instructed to do all in my power to aid you, I am ready. First, is it sport?
“Partly,” said George, but Lewis’s head gave denial.
“Because, if it is, I am not the best man. Well, then, is it geographical? For if it is, there is much to be done.”
“Partly,” said Lewis.
“Then I take it that the residue is political. You are following the popular avenue to polities, I suppose. Leave the ‘Varsity very raw, knock about in an unintelligent way for three or four years on some frontier, then come home, go into the House, and pose as a specialist in foreign affairs. I should have thought you had too much humour for that.”
“Only, you see, I have been there before. I am merely going back upon my tracks to make sure. I go purely as an adventurer, hoping to pick up some valuable knowledge, but prepared to fail.”
Gribton helped himself to champagne. “That’s better. Now I know your attitude, we can talk like friends. Better come to the small smoking-room. They’ve got a ‘51 brandy here which is beyond words. Have some for a liqueur.”
In the smoking-room Gribton fussed about coffee and cigars for many minutes ere he settled down. Then, when he could gaze around and see his two guests in deep armchairs, each smoking and comfortable, he returned to his business.
“I don’t mind telling you a secret,” he said, “or rather it’s only a secret here, for once you get out there you will find ‘Gribton’s view,’ as they call it, well enough known and very much laughed at. I’ve always been held up to ridicule as an alarmist about that Kashmir frontier, and especially about that Bardur country. Take the whole province. It’s well garrisoned on the north, but below that it is all empty and open. The way into the Punjab is as clear as daylight for a swift force, and the way to the Punjab is the way to India.”
Lewis rose and went to a rack on the wall. “Do you mind if I get down maps? These French ones are very good.” He spread a sheet of canvas on the table, thereby confounding all Gribton’s hospitable manoeuvring.
“There,” said Gribton, his eyes now free from drowsiness, and clear and bright, “that’s the road I fear.”
“But these three inches are unknown,” said Lewis. “I have been myself as far as these hills.”
Gribton looked sharply up. “You don’t know the place as I know it. I’ve never been so far, but I know the sheep-skinned devils who come across from Turkestan. I tell you that place isn’t the impenetrable craggy desert that the Government of India thinks it. There’s a road there of some sort, and if you’re worth your salt you’ll find it out.”
“I know,” said Lewis. “I am going to try.”
“There’s another thing. For the last three years all that north part of Kashmir, and right away south-west to the Punjab borders, has been honoured with visits from plausible Russian gentlemen who may come down by the ordinary caravan routes, or, on the other hand, may not. They turn up quite suddenly with tooth-brushes and dressing-cases, and they can’t have come from the south. They fool around in Bardur, and then go down to Gilgit, and, I suppose, on to the Punjab. They’ve got excellent manners, and they hang about the clubs and give dinners and charm the whole neighbourhood. Logan is their bosom friend, and Thwaite declares that their society reconciles him to the place. Then they go away, and the place keeps on the randan for weeks after.”
“Do you know a man called Marker by any chance?” Lewis asked.
Gribton looked curiously at the speaker. “Have you actually heard about him? Yes, I know him, but not very well, and I can’t say I ever cared for him. However, he is easily the most popular man in Bardur, and I daresay is a very good fellow. But you don’t call him Russian. I thought he was sort of half a Scotsman.”
“Very likely he is,” said Lewis. “I happen to have heard a good deal about him. But what ails you at him?”
“Oh, small things,” and the man laughed. “You know I am getting elderly and cranky, and I like a man to be very fair and four-square. I confess I never got to the bottom of the chap. He was a capital sportsman, good bridge-player, head like a rock for liquor, and all that; but I’m hanged if he didn’t seem to me to be playing some sort of game. Another thing, he seemed to me a terribly cold-blooded devil. He was always slapping people on the back and calling them ‘dear old fellows,’ but I happened to see a small interview once between him and one of his servants. Perhaps I ought not to mention it, but the thing struck me unpleasantly. It was below the club verandah, and nobody happened to be about except myself, who was dozing after lunch. Marker was rating a servant in some Border tongue—Chil, it sounded like; and I remember wondering how he could have picked it up. I saw the whole thing through a chink in the floor, and I noticed that the servant’s face was as grey as a brown hillman’s can be. Then the fellow suddenly caught his arm and twisted it round, the man’s face working with pain, though he did not dare to utter a sound. It was an ugly sight, and when I caught a glimpse of Marker’s face, ‘pon my soul, those straight black eyebrows of his gave him a most devilish look.”
“What’s he like to look at?” George asked.
“Oh, he’s rather tall, very straight, with a sort of military carriage, and he has one of those perfect oval faces that you sometimes see. He has most remarkable black eyes and very neat, thin eyebrows. He is the sort of man you’d turn round to look at if you once passed him in the street; and if you once saw him smile you’d begin to like him. It’s the prettiest thing I’ve ever seen.”
“I expect I’ll run across him somewhere,” said Lewis, “and I want badly to know him. Would you mind giving me an introduction?”
“Charmed!” said Gribton. “Shall I write it now?” And sitting down at a table he scribbled a few lines, put them in an envelope, and gave it to Lewis.
“You are pretty certain to know him when you see him, so you can give him that line. You might run across him anywhere from Hyderabad to Rawal Pinch, and in any case you’ll hear word of him in Bardur. He’s the man for your purpose; only, as I say, I never liked him. I suspect a loop somewhere.”
“What are Logan and Thwaite like?” Lewis asked.
“Easy-going, good fellows. Believe in God and the British Government, and the inherent goodness of man. I am rather the other way, so they call me a cynic and an alarmist.”
“But what do you fear?” said George. “The place is well garrisoned.”
“I fear four inches in that map of unknown country,” said Gribton shortly. “The people up there call it a ‘God-given rock-wall,’ and of course there is no force to speak of just near it. But a tribe of devils incarnate, who call themselves the Bada-Mawidi, live on its skirts, and there must be a road through it. It isn’t the caravan route, which goes much farther east and is plain enough. But I know enough of the place to know that every man who comes over the frontier to Bardur does not come by the high-road.”
“But what could happen? Surely Bardur is strongly garrisoned enough to block any secret raid.”
“It isn’t bad in its way, if the people were not so slack and easy. They might rise to scratch, but, on the other hand, they might not, and once past Bardur you have the open road to India, if you march quick enough.”
“Then you have no man sufficiently adventurous there to do a little exploring?”
“None. They care only about shooting, and there happens to be little in those rocks. Besides, they trust in God and the Government of India. I didn’t, so I became unpopular, and was voted a bore. But the work is waiting for you young men.”
Gribton rose, yawned, and stretched himself. “Shall I tell you any more?”
“I don’t think so,” said Lewis, smiling; “I fancy I understand, and I am sure we are obliged to you. Hadn’t we better have a game?”
They went to the billiard-room and played two games of a hundred up, both of which George, who had the idler’s knack in such matters, won with ease. Gribton played so well that he became excessively good-humoured.
“I almost wish I was going out again if I had you two as company. We don’t get the right sort out there. Our globe-trotters all want to show their cleverness, or else they are merely fools. You will find it miserably dull. Nothing but bad claret and cheap champagne at the clubs, a cliquey set of English residents, and the sort of stock sport of which you tire in a month. That’s what you may expect our frontier towns to be like.”
“And the neighbourhood?” said Lewis, with lifted eyebrows.
“Oh, the neighbourhood is wonderful enough; but our people there are too slack and stale to take advantage of it. It is a peaceful frontier, you know, and men get into a rut as easily there as elsewhere. The country’s too fat and wealthy, and people begin to forget the skeleton up among the rocks in the north.”
“What are the garrisons like?”
“Good people, but far too few for a serious row, and just sufficiently large to have time hang on their hands. Our friends the Bada-Mawidi now and then wake them up. I see from theTempsthat a great stirring of the tribes in the Southern Pamirs is reported. I expect that news came overland through Russia. It’s the sort of canard these gentry are always getting up to justify a massing of troops on the Amu Daria in order that some new governor may show his strategic skill. I daresay you may find things a little livelier than I found them.”
As they went towards the Faubourg St. Honoré a bitter Paris north-easter had begun to drift a fine powdered snow in their eyes. Gribton shivered and turned up the collar of his fur coat. “Ugh, I can’t stand this. It makes me sick to be back. Thank your stars that you are going to the sun and heat, and out of this hideous grey weather.”
They left him at the Embassy, and turned back to their hotel.
“He’s a useful man,” said Lewis, “he has given us a cue; life will be pretty well varied out there for you and me, I fancy.”
Then, as they entered a boulevard, and the real sweep of the wind met their faces, both men fell strangely silent. To George it was the last word of the north which they were leaving, and his recent home-sickness came back and silenced him. But to Lewis, his mind already busy with his errand, this sting of wind was the harsh disturber which carried him back to a lonely home in a cold, upland valley. It was the wintry weather which was his own, and Alice’s face, framed in a cloak, as he had seen it at the Broken Bridge, rose in the gallery of his heart. In a moment he was disillusioned. Success, enterprise, new lands and faces seemed the most dismal vexation of spirit. With a very bitter heart he walked home, and, after the fashion of his silent kind, gave no sign of his mood save by a premature and unreasonable retirement to bed.
ALLaround was stone and scrub, rising in terraces to the foot of sheer cliffs which opened up here and there in nullahs and gave a glimpse of great snow hills behind them. On one of the flat ridge-tops a little village of stunted, slaty houses squatted like an ape, with a vigilant eye on twenty gorges. Thin, twisting paths led up to it, and before, on the more clement slopes, some fields of grain were tilled as our Aryan forefathers tilled the soil on the plains of Turkestan. The place was at least 8,000 feet above the sea, so the air was highland, clear and pleasant, save for the dryness which the great stone deserts forced upon the soft south winds. You will not find the place marked in any map, for it is a little beyond even the most recent geographer’s ken, but it is none the less a highly important place, for the nameless village is one of the seats of that most active and excellent race of men, the Bada-Mawidi, who are so old that they can afford to look down on their neighbours from a vantage-ground of some thousands of years. It is well known that when God created the earth He first fashioned this tangle of hill land, and set thereon a primitive Bada-Mawidi, the first of the clan, who was the ancestor, in the thousandth degree, of the excellent Fazir Khan, the present father of the tribe.
The houses clustered on the scarp and enclosed a piece of well-beaten ground and one huge cedar tree. Sounds came from the near houses, but around the tree itself the more privileged sat in solemn conclave. Food and wine were going the round, for the Maulai Mohammedans have no taboos in eating and drinking. Fazir Khan sat smoking next the tree trunk, a short, sinewy man with a square, Aryan face, clear-cut and cruel. His chiefs were around him, all men of the same type, showing curiously fair skins against their oiled black hair. A mullah sat cross-legged, his straggling beard in his lap, repeating some crazy charm to himself and looking every now and again with anxious eyes to the guest who sat on the chief’s right hand.
The guest was a long, thin man, clad in the Cossacks’ fur lined military cloak, under which his untanned riding-boots showed red in the moonlight. He was still busy eating goat’s flesh, cheese and fruits, and drinking deeply from the sweet Hunza wine, like a man who had come far and fast. He ate with the utmost disregard of his company. He might have been a hunter supping alone in the solitary hills for all the notice he took of the fifty odd men around him.
By and by he finished, pulled forth a little silver toothpick from an inner pocket, and reached a hand for the long cherry-wood pipe which had been placed beside him. He lit it, and blew a few clouds into the calm air.
“Now, Fazir Khan,” he said, “I am a new man, and we shall talk. First, have you done my bidding?”
“Thy bidding has been done,” said the great man sulkily. “See, I am here with my chiefs. All the twenty villages of my tribe have been warned, and arms have been got from the fools at Bardur. Also, I have the Yarkand powder I was told of, to give the signals on the hills. The Nazri Pass road, which we alone know, has been widened. What more could man do?”
“That is well,” said the other. “It is well for you and your people that you have done this. Your service shall not be forgotten. Otherwise—”
“Otherwise?” said the Fazir Khan, his hand travelling to his belt at the sound of a threat.
The man laughed. “You know the tale,” he said. “Doubtless your mother told you it when you clutched at her breast. Some day a great white people from the north will come down and swallow up the disobedient. That day is now at hand. You have been wise in time. Therefore I say it is well.”
The stranger spoke with perfect coolness. He looked round curiously at the circle of dark faces and laughed quietly to himself. The chief stole one look at him and then said something to a follower.
“I need not speak of the reward,” said the stranger. “You are our servants, and duty is duty. But I have authority for saying that we shall hold your work in mind when we have settled our business.”
“What would ye be without us?” said the chief in sudden temper. “What do ye know of the Nazri gates or the hill country? What is this talk of duty, when ye cannot stir a foot without our aid?”
“You are our servants, as I said before,” said the man curtly. “You have taken our gold and our food. Where would you be, outlaws, vagrants that you are, hated of God and man, but for our help? Your bodies would have rotted long ago on the hills. The kites would be feeding on your sons; your women would be in the Bokhara market. We have saved you a dozen times from the vengeance of the English. When they wished to come up and burn you out, we have put them past the project with smooth words. We have fed you in famine, we have killed your enemies, we have given you life. You are freemen indeed in the face of the world, but you are our servants.”
Fazir Khan made a gesture of impatience. “That is as God may direct it,” he said. “Who are ye but a people of yesterday, while the Bada-Mawidi is as old as the rocks. The English were here before you, and we before the English. It is right that youth should reverence age.”
“That is one proverb,” said the man, “but there are others, and in especial one to the effect that the man without a sword should bow before his brother who has one. In this game we are the people with the sword, my friends.”
The hillman shrugged his shoulders. His men looked on darkly, as if little in love with the stranger’s manner of speech.
“It is ill working in the dark,” he said at length. “Ye speak of this attack and the aid you expect from us, but we have heard this talk before. One of your people came down with some followers in my father’s time, and his words were the same, but lo! nothing has yet happened.”
“Since your father’s time things have changed, my brother. Then the English were very much on the watch, now they sleep. Then there were no roads, or very bad ones, and before an army could reach the plains the whole empire would have been wakened. Now, for their own undoing, they have made roads up to the very foot of yon mountains, and there is a new railway down the Indus through Kohistan waiting to carry us into the heart of the Punjab. They seek out inventions for others to enjoy, as the Koran says, and in this case we are to be the enjoyers.”
“But what if ye fail?” said the chief. “Ye will be penned up in that Hunza valley like sheep, and I, Fazir Khan, shall be unable to unlock the door of that sheepfold.”
“We shall not fail. This is no war of rock-pigeons, my brothers. Our agents are in every town and village from Bardur to Lahore. The frontier tribes, you among the rest, are rising in our favour. There is nothing to stop us but isolated garrisons of Gurkhas and Pathans, with a few overworked English officers at their head. In a week we shall command the north of India, and if we hold the north, in another week we shall hold Calcutta and Bombay.”
The chief nodded his head. Such far-off schemes pleased his fancy, but only remotely touched his interest. Calcutta was beyond his ken, but he knew Bardur and Gilgit.
“I have little love for the race,” he said. “They hanged two of my servants who ventured too near the rifle-room, and they shot my son in the back when we raided the Chitralis. If ye and your friends cross the border I will be with you. But meantime, till that day, what is my duty?”
“To wait in patience, and above all things to let the garrisons alone. If we stir up the hive in the valleys they may come and see things too soon for our success. We must win by secrecy and surprise. All is lost if we cannot reach the railway before the Punjab is stirring.”
The mullah had ceased muttering to himself. He scrambled to his feet, shaking down his rags over his knees, a lean, crazy apparition of a man with deep-set, smouldering eyes.
“I will speak,” he cried. “Ye listen to the man’s words and ye are silent, believing all things. Ye are silent, my children, because ye know not. But I am old and I have seen many things, and these are my words. Ye speak of pushing out the English from the land. Allah knows I love not the breed! I spit upon it, I thirst for the heart of every man, woman, and child, that I might burn them in the sight of all of you. But I have heard this talk before. When I was a young priest at Kufaz, there was word of this pushing out of the foreigner, and I rejoiced, being unwise. Then there was much fighting, and at the end more English came up the valleys and, before we knew, we were paying tribute. Since then many of our people have gone down from the mountains with the same thought, and they have never returned. Only the English and the troops have crept nearer. Now this stranger talks of his Tsar and how an army will come through the passes, and foreigner will fight with foreigner. This talk, too, I have heard. Once there came a man with a red beard who spoke thus, and he went down to Bardur, and lo! our men told me that they saw him hanged there for a warning. Let foreigner war on foreigner if they please, but what have we to do in the quarrel, my children? Ye owe nothing to either.”
The stranger regarded the speaker with calm eyes of amusement.
“Nothing,” said he, “except that we have fed you and armed you. By your own acts you are the servants of my master.”
The mullah was rapidly working himself into a frenzy. He swung his long bony arms across his breast and turned his face skywards. “Ye hear that, my children. The free people, the Bada-Mawidi, of whose loins sprang Abraham the prophet, are the servants of some foreign dog in the north. If ye were like your fathers, ye would have long ago ere this wiped out the taunt in blood.”
The man sat perfectly composed, save that his right hand had grasped a revolver. He was playing a bold game, but he had played it before. And he knew the man he had to deal with.
“I say again, you are my master’s servants by your own confession. I did not say his slaves. You are a free people, but you will serve a greater in this affair. As for this dog who blasphemes, when we have settled more important matters we will attend to him.”
The mullah was scarcely a popular member of his tribe, for no one stirred at the call. The stranger sat watching him with very bright, eager eyes. Suddenly the priest ceased his genuflexions, there was a gleam of steel among his rags, then something bright flashed in the air. It fell short, because at the very moment of throwing, a revolver had cracked out in the silence, and a bullet had broken two of his fingers. The man flung himself writhing on the ground, howling forth imprecations.
The stranger looked half apologetically at the chief, whose glum demeanour had never relaxed. “Sorry,” he said; “it had to be done in self-defence. But I ask your pardon for it.”
Fazir Khan nodded carelessly. “He is a disturber of peace, and to one who cannot fight a hand matters little. But, by Allah, ye northerners shoot quick.”
The stranger relinquished the cherry-wood pipe and filled a meerschaum from a pouch which he carried in the pocket of his cloak. He took a long drink from the loving-cup of mulled wine which was passing round.
“Your mad priest has method in his folly,” he said. “It is true that we are attacking a great people; therefore the more need of wariness for you and me, Fazir Khan. If we fail there will be the devil to pay for you. The English will shift their frontier-line beyond the mountains, and there will be no more lifting of women and driving of cattle for the Bada-Mawidi. You will all be sent to school, and your guns will be taken from you.”
The chief compressed his attractive features into a savage scowl. “That may not be in my lifetime,” he said. “Besides, are there no mountains all around? In five hours I shall be in China, and in a little more I might be beyond the Amu. But why talk of this? The accursed English shall not escape us, I swear by the hilt of my sword and the hearts of my fathers.”
A subdued murmur of applause ran around the circle.
“You are men after my own heart,” said the stranger. “Meanwhile, a word in your own ear, Fazir Khan. Dare you come to Bardur with me?”
The chief made a gesture of repugnance. “I hate that place of mud and lime. The blood of my people cries on me when I enter the gates. But if it is your counsel I will come with you.”
“I wish to assure myself that the place is quiet. Our success depends upon the whole country being unsuspicious and asleep. Now if word has got to the south, and worse still to England, there will be questions asked and vague instructions sent up to the frontier. We shall find a stir among the garrisons, and perhaps some visitors in the place. And at the very worst we might find some fool inquiring about the Nazri Pass. There was once a man in Bardur who did, but people laughed at him and he has gone.”
“Where?” asked the chief.
“To England. But he was a harmless man, and he is too old to have any vigour.”
As the darkness grew over the hills the fires were brightened and the curious game ofkhotiwas played in groups of six. The women came to the house-doors to sit and gossip, and listened to the harsh laughter of their lords from beside the fires. A little after midnight, when the stars were picked out in the deep, velvet sky, Fazir Khan and the stranger, both muffled to the ears, stole beyond the street and scrambled down the perilous path-ways to the south.